Jane Erskine was at the present time at that interesting period when
her friends and relatives, having just discovered the unexpected fact
that she was grown up, subjected her to mildly severe criticism, while
believing that to have reached womanhood at all showed a considerable
amount of talent on her part. They were, they said, under no
misapprehension about Jane; in moments of extreme candour, touched with
responsibility, they had even been known to say that in one or two
respects she was not absolutely perfect. Miss Abingdon, for instance,
who always conscientiously encouraged these moods, and censured the
General for spoiling Jane, would frequently compare her niece with
herself, as she remembered that dim figure of girlhood, and never
failed to find cause for unfavourable comparison between the two. From
the portraits which she drew it was generally believed that Miss
Abingdon must have been born rather a strait-laced spinster of thirty,
and have increased in wisdom until her hair was touched with grey; when
she would seem to have become the mellow, severe, dignified, loving,
and critical lady who at this moment was looking out of her
drawing-room window, and trying to show her impartiality for her orphan
niece by subjecting her to lawful and unbiased criticism.
'The day of the incomprehensible woman is past and gone,' said Miss
Abingdon, and she sighed a little.
Jane Erskine was painting a rabbit-hutch on the lawn. Her attitude
showed the keen workman, but disguised the woman of grace. Miss
Erskine, in fact, was lying full-length on the greensward of her aunt's
lawn absorbed in the engrossing occupation of putting the right dabs of
green paint upon a portion of the inside of the rabbit-hutch which was
awkward to get at.
'They are all alike,' sighed Miss Abingdon. She alluded to the
girlhood of the present day as it presented itself to her regretful and
disapproving eye. 'They wear shoes two sizes too large for them, they
don't require to be taken care of, they buy their own horses, and they
are never ill. They call young men by their Christian names! I don't
think they even have headaches.' Miss Abingdon sighed again over this
lost art of womanhood. 'There is my niece Jane Erskine; she might be a
graceful and elegant young woman, whereas she is sunburned, and--it is
a dreadful word of course--but I can only call her leggy. Perhaps it
is the fault of those narrow skirts. Women have never been so much
respected since crinolines went out of fashion. I believe the
independence of the modern girl is no longer assumed; it is not even a
regrettable passing fashion; the time has come when I am afraid they
really are independent. Jane would think me insane if I were to go out
and sit with her in the garden when Peter comes to call, and I don't
believe she has ever done a piece of fancy-work in her life!' said Miss
Abingdon.
She looked round her pretty drawing-room in which, with a spinster's
instinct for preserving old family treasures, she had gathered and
garnered antique pieces of furniture, ill-drawn family portraits, and
chairs covered with the worsted-work and beadwork of fifty or sixty
years ago. She looked regretfully at the piano and the old, neatly
bound folios of music with 'M. A.' upon the covers, and she wondered
how it was that no one cared to hear her 'pieces' now. She went over
to the music-stand and fingered them in a contemplative way. How
industriously she used to practise 'Woodland Warblings,' 'My Pretty
Bird,' 'La Sympathie, Valse Sentimentale pour le Piano,' and 'Quant' è
piu bella,' fingered and arranged with variations.
On Sunday afternoons when her guests 'were having a look at the mokes'
Miss Abingdon still played through her book of sacred pieces; and it
was on Sunday afternoons, too, that she always stirred the jars of
potpourri upon the cabinets, so that their pungent, faint odour might
exhale through the room. The old pieces of music and the scent of the
dried rose-leaves together always brought back to Miss Abingdon's mind
fragrant memories of long ago.
'We used to take a roll of music with us when we were asked out to
dinner,' she reflected, 'and it was all-important to us who should turn
over our leaves for us, and we generally blushed and hesitated before
we sat down to the piano at all. Last night Jane almost fought with
Peter for the larger portion of the keyboard of the piano; and they
played music without any tune in it, to my way of thinking, and there
is no seriousness at all about any of them.'
'I wonder if they'--Miss Abingdon again referred to that distressing
body of young women of the present day--'I wonder if they have ever
kissed a lover's letter, or have slept with his picture underneath
their pillows at night? Or have they ever lain sleepless for an hour
because of a loved one's absence, or because of a cold word from him?
Do they write verses, or exchange valentines, or even give each other
flowers?'
