As Lady Rossiter proceeded on her way downstairs, leaving Iris to the
completion of her lesson, she was waylaid by young Cooper.
"I've been waiting for you, in the hope that you would spare me one
moment, Lady Rossiter. There was a little matter about which the staff
wanted me to consult you."
Such a reference appealed to Edna at any time, and came as balm to the
present state of her spirit, at the moment so seriously discomposed
that she had been obliged to repeat to herself more than once, as she
went downstairs:
"Still lovingly to bear a fool,
Nor speak till wrath has time to cool,
And thus live out my golden rule."
"I always have time for the business of the College, as you know," she
responded graciously. "What is it?"
"Why, the staff thought--the idea, as a matter of fact, originated with
me, and they have all taken it up quite enthusiastically--we thought
that we should very much like, in view of our long connection with Mr.
Mark Easter, to make a little presentation to Miss Iris Easter, in
honour of her wedding. Just a small affair, you know--subscribed for by
the staff of the College."
"But how charming of you all! Only--no one must be put to serious
expense. I am sure Miss Easter would be dreadfully distressed if _that_
happened."
Cooper looked rather offended.
"Certainly not, Lady Rossiter. I think you may rely upon my judgment
not to make excessive demands. But, of course, if you think anyone else
had better collect the money, I shall resign the job into other hands
with the very greatest pleasure."
Edna hastily uttered the necessary disclaimers.
"It was suggested," said Cooper, still with reserve in his voice, "that
you would be so very kind as to assist at the presentation, which might
perhaps be made the occasion for some small gathering such as we had
last year at Christmas. I find that the members of the staff are quite
anxious for it."
Lady Rossiter remembered, without much enthusiasm, a New Year party at
which the staff of the Commercial and Technical College had entertained
their directors, pupils and acquaintances, in a large classroom
decorated with bunting for the occasion.
"That is a most excellent idea," she said slowly, partly because it
sounded sympathetic and partly in order to gain time. "But perhaps
Miss Easter might feel rather shy in the presence of so many people
who would be strange to her. What about a little informal tea-party?
But, of course, all that can be settled later. What are you thinking of
giving her?"
"Nothing has been actually decided upon, though _I_ should suggest
some little thing in silver. The ladies always like silver. I remember
selecting a wedding-present for a lady friend," said Cooper, looking
slightly sentimental, "that proved highly acceptable. A silver
serviette-ring it was, with her initials--her _new_ initials--engraved
upon it."
"I'm sure it was delightful, and Miss Easter is certain to like
anything that you all choose."
"We all know her, and she's been here quite a lot lately, and of course
Mr. Mark Easter does a great deal for the staff, and we're all very
fond of him," added Cooper, with a sudden outburst of naturalness.
Edna, in common with quite a number of other people, always underwent,
more or less unconsciously, a slight stirring of resentment at any
spontaneous tribute to someone else's popularity.
It was perhaps this which moved her to a rather thin and repressive
smile.
"It will gratify Mr. Easter very much indeed, I know. And after all,
it's the thought that is of real value--not the offering. Do tell the
staff how very much I hope they will let me hear any further ideas."
"Thanks very much, Lady Rossiter," said Cooper, rather stiffly.
Edna, dissatisfied, reflected for a moment.
"Couldn't you all come out to Culmhayes and talk it over with me?" she
enquired, as by an inspiration. "We might form a little committee, and
go into ways and means, and perhaps I could find out some trifle that
would please Miss Easter, and let you know. How would that be?"
"It's very kind of you. I myself always prefer to have these things on
a business footing," said Cooper, looking cheered. "I am essentially a
business man."
"Then what about Sunday afternoon? Perhaps you and Miss Farmer--and
what about Mr. Fuller?"
If young Cooper could have answered all too certainly, "what about
Fuller," he refrained from any such disastrous candour. But he gave
his grateful pledge of coming to Culmhayes on the following Sunday
with as many of the staff as were considered necessary to form a small
committee. Cooper was insistent upon the necessity for such.
"You notice that I like things done in order?" said he.
"Yes, indeed," murmured Edna. "Here is Miss Easter coming downstairs,
so I suppose the lesson is over, and we must be going. Good-bye, Mr.
Cooper--I shan't forget."
"Let me see you down. Hark!" said Cooper, with an expression of
animated interest.
Iris and Lady Rossiter both paused.
"Did you hear my knee-joint crack just now? That was my knee. I put it
out at football, months ago, and since then it cracks, like that."
And with this addition to the sum total of their general information,
Edna and Miss Easter drove away from the College.
"Poor young man!" said Lady Rossiter leniently.
"Oh, the dear College! I wish my lessons hadn't come to an end, but of
course I shan't have time now. Miss Marchrose is going to come and stay
with us, later on--when----"
"When you're married?"
Iris put her head on one side.
