THE FIRST QUARREL
So far I have had things all my own way.
During the three days that I have now been staying at The Lawn, I
have managed to “keep up” without difficulty two utterly distinct and
different _manners_.
“Manner A.”—assumed for the benefit of the Governor’s family—the rather
shy but charming and devoted young _fiancée_.
“Manner B.”—well, to be frank, a perfect little _cat_!
But to begin with the first manner.
I should be ashamed to act it as well as I do, if it weren’t that I must
keep the whip-hand over the Governor, and that this is the only way, for
his mother and sisters are really too sweet with me.
Never, during all the palmy days of the Trant family, have I had so many
pretty and generous things said about me as I’ve heard in these three
days from my employer’s unsuspecting mother.
She told me yesterday, “When Billy was ten I’d begun to wonder whether,
somewhere, some other mother was watching a pink-lined cot that held
something which was to become very precious, later on, to my little son.
And—twenty-one, are you, dear?—it must have been so, then. How glad I
am it was you! Ten years is such a nice difference in age, too; I was
twenty-one——”
And her soft grey eyes looked at me as if they saw, through me, into the
past.
Her young daughter Blanche, on the other hand, gazes at me as wistfully
as though, through me, she could look into the future. I feel as if I
were supposed to be standing beside a wall which only I am tall enough
(for once!) to see over.
“_Sister Anne, do you see anyone coming?_” That, of course, isn’t what
she says.
“Nancy, I suppose you knew almost at once what you felt about Billy?”
“Oh, yes!” (Readily.)
“You knew he was absolutely the one and only? How lovely!” A pause. “I
suppose the way to find out is to imagine him among seventeen other young
men, all frightfully good-looking and nice and good sorts, and the right
kind of voice, and all wanting to marry you at once, and all that? Then,
if you still feel you could choose _him_ out of all those——”
“But, Blanche, I should have _had_ to,” I explained, truthfully enough,
as I thought of the five hundred pounds. “Couldn’t help myself!”
“I see,” sighed Blanche. “_Mustn’t_ it be glorious for you both?”
And thirteen-year-old Theo, pouring upon her “new sister” the wealth of
superfluous adoration which will some day be wasted, I suppose, upon some
quite ordinary young man, proclaims at frequent intervals, “Isn’t it
_ripping_ having her here?” and lives entirely in the present. Theo, by
the way, is the only one of them before whom I feel I have to be careful
not to over-do Manner A.
Manner B. is reserved for those hours which, for the sake of appearances,
his official _fiancée_ is obliged to spend alone with Mr. Waters; going
for dull walks—that is, for me they’re kept from being too deadly dull
by the certainty that I am making them so for him!—and sitting with him
in the den, where I will _not_ play accompaniments to his songs except
as a last resource after I’ve exhausted every possibility of the stilted
remark, the awkward pause, the resigned glance, and the languor that
stops short only at the visible yawn. Since that first _tête-à-tête_ I
have brought the contrasting of Manners A. and B. to a fine art. I’ve
been revelling in the idea that for a whole fortnight this is what my
employer will be forced to put up with. After all, it’s what the whole
lives of some _married_ men amount to! And, according to the terms of the
Governor’s own agreement, there’s nothing in all this of which he can
openly complain!
* * * * *
He _has_ complained!
Really, I need not have been surprised when it occurred, though I was
scarcely expecting it.
It began this (Saturday) morning, at breakfast. Now, any outsider peeping
into the sunny dining-room might have considered that the group round the
breakfast-table made an ideal picture of English family life.
There was the gentle, grey-gowned mother pouring out coffee. The big,
blonde son of the house, dressed for the City, sitting opposite to his
_fiancée_—rather silent, but presumably only out of devotion.
The _fiancée_ herself, a small brunette in dull-pink linen, looking, I
think I may say, the picture of girlish sweetness, and being made much of
by the two younger, taller, fair-haired sisters.
For no outsider could have suspected that the small, dark girl and the
big, blonde man were secretly at daggers drawn. Nor have the family a
notion that I’m anything less than “the ideal wife for Billy.”
I had come down last, to be greeted by the clarion voice of Theo, now no
longer muffled in my presence.
“Nancy! _Here’s_ news for you! Juno what? Our celebrated Uncle Albert
Waters is coming down to inspect Billy’s sweetheart!”
“Oh!” I said smiling. I didn’t see then why I shouldn’t smile. I hadn’t
yet heard anything about this other Mr. Waters.
“It’s to be hoped that he will admire her as much as we all do,”
proclaimed Theodora; “because, if he doesn’t, won’t it be a ghastly
week-end, Mother?”
