“HIS” MOTHER’S INVITATION
The note of invitation from “my _fiancé’s_ mother” is purely formal
and absolutely non-committal; in fact, exactly the note I should have
imagined that a Mrs. Waters would write.
I’ve got a perfectly clear mental image of this mother of an animated
tape-machine. Handsome, in a regular-profiled, stately, mid-Victorian
style, with steely grey eyes that “corkscrew” all the self-possession
out of you, and—oh, the manner! She won’t be openly disagreeable after
all, I’ve decided. Worse; she’ll be rigidly, frigidly polite; clothing in
irreproachable civilities the obvious wonder whether her son has taken
leave of his senses, to propose to one of his own employees.
She writes that she looks forward (of course!) with pleasure
(_dis_-pleasure, she means) to making my acquaintance (_will_ she!) at
The Lawn (well, I suppose they can’t _call_ their house The Sarcophagus.
But that’s what it ought to be. A glorified edition of the Governor’s
private office. Marble halls and chilly statuary—brr!) on Monday next. I
expect she guesses that “this Miss Trant,” or “that young woman,” or “the
horrid little typist-person,” or whatever she calls me in her own mind,
will be rather overwhelmed by the prospect; and no doubt Mrs. Waters
means to see that I shall continue being overwhelmed—“kept in my place,”
indeed—during the whole of the fortnight that the Governor specified. But
she can’t realize the positive panic with which I anticipate the meeting.
And, if I can steel myself to help it, she _shall not_ realize it.
“I should think you can hardly wait until you get there, Tots,” said
Cicely, watching me pack new clothes in the new dress-basket bought
specially for the dread occasion, for I’ve spent every minute of two days
in shopping. “Aren’t you _dying_ to see what everything is going to be
like?”
“I shall have to survive until to-morrow, anyhow.”
“‘His’ home! His father’s dead, you said. Is there only his mother?”
“I suppose so. Quite enough too. _I_ think all engaged men ought to be
orphans and only children before they begin, for the sake of the girl.
‘Only’ his mother, indeed!”
“Well, she’s _bound_ to be pleased with you, Tots! You’re so pretty and
ripping, especially now you’ve got all these lovely new things. What a
mercy that you had that little windfall of a legacy just in time to let
you buy all fresh!”
(This is how I’ve been obliged to account for that.)
“You could go and stay anywhere now, meet anybody! He’ll be so proud of
you. It must be such a comfort for an engaged man when he knows that his
people and his friends _can see what he means_ when he shows off his
_fiancée_ to them for the first time, instead of their wondering what on
earth he finds to admire!”
“Do you think Mrs. Waters will ‘see what he means’ by his getting
himself engaged to his clerk?” I said, with a private giggle at my own
bitterness. “I wish _I_ did!”
“Now, Tots, don’t fish for any more compliments. You know how people
must admire you. Why, as Mr. Vandel—I mean, it’s so obvious! Don’t look
so depressed, my dear. Of course I suppose going to meet ‘his’ people is
always a fearful ordeal, but it ought to be less so for you than for most
engaged girls!”
* * * * *
Perhaps—though Cicely doesn’t know why—_it ought_!
Anyhow, these encouraging words of my chum’s were still echoing in
my ears as a late afternoon train bore me off from Victoria towards
Sevenoaks and that terrifying visit to my (official) mother-in-law
elect. For the first time since the days when it was a matter of
course for me to do so, I travelled first class. It wouldn’t do for me
to alight at Sevenoaks station under the eyes of some pompous Waters
domestic, all crumpled and dusty and warm from a compartment crowded
with market-baskets and moist babies. I am taking this man’s money to
pose as his _fiancée_, and it’s only fair to him that I should do him no
discredit in any way.
So I travelled down in expensive seclusion, wearing for the first time
one of my new costumes, a real success in thick tobacco-brown silk, with
a duck of a little brown hat to match. Cicely chose that out of a big
boxful “on approval” from Madame Chérisette’s.
Even without Cicely’s gratifying gush on the subject, I can’t
help knowing that the smoky-cream underlining and the trimming—a
cream-coloured feathery mount and a knot of dull-pink buds—are
delightfully becoming to a clear brunette complexion and glossy black
hair.
Thanks to my being an easy-to-fit small “stock size,” I’ve got a really
charming little trousseau together at very short notice. As it’s probably
the only trousseau of any sort that I shall ever possess now (I wonder
what Sydney Vandeleur thought of my note?), I selected it with gusto, and
I mean to enjoy the wearing of every stitch of it, from the fur-lined
motor-wrap to those American-pattern nighties that the girl in the shop
said were “so sweetly bridal-looking, Moddam.”
