Edna Rossiter, in common with the majority of her sex, supposed herself
to be a religious woman because she had, from early girlhood, indulged
nightly in five minutes spent on her knees beside her bed, her face
pressed against the satin quilt, while she thought about herself.
Very soon after her marriage she formed the habit of prolonging the
five minutes into ten, or even fifteen, while she consecrated a few
vindictively earnest thoughts of forgiveness to her husband.
Within the last ten years, all the forbearance which she was capable of
displaying being apparently without any effect upon Sir Julian, Lady
Rossiter had rather disgustedly transferred her allegiance from the
Almighty, _in propria persona_, to God as He is found in Nature.
Nature, primarily, meant out-of-doors generally, in warm weather, and
the sound of the sea two miles off, audible from beside the boudoir
fire, in the colder seasons.
Lately, however, Nature had also embraced such of humanity as had its
place rather lower than that of the Rossiters in the social scale.
Edna sought for the Divine Spark in her fellow-creatures, and
frequently discovered it, with renewed satisfaction to herself and to
its possessor.
As she often said, smiling a little:
"There's so much bad in the best of us,
There's so much good in the worst of us----"
She never finished the quotation, except by the smile, because she knew
it to be at all times easy to trip over its inversions and repetitions,
and thus risk the transition from the sublime to the ridiculous.
One of the most recent manifestations of what Julian had once
designated in his wife's hearing as the "Hunting of the Spark," was her
wholesale invitation to the staff of teachers at the College to spend
Sunday afternoon at Culmhayes.
A few stray and tentative young women had availed themselves of it
once, showing a marked disposition towards wandering arm-in-arm round
the gardens, avoiding their hostess as much as possible, and Cooper had
twice walked over from Culmouth and made nervously easy conversation to
Lady Rossiter, which had dwindled into a sort of alert silence when her
husband came in.
"Mind you bring them _all_ next week," had been Lady Rossiter's
farewell injunction, to which Cooper had replied with great confidence
and assurance.
Preparing for her guests on Sunday afternoon, therefore, Lady Rossiter
gazed smilingly out of her window at a cloudless day of August.
Evidently Nature was in league with her votary.
Lady Rossiter told her maid to bring the black-and-white _mousseline
de soie_. No other colours suited her fairness so admirably, and
she always wore the combination when embarking upon any enterprise
of particular benevolence. The thick pallor of her complexion could
afford to defy the sun, and she seldom wore a hat in the garden. A
black-and-white-striped sunshade made quite as effective a background
for her mass of auburn hair and black eyebrows and lashes.
Before going downstairs she thoughtfully slipped the rings from her
long white fingers, and bade her maid substitute a small crystal cross
on a velvet ribbon for her pearl necklace.
The maid had not been with her very long, and obeyed the mandate with
such wooden matter-of-factness that Lady Rossiter added gently:
"One doesn't want anyone to feel the least little--difference--in any
way. We have all grown to have such false ideas of values...."
"Yes, m'lady," said Mason, looking so thoroughly bewildered that Lady
Rossiter resolved to read extracts from Ruskin aloud to her while her
hair was being brushed at nights.
She went downstairs slowly, to find Julian reading in the hall.
"Jorrocks?" she enquired playfully, but with a meaning that she knew
would not be lost upon her husband.
Ever since she had wrung from a monosyllabic Julian the admission that
neither Ruskin, Pater, nor Stevenson "meant" to him that which they
meant to her, Edna had assumed, by almost imperceptible degrees, that
her husband's only literature consisted of Jorrocks and the volumes of
the Badminton series.
Dickens she had unwillingly conceded to him, since Dickens made no
appeal to her personally, but she was more apt to dwell upon his liking
for the "Pickwick Papers" and "Nicholas Nickleby" than for "Great
Expectations" or "David Copperfield."
At her enquiry Julian closed his book.