Miss Abingdon recalled in her own mind the days when she and her sister
used to walk together in the park, with mamma leaning upon papa's arm
and pacing sedately behind; and how, when they used to sit down on one
of the lawns, it had always been in a group of four. Ah! those were
the days when one went home and wept because the dear one--the handsome
hero who filled half a girl's thoughts and was the object of more than
half her worship--had not seen, one across the crowd; or he had seen,
perhaps, but girlish modest eyes were forbidden to give the signal of
approach. It was more maidenly then to be oblivious of a young man's
presence. 'Now,' said, Miss Abingdon, 'when they see a young man whom
they know--a pal I believe they call him--girls will wave their
parasols or even shout. I have known them rise from their own chairs
and go and speak to a man. The whole thing is extraordinary to me.'
It was a relief to Miss Abingdon's sombre reflections when her friend,
the vicar's wife, came in for a morning call. She thought that Mrs.
Wrottesley's brown merino dress and bonnet, and constraining mantle
which rendered all movements of the arms impossible, looked very
decorous and womanly compared with the soles of a pair of brown leather
shoes, and the foreshortened figure of five feet eight of slender young
womanhood stretched in strenuous devotion to her strange occupation on
the lawn.
When Mrs. Wrottesley seated herself opposite the window Miss Abingdon
resisted an impulse to pull down the blind.
'Yesterday,' said Miss Abingdon, glancing at her niece, 'she was trying
to copy a feat which she had seen at the hippodrome, and was riding one
pony and driving another tandem in front of her over some hurdles in
the field.'
Mrs. Wrottesley smiled with the rather provoking indulgence with which
our friends regard the follies of our relations.
'She is so young,' said Mrs. Wrottesley, 'and she is very beautiful.'
'No,' said Miss Abingdon, with inward pride at her own unwavering
impartiality, 'I honestly believe that if we were to consider Jane
without prejudice we should find that she is simply healthy.'
'It is a great charm,' said Mrs. Wrottesley.
'No, no,' corrected Miss Abingdon quickly, 'the charm of womanhood
consists in its mysteriousness. Now, the girl of to-day is simply a
good fellow. She doesn't require to be understood, and she doesn't
drive men crazy; she shoves her own bicycle up hills and fights for the
larger half of the keyboard of the piano.' She sighed again.
'She is a moral influence,' said Mrs. Wrottesley. Mrs. Wrottesley also
alluded to the girl of the period; and Miss Abingdon thought that to
refer to her as 'she' or a type, instead of 'they,' had a flavour of
culture about it, but she did not mean to give in.
'Yes, yes,' she said impatiently, her love of contradicting Mrs.
Wrottesley and at the same time holding her own in the discussion
inclining her to undue severity, 'she is as straight as any other good
fellow, and she pays up if she has lost at bridge, and would as soon
think of picking a pocket as of cheating at croquet; but she is not
mysterious--she is absolutely comprehensible.'
'Probably,' said Mrs. Wrottesley, 'Jane's shortcomings in this respect
are due to the fact that she is lamentably unaffected. Affectation, in
the case of girls who ride straight and don't know what it is to have a
headache, very often takes the form of boyishness. Let us console
ourselves with the fact that, being perfectly natural, Jane has escaped
masculinity.'
'Jane is a lady,' said Miss Abingdon severely, and with the faint
suggestion of administering a snub. 'But,' she added, with that touch
of superiority in her manner which obtruded itself in most of her
conversation with the vicar's wife, 'there are certain accepted
traditions of womanhood such as conventionality approves, and it was
not called artificial to conform to them when I was a girl.'
'I remember,' said Mrs. Wrottesley, 'that we honestly thought that we
were interesting when we ate very little, and I myself often used to
aspire to an attractive display of timidity when inwardly I had no
sensation of fear.'
As the wife of the vicar of the parish Mrs. Wrottesley wore brown
merino and a mantle, but these hid a great soul securely held in check
and narrowed down by a strict adherence to the small conventions and
paralysing rules which society seems to have prescribed for vicars and
their wives in the rural parishes of England. She prayed every morning
of her life for more faith, and meant by that a narrower creed. Mrs.
Wrottesley was an inarticulate woman, and had gained for herself the
character of being reserved.
Her own view of things differed in all essentials from the opinions
which were held by those about her, and were even inwardly opposed to
theories which her husband, with such gentlemanly eloquence, expounded
every Sunday morning. People thought themselves charitable when they
merely said that they did not understand Mrs. Wrottesley.
'The modern girl has a good effect upon society,' she continued; 'and
she is not a cat.'
'Ah, yes,' allowed Miss Abingdon, conceding a point, but prepared with
unanswerable argument; 'but will she ever be loved as the old eternal
feminine was loved?'
'Many people believe,' said Mrs. Wrottesley, 'that you can't be a man's
divinity and surround yourself with a golden halo, and be his pal at
the same time.'
