mature heart case-hardened to bear its burdens. It is, I am sure of it,
the heart of the young only which can break. Terrible things were
hanging over the house. Sin and shame in the person of Jack Marston
were approaching it by the 5.15 train. Its most idolised inmate was to
be killed with disappointment, or to bind herself on the morrow to a
life of misery, perhaps disgrace; but in the drawing-room was already a
sprinkling of guests, many more were on their way. The wolf may gnaw at
the vitals, but a hostess must wear a smiling face.
* * * * *
The omnibus and the brougham returned duly from the station with the
last expected guests, vehicles containing their luggage and their
servants followed; but the dog-cart, sent specially to meet Jack
Marston, came back empty.
The master of the house heard the intelligence without comment.
Presently he came across to me with an ugly look on his set face.
"The beggar has got wind of it, you see, and has made a bolt," he said.
I hardly know if it was a relief or not to find that this was not the
case. One of the Mayors' newly-arrived cousins, who had seen the
bridegroom at Liverpool Street, had been entrusted with a note to the
bride which satisfactorily explained his absence.
I carried this note in to Daphne as she dressed for dinner. It was only
a hurried scrawl on a leaf torn from a memorandum book, and, having
read it, she passed it on to me.
"Four whole hours before he gets here!" she lamented. "Oh, Hannah!
could anything have been more truly unlucky?"
"Darling," the pencilled lines ran, "I find those beggars in Covent
Garden have not sent the carnations. I shall wait till the last
minute, and if not here must go after them. I dare not come to you
without the carnations! Have me met by the 9.30. Yours for ever,
and ever, and ever--JACK."
"My dear, four hours isn't much," I reminded her.
"Four hours is a lifetime," she said.
She stared, positively with tears in her eyes, at her pretty reflection
in the glass. "I don't know how I shall get through this evening," she
said.
I don't know how we all did; but it passed somehow, although it did not
pass gaily. Hugh was too young and honest to hide with any success the
care that harassed him; his glum face at the head of the dinner-table
was discouraging to the most persistent cheerfulness. Mrs Mavor did her
best, but she was ill at ease, and, as must have been patent to all,
strongly disinclined to talk of to-morrow's event. To Daphne,
disappointed of her lover's presence and support, the gathering of the
clans was an ordeal and an embarrassment.
Standing beside her when coffee was brought to her, I heard her ask of
the servant if the dog-cart was yet gone to meet Mr Marston. He
believed it was just upon the start, the man said.
"Let me know as soon as it goes, please," Daphne said, and presently
the footman came in again with the desired intelligence.
I suppose the poor child wanted to follow in fancy the dog-cart along
the silent roads and the dark lanes, beneath the starlit sky; to see it
arrive at the little wayside station in time for the rush and roar of
the train, dashing like a jewelled monster out of the desert of night;
dashing off again, its great ruby eyes shining in its tail, into the
blackness of space, having deposited the one precious item of its
freight on the platform.
A half-hour before Marston could arrive Daphne slipped away. "I shall
wait up for Jack," she said to her mother. "Send him, _the instant he
comes_, to me in my sitting-room."
One by one the ladies of the party followed Daphne's example. The men
went off into the smoking-room. Mrs Mavor and I were left alone. Her
nervousness and excitement, suppressed hitherto, were now at fever
heat. She moved about the room, pushing chairs into fresh positions,
shaking their cushions, taking up and setting down, now this now that
ornament, with trembling fingers pulling out and pushing in flowers in
the vases, not improving their arrangement by any means.
"The question is what Hughie will do," she said for the twentieth time.
"If only he would leave it alone! If he would not interfere! It has
gone so far, only Heaven should intervene. You know, Hannah, we all
marry men with our eyes blinded. Daphne must take her chance like the
rest. Supposing it was you, Hannah; if the man was a--murderer--and you
loved him, and knew that he madly loved you, would you thank anyone for
coming between? You'd marry him, wouldn't you?"
I declined to say how I should proceed with my murderer. If I had it in
me to love a man against my reason and my conscience I could not tell.
"It's eleven o'clock," I said. "I thought you told me he would be here
by half-past ten."
She ceased to fidget with the furniture, and came to the mantelpiece by
which I was standing.
"The clock's wrong," she said. "Fast, a good half-hour." She seized the
little gold carriage clock and shook it in her nervous fingers as if
that would put the matter right. The door opened.
"Here he is!" she said, and started violently, almost dropping the
clock.