"Jorrocks, of course," he assented expressionlessly, putting down
Huysman's "En Route," and not troubling to display the title.
"Did Mr. Fuller tell you how many of my staff meant to come this
afternoon?"
"No. I don't suppose, in any case, that they would have told him."
"That's so curious to me, Julian. To work together all the week, and
yet know nothing of one another's _real_ life--nothing of what goes on
in the free time, or the one holiday of the week."
"What generally goes on, I imagine, is that the girls have their hair
waved on Saturday afternoons, stay in bed on Sunday mornings, and go
out with their young men on Sunday evenings. I doubt if the procedure
ever varies."
"And that with God's own blue sea less than a mile away!" ejaculated
Lady Rossiter under her breath, but nevertheless quite audibly.
"Cooper generally goes for a walk on Saturday afternoon," said Sir
Julian consolingly; "and Fuller, and I imagine a good many of the other
fellows as well, to a football or cricket match."
"Can you wonder that we long to win them to clearer, wider ideals?" his
wife enquired.
She waited for no reply, aware of old that Julian invariably professed
a supreme indifference to the outlook of the College staff when outside
their College walls, but trailed into the wide, cool drawing-room
containing little furniture and an abundance of roses and heliotrope.
Lady Rossiter arranged the flowers herself, and did so exquisitely.
She often said that flowers were literally a necessity to her--an
opinion frequently held by those whose financial situation has
never compelled them to regard flowers as an alternative to, let us
say, butter for breakfast, in which case the relative value of the
commodities in question is apt to undergo alteration.
Poised over her bowls of pink roses, Lady Rossiter was taken by
surprise when her guests eventually arrived.
Sir Julian strongly suspected that had the drawing-room window given on
to the drive, instead of on to the green bowling-alley, his wife would
herself have met her visitors at the hospitably opened hall door, thus
sparing the dignity of Horber, undemocratic as only a butler can be,
from the announcement which he stiffly made out of the extreme corners
of his mouth.
"Miss Farmer, Miss Sandiloe, and Mr. Cooper, m'lady."
Miss Farmer, in a green linen which accorded singularly ill with a
sallow complexion; Miss Sandiloe, girlish, pretty and full of giggles
that threatened disaster to a tightly-fitting and transparent white
muslin; and Mr. Cooper, obviously in the toils of Miss Sandiloe, came
one by one into the drawing-room, where Lady Rossiter, in point of
fact, had never intended them to penetrate at all.
Sir Julian, watching the entry in an angle of the hall window-seat
which he trusted to be invisible from the drawing-room, could not
forbear the tribute of an unwilling admiration to his wife's handling
of the rather embarrassed trio.
"Ah, but how nice! Miss Farmer, of course we've met before; and
Mr. Cooper"--a shake of the hand to each. "And----?" A pause, with
pleasantly uplifted eyebrows, in front of Miss Sandiloe.
"Miss Sandiloe," Miss Farmer supplied, and added rather haltingly,
obviously unsure of the etiquette governing the position:
"The junior teacher of shorthand, Lady Rossiter."
"I'm so glad to see you," said the lady, with an additional
graciousness designed, Julian imagined, to set the youthful stranger at
her ease.
The unexpectedly high-pitched note, however, upon which Miss Sandiloe
off-handedly replied, "Oh, thanks!" did not indicate shyness.
Julian viewed it as an example of the law of cause and effect that his
wife's next observation was made in tones that savoured less of kindly
welcome and more of rather distant patronage.
"I am always anxious to get to know all the members of the College
staff, and have them out here if I possibly can. I take a great
interest in the College. In fact, I'm on the committee of management."
"Are you?" said Miss Sandiloe indifferently. "What topping flowers
those are!"
She thrust her face into the fragrant mass which Lady Rossiter had just
left.
"You must all come into the garden, when it's a little cooler."
Lady Rossiter addressed herself to Miss Farmer.
"Meanwhile it's too bad of me to keep you standing in this hot room.