It’s been such ages since I was able to choose and arrange a kit with
garments for separate occasions and with a definite colour-scheme; it’s
so long I’ve been, not “dressed,” but “covered”—yes! covered in patches
with something in navy-blue that I’ve managed to afford at one time;
something in brown that I’ve “had to have” at another time; something
black that I’ve just “had by me.”
But now I shall be able to look “together” once more in my favourite
harmonies of soft browns, creams and pinks. A dream of mine on my way to
the office has come true at last; it’s a dream of a thick, clover-pink
linen suit, with touches of heavy creamy lace in just the right places.
In just the right places, too, it fits or falls away from me; and I don’t
think even the feminine edition of Still Waters will be able to help
being _rather_ impressed by it!
As for Sydney Vandeleur, I know _he_ would have said——
* * * * *
I’ve been wondering whether after all I need have sent that curt note to
Sydney? Of course, I _was_ furious with him, first for coming too late,
and secondly for proposing at all after I was powerless to accept him—he
didn’t know that; but what a position he put me into!
_Could_ I have put an end to it? (My thoughts raced on with the train.)
_Could_ I have written that very evening to Mr. Waters, cancelling that
preposterous arrangement with him, returning that lump sum of salary, and
saying——
Impossible! A hundred pounds of that salary had had to go, irrevocably,
as soon as I got it. And already I’d broken into that remaining four
hundred in the bank! I couldn’t make up even that.
How would it have been if when Sydney proposed to me, I had replied:
“_I can’t see you. I can’t even tell you anything more, yet.
But wait a year, and then ask me again_”?
Since he’s “waited” _so_ long——!
But no.
That wouldn’t have done either. It wouldn’t be keeping my bargain. It
would be “giving away” my compact with that other, that detestable man,
who trusts after all to my word—and after all, Sydney _has_ got himself
to thank for the fact that I haven’t been choosing a trousseau to please
_him_....
* * * * *
Well! There’s nothing in _this_ outfit, I hope, that won’t pass the
censorship of the most critical glances in any big house—those of the
servants. Men-servants, I suspect, are almost harder to “impress” than
maid-servants.
But it was no lordly groom or supercilious chauffeur who met me at
Sevenoaks Station as I stepped out of the train.
The tall, broad-shouldered figure that strode towards me looked, in a
big, grey, loose motor-coat, so utterly different from the mind-picture
of the slimly-built, dark, Vandyke-bearded young man that had travelled
most of the way down with me, so different, too, from the other
apparition I know only too well in immaculate “City” get-up, that at
first I didn’t recognize him.
Then a cap was lifted. I saw the fair hair, brushed sleek as satin, and
the keen, blonde face of my employer.
Several people on the platform were glancing at him as if he were almost
as well known down here in the country as in Leadenhall Street.
Then eagerly inquisitive glances were turned to me. I caught a whisper
of “Mr. William Waters’ young lady!” I wondered if the speaker—a
prosperous-looking sort of butcher—expected to overhear some tender
greeting? How “sold” he’d have been!
“Ah, there you are, Miss Trant!”—briskly as ever. “Good afternoon. What
luggage have you? Porter, bring these things across to the car. I’m
motoring you up to the house myself,” added Mr. Waters to me, as we left
the station, “because there’s a little supplementary detail I wanted to
‘put you on to,’ so to speak, before you meet my people.”
“Oh, yes?” I said inquiringly, and I mentally reached for my pencil and
pad.
But as I sat beside him on the comfortably padded seat with a lovely rug
drawn up over my knees, and with a thick glass screen keeping my _chic_
little new hat from getting blown about, I felt the pad-and-pencil side
of my life slipping away from me as swiftly and steadily as the green
hawthorn hedges that lined the road seemed slipping past this gliding car.
I had had a brute of a time just lately—now came the reaction. I suppose
it was partly the entirely feminine sensation, thrilling every scrap of
my body, that it was once more decently dressed! Partly, too, it was the
influence of skimming over a country road again, breathing in untainted
breezes under a blue sky with rolling white cauliflower clouds; having a
whole smiling landscape to myself again!—for the moment I lost count of
_how_ this had happened. The thoughts of the last hour were left behind
with those of the last two years—with the mean streets and the City
smells and noises, and those Battersea rooms, and that utter lack of
space and privacy, and that crushing sense of being just one unit out of
millions that didn’t matter!
Before I’d experienced these things, I’d lived for nineteen years,
another sort of life; and this seemed almost like coming home to it.
I felt as if I were the fish that, having been left stranded on the
proverbial gravel path, has somehow succeeded in flopping back to his
native element.