"It is nice and generous of you to have taken a fancy to poor
Miss Marchrose," said Lady Rossiter, who seldom divested the Lady
Superintendent of the adjective. "But after all, there are one or two
things to be considered. Your husband may not take a very great fancy
to her."
Edna's warning would have tallied much more with her very real distrust
of the proposed scheme had she omitted the word "not" in the last
sentence.
Iris, however, answered confidently, "Oh, but Douglas will always like
my friends, and I shall always like his. We have every single thing in
common, you know."
Leaving Iris to her delusion, that wreathed her pretty, silly little
face in dreamy smiles, Lady Rossiter leant back and indulged in
reflections of her own. She was more tired than was usual with her, and
her habitual serenity of mind was invaded by a certain discontent of
which she did not seek to analyse the cause.
She looked at the hoar-frost, sparkling on the hedges, and at the chill
blue of the sky, and perfunctorily told herself, as often before,
"God's in His Heaven--all's right with the world"; recalled, in a vague
and disjointed manner, fragments of R. L. Stevenson that she had often
thought to be peculiarly applicable to herself, and remembered that two
of her particular friends were a humble little dressmaker and a quaint
old seafarer; she humorously adjured herself to "t'ink ob de blessings,
children, t'ink ob de blessings." But all was of no avail. She felt
saddened, inexplicably depressed.
For many years Edna Rossiter had believed that her strong suit, so to
speak, was Love. She "gave out."
As a young girl, she had perhaps fancied, as young girls are prone
to fancy, that only as the heroine of a _grande passion_ could she
fulfil herself. Her first love had disappointed her. A cheerful,
beauty-loving young architect, he had failed to return adequate replies
to the letters, pulsating with quotations from Laurence Hope, in which
Edna had poured forth her soul during a temporary absence.
She began to doubt, to read the verses of Arthur Symons, and to think
that only by suffering could she find herself. Even the breaking-off
of her engagement, however, failed immediately to terminate the quest
successfully.
"I have tried not to be bitter," was the keynote of Edna's twenties.
By the time she had reached the stage of quoting:
"How many loved your moments of glad grace
And loved your beauty with love false or true,
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows in your changing face----"
--lines which the majority of women read with such a singular sense of
applicability to their own needs--Edna had met Sir Julian Rossiter.
She was a great deal more beautiful at nine-and-twenty than at
nineteen, and she had, moreover, learnt to smile. Tragedy, in which
she really excelled, had proved strangely unprovocative of interest in
anyone but herself, and she had therefore been obliged to cultivate the
large, grave serenity that forgets itself in the thought of others.
It was not this, however, which had caused Sir Julian to ask her to
marry him.
Edna disliked the memory of the scene that had led to his proposal,
although time and her own industry had draped the situation with much
that it had lacked at the moment. She had met him on board ship, and
her mother, a slightly vulgar woman who had always rather disliked
the only one of her daughters whom she had not married off in early
girlhood, had speedily discovered that the owner of Culmhayes was in
need of a wife. Edna, who had so long and so vainly visualised herself
as the ideal Héloïse to an as yet-unfound Abēlard, had had time to
become heartily sick of such barren dreams, and was by now prepared to
relinquish them in favour of mere emancipation from spinsterhood and a
restricted life.
For three of the endless days of a sea-voyage Sir Julian had appeared
to be attracted by her, and on the fourth he had devoted himself to a
blue-eyed widow, travelling second-class. The voyage was nearly over
before the first-class passengers saw him again in their midst. Edna
could remember still the evening before Dover was reached, when her
mother, exasperated, had uttered the short, sudden gibe that had put
into words the humiliating truth never before spoken between them.
She remembered still the despairing resentment that had seized upon
her, at her realisation that such taunts, once uttered, may speedily
become common, between people in constant proximity and without mutual
respect.
Her rare tears had shaken her, and it was Sir Julian who had found her,
crying in a solitary corner of the deck. Edna could remember--though
never in her life did she willingly recall--that anger and misery
together had made her give him, in reply to his urgent enquiry,
something that very nearly approached to the raw, crude truth. And
that night she had said to herself:
"Thank Heaven, I shall never see him again!"
The next morning he had asked her to marry him, making no protestations
of passion such as she had once thought herself fated to evoke, but
suggesting a mutual companionship, likely to prove of solace to both,
and to release her from a situation which had become intolerable to her.
Julian's candour had humiliated her bitterly, for her one moment of
envisaging the truth in all its bitterness had passed from her.
But she had accepted him.
She would not have believed it, had she been told that the evening of
that self-betrayal, of which she thrust the memory away thenceforward,
had witnessed the truest, most intimate relationship in which she and
her husband were destined ever to stand towards one another.