“Nonsense, dear! Don’t try and alarm poor Nancy about the new relation
she has to meet.”
“But—fancy! Meeting Uncle Albert _for the first time_! Golly!”
“Theo-dora!”
“I know. I did promise to chuck saying ‘Golly,’ but really it’s the
only word that seems at all _like_ Uncle Albert,” declared the child.
“Uncle Albert’s a terror! Talk about me-ee! Yes, talk about _me_ saying
everything that comes into my head! Why, it’s from him that I inherit
that! Only, I’m not in it with him!”
“It would be a good thing if you were, Theo,” reproachfully from Mrs.
Waters. “I am sure your uncle has a heart of gold.”
“Always means there’s something else the matter with a person”—thus the
irrepressible Theo. “People with ‘hearts of gold’ are either fearfully
rude like old Miss Crabbe, and never say ‘Thank you,’ or they don’t
care a rap what they do say, like Uncle Albert. If he doesn’t happen to
approve of Billy’s _fiancée_, he’ll think nothing of telling Billy to
break off——”
“Break off yourself, young woman. You talk a good deal too much,” put in
her brother, as he rose, big and well-groomed, from the breakfast-table.
“And keep Cariad, will you? He knows he never follows anyone but his
mistress, but I’ve had to send the station-master’s boy back with him
three times this week. Good-bye, all.”
“Good-bye,” said I sweetly. “Give my love to the Near Oriental,
especially to the typists’ room, will you? How stuffy it will be getting
there now! How thankful I am for anything that keeps _me_ out of it on
a morning like this! Still, I suppose one ought not to abuse the place
where we first met.”
This with a glance at him, expressly for Blanche’s benefit, from under
my eyelashes. For I am acquiring a taste for positively “baiting” my
employer. I’m not going to be the one made to feel all the awkwardness of
the situation. Not I!
Let _him_ redden with embarrassment before the guileless remarks or
questions that I aim at him before his mother and sisters. Serve him
right! As for my employer’s feelings towards me, I have seen them
ripening from obliviousness of my presence, through indifference and
dislike, into positive _hatred_!
I knew he’d felt the flick of my last remark. I also knew how he would
have liked to retaliate. Any time since that first evening in the den I
have seen in his eye the yearning to take me by the shoulders and shake
me.
But he said serenely: “It is a glorious morning, certainly. Too fine not
to walk down to Sevenoaks, so I’m starting a little earlier.”
Good! I thought. I always welcomed the moment that saw the last, for the
whole happy, idle day, of the only inhabitant of The Lawn with whom I’m
not on excellent terms. Once _he’s_ out of the house, I can enjoy myself
and forget (almost) why I’m in it.
So it was an annoying shock to me when he stopped short on his way to the
door and added:
“Nancy, do you care to come part of the way towards the station with me?”
He had me there. I saw there was no escape. For the first time this week
he was able to check me in having things all my own way; and, mortified
and irritated as I felt, I could only smile up at him in Manner A, and
reply, all eager delight:
“Oh, I’d love it! Give me two minutes to put on my hat.”
In five minutes—for I knew he’d loads of time for his train, and it was
still a further turning of the tables to keep the Governor waiting—I
joined him outside the front door.
Presently we were walking briskly together down the drive between the
green cliffs of laurel; the air was sweet with the scent of sun-warmed
lilac, the sky was cloudless, the morning all sunshine—everything, in
fact, was as unlike my own mood as might be.
For I’d guessed that I was “in for” something. And although I didn’t yet
know what this might be—although it seemed a whole pre-existence since
the day when the prospect of a few words from the Head of the firm made
his trembling typist feel that the end of all things was at hand!—I still
felt, amongst other emotions, a little _frightened_. Again I saw in my
mind that odd, half-amused, half-threatening stare which the Governor had
bent upon me that first evening when I said good-night at the door of his
den. Supposing I wasn’t able to keep the reins in my own hands after all?
A new nervousness mingled in me with an utterly new form of resentment.
I hadn’t long to wait for my few words from the Governor.
He began—rather to my surprise—without his traditional “Now, Miss Trant,”
but grimly and stiffly as I don’t suppose Mrs. Waters knows he can speak.
“Now! There is something I wanted to say to you. I am sorry to trouble
you, but I am afraid that I have to ask you to be a little more careful
in your manner to me.”
Which of the two manners was he going to fix upon? The one I reserved for
him alone, or the pretty one that I used to him before his people?