Come into the morning-room."
Julian fancied that Miss Farmer, heated and wearied, and with dusty
patent-leather shoes that creaked as she walked, and bore a large crack
across each, as though they were too tight, cast a rather wistful look
at the large, beautifully-shaded room of which they had penetrated no
further than the threshold.
But she obediently followed her hostess, and Miss Sandiloe, giggling
slightly, tripped behind her with Cooper in tow.
From sheer curiosity, Julian went into the morning-room twenty minutes
later.
His wife, looking unusually harassed, was seated near the window,
Miss Farmer, Miss Sandiloe and Mr. Cooper having unconsciously placed
themselves in a semi-circle in front of her, each seated upon the edge
of an upright chair.
"Why," Lady Rossiter was exclaiming in her brightest voice, "one of my
greatest friends is a dear little dressmaker who lives in Culmouth, and
another is the quaint old man who looks after the lifeboat-house down
in our Duckpool Cove."
Edna must be hard put to it, Julian reflected, to have made use of both
her dear little dressmaker and her quaint old man within one sentence.
Both, he knew, were frequently in requisition for the dissipation of
any sense of awkwardness which she suspected might be assailing her
visitors, but one was generally held in reserve to supplement the
effect of the other if necessary.
"Here you are!" Edna exclaimed, almost with relief in her voice, as
he entered, thereby, Julian told himself, depriving young Cooper of a
remark which he would certainly have made his own.
Young Cooper, however, was not to be defeated.
"We've accepted Lady Rossiter's kind invitation, you see, Sir Julian,"
he observed.
"How are you, Cooper? How d'y'e do?" He shook hands with the shorthand
teachers. "Were you the only people energetic enough to walk over in
this heat?"
"Why, yes. The new Lady Superintendent spoke of coming since Lady
Rossiter was so kind, but she didn't turn up, so we've come without
her."
"Tell me about the new Superintendent," said Edna quickly. "Miss
Marchrose, isn't she?"
"Most pleasant and energetic," said Cooper rapidly. "The sort of young
lady _I_ call capable."
"She's got into the way of things very quickly," Miss Farmer
supplemented.
"I wonder if she is connected with a Miss Marchrose whom I used to hear
about, some years ago----" said Lady Rossiter thoughtfully.
"Here's Easter!" exclaimed her husband, looking from the window and
feeling thankful for any interruption to Edna's possible intention of
recapitulating the scandal attaching to the unfortunately uncommon name
of the new Superintendent.
Young Cooper sprang up.
"Let me make rather more room. I'll move to this chair, if I may, Lady
Rossiter."
Mark Easter's arrival improved matters greatly, even though he was
accompanied by the preposterous Ruthie, adopting a sudden pose of
extreme shyness, and concealing her face on her left shoulder, after
the manner of a timid infant of two years old. The members of the staff
knew Mark, had laughed at his jokes in and out of office hours, had
experienced his pleasant, courteously-abrupt authority in work-time,
and knew him for a fellow-worker who spared himself less than he did
them.
Miss Sandiloe launched into the shrill fire of giggling repartee
which was her nearest approach to naturalness. Miss Farmer's frown of
strained attention relaxed, and she leant back, as though for the first
time able to look at her surroundings, and Cooper ceased to fix bulging
and attentive eyes upon his hostess.
Julian marvelled, not at all for the first time, at the invariable
effect upon his surroundings of Mark Easter's elementary witticisms and
gay, indefinable charm of manner.
He knew that his wife liked Mark, if only because he was always ready
to let her talk to him in low-voiced, womanly sympathy of the otherwise
unmentioned Mrs. Easter. Lady Rossiter often said that, but for her,
the tragedy of Mark's life would have been left to corrode in silent
bitterness.
Perhaps it was true.
Julian knew that to his wife was it frequently given to rush in where
others might not only hesitate, but positively refuse, to tread, and
he knew that Mark's simple gratitude for her interest in him was as
genuine as it was outspoken.
