HER LADYSHIP
At Hazels Mary found her duties more onerous than they had been in town.
It was delightful to see Lady Agatha among her own people. She had made
life easier for them. Mary marvelled at the prettiness of the red-brick
farmhouses, with roses and honeysuckle to their eaves. She could never
get over the feeling that it was only a picture. They would walk or
drive to them, and the farmer's wife would come out and beg her Ladyship
to come in for a glass of cowslip wine; and she and Mary would go in to
a rather dark parlour--to be sure, the windows were smothered in
jessamine and roses and honeysuckle--and sit down in chairs covered in
flowery chintz, and sip the fragrant wine and eat the home-made cake,
while the topics of interest between landlord and tenant were discussed.
Then the farmer would come in himself, hat in hand, and his eyes would
light up at the sight of the visitor, and there would be more pleasant
homely talk of cattle and crops, and the harvest and the plans for the
autumn sowing, and the state of fairs and markets.
There was Nuthatch Village, which seemed to have stepped out of
Morland's pictures. It was all so pretty and peaceful, with its red
gabled cottages sending up their blue spirals of smoke into the
overhanging boughs of great trees. Mary cried out in delight at the
quaint dormers, with their diamond panes, at the wooden fronts, at the
gardens chockfull of the gayest and most old-fashioned flowers.
"As for prettiness," said Lady Agatha, "it isn't a patch on Highercombe,
a mile away, and, what is more, I've done more than anyone else to spoil
its prettiness. I've filled in the pond and driven the swan and the
water-hen to other haunts. I've given them a new water-supply and done
away with the most picturesque pump, which was sunk in 1770 by Dame
Elizabeth Chenevix. I've put new grates and new floors into the houses,
and I've seen to it that all windows open and shut. The pity of it is
that I can't compel them to make use of their privilege of opening.
Also, I've introduced cowls on the chimneys. My friend, Lionel Armytage,
the painter, lifted his hands in horror at my doings. I'd have liked to
get at the chimneys, but I'd have had to pull down every cottage in the
place to rectify them. Oh, I've spoilt Nuthatch, there's not a doubt of
it. You must see Highercombe."
"The children seem healthy," Mary said thoughtfully, "and the old people
walk straighter than one sees them often."
"Ah, yes, that is it." Lady Agatha's face flushed and lit up. "I've made
it healthy for them. Highercombe is a painted lie--a pest-house, a
charnel-house, full of unwholesome miasmas from its pretty green, its
pond covered with water-lilies. Death lurks in that pond. There is bad
drainage and bad water; the damp oozes through the old brick floors of
the houses. The whole place is as deadly in its way as those West
African jungles of which Mr. Jardine told us."
They were to see Mr. Jardine later. At present he was on a round of
visiting at the houses of the great. The names of the people who had
elected to do honour to Paul Jardine would have been a list of pretty
well the most illustrious persons in the kingdom. When Lady Agatha had
suggested to him that he might give a week to Hazels before the summer
was done, he had been eager about it, had even suggested dropping some
of his other engagements. But that she would not hear of. She seemed to
take an odd pride and pleasure in the way he had conquered the world
best worth conquering.
"What!" she had said. "Drop Sir Richard Greville and Lord Overbury! Not
for worlds! You may find it dull. Sir Richard lives the life of a
hermit, and you won't get anything fit to eat at Lord Overbury's. He
never knows what he's eating, and his cook has long given up trying to
do credit to herself. I believe that only for his dining-out he'd be
starved. Even as it is, he's been known to take mustard with his soup
and red-currant jelly with his cheese. Still--he's Lord Overbury!"
They led a very quiet life at Hazels, seeing hardly anyone. Lady Agatha
had declared that she was going to make up for her rackety life in town,
as well as to prepare for the winter. She had looked as fresh as a rose
through all the racketing, and when she talked about the need for rest
she had smiled.
As a matter of fact, her energy was too overflowing to permit of her
resting as other folk rested. A change of occupation was about as much
as one could hope for. And now she was restless as she had not been
before, for, energetic as she had always been, she had never driven
others. Indeed, many people had found absolute restfulness in her
Ladyship's big, wholesome presence.
"The life in town has only stimulated me, Mary," she confessed; "just
stimulated me and excited my brain. I must work it off somehow. Let us
begin at the novel to-morrow."
