She had thought of Lee on the Solent. (You will remember, reader, that
Mr. Vavasour's place was near Lee.)
"Why Lee?" I said, pretending surprise. "Expensive and only ten miles
away. No real change of climate. Send them to Felixstowe or
Scarborough."
But Gertrude's mind was made up. She poured forth batches of adequate
reasons. It must be Lee. Would I accompany the party as their guest?
Joan and Dulcie were rather too young to go into lodgings alone.
I saw at once that, under the circumstances, Lee was no place for me. I
might get into hot water. I, so free now, might become entangled in the
affairs of others, and might be blamed later on. I might find myself
acting with duplicity or, to be more exact, I might be found out to be
doing so.
I declined with regretful gratitude. If it had been Felixstowe or
Scarborough I would have taken charge with pleasure, but I always had
rheumatism at Lee. Rheumatism was a very capricious ailment.
"It is, indeed," said Gertrude coldly.
"Send your old governess," I suggested, "the ancient Miss Jones who
lives at Banff. You have her here every summer for a month. Kill two
birds with one stone. Let her have her annual outing at Lee instead of
here."
Gertrude was undeniably struck by my suggestion, though she found fault
with it. As she began to come round to it I then raised objections to
it. I reminded her that Miss Jones was as blind as a bat: that when she
accompanied them to Scotland the year before she had mistaken the
footman bathing for a salmon leaping. But Gertrude was of the opinion
that Miss Jones's shortsightedness was no real drawback.
The expedition started, and I actually produced five pounds for Dulcie
to spend on seaside attire. I considered it a good investment.
Before Gertrude departed with Jimmy for Harrogate she volunteered with a
meaning smile that she understood Mr. Wilson bicycled over frequently to
Lee.
"Ten miles is nothing," I said, "to a high principled poultry fancier."
"Now you know," she said archly, "why I did not wish to remove Dulcie to
a great distance at this critical moment in her young life. I hear from
Miss Jones, who writes daily, that there are shrimping expeditions and
picnics with the children, strolls by moonlight without them."
Reader, I did not oblige that serpent to disgorge the fact that
moonlight strolls are not taken by two women and one man. I knew as well
as possible that Miss Jones had received a hint to give these two young
men every opportunity. I thanked Providence that I had not got into that
_galère_. I had been saved by the fixed principle of a life time to
avoid action of any kind.
I had hardly begun to enjoy the month of solitude when it was over, and
Gertrude and Jimmy returned from Harrogate, he very limp and depressed,
as always after his cure, and sure that it had done him more harm than
good.
The two girls came back from the Solent looking the picture of health;
even Joan was almost pretty, beaming under her tan. Dulcibella, who did
not tan, was ravishing. The children were a rich brown pink apparently
all over, and the ancient Miss Jones was a jet-beaded mass of bridling
gratitude and self-importance.
Then, of course, the storm burst.
You and I, reader, know exactly what had happened. Dulcie had got
engaged to Mr. Vavasour, and Joan to Mr. Wilson.
Dulcie came skimming down in the dusk the first evening to announce the
event to me, her soft cheek pressed to mine. She said she wanted me to
be the first to know.
_And Gertrude had said I could do nothing for her!_
She told me that at that very moment the blissful Joan was announcing
her own betrothal to her parents.
Next morning Jimmy came down to see me. He generally gravitated to me if
anything went wrong.
"We are in a hat up at the house," he said. "Joan has actually engaged
herself to that oaf, Wilson. Infernal cheek on his part, I call it."
"You have had him hanging about for months," I said, "I expect he and
Joan thought you approved."
"They did. They do. But that doesn't make it any better. Of course I
said I would not allow it, and Joan was amazed and cried all night, and
Gertrude is in a state of such nervous tension you can't go near her,
and poor old Jones, who came back preening herself, is bathed in
tears--and Gertrude says I have got to speak to Wilson at once. She
always says things have got to be done at once."
He groaned, and sat down heavily on my low wall, crushing a branch of
verbena.