It was Hugh who came in, his face pale, a fire of excitement gleaming
in his eyes, his watch in his hand. "He should have been here half an
hour ago. It is as I told you: he has made a bolt," he said.
"The dog-cart is not back?"
"No; but you'll see!"
"Are the men gone to bed, Hugh?"
"No, they're in there"; he gave a backward toss of his head in the
direction of the smoking-room. "It all makes me sick," he said. "I
can't sit there and hee-haw with them."
He took up his position between his mother and me, his hands on the
mantelpiece, his foot on the fender, and gloomed down upon the hearth.
When the hands of the little clock showed that another half-hour had
flown, the door was flung open and Daphne came in.
"Hasn't he come?" she asked. "I thought you were keeping him away from
me, downstairs. Hasn't he even _come_?"
"The train is late," the mother said.
But Daphne was overwrought. She flung herself upon a chair, and
twisting herself so that her arms embraced its back and her face was
hidden, began to cry hysterically.
"There has been an accident," she sobbed, presently, lifting her head.
"Hamley has overturned the dog-cart in the dark; Jack has been pitched
out; there is no one to help,--and you all stand here! You all stand
here!"
She insisted that her brother should go at once on his bicycle to see
what was amiss. Her distress unnerved the boy, and softened him. He
lifted her from the chair, and put his arm round her and led her to the
door.
"You go to bed, Dapple-ducky," he said, calling her by the name he had
given her in childhood. "It's all right, dear. Don't you be a silly.
I'll go along at once and fetch him."
His stern resolve was shaken. If Jack Marston had come then he would
have relented; I think the marriage would have taken place.
But he did not come. He never came.
Halfway to the station Hugh Mavor met the dog-cart returning, the groom
alone seated in it. There had been an accident, he said; a couple of
carriages had run off the line and overturned. He had waited for the
surviving passengers to be brought in. The train bringing them had at
length arrived; Mr Marston was not among them.
The accident had happened ten miles down the line. Hugh got into the
dog-cart and drove to the scene of the disaster.
Mrs Mavor spent the night in Daphne's room. I awaited Hugh, sitting
alone by the drawing-room fire, when he returned at four o'clock in the
morning of what was to have been his sister's wedding-day. He came in,
carrying a florist's tin box in his hand, and I read the news in his
face before he spoke.
"Only three killed. He was one. I saw him. I thought I had to. It was
awful."
He sank into the chair where Daphne had sat, hid his face on its back
as she had done, while his shoulders heaved with painful sobbing. After
a few minutes he turned to me.
"We shall have to tell her," he said. "That is the next thing to do."
He got up, and with shaking fingers, not knowing, I think, that he did
so, pulled the string from the tin box, which lay on the table beneath
the lamp, pulled it open.
"Everything else in the carriage seemed to be in shivers--but this," he
said.
Inside, beneath the snowy wrappings of cotton wool, great perfect
blooms of pink carnations lay. The spicy fragrance rose in our faces;
in the light of the lamp the glowing flowers smiled in their faultless
beauty.
"Poor Dapple's lucky flowers!" the boy said.
* * * * *
Those among us who know more of her dead lover than was ever told to
Daphne are disposed to call them her lucky flowers still.
A LITTLE WHITE DOG
"There!" Elinor cried. "Now, how could you be so careless, Ted?"
"The blessed thing must have jumped of its own accord off the
chimney-piece," Ted said. He looked down at his wife on her knees
beside him, ruefully collecting the fragments of the broken vase. "I
wasn't so much as looking at it, Nell."
"No! If you'd only had the sense to look at it!" Nell sighed. "But you
_will_ stand with your heels on the fender, and you push those great
shoulders of yours against the chimney-board, and smash go all my
ornaments--and a lot you care! However, something had to break to-day,
and it might have been worse."
"How do you mean 'had to'?"
"That great awkward Emily threw down a soup-plate last night; and
I----"
"No, not you, surely, Nell?"
"It wasn't my fault, of course. I was lifting the hand-glass from my
dressing-table as carefully as carefully, and it just dropped out of my
hands! 'That is the second,' I said to myself; 'now I wonder what the
third will be.'"
"And why did you say anything so silly?"
"Have you actually grown to your enormous age, and not known that when
one thing is broken in a house three are broken? Well, you have had an
ineffectual sort of education!"
"You don't believe such rotten rubbish?"