They began at the novel. Lady Agatha dictated it, and Mary took it down
in short-hand. They worked out of doors. Mary had her seat under the
boughs of a splendid chestnut tree on a little green lawn. The lawn was
at the side of the house, not over-looked, enclosed on three sides by a
splendid yew hedge. The dogs would lie at Mary's feet. There were Roy
the St. Bernard, and Brian the bull-dog, a toy Pomeranian, and a little
Chow. The dogs always stayed at Hazels. "If I took them up to town,"
Lady Agatha said, "they would see more of me, to be sure, but then they
would always be losing me, for, of course, I couldn't take them out in
town. And they always know I'll come back--they're so wise. The parting
is dreadful, but they know I'll come back."
Mary sometimes wondered how her Ladyship had found time to think out her
novel. For it seemed all ready and prepared in her mind. She would sweep
up and down the grass while she dictated. Mary used to say that it meant
a ten-mile walk of a morning. The train of her white morning-dress
lopped the daisies in their places; the incessant passage of her feet
made a track in the grass. Sometimes she would pass out of her
secretary's hearing and have to be recalled by Mary's laughing voice of
remonstrance.
"Am I afflicting you, Mary?" she asked on one of these occasions. "Am I
overwhelming you? It's a horrible flood, isn't it?"
"You are very fluent," Mary answered, looking down at the queer little
dots and spirals on her paper. "I daresay we'll have to prune it before
it's printed. But it is a good fluency, a rich fluency. To me it is
irresistible--like a spring freshet, like the sap rushing madly through
all the veins of spring."
"Ah, you feel it?--you feel it like that, Mary? I feel it so myself; I
riot in it."
"It will have no sense of effort--it is vital. I hope we shall be able
to keep it up."
"Why not, O Cassandra?"
She stood with one hand on the back of Mary's chair, and looked up into
the tree.
"The book should have been written in spring," she went on. "I feel the
spring in my blood. Why should I, Mary, now when it is full summer, and
the trees are dark?"
"I don't know, unless that you were so busy in spring that you had not
time to enjoy it. Come, let us get on; perhaps presently you will flag.
We must get the book done before anyone comes to interrupt us."
"Never was there such a willing co-worker. You mustn't overdo it, Mary.
How many words did I dictate to you yesterday?"
"Six thousand."
"And you gave them to me typewritten this morning."
"I wanted to see how they looked in type. It is all right, Agatha. Even
you cannot go on for long, dictating six thousand words a day. We must
take the tide at the flow."
"Afterwards I shall do a play--after I have given you a rest."
"More kingdoms to conquer," Mary laughed. "There is only one person like
you--the Kaiser."
"I have an immense admiration for him."
Mrs. Morres meanwhile sat and smiled to herself. She had given up the
crochet for point-lace, which, as it had more intricate stitches,
necessitated the more care. Sometimes she knitted and read with a book
in her lap. But when she was not reading, she smiled quietly to herself.
It was a curious smile, half-satisfied as one whose prognostications
have come true, half-dissatisfied as though there was no great cause for
congratulation.
Once Mary was curious enough to ask her why she smiled. Lady Agatha at
the piano was playing Wagner like a professional musician. Mrs. Morres's
smile grew more inscrutable.
"It amuses me," she said, talking loudly, so that her words might reach
Mary through the storm of the music, "to find that Agatha is just a
woman, after all. It amuses me--and yet--it had been happier for you and
me if she had contented herself with the unrealities of life a little
longer."
Mary did not understand at the moment. She began to understand a little
later when Mr. Jardine came. The novel, after all, had not been
finished. For the last week or so before the visitor arrived her
Ladyship had apparently lost interest in it.
"My brain has dried up, Mary," she said. "I should only spoil it if I
went on. Put it away in a drawer, and when I feel like it we can go on
again. You want a rest. I've over-tired you."
"I felt I couldn't rest till it was done," Mary said, with a little
sigh. "I wanted to know what became of them all. And it is such an
interesting point. Tell me, does Clotilde marry Mark, after all?"
"How should I know? I have nothing to do with what she does. Clotilde
knows her own mind. I do not. Wait till we get back to it."
"Ah! you should finish it--you should finish it. You'll never get that
young green world in it again. It was an inspiration. We should have
held on to it like Jacob to the angel's robe."
But for the time Lady Agatha's literary energy was exhausted.