I gave myself up to the luxury of the feeling—to the exhilarating rush
through the clear air.
And I’d practically forgotten who was driving me, when his business-like
voice sounded once more in my ear.
“Miss Trant! Your Christian name, as I saw by your note to my mother, is
Monica?”
“Yes.”
I supposed he was now going to ask me if I had any objection to his
addressing me thus as long as I was his mother’s guest. Why, of course,
he’d _have_ to! Just as I should have to bring myself to use his own
name of “William.” (“_Ahem!_ _Wil_-liam!” as Miss Robinson pronounced it
pompously.) How queer to have to be asked to accord one’s Christian name
under such terms! Really, he might have taken it as a matter of course
that he must, for the next fortnight or so, call me “Monica.” Therefore I
was rather taken aback by his next remark.
“I shall have to ask you if you would mind very much, while you are
staying at The Lawn, being called ‘_Nancy_’?”
“Nancy!” I echoed, opening my eyes. “Oh, yes—no—I mean—anything you
like; but why _Nancy_?”
Mr. Waters turned to me for a moment as the car sped smoothly down a
level, empty stretch of the white highway.
“I’d better explain to you ‘why Nancy,’” he said dryly. In those keen
grey eyes of his, where some time before I had suspected a gleam of
humour, I now saw a quite unmistakable twinkle of fun!
There was even a twitch at the corner of those tightly-fitted lips.
But he went on still more dryly. “When I informed my mother that I was
engaged to be married to a lady in the office, she had a good many
questions to put.”
(Well, I should think so! The Longer Catechism, in fact!) “Really?” I
said meekly.
“And almost the first thing she asked me was what her Christian name was.”
(M’m, “almost”—I wonder what the _very first_ thing was? What is it
generally?)
“Of course, I ought to have foreseen that——”
(And _hadn’t_ he? Good gracious! The mapped-out scheme with _another_
flaw in it!)
—“but curiously enough, I’d overlooked it, and wasn’t prepared for it.
Now, I couldn’t very well tell my mother the truth, namely, that I did
not know. I have never been able to make out whether your usual initials
were ‘M’ or ‘N.T.’ I had taken it for ‘N.’ So, on the spur of the
moment, I gave her the first girl’s name that began with N that I could
think of.”
N or M! Yes! _Exactly_ like the catechism!
For the first time in my life in Still Waters’ presence I laughed aloud.
Surely the country air and the rush through it in the car must have gone
to my head. Amazed at myself, but even then laughing a little still, I
pulled myself together to inquire, “And what did you say to Mrs. Waters
when she received my note signed by my real name?”
“Oh!—I said—something or other about ‘Nancy’ being the usual abbreviation
for ‘Monica’ in some places!”
“How _quick_ of you!” I retorted—while my Near Oriental self sat back and
gasped at my new boldness. He _must_ have wondered at it too; thought it
bravado, the recklessness of despair, I suppose.
“_Something_ had to be said! And I am afraid, Miss Trant, that, for the
matter in hand, ‘_Nancy_’ it will have to be. A sort of _nom-de-guerre_,
you know—if you can call it ‘_guerre_.’”
He was actually laughing himself now. This made his face look at least
ten years younger, changing him so that I felt him to be even more of a
stranger to me than the machine-like autocrat who rapped out his “_Now,
Miss Trant!_” and his “_Take this down_” at the Near Oriental. But in
a moment he was serious again. He seemed, for the first time, to feel
something of what _I’ve_ been feeling ever since we’ve been—so to speak,
“engaged.”
“It’s asking a good deal, but I have to trust to you to meet all these
awkwardnesses as well as you can,” he said gravely. “And I’ll do all in
my power to avoid them, I assure you. A good deal of the strangeness can
be put down to the—er—natural shyness of people who are—so—er—recently
engaged.”
“Oh, of course,” I murmured, struggling not to laugh any more.
But I wondered what other wild fictions about “_Nancy_” he’d had to
improvise for his mother. Supposing she’d wanted to know what I was like
to _look_ at? Well, _he_ wouldn’t know! Dark or fair—short or tall? As
likely as not he’d tell her—as _something_ had to be said—that I was
six foot high and a radiant blonde. And what would she think of his not
possessing a single photograph of me to show her? Really, he was almost
benighted enough, since he’d given me another girl’s name, to pass off as
mine another girl’s portrait!
Even as I was laughing to myself again, the car turned in at a
stone-pillared entrance, and its plumply-tyred wheels purred on a
perfectly-gravelled drive between tall laurel-hedges.
Oh! we were nearly there, then. I didn’t want to laugh any more. Now for
it....