'I remember,' said Miss Abingdon reminiscently, and feeling that she
was still scoring heavily against her friend--'I remember we used to
come down to breakfast in light gloves to match our gowns, and we drew
them on when the meal was over and only removed them in the
morning-room when we had taken out our embroidery to work at it.'
'And when embroidery bored us,' said Mrs. Wrottesley, 'we thought we
were in love.'
'A Miss Sherard stayed here last summer,' said Miss Abingdon, 'a friend
of Jane's, and she smoked cigarettes in her bedroom. I know that, for
I saw the ashes in her pin-tray.'
Miss Abingdon rather enjoyed making little excursions through her
guest's bedrooms of an afternoon, when she had the house to herself;
and, without deigning to touch or disturb anything, she knew pretty
well, for instance, whose complexion was real and whose was false, who
wore powder and who did not.
Mrs. Wrottesley glanced at her own figure in the drawing-room mirror;
her mantle disguised the fact that she had either a waist or a pair of
arms, and she gave a little dry smile as she reflected that she had
accepted a dolman cloak with all the other outward conventions of
orthodoxy as understood by society in rural England.
'My cousin, Peter Ogilvie, comes here every day,' said Miss Abingdon;
'he is crossing the lawn now. In former days these two young people
would have been talked about. (Peter is my cousin, you know, on my
father's side of the house--he is not related to Jane.) But neither
will probably mind in the least what is said about them, and for my own
part I am positively unable to say whether they care for each other or
not. Had I been Jane I would have sat in the arbour this morning, with
a pretty, cool white dress on, reading poetry or some light romance, or
working at my embroidery till my lover came, instead of being found
covered with paint and with the footman's baize apron on.'
The two ladies moved closer to the window and watched the young man
crossing the lawn. He was well-built and not many inches above Jane's
own height; and perhaps when one has said that he was fair with that
Saxon fairness which suggests an almost immaculate cleanliness, and
looked like a gentleman, there is not much more to be stated about his
external appearance.
Jane rose from her recumbent position on the turf and shook off some
blades of short grass from her apron, and waved a brush filled with
green paint in the air.
'Don't touch it, Peter!' she cried. 'Isn't it lovely?'
'Good morning, Jane,' said Peter, lifting his cap. Whatever else might
be said of them, it would have to be admitted that there was a
fundamental sense of courtesy and good-breeding underlying the
regrettably frank manner of these young people. 'If you wave your
brush about in that triumphant way you 'll splash me with green paint.'
'I have sacrificed two dresses already,' answered Jane; 'but real Art
is worth that!'
'The hutch looks ripping,' said Peter; 'but I should feel safer if you
would put down that brush.'
'I couldn't resist painting the inside,' said Jane, surveying her work
ecstatically. 'Do you think the rabbits will lick on the paint and be
sick, Peter?'
'Probably,' said Peter.
'Of course we don't know,' said Jane gravely, 'that it isn't their
favourite food. Rabbits may flourish on green paint just as we
flourish on roast mutton.'
'It would be beastly to have a green inside!' said Peter.
'I wonder what they are talking about,' said Miss Abingdon, glancing
with an apprehensive eye from the drawing-room window. 'Perhaps, after
all, they are making love to each other; and if they are, I certainly
ought to go out and sit with them.'
Miss Abingdon had antiquated notions of a chaperon's duties.
'I suppose there would be no objection to the match if they do care for
each other,' said Mrs. Wrottesley, in a manner that was often called
brusque and had served to make her unpopular. 'Jane is rich----'
'Jane has money,' corrected Miss Abingdon, who saw a well-defined
difference between the two statements. 'She is a ward in Chancery, you
know, and she will not come of age until she is twenty-five. Peter, of
course, has a very large fortune. Still, one would not like to be
responsible for a marriage, even if it is suitable, and I should not
like the Erskines to think I had not looked after Jane properly.'
That nothing should happen always seemed to Miss Abingdon the height of
safety and of peace. She mistrusted events of any kind, and had
probably remained single owing to her inability to make up her mind to
such a momentous decision as is necessarily involved by matrimony. She
had never been out of England, and now could seldom be got to leave
home; whenever she quitted her own house something was sure to happen,
and Miss Abingdon disapproved of happenings. She believed in the
essential respectability of monotony, and loved routine. But alas for
routine and respectability and a peaceful and serene existence! Even
elderly ladies, who dress in black satin and pay their bills weekly,
and whose most stimulating and exciting morning is the one spent in
scolding the gardener, may be touched with sorrows for which they are
not responsible, and shaken by tragedies such as they never dreamed
would come near them.
