MRS. DENNISON'S ORDERS.
Next door to Mrs. Dennison's large house in Curzon Street there lived,
in a small house, a friend of hers, a certain Mrs. Cormack. She was a
Frenchwoman, who had been married to an Englishman, and was now his most
resigned widow. She did not pretend to herself, or to anybody else, that
Mr. Cormack's death had been a pure misfortune, and by virtue of her
past trials--perhaps, also, of her nationality--she was keenly awake to
the seamy side of matrimony. She would rhapsodise on the joys of an
ideal marriage, with a skilful hint of its rarity, and condemn
transgressors with a charitable reservation for insupportable miseries.
She was, she said, very romantic. Tom Loring, however (whose evidence
was tainted by an intense dislike of her), declared that _affaires du
coeur_ interested her only when one at least of the parties was lawfully
bound to a third person; when both were thus trammelled, the situation
was ideal. But the loves of those who were in a position to marry one
another, and had no particular reason for not following that legitimate
path to happiness, seemed to her (still according to Tom) dull,
uninspiring--all, in fact, that there was possible of English and
stupid. She hardly (Tom would go on, warming to his subject) believed in
them at all, and she was in the habit of regarding wedlock merely as a
condition precedent to its own violent dissolution. Whether this unhappy
mode of looking at the matter were due to her own peculiarities, or to
those of the late Mr. Cormack, or to those of her nation, Tom did not
pretend to say; he confined himself to denouncing it freely, and to
telling Mrs. Dennison that her next-door neighbour was in all respects a
most undesirable acquaintance; at which outbursts Mrs. Dennison would
smile.
Mrs. Dennison, coming out on to the balcony to see if her carriage were
in sight down the street, found her friend close to her elbow. Their
balconies adjoined, and friendship had led to a little gate being
substituted for the usual dwarf-wall of division. Tom Loring erected the
gate into an allegory of direful portent. Mrs. Cormack passed through
it, and laid an affectionate grasp on Maggie Dennison's arm.
"You're starting early," she remarked.
"I'm going a long way--right up to Hampstead. I've promised Harry to
call on some people there."
"Ah! Who?"
"Their name's Carlin. He knows Mr. Carlin in business. Mr. Carlin's a
friend of Mr. Ruston's."
"Oh, of Ruston's? I like that Ruston. He is interesting--inspiring."
"Is he?" said Mrs. Dennison, buttoning her glove. "You'd better marry
him, Berthe."
"Marry him? No, indeed. I think he would beat one."
"Is that being inspiring? I'm glad Harry's not inspiring."
"Oh, you know what I mean. He's a man who----"
Mrs. Cormack threw up her arms as though praying for the inspired word.
Mrs. Dennison did not wait for it.
"There's the carriage. Good-bye, dear," she said.
Mrs. Dennison started with a smile on her face. Berthe was so funny; she
was like a page out of a French novel. She loved anything not quite
respectable, and peopled the world with heroes of loose morals and
overpowering wills. She adored a dominating mind and lived in the
discovery of affinities. What nonsense it all was--so very remote from
the satisfactory humdrum of real life. One kept house, and gave dinners,
and made the children happy, and was fond of one's husband, and life
passed most----Here Mrs. Dennison suddenly yawned, and fell to hoping
that the Carlins would not be oppressively dull. She had been bored all
day long; the children had been fretful, and poor Harry was hurt and in
low spirits because of a cruel caricature in a comic paper, and Tom
Loring had scolded her for laughing at the caricature (it hit Harry off
so exactly), and nobody had come to see her, except a wretch who had
once been her kitchenmaid, and had come to terrible grief, and wanted to
be taken back, and of course couldn't be, and had to be sent away in
tears with a sovereign, and the tears were no use and the sovereign not
much.
The Carlins fortunately proved tolerably interesting in their own way.
Carlin was about fifty-five--an acute man of business, it seemed, and
possessed by an unwavering confidence in the abilities of Willie Ruston.
Mrs. Carlin was ten or fifteen years younger than her husband--a homely
little woman, with a swarm of children. Mrs. Dennison wondered how they
all fitted into the small house, but was told that it was larger by two
good rooms than their old dwelling in the country town, whence Willie
had summoned them to take a hand in his schemes. Willie had not insisted
on the coal business being altogether abandoned--as Mrs. Carlin said,
with a touch of timidity, it was well to have something to fall back
upon--but he required most of Carlin's time now, and the added work made
residence in London a necessity. In spite of Mr. Carlin's air of
hard-headedness, and his wife's prudent recognition of the business
aspect of life, they neither of them seemed to have a will of their own.