"Don't you? When I tell you of the soup-plate, the hand-mirror, and now
this vase? You can't call it nonsense, because there it is. A proof
before your very eyes. You might as well say it isn't unlucky to see a
single crow----"
"I'd sooner see one of the mischievous brutes any day than fifty."
"--That you may expect things to go pleasantly on the day you put on
your petticoat the wrong side out----"
"I should expect them to take a comic turn on the day I did that,
certainly!"
"What a ribald boy! Now, listen, Ted; be very attentive, and I will
tell you a true, true story. You mustn't laugh the tiniest titter--ah,
now, Ted! you won't laugh, will you?"
They were very young married people, and were not yet disposed to sit
quietly apart and talk to each other. She seized him by the lapels of
his coat now, and shook him to attention, while he, looking down upon
her with the hardly yet familiar pride of possession in his boyish
eyes, swayed his big frame in her grasp, flatteringly yielding to her
small efforts.
"Are you going to attend, sir? Well, then--There was once a young
man----"
"Who met a small vixen called Nell, and she fell in love with him and
made him marry her."
"Ah, now, Ted, do listen!--A young man, and his mother told him never
to walk under a ladder."
"And he did, naughty youth, and a bricklayer fell on him, and he died?"
She pleaded with him. "Seriously, Ted; no nonsense!" So he grasped her
by the elbows and looked gravely in her face.
"It was mother's cousin Harold--really and truly--not a make-up."
"Hurry up, darling. I'm swallowing every word, and it's most awfully
interesting."
"And he didn't believe that kind of thing--just like you, you
know--ladders, and crows, and petticoats, and things. And he was going
out to the West Indies to an awfully good appointment--hundreds a year!
And his mother went for a walk with him on the last day. And they were
building a row of houses----"
"Cousin Harold and his mother?"
"No. _You_ know. And his mother said, 'Don't go under the ladder,
dear'--and he did."
"Naughty boy! Naughty Cousin Harold!"
"You're laughing! Very well, just wait. To tease her, he would. 'Now,
look here,' he said, 'every ladder I come to I mean to go under
_twice_.' And he did. And his mother couldn't stop him, and she cried.
And--that's all----"
"All? But where's the point?"
"I didn't say there was a point. You know about mother's Cousin
Harold."
"I'm hanged if I do."
"He never, never came back."
"Goodness!"
"He never even got there."
"Break it gently, Nell."
"The ship he went in sank, and no one escaped to tell the dreadful
tale."
"And supposing he hadn't walked under ladders, but was alive in the
West Indies, what relation would he be to you and to me?"
She was proceeding to tell him in all good faith, but he stopped her.
"And now," he said, "I will tell you a tale. But first, as my feelings
have been considerably harassed, I will solace myself with a pipe."
She was being taught to fill his pipe, and to light it, and on this
occasion was made to take a couple of draws to prove to herself that
she had not properly cleaned it with the hairpin, according to
instructions given last night. So that the story was long delayed, and
when at length it came it did not amount to much.
"There was once an old man who gave a dinner-party."
"That was daddy," Elinor said, from the arm of the chair where she was
now sitting with her shoulder against his.
"It was on the occasion of the marriage of his only daughter to a
handsome and agreeable young man, the most eligible parti of the
neighbourhood."
"That was you and me," Nell explained, contentedly. "Well, you are a
vain old boy!"
"No interruptions, please," Ted went on, pulling at his pipe. "Although
the occasion was one of rejoicing, there was a melancholy circumstance
connected with it which cast a shadow over the otherwise
sunshiny--'m--sunshine of the scene."
"You're as bad as a newspaper. Go on softly, or you'll never keep it
up. I can't think what's coming."
"The guests sat down thirteen to table----"
"Well, so they did!" Nell recalled. "Now, that is really very clever of
you, Ted. I'd quite forgotten. I was horribly frightened then--but I'd
as clean as clean forgotten!"
"Well, there you are!" Ted said. "There's your moral."
"Where? Where?"
"Why, here we are, all alive and well and kicking; you and me, your
daddy and mummy, your uncles and your cousins and your aunts."
"But supposing one of us wasn't!" Nell remarked sagely. "When you ask
your thirteen to dinner and one dies it must be horrid; and I should
think your guests might--might bring an action against you."
She was holding the hand he had just put up to meet hers, which was
round his neck now, and a thought suddenly struck her. "But the year
isn't up yet, Ted," she said.