“My manner? Oh!” I turned a dismayed face, the face of a typist caught
out in some careless mistake, up to his as we walked along. “I am afraid
I don’t quite know what you mean.”
“You do,” said his face.
But he only said concisely: “I mean the tone you sometimes feel called
upon to adopt towards me, as just now, at breakfast. Of course when we
are alone you must please yourself entirely. But that will hardly do
before others.”
Ah, it was for Manner A, then, that he’d settled to take me to task. So
none of it had been lost upon him, then; none of the unearthly sweetness
hiding home-thrusts that only he was able to recognize as such! None
of the elaborate ways in which I’ve been pretending to think of little
things to please him; quoting (in public) bits of his songs that I call
my favourites, picking a sulphur-coloured pansy—that he daren’t _not_
wear!—for his button-hole, then making him take it out to let me change
it for a leaf of scented geranium, because there were table decorations
of those at the Savoy “the day we lunched there before you chose my ring;
do you remember?” I hope he’ll never cease to remember _and to regret_
“that day!”
For the whole nature of the grudge I have against him has changed in
these few days. The thoughts have gone into the background of all that
office drudgery and Near Oriental unpleasantness. I’ve forgotten that
I used to hate him as part of a life of being ordered about on a few
shillings a week. But when, in accepting this invitation to a house of
luxury and leisure, I had the feeling of “coming home” to my old sort
of life, I hadn’t realized how many of the feelings belonging to that
by-gone life were going to wake up again inside me, indignantly ashamed.
I was my father’s daughter. I was well accustomed to the ease and space
and comforts of such a house as The Lawn—the Waters don’t suspect that,
but I _was_ born to them. I wasn’t born, however, to taking up the
position in such a house which he has forced upon me. Dully simmering in
my mind, for some time now, has been the thought of this slight which he
has put upon me, this insult.
This was the thought that softened my voice into the timid and suppressed
“office” key, which I felt I couldn’t keep up very much longer.
“Have I been saying and doing the wrong things before your people then? I
am sorry!”
I hoped my voice was not going to run away with me, but I heard myself
beginning to lose control over that serviceable meekness as I went on.
“It is rather difficult for me, you know. Still, I did think I _seemed_
everything that your _fiancée_ ought to be! I have been trying——”
“You have,” admitted Mr. Waters grimly. “Very.”
“Do you mean I _haven’t_ been a success, then?” I heard myself demanding
quickly. “Oh! Because, if I don’t give satisfaction——”
I stopped. It wasn’t my place to finish the sentence with “I had better
give notice!”
“H’m,” said my employer curtly. “I see.”
Did he “see,” I wondered? Did he realize that, though I was bound hand
and foot by that absurd muddle of an agreement, he might break it when
he chose, and that I was longing, desperately, for him to do so then and
there?
“It’s very hard,” I explained as evenly as I could, hoping that this
explanation would give him his cue, “hard to manage to hit the right
note always, and to have to decide every minute upon the way I should
naturally behave if I really _were_ engaged; Of course _I’m_ under
contract, but——”
Here, very suddenly and unexpectedly, Still Waters broke out into a
tone I’d never heard from him before. He positively “let himself go” as
he lashed out with his walking-stick at an inoffensive dock-leaf in the
hedge-row we were passing, and exclaimed:
“By Jove! I’d pity any man who was ‘really engaged’ to _you_!”
Ah! So I had got him to speak his mind at last, his own mind that he
would have given anything not to have revealed to any employee! More than
that, I’d driven him into being inexcusably rude to a woman. His face,
where the tan had deepened to a sullen red, his lips, compressed into
what seemed like a thin, pen-drawn line, showed me that _he_ had realized
this. _I_ don’t mean him to forget what he said. I said nothing. The most
awkward of all the many awkward pauses so far, elapsed between us as we
walked along, and before he spoke again. When he did, I saw that it cost
him more than he liked me to notice.
“Yes. You see—I ought not to have said that. I beg your pardon.”
“Oh! Please don’t! I didn’t mind it at all,” said I, better able to speak
very sweetly now that I felt I had regained some of my ascendancy. But
all the fun of “scoring” off him had gone, though I must not let him see
that. “Of course you’ve every right to say exactly what you think, just
as Theo does.”
For his face, still flushed, ruffled, and without a trace of the
“office-mask,” wore a fleeting but quite laughable likeness to his
youngest sister’s. I have heard it said of some girl, “She isn’t pretty
exactly, but she has pretty looks,” and positively, if I didn’t dislike
him so intensely, I should say that the Governor, though never handsome,
has “handsome looks” himself.