The prosperous chatelaine of Culmhayes had had many years in which
to forget the mortifications and disappointments of her pre-marriage
days. She ruled an admirable household admirably, she "gave out,"
she discovered Nature, and she opposed a perpetual exhalation of
large-hearted tolerance to the small shafts of rather indifferent
satire that more and more formed the basis of Sir Julian's conjugal
intercourse.
Edna indulged in no bitterness of resentment against her husband,
except on the rare occasions when she, always unwillingly, remembered
that chivalry and not love had prompted his offer of marriage to her.
His frequent captiousness, his small verbal incivilities, his absence
of any sympathy with her ideals, even his systematic reticence as to
his personal thoughts and feelings, roused nothing in her beyond an
appreciation of the opportunity that they provided for breadths of
sunny-hearted charity. She was not an unhappy woman, and never made
the mistake of calling herself one. Even the absence of children she
regretted more for their own sakes than for hers, since she believed
that her maternal instinct had become diverted into more universal
and more spacious channels than could have been the case had it been
exercised solely upon sons or daughters of her own.
That Sir Julian was "difficult" she never disguised from herself. He
had, in fact, become rather more "difficult" year by year, and Edna had
long since given up her early attempts to probe into his point of view.
She came to the conclusion that Julian was inarticulate because he was
unenlightened, that he liked "Jorrocks," and that he was permanently
discontented because he had not enough to do and refused to envisage
the deeper issues of life.
She reflected complacently sometimes that they had never had a
quarrel--and remained unaware that the fact admirably measured the
extent of their estrangement.
Lady Rossiter sighed at the end of her retrospect.
"Don't you like Miss Marchrose?" enquired Iris quite suddenly.
"But I wasn't thinking about her! What makes you ask?"
"I don't know," said Iris vaguely. "I've sometimes thought you didn't
like her awfully much."
Lady Rossiter reflected before making any reply. She held the theory
that the expression of an opinion should always be a well-considered
matter, and was apt to say that words were like thistledown and might
blow to unsuspected distances and in unforeseen directions.
There was, however, nothing of the airy quality of thistledown in her
deliberately given answer.
"Miss Marchrose does not strike me as attractive," she said carefully,
"but a young woman earning her own living is hardly to be judged by the
rules that we should apply to one of _nous autres_. I never care to say
that I dislike anyone--it seems to me so trivial, so short-sighted, to
dislike the little that one can know of any fellow-creature. The Divine
Spark is always lurking somewhere--although I admit that sometimes, in
the less advanced, it is difficult really to hold fast to that belief."
"Oh, but you always do! _No one_ is like you," said Miss Easter, in all
good faith. "I don't believe I've ever heard you say an unkind word of
anybody."
Lady Rossiter smiled.
"The great thing," she observed gently, "is never to say anything,
unless one can say something kind. And it is very strange, Iris dear,
how one can nearly always find something that is nice and yet true, to
say of everyone."
"_You_ can, I'm sure."
Iris was always complaisant, besides being young and happy and
therefore disposed to be uncritical, and she had long entertained a
simple and quite unreasoning admiration for Lady Rossiter.
Her enthusiasm for Miss Marchrose was a recent impulse only, and did
not prevent her from a further endeavour to obtain light upon Lady
Rossiter's views.
"She's quite too nice to me, always, and I do think she must have been
pretty. In fact, she is now, in a sort of way."
"Quite," agreed Lady Rossiter serenely.
"Sometimes I wonder if she has foreign blood in her."
"Why?"
"I'm not sure," said Miss Easter impressively, "that I should quite,
absolutely, always trust her."
Lady Rossiter's common-sense did not altogether admit of her accepting
so remarkable a reason for assuming untrustworthiness, but she was
entirely in accord with the result of Miss Easter's logic, however
defective the means by which that result was obtained.
"It's curious that you should say that," she remarked slowly. "Instinct
is a strange thing, Iris."
"Yes, isn't it? They always say a woman's instinct is never wrong,"
glibly returned Miss Easter. "But I don't mean anything unkind about
Miss Marchrose, truly I don't; there's only one thing I don't like
about her."
Lady Rossiter made a sound expressive of enquiry.
"I never can bear people who try to be sarcastic," murmured Iris,
voicing unaware the fundamental distrust which governs the whole of the
British middle classes.
"Satire is a very cheap, unworthy weapon," said Lady Rossiter, not
without inward reminiscences of Sir Julian as she spoke. "But to be
quite fair, I don't think I've ever heard poor Miss Marchrose try to be
satirical or anything of that sort. She's generally rather tongue-tied
and awkward when I'm there. You see, Iris, I'm afraid she knows that I
have heard a good deal about her, one way and another."
Lady Rossiter hesitated, remembered Mark, and decided to go on.
"I am afraid there is not much doubt that Miss Marchrose once did a
very, very heartless action, and I am afraid that heartlessness and
meanness are only too terribly apt to go together. There is something
about the hard lines of her mouth--but after all, how can I cast the
first stone? I had rather let the facts speak for themselves."