The dinner had been an epoch in their young lives; they both remembered
the date was the eighteenth of October. He pointed to the silver
calendar on the chimney-piece, to which the parlour-maid attended.
"This is the eighteenth again," Ted said. "There aren't two eighteenths
of October in one year."
Elinor was back in memories of the event. "Do you remember Aunt Carrie,
and how ill she was? At the very verge of the grave. And how afraid
mummy was she should notice there were thirteen? Now, here she is as
well as any of us, and going to get married again. Ah! What are you
doing, Ted?
"No, Ted! Oh, no, please! My hair will come down!"
"I'm getting another hairpin."
It was such pretty hair, he was always pleased to see it hanging about
her ears, as had been its fashion when he had first met her--not so
long ago. So he fought her for the hairpin while she ducked her head
and threw it backwards, and laughed, and struggled in his grasp; to
submit, of course, at last, to yield up the hairpin, to roast it, red
hot in the fire, to watch it burn its malodorous passage through his
pipe.
That ceremony over, she got him his boots, and would have laced them
for him, and kissed them too, if he would have let her, and did grovel
at his feet to arrange the roll of his stockings for him.
"You _have_ got nice calves, Ted!" she told him. "I don't think I could
love even you if you had sticks of things like Robert Anstey's."
"Oh, Bob's legs'll do all right," Ted said, loyally. He stamped a foot
into the second boot, and in doing so ground some of the broken vase
beneath his heel. He filliped her cheek, then, smiling into her eyes--
"You and your old woman's superstitions!" he said. "Perhaps you don't
know I've a--what d'ye call it?--a portent in my own family--or had
when I had a family," he told her, bending again over his boot. "Well,
I have, then!"
"And what's a portent, silly? I daresay it's nothing to boast of."
"It's a little--white--DOG!"
He barked the last word at her, loud and sharp, his face suddenly
projected into hers. She fell backward and sat on her heels.
"Ted! How horrid of you! What does it do?"
"I haven't the faintest notion."
"Are you making it up?"
"Not I. They all made it up. My father, and my grandfather, and the
whole tribe. They stuck it into each other, and tried to stick it into
me, that whenever one of us is going to die he sees this beastly little
hound."
"Ted!" she was clinging to the calf she admired now, in an agreeable
ecstasy of shuddering. "I wish I had a ghost, too."
"You shall have mine, with pleasure."
"But why didn't you tell me before?"
"I clean forgot it till this minute. My father told me about it when I
was quite a little chap."
"But is it true, Ted?"
"Of course it isn't."
"And did they really see it?"
"They said they did. You may bet your life they didn't."
When he was ready to walk round the little domain he had inherited from
his father, Elinor accompanied him to the gate. "I wouldn't have a
little white dog for a ghost!" she said to him, slightingly, as they
parted. "Anyone could have as good a ghost as that if they tried!"
"Everyone couldn't have an ancestor who had tortured one to death to
spite his wife!" he said.
"You can see a dozen little white dogs any day," she taunted him.
"I saw one more than I wanted yesterday when I was out with my gun," he
admitted. "That new little beast of Anstey's ran in front of me into
every field and frightened the birds. I hardly had a shot."
"Tell Bob to keep it at home," advised Nell.
"I must," Ted acquiesced, and went.
In the course of the morning Bob Anstey, who always appeared some time
during each day, came in. Elinor found him standing up by the
chimney-piece, manipulating the silver calendar.
"You're a day too previous in your calculation," he said. "This isn't
the eighteenth, but the seventeenth, madame."
"Well, how funny!" Elinor cried. "Now I wonder how Aunt Carrie is! I
shall have to tell Ted the year isn't up, after all."
To Anstey that was rather a cryptic utterance, but he asked for no
explanation. These two were full of little jokes, of allusions, of
reminiscences, interesting to them, in which he had no part, close
friends as they were.
"Can you spare Ted to me for an hour or two this afternoon?" he asked.
"She could not," she said, smiling; "she could never spare Ted."
"Then come along with us yourself, madame. I want Ted's opinion of that
mare I've got my eye on at Wenderling. Your ladyship's opinion would be
of value, too."
"Ted has nothing to ride. Did you hear that his horse had wrenched its
shoulder yesterday? A wretch of a little dog ran out of a cottage and
got mixed up with Starlight's feet. Ted jerked the horse round to spare
the dog--and Starlight is as lame as a tree."
They would bicycle then, he decided. The roads were good. They would
get into Wenderling in time for tea, and take it easy, coming home in
the dusk. They must remember to take lamps. They would start at three.