Willie--as they both called him--was the Providence, and the mixture of
reverence and familiarity presented her old acquaintance in a new light
to Maggie Dennison. Even the children prattled about "Willie," and their
mother's rebukes made "Mr. Ruston" no more than a strange and transitory
effort. Mrs. Dennison wondered what there was in the man--consulting her
own recollections of him in hope of enlightenment.
"He takes such broad views," said Carlin, and seemed to find this
characteristic the sufficient justification for his faith.
"I used to know him very well, you know," remarked Mrs. Dennison,
anxious to reach a more friendly footing, and realising that to connect
herself with Ruston offered the best chance of it. "I daresay he's
spoken of me--of Maggie Sherwood?"
They thought not, though Willie had been in Carlin's employ at the time
when he and Mrs. Dennison parted. She was even able, by comparison of
dates, to identify the holiday in which that scene had occurred and that
sentence been spoken; but he had never mentioned her name. She very much
doubted whether he had even thought of her. The fool and the fool's wife
had both been dismissed from his mind. She frowned impatiently. Why
should it be anything to her if they had?
There was a commotion among the children, starting from one who was
perched on the window-sill. Ruston himself was walking up to the door,
dressed in a light suit and a straw hat. After the greetings, while all
were busy getting him tea, he turned to Mrs. Dennison.
"This is very kind of you," he said in an undertone.
"My husband wished me to come," she replied.
He seemed in good spirits. He laughed, as he answered,
"Well, I didn't suppose you came to please me."
"You spoke as if you did," said she, still trying to resent his tone,
which she thought a better guide to the truth than his easy disclaimer.
"Why, you never did anything to please me!"
"Did you ever ask me?" she retorted.
He glanced at her for a moment, as he began to answer,
"Well, now, I don't believe I ever did; but I----"
Mrs. Carlin interposed with a proffered cup of tea, and he broke off.
"Thanks, Mrs. Carlin. I say, Carlin, it's going first-rate. Your
husband's help's simply invaluable, Mrs. Dennison."
"Harry?" she said, in a tone that she regretted a moment later, for
there was a passing gleam in Ruston's eye before he answered gravely,
"His firm carries great weight. Well, we're all in it here, sink or
swim; aren't we, Carlin?"
Carlin nodded emphatically, and his wife gave an anxious little sigh.
"And what's to be the end of it?" asked Mrs. Dennison.
"Ten per cent," said Carlin, with conviction. He could not have spoken
with more utter satisfaction of the millennium.
"The end?" echoed Ruston. "Oh, I don't know."
"At least he won't say," said Carlin admiringly.
Mrs. Dennison rose to go, engaging the Carlins to dine with her--an
invitation accepted with some nervousness, until the extension of it to
Ruston gave them a wing to come under. Ruston, with that directness of
his that shamed mere dexterity and superseded tact, bade Carlin stay
where he was, and himself escorted the visitor to her carriage. Half-way
down the garden walk she looked up at him and remarked,
"I expect you're the end."
His eyes had been wandering, but they came back sharply to hers.
"Then don't tell anybody," said he lightly.
She did not know whether what he said amounted to a confession or were
merely a jest. The next moment he was off at a tangent.
"I like your friend Miss Ferrars. She says a lot of sharp things, and
now and then something sensible."
"Now and then! Poor Adela!"
"Well, she doesn't often try. Besides, she's handsome."
"Oh, you've found time to notice that?"
"I notice that first," said Mr. Ruston.
They were at the carriage-door.
"I'm not dressed properly, so I mustn't drive with you," he said.
"Supposing that was the only reason," she replied, smiling, "would it
stop you?"
"Certainly."
"Why?"
"Because of other fools."
"I'll take you as far as Regent's Park. The other fools are on the other
side of that."
"I'll chance so far," and, waving his hand vaguely towards the house, he
got in. It did not seem to occur to him that there was any want of
ceremony in his farewell to the Carlins.
"I suppose," she said, "you think most of us fools?"
"I've been learning to think it less and to show it less still."
"You're not much changed, though."
"I've had some of my corners chipped off by collision with other hard
substances."
"Thank you for that 'other'!" cried Mrs. Dennison, with a little laugh.
"They must have been very hard ones."
"I didn't say that they weren't a little bit injured too."
"Poor things! I should think so."
"I have my human side."
"Generally the other side, isn't it?" she asked with a merry glance. The
talk had suddenly become very pleasant. He laughed, and stopped the
carriage. A sigh escaped from Mrs. Dennison.
"Next time," he said, "we'll talk about you, or Miss Ferrars, or that
little Miss Marjory Valentine, not about me. Good-bye," and he was gone
before she could say a word to him.