Followed the narrative of Captain Isbister, his engagement to a girl
not of his own class, his accident, his offer to release the girl, and
her prompt acceptance of it, culminating in the unbridled display of
anguish witnessed in the nursing-home by Captain Isbister's attendant,
which climax was received by Iris far otherwise than it had once been
received by Sir Julian Rossiter.
"Oh, oh, poor dear thing! How too terrible! I am sure Douglas would go
on exactly like that if I ever threw him over. But of course I never
could. It's the most dreadful thing I ever heard of--how anyone could
be so heartless!"
"How indeed!" sadly ejaculated Lady Rossiter. "And you know, Iris, by
some miracle of science, he actually did recover, and can walk as well
as you or I. So if she had been steadfast, they would have been married
by this time, and she would have been in a very different position now."
"It's like a book," said Iris, awe-stricken. "But she couldn't have
cared for him really."
"Indeed, no! I thank God from the bottom of my heart that poor Clarence
found out in time what a mistake he had made. He was younger than she,
poor boy, and it was all thoroughly unsuitable. He has found his ideal
since then."
Iris looked a shade disappointed.
"Ah, my dear, you are thinking that nothing is like first love--and
in a way it's true. But there's another kind of love, too, that comes
later, when one has outgrown the personal part of it all--the divine
selfishness that is so sweet and natural and inevitable in youth. And
that is the love, the great universal tenderness, that comes to one
later on, and that seeks a widening circle, and a bigger outlet, in
order to spend itself on others. But you know nothing about that yet,
childie dear. How should you, indeed?"
Very few people like to be told that there is anything in the gamut of
the emotions of which they know nothing, and Iris looked with rather an
unresponsive eye at her dear Lady Rossiter.
"After all," said that lady, rendering her usual smiling acknowledgment
to the Deity, "after all, there are many compensations for growing old,
in God's world."
The aphorism admitted not at all of contradiction, and hardly of
agreement, and Iris accordingly relapsed into silence.
"I will let you know about my little tea-party for the staff," was Lady
Rossiter's last remark. "They will like to see your bright face and
pretty frock, dear. Their lives are very drab."
The bright face and pretty frock of Iris Easter, however, were not
allowed to shed illumination upon the drab lives of Lady Rossiter's
guests on Sunday until the wedding-present question had been
inadequately discussed.
Mr. Cooper was mounted upon verbal stilts, and adorned his discourse
with many tags of commercial phraseology; Miss Farmer would only say
that she was sure Miss Easter would be pleased whatever they settled;
and Miss Sandiloe giggled and looked meaningly at Mr. Cooper. Needless
to say, Mr. Fairfax Fuller put in no appearance.
Edna was by turns kindly, practical, helpful and sympathetic, but still
no decision could be reached.
"What is the amount subscribed?"
"Just over two pounds, so far, but there are a few more responses to
come in."
"It isn't the _amount_, Lady Rossiter, is it?" wearily enquired Miss
Farmer.
"Certainly not. The thought is everything."
It almost appeared as though the thought was indeed to be everything.
"Have you decided what you wish to give?"
The three members of the staff exchanged glances.
"So many people thought of a pair of silver vases."
"Or a little travelling-clock, Lady Rossiter."
"A good many voted for a small paper-knife, as being individual, like,"
said Cooper.
"Charming," warmly said Lady Rossiter, appearing to address all her
three _vis-à-vis_ at once.
The discussion continued at a similar rate of progress for the
remainder of the afternoon.
Edna began to feel considerably taxed at the inordinate extent to which
she was required to "give out," in her own favourite phrase. There
were limits to the life-giving forces that could be radiated for the
benefit of three discursive and unbusinesslike fellow-creatures on a
cold afternoon in winter. True to her principles, she reflected, with
a humorousness that remained strictly tender, that she must definitely
take the responsibility for which they all appeared so inadequate onto
her own shoulders.
She prepared to intimate her decision by a leading question.
"And about the actual presentation? Perhaps it would prevent little
jealousies, little follies of that sort--after all, human nature is
human nature--if it were presented by someone not quite of the College
personnel? Of course, in the name of you all, by someone who would be
able to make a little speech. Oh, nothing formal, of course, only a few
words, but one wants those to be the _right_ words! I don't know if----"
She paused.
"It was proposed," said Cooper--"and I may add carried
unanimously--that the presentation and a few words of good wishes from
us all----"
"----Being a good speaker," interpolated Miss Sandiloe.
"----And in an official position, so to speak--and a friend of Miss
Easter's," said Miss Farmer, also in parentheses.
Cooper shot a repressive glance left and right. "I am just telling
Lady Rossiter. The obvious person, of course, Lady Rossiter, has been
approached. Miss Marchrose has kindly agreed to make the presentation
on behalf of the staff."