MRS. FELLOWES, meanwhile, was having a most unsatisfactory time with the
Park people; it seemed absolutely impossible to dig into them or to be
of any service to them. They were wearing her to skin and bone, and she
was meditating a change somewhere or other, when one day, crossing the
hall just after lunch, she heard a knock at the door and opened it
herself.
She found Mr. and Mrs. Waring standing in their normal attitude and
looking frightfully embarrassed; she saw at a glance that they looked
queerer than usual, and not feeling equal just at that minute to face
them alone, she carried them straight off to the dining-room.
“Ah, the _Nineteenth Century_, I perceive,” said Mr. Waring as soon as
he found himself in a chair, with his hat grasped in one hand and the
other on the edge of his knee with the fingers stretched out and feeling
nervously in a baulked way.
“In that last article of St. George Mivart’s,” continued Mr. Waring, “we
find a marked evidence of the deteriorating effect of any special bias
on a man’s mind. If this man were not an ardent churchman of the Romish
persuasion I have always thought he might have done well in literary
science, but as it is—it seems to me he has so much confused the thread
of his discourse as to render it comparatively valueless by weaving into
it, with most conscientious persistence, stray fragments of the
deductions he has drawn from his own crude creed. This demands, on the
reader’s part, a searching, sifting process, which the intrinsic value
of the gentleman’s articles to my mind hardly warrants.”
“Ah, you like your science neat,” said the rector, “so possibly might I,
if I had time to collect my own facts.”
“Ah, but for work that must last, time and an undivided mind are
necessities, no matter what the cause may be that clouds the brain.”
He looked at his wife, and his floating, near-sighted eyes grew dim with
tender pain, and the tendril-like movement of his fingers increased.
He forgot St. George Mivart, and all at once it occurred to him why he
had come.
“Poor old boy, his punishment is horribly out of proportion to his
deserts,” thought the rector, as, in the pause that followed, he caught
snatches of the low-toned talk of the women, with Gwen’s name entering
largely into it, and saw Mrs. Waring’s face fixed on his own wife with
pathetic shy yearning, not veering round to her husband with covert
eagerness, as it used to do.
Mr. Fellowes caught himself echoing the other husband’s sigh, and he
laughed as the absurdity of the situation struck him.
“This must be stopped,” he thought, “it grows mawkish. I wonder if they
have forgotten to feed—more than likely. Ruth, have you asked Mrs.
Waring if she has lunched?”
“Indeed I haven’t!” she cried, “I don’t know what I can have been
thinking about.”
“Oh, please, Mrs. Fellowes,” stammered the little woman, then her eyes
turned towards their magnet.
Mr. Waring was at her side and with her hand in his, with a speed that
made Mrs. Fellowes gasp.
“The fact is, Mrs. Fellowes,” he explained heroically, “we were both a
little forgetful, we—we—” he paused painfully and gulped. “Ah!——I”—
He repented the word sadly, it was the first time his conscience had
forced him to separate the two, and it hurt him. “Yes, I was much
absorbed in my work—and my wife, I think she is not very well.”
“I am quite well, dear,” she murmured.
“Ah, dearest, I doubt it. I thought some quinine might be beneficial,
Mrs. Fellowes. In fact, that was the primary motive of our call.”
“Give her some claret for the present, and make her eat something, wine
and meat are as good as quinine any day.”
Mrs. Waring was the most docile creature breathing, she swallowed
obediently everything set before her, when suddenly a little tremble ran
all down her and shook her gently, and she let her fork drop with a
little clash.
She had caught sight just over the sideboard of one of Brydon’s sketches
of Gwen, that she had sent Mrs. Fellowes.
Her husband had not seen the picture, so he only pressed her knife hand
gently, and murmured, “Nerves!”
She went back obediently to her meal, and if they had given her the
whole of a chicken and a quart of claret, she would have swallowed both
without a murmur, so long as they let her get finished and go close up
to that picture.
Mr. Waring’s meal, on the contrary, was very interesting to him, and he
enjoyed it with a zest that set him playing at a quite new and charming
departure in classification. A graceful pretty house-mother moving on
the field of his vision, and supplying every unspoken want of his, was a
pleasing variation.
“A charming type, this serving woman,” he reflected, regarding her with
gentle favour, “charming. By no means a unique or even an unusual one,
but really quite charming and pleasant to observe. In that woman the
maternal instinct will be found in a very advanced state of
development—and yet, if I recollect aright,” he started, frowning, and
pausing, with a morsel of meat on his fork, he contemplated her
curiously, “Yes, I believe my recollections are accurate, she has never
had any children and probably, after this lapse of time, will not
produce any. Very strange indeed, very strange, another of those most
puzzling instances of Nature’s waste.”
He sighed and reflected a little on Mrs. Fellowes as she helped his wife
to cream, then he went rather sadly to his tart, feeling a slight tinge
of contempt for Nature’s inconsistency.