He wondered, sometimes, at that very simplicity, in a man of acute
sympathies and unfailing intuition such as Mark again and again proved
himself to possess in almost every relation into which he entered.
There were even times when he asked himself, in utter perplexity,
whether Mark could himself be as sensitive as his quickness of
perception for sensitiveness in others appeared to denote.
He thought that he had seldom seen Edna look more relieved than at the
dissipation of the constraint amongst her tea-party, caused by Mark's
entrance.
"Will you ring for tea, Mark?" she asked smilingly. She had the trick,
not uncommon to a certain type of woman, of assuming a more proprietary
tone and manner when speaking to a man not her husband.
Julian's restless and observant mind almost automatically registered
the subconscious irritation instantly produced in the other two women.
Miss Farmer, turning to young Cooper, asked him if he would be so very
kind as to reach her little bag, which contained a handkerchief.
Miss Sandiloe, more actively resentful, as well as far more
self-confident in the youthful security of possessing good looks and an
evident admirer in the shape of Cooper, was bolder.
"Oh, Mr. Easter, I'm awfully glad you're here. I mean, really I am.
I've got some killing things to tell you, about the Coll. We've got
some freaks there now, really we have."
"What have you done with the young gentleman who wanted to learn enough
shorthand to get him a post in a newspaper office in six lessons?"
enquired Mark, as usual full of interest.
"Oh, him! It wasn't him I was thinking of so much, really, though he
certainly is a caution. I mean, really he is. But he's come off the six
lessons stunt, all the same."
"Well done! Have you persuaded him to take a course?"
"I don't know what _I_'ve got to do with it, I'm sure," Miss Sandiloe
said, with a self-conscious laugh. "But I'm taking him for private
tuition now, three times a week, as well as him going to the usual
classes, and he'll be in the Speed in no time."
Miss Farmer, looking more animated than when making impersonal and
agonised conversation with her hostess, joined in.
"Miss Marchrose is taking the High Speed room now, Mr. Easter. She's
got a beautiful pronounciation--so clear, it is."
Lady Rossiter smiled--a kind, faint smile, that, to her husband's
perceptions, admirably succeeded in underlining her determination to
avoid noticing Miss Farmer's slip.
"It's so wonderful of you, I think, to be so devoted to your work," she
said. "That is one reason why I love the society of workers. They are
always so eager about their work, and I think it is so wonderful of
them."
Edna did not generally repeat herself, but the curious hostility
vibrant in the air surrounding her philanthropic enterprise was making
her nervous.
"I've always been keen on my job," said Cooper complacently, "but I
ought to have been an engineer. I should have liked that."
"But then--why not have followed your vocation?" Edna enquired, with
tilted eyebrows.
Cooper shook his head.
"It's an expensive training, Lady Rossiter. If I'd had the capital, I
should have liked it, though."
"I understand," gently said Edna, with a whole world of implication in
her tone, at which Cooper looked rather astonished, and Miss Sandiloe
decidedly resentful.
"Daddy!" said a sudden voice.
Everybody looked at the forgotten Ruthie, who stood on one leg beside
her father's chair.
"Daddy, I'm afraid I shall forget my piece, if I don't say it soon,"
said Ruthie in an excessively audible aside, and with the evident
determination of displaying her histrionic attainments to the assembly.
Mark laughed, with the injudicious tolerance that he was all too apt to
accord to the ill-timed demonstrations of his offspring.
"Not now, Ruthie. Perhaps Lady Rossiter doesn't want you to say your
piece at all."
Few suggestions could have been better founded upon fact, and Lady
Rossiter made no attempt to contradict Ruthie's father.
Julian wondered if it was altogether undesignedly that Miss Sandiloe
instantly exclaimed:
"Are you going to recite to us, dear?"
"Yes, I am," said Miss Easter in loud, confident tones. "I always
recite when I go out to tea."