"It's not as if I hadn't warned Gertrude," he went on. "I said to her
several times 'I'm always catching my foot against Wilson,' and yet she
would have him about the place. She as good as told me she thought he
and Dulcie might make a match of it. But it's my opinion Dulcie never so
much as looked at him. I told Gertrude so, but she only smiled, and said
I was to leave it to her, and that it was in those confounded stars that
Dulcie would marry almost at once. This is what her beastly stars have
brought us to."
"She did tell me there was an early marriage for Joan, too, in her
horoscope," I hazarded.
"Well, we had had thoughts, I mean Gertrude had, that young Vavasour
came over oftener than he need. He's rather a bent lily, but of course
he's an uncommonly good match. I should not have thought there was
anything in it, myself, but Gertrude kept rubbing it in. That is why
they went to Lee."
"You don't say so!"
"Yes, I do say so. But look how it has turned out."
"I think I ought to tell you--I'm so astonished that even now I don't
know how to believe it--I only heard of it last night,--that Dulcie has
accepted Mr. Vavasour."
For a moment Jimmy stared at me, and then he burst into shouts of
laughter.
"Well done, Anne!" he said, rolling on my poor verbena. "Well done,
Dulcie. That little slyboots. Thirty thousand a year. What a score. Who
would have thought it, Anne! You look so remote and unworldly in your
grey hair, stitching away at your woolwork picture. But you've outwitted
Gertrude. Well, I don't care what she says. I'm glad of any luck
happening to Dulcie. She is not fit to struggle for herself in this hard
world. But Gertrude will never forgive _you_, Anne. You may make up your
mind to that."
"But what have I done?" I bleated. "Nothing. I'm as innocent as an
unlaid egg."
"You may be, but she will never forgive you all the same," said Jimmy
slowly rising, and brushing traces of verbena from his person. "Stupid
people never forgive, and they always avenge themselves by brute force."
Old Miss Jones, bewildered and tearful, toddled down to see me, boring
me to death with plans for leaving Banff and settling in Bournemouth
with a married niece. Joan rushed down, boisterously happy, and
confident that her father would give in; Jimmy, weakening daily, came
down. Mr. Wilson called, modest and hopeful; Dulcie, and the children
came down, Mr. Vavasour, a stooping youth, with starling eyes, and an
intense manner, motored over.
_But Gertrude never came._
I consoled myself with Mr. Vavasour. There was no doubt he was in love
with Dulcie, and I surmised that in the future, if she could not
dominate him, his aunt by marriage might be able to do so. I can't say
whether Dulcie cared much about him, but I told her firmly that she was
very much in love, and she said, "Yes, yes, Aunt Anne."
That was what was so endearing about Dulcie.
She was so obliging; always ready to run upstairs for my spectacles, or
to marry anybody.
One evening, when she was dining with me, she proceeded to draw out her
Ronald's horoscope.
She was evidently extraordinarily well up in the subject.
"I will ask, Mrs. Cross," she said at last, after much knitting of white
brows, "but I should say Ronald was certainly not going to marry at all
at this moment with Mercury and Jupiter in opposition. But then I said
the same about myself, and about your going on a long journey. I should
have thought some great change was inevitable with your sun now
sesquiquadrate to Uranus in Cancer. But Mrs. Cross said I was absolutely
mistaken about both. She was very emphatic."
"You don't mean to say you believe a single word of it," I said, amazed.
"Oh, yes, Aunt Anne, of course I do. Why, don't you remember you
yourself advised me to study it. I'm _sure_ it's all true, only it's
difficult to disentangle."
Jimmy came down next day, and a more crestfallen man I have never seen.
I was dividing my white pinks, and he collapsed on a bench, and looked
at me.
"You've given in about Mr. Wilson," I said drily.
"I have. Gertrude came round to it quite suddenly last night."
"Bear up," I said "They will probably be very happy."
"I don't find I mind much now it's decided on. And between ourselves
Gertrude and Joan did not hit it off too well. I used to get a bit
rattled between the two of them. It will be more peaceful when Joan is
married."
"Then I don't see why you look so woe-begone."
Jimmy shifted on his bench.