When Mrs. Waring had consumed as much nourishment as her entertainers
thought fit for her, Mr. Fellowes went over to the sideboard, unhooked
the sketch, and propped it against the claret jug.
“The colouring is good, isn’t it?” he said. “Gwen sent it to us last
week.”
Mrs. Waring threw up her head and looked at the rector’s wife, then her
face flooded with pink, and there came a pain into her heart that she
had never felt before. For the first time in her seven-and-thirty years
this little woman was jealous.
“Gwen gave it!” she repeated. “Henry, do you think Gwen would give us
one?”
There was a perceptible choke in her voice, and she put up her little
hand to her throat with a swift movement.
“My love!” he said in a rather frightened way, “we could hardly ask our
daughter for such a very valuable present.”
“I suppose we could not,” she said, with sweet humility.
“My reasonable, my docile one!” he thought, with tender satisfaction,
“better a thousand times than any other female type, serving or
otherwise.”
He might have felt more disturbed if he had had the merest ghost of a
notion as to the causes of her humility, which had less to do with him
than he would altogether have relished. With all this congestion of
novel emotion the woman was losing her pristine transparency.
“What are your plans for the afternoon?” asked the rector. “You know
that even the ordinary decencies of civilization have to be shunted in a
parson’s life, I must be off in five minutes. Are you on for a walk,
Waring?”
“I!—Oh, thank you, but, we—I—we—” he caught nervously on to his wife’s
eyes, “we—we are very much engaged just now. We just called concerning
this matter of quinine, and we have already absorbed too much of your
time; untimely visitors are a keen trial—my wife and I have suffered
much from this form of affliction.”
The rector laughed.
“Visitors are a brutal bane, ninety per cent. of them, but you two are
most marked exceptions. We can go as far as the Park, anyway, for that
is on my way, and I know my wife has designs on yours—you won’t get her
back much before dinner time.”
Mr. Waring turned round with a start.
“Is this the case?” he asked blankly.
“I would like to stay,” said Mrs. Waring softly, but she hung her head
and did not look at her husband.
He looked at her, however, and his brows lifted themselves. He turned
with solemnity to Mrs. Fellowes.
“Pray consider this question of quinine,” he said, “and let us know the
result—our experience is quite insufficient to go on.”
“You are quite welcome to all mine,” said Mrs. Fellowes laughing.
He turned to his wife again. “Good-bye, my love. I hope I shall be able
to get on with my work, but—ahem—this upsets one sadly.”
Mrs. Fellowes went to her husband in the hall just then and they were
alone.
“This is quite unusual, love—are you wise to remain?” he said.
Mrs. Waring’s eyes wandered to Gwen’s picture.
“I would like to stay,” she said, then suddenly she bent towards him and
the pink deepened on her cheeks, “but I will go if you like.”
“I wish you to do just as you like yourself, love.”
He loosed his hand gently from her clasp and followed Mrs. Fellowes into
the hall, his fingers twitching.
In an instant she was after him and making for her hat when Mrs.
Fellowes caught her.
“Come to the door and see them off,” she remarked innocently, drawing
her arm through her own.
When she had seen them off the premises, Mrs. Fellowes shut her guest up
with the picture and went to dress, then she scurried her off to the
village, where they spent a rather remarkable two hours.
Mrs. Fellowes’ companion was first discovered by an urchin who was
making mud pies in a gutter. At the first shock of his find, he gave a
whoop and turned a summersault back into the dust, then he uplifted
himself and fled with the news, despatching scouts to right and left on
his progress.
When the ladies reached the village they found it all agog, every door
was full of faces, and the howls of scrubbing infancy arose from every
yard.
Mrs. Waring looked shy and twitched a good deal, but on the whole she
bore herself gallantly.
The mothers embarrassed her, they seemed to expect conversation, and
this was even the case with the children; she could just smile at them,
however, and be silent. It was among the babies she shone, not, indeed,
in her mode of holding them—she did that with her fingers, delicately,
as if they were pens—but she got so eager over them, so full of
interest, asked so many anxious questions as to their appetites, and
gave such amazing hints concerning their management that she made an
impression on the village such as astonished the oldest inhabitant, and
set the women’s tongues wagging at a rate to surprise even their
husbands.
It was an event, an epoch-making day in the village of Waring, when the
squire’s wife stepped in bodily presence in and out of its houses, and
disseminated useful knowledge concerning the human infant.
When Gwen heard of it, in the same letter that told her to send her
mother a sketch of herself without delay, she laughed sarcastically.
“This is dishonest of Mrs. Fellowes!” she cried with a little stamp,
“how dare she make all this fresh phase of lunacy into a pathetic story?
There is a ring of false sentiment through the whole business.”
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Transcriber’s Note
This book uses inconsistent spelling and hyphenation, which were
retained in the ebook version. Ditto marks used to represent repeated
text have been replaced with the text that they represent. Some
corrections have been made to the text, including normalizing
punctuation. Further corrections are noted below:
p. 10: The misery I have to endureit wh servants -> The misery I have to
endure with servants