The relentless inevitability of the proposed entertainment deprived
even Miss Sandiloe of further utterance for the moment.
"You will not be asked again if you give yourself such a bad
character," said Mark in a rather hopeless voice.
"Oh, yes, I shall. Lady Rossiter always likes me and Peekaboo to come;
she said so! We can come whenever we like."
Sir Julian's regard for Mark Easter alone prevented him from
disclaiming aloud any share in the unlimited hospitality so rashly
proclaimed by his wife in the days of Ruthie's and Ambrose's
comparatively innocuous babyhood, and so unscrupulously worked to death
by them ever since.
"Is Peekaboo a pet?" asked Miss Farmer kindly.
"Not always," Ruthie replied literally. "Sometimes he's a very naughty
boy. Sarah has locked him up in the boot-cupboard this afternoon,
because----"
"Hush, hush," hastily said Mark, "we don't tell tales out of school."
Julian wondered grimly what story of misdoing the exhortation to
fraternal charity might cover. The unforeseeable and disastrous
ingenuity of Ambrose's misdeeds was only to be compared to the skill
with which his partner and instigator in crime invariably managed to
extricate herself at the eleventh hour from complicity and leave him
the solitary victim of blame and punishment.
Tea and cakes, arriving opportunely, staved off Ruthie's recitation,
and brought the relief of movement.
Lady Rossiter crumbled a very small sponge-cake behind the
silver-kettle, and said in a general sort of way that she hoped
everyone would make a very good tea and eat a great deal. She herself
always thought of Sunday tea as one of the principal meals of the day,
as it would only be followed by cold supper in the evening.
Whether cold supper was to be the portion of her guests or not,
however, the piled plates of buns and the large cakes, bearing a
certain superficial resemblance to preparations for a school-treat,
were better patronised by Ruthie than by the members of the College
staff.
"We mustn't leave it too late to be starting back," Miss Farmer said
nervously. "I mean, it's quite a longish walk."
Julian gauged the measure of Edna's discouragement by her omission to
insist graciously upon an expedition first round the garden.
"You must come again one Sunday," she said, not, however, making
precise mention of any date. "I should like you to see my view of the
sea. There is a beautiful little glimpse to be had from a corner of the
garden.... You must so need a draught of blue distance after working
inside four walls all the week."
"Thank you, Lady Rossiter," said Miss Farmer meekly, turning a pale
brick-colour.
"Thanks," said Miss Sandiloe, her nose in the air and her voice
aggressive; "but really I can get all the view I want of the sea from
Culmouth. My window looks right over the bay--that's why I took the
apartments I did. Are you ready, Horace?"
"Ready," said Mr. Cooper, with an alacrity that might be partly
attributable to the unprecedented use of his Christian name--Miss
Sandiloe's not too subtle retaliation for Lady Rossiter's frequent
"Mark."
"Come along, Ruthie," said Mark Easter. "We'll walk with you part of
the way if we may, Miss Farmer."
The teacher looked pleased, and they followed Miss Sandiloe and her
admirer, Mark adjusting his long, easy stride to the very obvious
limitations of Miss Farmer's patent-leather shoes.
Edna looked after them, wearing a rather exhausted expression.
"I am very tired, Julian. I shall go to the boudoir and enjoy the
silence till it's time to dress. Nothing is so restful as complete
silence, after all."
Julian honoured the assertion by making no reply to it whatever.
"I have been told," said Edna, with gentle solemnity, "that my
spirit is burning itself away. I know you don't sympathise with that
necessity for pouring out, Julian--this afternoon, for instance, has
taken a great deal out of me--but I noticed that you gave out nothing
at all--not one spark. Isn't it rather a pity? One can do so little,
materially, but the things of the spirit.... Ah, well, I grudge none of
it."
She went upstairs, however, very slowly, and leaning heavily upon the
banisters.
Julian's gaze did not follow her.