"Anne," he said solemnly, "you made the great mistake of your life when
you refused me."
"You could not expect me to leave a brand new kitchen boiler for you. I
told you that at the time."
"We should have suited each other," went on Jimmy, drearily, ignoring
manlike, my reasons for celibacy. "We are both," he paused and then
added with dignity, "contemplatives by nature. We should have sat down
in two armchairs for life. I should never have been a magistrate, and a
chairman of a cursed Parish Council. I should just have been happy."
"I _have_ been happy," I said, "I _am_ happy."
"You have had a beautiful life: one long siesta. That is so like you.
_You_ have fetched it off and I've missed it. Just as Gertrude has
missed this match for Joan, and you have fetched it off for Dulcie. If I
had married you you would never have wanted me to exert myself. That was
why my higher nature turned to you like a sunflower to the sun. You
ought to have taken me. After all, you are the only woman I have ever
proposed to," said the twice married man.
"I thought as much," I said, pulling my white pinks apart.
"You might have known," he said darkly, and a glint of malice
momentarily shone in his kindly eyes, "that trouble would some day
overtake you for your wicked selfishness in refusing me."
I did not notice what he was saying so much as that alien expression in
my old friend's face. I stared at him.
"I'm putty in Gertrude's hands," he continued solemnly, "as I should
have been in yours. It's no kind of use saying I ought not to be putty.
I know I ought not, but putty I am. You don't know what marriage is
like. No peace unless you give in entirely--no terms--no half-way house,
no nothing except unconditional surrender."
I had never heard Jimmy speak like this before. I put in a layer of
pinks, and then looked at him again.
There were tears in his eyes.
"My dear old soul," he burst out, "I can't help it, I _cannot_ help it.
She insisted on my coming down and telling you myself. She said it must
come from me, as my own idea, and I'm not to mention her at all. The
truth is--she has decided--and nothing will move her--that it will be
best if Joan and Bobby Wilson lived quite near us for a time as they are
both so young--in fact--" his voice became hoarse--"in this cottage."
"_My_ cottage!" I said. "_Here!_"
He nodded.
For a moment I could neither see nor hear. My brain reeled. I clutched
at something which turned out to be Jimmy's hand.
"My own little house," I gasped. "My garden, made with my own hands. The
only place my rheumatism--" I choked.
"Don't take on so, Anne," but it was Jimmy who was crying, not I, "I'll
find something else for you. Miss Jones is leaving Banff. You shall have
her house rent free. I hate it all just as much as you. It makes me
sick to think of chicken hutches on your lawn; but, but--you _shouldn't_
have outwitted Gertrude."
"She told me there was no movement, no journey of any kind in my
horoscope," I groaned.
"She says she made a mistake, and that she sees now there is a long
journey. Dulcie told her so some time ago, but she would not hear of it.
But now she has worked it out again, and she says Dulcie was right after
all. You are plum in the thick of Uranian upheavals."
"And is Dulcie's marriage a mistake, too?"
"She said nothing about that. But, between ourselves, Anne, though I'm
not an astrologer, I should not count on it too much, for I've been
making a few enquiries about Vavasour, and I find he has been engaged
four times already. It's a sort of habit with him to get engaged, and
his mother never opposes him, but she has a sort of habit of gently
getting him out of it--every time."
* * * * *
All this took place several years ago. I live in the suburbs of Banff
now in Miss Jones's old house. As there is no garden that kind Jimmy has
built me a little conservatory sticking like a blister to the unattached
wall of my semi-detached villa. He sends me a hamper of vegetables every
week, and Joan presents me with a couple of chickens now and then,
_reared on my lawn_.
They come in handy when Dulcie and her Wilhelm are staying with me. Herr
Müller has an appointment in Aberdeen now. They are dreadfully poor, and
a little Müller arrives every year, but Dulcie is as happy as she is
incompetent and impecunious. She adds to their small muddled away income
by giving lessons in astrology. I have learned the rudiments of the
science, in order when I stay with her to help her with her pupils. But
I never stay long as I have rheumatism as severely in Aberdeen as in
Banff.