But it was natural that she should think a little about him. She had
not, she said to herself with a weary smile, too many interesting things
to think about, and she began to find him decidedly interesting; in
which fact again she found a certain strangeness and some material for
reflection, because she recollected very well that as a girl she had not
found him very attractive. Perhaps she demanded then more colouring of
romance than he had infused into their intercourse; she had indeed
suspected him of suppressed romance, but the suppression had been very
thorough, betraying itself only doubtfully here and there, as in his
judgment of her accepted suitor. Moreover, let his feelings then have
been what they might, he was not, she felt sure, the man to cherish a
fruitless love for eight or nine years, or to suffer any resurrection of
expired emotions on a renewed encounter with an old flame. He buried his
dead too deep for that; if they were in the way, she could fancy him
sometimes shovelling the earth over them and stamping it down without
looking too curiously whether life were actually extinct or only
flickering towards its extinction; if it were not quite gone at the
beginning of the gravedigger's work, it would be at the end, and the
result was the same. Nor did she suppose that ghosts gibbered or clanked
in the orderly trim mansions of his brain. In fact, she was to him a
more or less pleasant acquaintance, sandwiched in his mind between Adela
Ferrars and Marjory Valentine--with something attractive about her,
though she might lack the sparkle of the one and had been robbed of the
other's youthful freshness. This was the conclusion which she called
upon herself to draw as she drove back from Hampstead--the plain and
sensible conclusion. Yet, as she reached Curzon Street, there was a
smile on her face; and the conclusion was hardly such as to make her
smile--unless indeed she had added to it the reflection that it is ill
judging of things till they are finished. Her acquaintance with Willie
Ruston was not ended yet.
"Maggie, Maggie!" cried her husband through the open door of his study
as she passed up-stairs. "Great news! We're to go ahead. We settled it
at the meeting this morning."
Harry Dennison was in exuberant spirits. The great company was on the
verge of actual existence. From the chrysalis of its syndicate stage it
was to issue a bright butterfly.
"And Ruston was most complimentary to our house. He said he could never
have carried it through without us. He's in high feather."
Mrs. Dennison listened to more details, thinking, as her husband talked,
that Ruston's cheerful mood was fully explained, but wondering that he
had not himself thought it worth while to explain to her the cause of it
a little more fully. With that achievement fresh in his hand, he had
been content to hold his peace. Did he think her not worth telling?
With a cloud on her brow and her smile eclipsed, she passed on to the
drawing-room. The window was open and she saw Tom Loring's back in the
balcony. Then she heard her friend Mrs. Cormack's rather shrill voice.
"Not say such things?" the voice cried, and Mrs. Dennison could picture
the whirl of expostulatory hands that accompanied the question. "But why
not?"
Tom's voice answered in the careful tones of a man who is trying not to
lose his temper, or, anyhow, to conceal the loss.
"Well, apart from anything else, suppose Dennison heard you? It wouldn't
be over-pleasant for him."
Mrs. Dennison stood still, slowly peeling off her gloves.
"Oh, the poor man! I would not like to hurt him. I will be silent. Oh,
he does his very best! But you can't help it."
Mrs. Dennison stepped a yard nearer the window.
"Help what?" asked Tom in the deepest exasperation, no longer to be
hidden.
"Why, what must happen? It must be that the true man----"
A smile flickered over Maggie Dennison's face. How like Berthe! But
whence came this topic?
"Nonsense, I tell you!" cried Tom with a stamp of his foot.
And at the sound Mrs. Dennison smiled again, and drew yet nearer to the
window.
"Oh, it's always nonsense what I say! Well, we shall see, Mr. Loring,"
and Mrs. Cormack tripped in through her window, and wrote in her
diary--she kept a diary full of reflections--that Englishmen were all
stupid. She had written that before, but the deep truth bore repetition.
Tom went in too, and found himself face to face with Mrs. Dennison.
Bright spots of colour glowed on her cheeks; had she answered the
question of the origin of the topic? Tom blushed and looked furtively at
her.
"So the great scheme is launched," she remarked, "and Mr. Ruston
triumphs!"
Tom's manner betrayed intense relief, but he was still perturbed.
"We're having a precious lot of Ruston," he observed, leaning against
the mantelpiece and putting his hands in his pockets.
"_I_ like him," said Maggie Dennison.
"Those are the orders, are they?" asked Tom with a rather wry smile.
"Yes," she answered, smiling at Tom's smile. It amused her when he put
her manner into words.
"Then we all like him," said Tom, and, feeling quite secure now, he
added, "Mrs. Cormack said we should, which is rather against him."
"Oh, Berthe's a silly woman. Never mind her. Harry likes him too."
"Lucky for Ruston he does. Your husband's a useful friend. I fancy most
of Ruston's friends are of the useful variety."
"And why shouldn't we be useful to him?"
"On the contrary, it seems our destiny," grumbled Tom, whose destiny
appeared not to please him.