I went on, still mildly: “Only, you know, Theo and Blanche and your
mother don’t happen to think—what you’ve just said. They seem to consider
that—well! that the man I was engaged to isn’t—wouldn’t be at all to be
_pitied_!”
“I know. You needn’t tell me that. You have contrived to make all three
of them ridic—extremely fond of you!” This resentfully, realizing it
as part of my insolence to him. “My mother and the girls don’t see
through it, when you are—are covertly reminding me, in a hundred small
ways, of what I don’t need to be reminded of. _That_ would be all
right, therefore—only——Other people who came to the house might not be
so unsuspecting _They_ might chance to notice that there was something
odd—unusual—unnatural in your attitude to me.”
“But—but you said any strangeness would be put down to the awkwardness of
a girl so recently engaged?”
“No one would give _you_ much credit for being ‘awkward!’” Still more
resentfully. “And something might come out. That is why I am obliged to
ask you to be a little more guarded.”
“‘More guarded,’” I repeated meekly, like a child who is learning by
heart. “Yes. I must. I must try harder to make it seem less ‘unnatural’
that we two should be engaged.”
Again the look, instantly banished, that meant he pined to shake me.
“Thank you,” he said.
“And by the ‘other people,’ I suppose you mean this other—outspoken Mr.
Waters who is coming over to ‘inspect’ me? Do you think—are you afraid
that _he_ will be sorry for the man who is supposed to be engaged to me?”
Under his breath Mr. William Waters muttered what _sounded_, at least,
like the one word, “IMP!”
I heard him.
Perhaps it was only the first syllable of the word “Impertinence!”
At all events, I heard that distinctly. And though it meant I _had_
scored another point and made His Imperturbability forget himself yet
again, I couldn’t enjoy the triumph of it, nor even laugh to myself.
There had been too much of all this.... I was suddenly tired. Tears, of
fatigue, I suppose, rushed unexpectedly into my eyes, and I was obliged
to turn my head and glare over the hedge at a may-tree in full bloom
that became a dancing blur of pink.
_He_ was pretending that he hadn’t begun to speak at all. He began again,
stiffly:
“My uncle and another man are coming over to-night. This uncle of mine is
eccentric in some ways, but extremely shrewd; and no—er—two-edged sort of
remark would be lost on him.”
“I see,” I said, blinking angrily at the next may-tree, but still
controlling my voice. “I had better not make _any_ sort of remark at all
then, before him. I could be too shy to open my lips. In fact, just as I
am—used to be, at the office. Would that be better?”
“Distinctly better than—er—recent methods,” said the Governor dryly.
“This other man is merely a business acquaintance with whom I hope to
have dealings. So——”
“You want him to be favourably impressed,” I concluded intelligently,
“with your _fiancée_ and all your other belongings.”
“If you choose to put it so. But——”
A pause.
“Above all,” said the Governor, “I don’t, on this particular occasion,
don’t want to be made to look a _fool_!”
It came out quite boyishly and slangily, and for a moment I could almost
have liked Still Waters for that. Then—yes! I thought, savagely, he
mustn’t be allowed to look a fool even for once, but I may go on looking
a fool and worse, for the next year! And then I saw that he was inwardly
rating himself for having, as he considered, played into the enemy’s
hands—having allowed me to see exactly when and where I could get the
better of him next.
He didn’t trust me.
“I will do my best,” I said, softly and bitterly. Let him suppose, if he
chose, that I meant doing my best to let him look a fool before his uncle
and his pompous fine business acquaintance, indeed. What would he amount
to, I wondered, this acquaintance of the Governor’s for whom I, Monica
Trant, was to be on my best behaviour? Probably someone Father wouldn’t
have had in the house!
We reached the turning to the station and I stopped.
“Was there anything else that you wished to speak to me about?”
“No, thank you,” said my employer at his curtest. “That was all.
Good-morning!”
He lifted his hat; his face beneath it was set with temper. Good! Let him
vent it on Mr. Dundonald at the office!
“Good-morning,” I said, and turned away. I was glad that there had been
no one in the lane to see that parting; to anyone who had watched,
knowing who that tall, blonde, savage-looking man was who had said
good-morning so frigidly to that small girl with her head held in a very
straight line with her back, it would have looked so ludicrously like the
last thing in the world that it really was—a lover’s quarrel!
How furiously he had marched off! I turned round, after walking on a few
yards, to catch another glimpse of that stampede.
Then I was sorry.
For at that very moment he had elected to turn round and see me!
It just shows that people are quite right to teach children _never_ to
turn round on the road.
I wish I hadn’t!