She agreed to all arrangements, swaying herself idly in the
rocking-chair Ted had bought for her; a pretty slip of a girl with a
happy, almost childish face. Anstey little thought as he looked at her
how often and often through all his life he would with his mind's eye
see her so again!
As he was going through the door she called a laughing reproach to him.
"Your abominable dog spoilt my husband's sport yesterday, Mr Anstey.
Why do you keep such a wretch?"
"Which dog?" he asked, pulling up, smiling at her.
"Your horrid little white dog."
"I haven't got a little white dog," he said, and laughed, and went
away.
After all, Elinor did not share the expedition to Wenderling; for at
lunch-time it came on to rain, and Ted would not let her get wet. He
was proud of seeing her rough it sometimes; he delighted to take her
hunting on days when no other lady was in the field, to see her face,
rosy and eager, her bright hair darkened with the wet, the raindrops
hanging on her hat. He kept her beside him, standing silent and patient
in a certain soppy, sodden spot by the river, waiting for the chance of
a wild duck flying homeward above the low-lying mists of the fens. What
did not hurt him could not harm her, in her youth and strength and
spirit, he thought.
"She has the pluck and the staying power of a man," he was proud to
tell Anstey; but was proud, too, now and again, to exercise his new
prerogative of taking care of the wife who was such a recent, dear
possession. Quite unexpectedly, he would veto some proceeding she
proposed.
"I won't have you doing it," he would say with dignity. And she was
equally proud to obey.
"Ted says I mustn't," or "Ted says I may." What, in those golden hours,
did it matter which?
She walked with him, bareheaded, through the drizzling rain to the
house where the bicycles were kept, and felt the tyres with him, and
rubbed a spot of rust off the handle bar, and walked beside him again,
he pushing the machine, down the drive to the road.
"It's a beastly day," Ted said, with an eye cocked at the low-hanging,
steel-coloured clouds. "If Bob wasn't so keen on my seeing this horse,
I'd chuck it and stay with you."
"Come home soon," she begged him; and, "You may be sure I shall come as
soon as I possibly can," he promised her.
"It wasn't Bob's dog that bothered you the other day," she told him as
he stood ready to mount, his foot on the pedal; "Bob hasn't got a
little white dog."
"It must have been that brute that ran out from Barker's under
Starlight's feet the other day, then," he called, and was off.
Nell stood by the gate and watched him till he joined his friend, and,
in spite of the faster falling rain, she watched him still. Before they
reached the bend of the road Ted turned his head; she waved a gay hand
to him, and he, hesitating for a moment, wheeled round and bicycled
back.
"Did you call me, Nell?" he said.
Of course she had not called.
"Bob knew you hadn't, but I thought I heard you call; and then you held
up your hand and beckoned me."
"Nonsense! Nothing of the sort!" she laughed. "Be off, Ted. I shall
never get you home again if you don't start."
"You'll have me home in a twinkling," he promised. And in a flash was
gone.
She turned and ran back, with head bent beneath the downpouring rain,
light-hearted, to her home, not knowing, never guessing that on that
handsome, smiling, healthy face of her young husband she had looked her
last.
For when, a couple of hours later, borne on men's shoulders, he was
carried to his home, he was so crushed and mangled out of his likeness
as his wife had known him that, even by force, they prevented her from
looking upon him.
When time had elapsed--Elinor, for some part of it mercifully numbed or
unconscious, could not have told if hours, days or weeks--Bob Anstey,
at her request, was brought to her. He had been in waiting, knowing
that, sooner or later, that meeting, if they did not die with the pain
of it, must be lived through.
He had expected to see her lying helpless and strengthless with hidden
face. She was standing up against the darkened windows at the end of
the long room furthest from the door. He started, walking slowly,
almost as if he was groping his way, among the familiar chairs and
tables, in her direction. But when half the space was traversed, and
she still stood there, uttering no word, dully watching him, his
courage failed, and he stopped short. It was the sight of Ted's chair,
his pipes on the bracket beside it, the picture of him, smiling, in the
silver frame on the mantelpiece, which unmanned him. He had prayed that
he might have strength to support the girl-widow in this interview; and
he found himself suddenly giving way before her, sobbing like a child;
while Elinor looked on tearlessly from afar, dangling the tassel of the
window-blind in her hand.
When at length he somewhat mastered his grief and looked up, she had
come quite close to him, but she did not speak.