"I daresay there's a deal of fustian in it. There's sure to be," she
said. "I don't think anything could be really good that was produced
with so little pain. I daresay I'll be for tearing it up, so you'd
better lock it away. Do you feel equal to walking ten miles? If not, get
your bicycle and I'll walk beside you. I've been cramped up too long."
This time it was a mood of physical restlessness. She walked and rode
and went out golfing, and played tennis, and rowed on the river, and did
a thousand things, while Mrs. Morres made her delicate wheels and
trefoils, and smiled a more Sibylline smile than ever.
At last he came. When the sound of his footstep and of his voice reached
them where they stood in the drawing-room awaiting him, her Ladyship
turned to Mary, and her face was full of an immense relief.
"I didn't really believe he'd come," she said. "I've been feeling quite
sure that something would occur to prevent his coming."
"The weeks have been endless," Paul Jardine said, coming in and taking
her Ladyship's two hands. "How could you put me off till September? I've
had a heavy time. I don't like being made much of by other folk, so I am
going out again after Christmas."
Then, to be sure, Mary knew. The pair leaped to each other as though
they had been two halves of one whole separated long ago, and now drawn
together in a magnetic rush. Mary had always known that when Lady Agatha
attracted she attracted irresistibly; there was no half-way, no
haltings, no looking back possible.
"We are out of it, Mary, we two," Mrs. Morres said, and the smile had
become a trifle weak and wavering. "What do you suppose is going to
become of us? Hazels is a pleasant place, and there has always been
something of assurance and comfort about Agatha. I had a hard life, my
dear, before I came here. Yet what would she do with us? She can't very
well take us out to Africa. I, at least, should not know what to do in
those places."
It was a wooing that was not long a-doing. Her Ladyship and Mr. Jardine
came in one evening in time for afternoon tea. The days were closing in
by this time, and a fire was welcome. There had been rain, and the fire
sparkled on her Ladyship's black curls and her eyelashes as she stood by
the fire, taking off the long cloak in which she wrapped herself when
she went out walking in bad weather. Her eyes were at once bright and
shy.
"Congratulate me," she said. "He has consented to take me with him. He
held out for a long time, but I was determined to go. As though I should
take the chances!"
"It is I who am to be congratulated," said Paul Jardine, and the
happiness in his voice thrilled his listeners. "Of course, I wouldn't
have listened to her if she wasn't so splendidly strong. It will be an
odd place for a honeymoon. Do you think I ought not to have consented to
take her, Mrs. Morres?"
"For how long?"
Mrs. Morres's voice shook. All the Sibylline quality was gone from it
now.
"For a year. I must fulfil my engagements. Afterwards I must do my best
for them over here. I never thought that I could do as I would as a
married man. Do you think I ought not to have consented?"
"She would have gone without your consent."
Lady Agatha came over and put a hand on her shoulder, a kind, caressing
hand.
"You are quite right," she said. "Oh, he has wriggled, but it had to be.
It had to be, from the first minute we met."
"I knew it."
"You did, you wise woman. And you will keep house for me when I am gone?
You will take care of the dogs for me? You will oscillate between Hazels
and town? You will keep the places ready against our return? You are
never to leave us."
Mrs. Morres's eyes overflowed.
"My dear," she said, "it would have broken my heart to have left you.
And Mary--what is to become of Mary?"
"I have a plan for Mary, unless she will stay here with you."
"I must earn my bread," said Mary.
"For all the bread you eat, I eat four times as much as you. Still, you
have talents to be used for the many, as Sir Michael Auberon said. I
have no right to keep you from them. You will talk to Robin Drummond
about that. He is starting a bureau for purposes of organisation amongst
the women. He has had his eye on you. I told him he could not have you.
Now, it will fill a gap, perhaps. I shall need you again."
"The funny thing," said Mrs. Morres, and the amusement had come back in
her voice--"is that Colonel St. Leger won't like your marriage at all.
He has always wanted you to be married. But now--this African
marriage--he will talk about it as though you were marrying a man of
colour, Agatha, my dear. How his eyebrows will go out!"
"To think," said Mary, with a little sigh, "that the novel is
unfinished, after all."
"A novel is so much more interesting," said Lady Agatha, "when you live
it, Mary. Besides, it has troubled me that if I published the novel I
must come into competition with the legitimate workers. They should form
a Trades' Union against us, women of leisure and money, to keep us from
poaching on their preserves. They really should. My dears, I have a
presentiment that the novel never will be finished."