The young couple on the lawn left the unfinished rabbit-hutch and
paint-pots and strolled towards a garden-seat. All the gates and seats
on Miss Abingdon's small property were painted white once a year, and
their trim spotlessness gave an air of homely opulence to the place.
The bench which her young relatives sought was placed beneath a
beneficent cedar tree that stretched out long, kindly branches, and
looked as though it were wrought of stitch-work in deep blue satin.
Jane wiped her fingers upon the baize apron, and Peter lighted a
cigarette.
'Have you seen Toffy's new motor-car yet?' he asked.
Had any one demanded of Peter or Jane what they meant by the art of
conversation, they would probably have replied that it had something to
do with Ollendorf's method.
'How 's Toffy going to afford a motor?' said Jane, with interest. 'Is
it going to be "the cheapest thing in the end," like all Toffy's
extravagances?'
Finance, one of the forbidden topics of 1850, was discussed to-day with
a frankness which Miss Abingdon thought positively indelicate.
'He says he 'll save railway fares,' said Peter, 'and as they are the
only thing for which Toffy has paid ready money for years, I suppose
there is something to be said for the motor.'
'Is he going to drive it himself?'
'He says so, and the motor is to be run on the strictest lines of
economy. I am not sure that he is not going to water the petrol to
make it go farther.'
'I don't quite see Toffy steering anything,' said Jane, laughing with
great enjoyment at the recollection of Toffy's mad riding; 'he can
never take his horse through a gate without scraping his leg against
it.'
'So Toffy generally goes over the gates,' said Peter, laughing also;
'and probably he 'll try the same sort of thing with the motor-car.'
'Toffy _is_ an ass!' said Jane affectionately.
'I am sure it is time I should go and mount guard,' said Miss Abingdon
anxiously, from her post by the window. 'Why should they sit together
under the cedar tree like that unless they are making love?' She
stepped out on to the lawn with a garden-hat placed above her cap and a
sun-umbrella held over her head.
'Aunt Mary,' said Jane, 'Toffy's got a new motor! Isn't it fearfully
exciting! We are going for a serpentine run with him, and our
next-of-kin are going to divide Peter's and my insurance between them
if we never come back again. Be sure you claim all you can get if I
depart in pieces!'
Miss Abingdon laughed. She knew she was weak even where she
disapproved of her niece. Jane never kept anything from her, and she
would tell her aunt ridiculous items of sporting intelligence which
were as Greek to that excellent lady, and would talk to her as to any
other really good friend. Miss Abingdon was conscious of the charm of
this treatment, but the disciplining of youth was important, and Jane
required both training and guidance.
'I can't think why,' she said severely, 'you should call a young man
Toffy. It is a name I should hardly liked to have called a dog when I
was a girl.'
Peter raised his fair eyebrows and looked distressed. 'I don't see
what else you could call a man named Christopherson,' he said. 'You
couldn't call him Nigel--that's Toffy's front name--and I 'm afraid he
hasn't got any other. I believe fathers and mothers think you must be
going to die young when they give you a name like that, and that it
will look well on a tombstone.'
'You shouldn't joke about death, Peter,' said Miss Abingdon. She felt
almost as though she saw an ally approaching when she perceived the
Reverend Canon Wrottesley come up the drive to call for his wife on the
way to the vicarage. Miss Abingdon had long ago accepted with
thankfulness St. Paul's recommendation to use the Church as a final
court of appeal.
'How-do-you-do, Peter, how-do-you-do?' said the canon cordially, as
Peter went across the lawn to meet him. 'Got leave again, have you? I
don't believe you know what hard work is!' The vicar had pottered
about a small parish for thirty years and had given his five sons an
excellent education on the handsome fortune which his wife had brought
him. This helped to convince him that he had borne the burden and heat
of the day, and very naturally he regarded idleness as the root of all
evil.
'Mrs. Wrottesley is looking over the guild work in the morning-room,'
said Miss Abingdon conscientiously. She loved a chat with the vicar,
and thought him more genial and charming when his wife was not present.
'Shall I tell her you are here?'
'She likes taking a look at the things the girls have made,' said the
canon indulgently.
The Vicar of Culversham and Honorary Canon of Sedgwick-in-the-Marsh was
a genial and delightful man. He always spoke kindly of his wife's
work, and he could even pardon fussing on the part of a woman. He was
a universal favourite and was no doubt aware of the fact, which gave
him a very legitimate and wholly pardonable sense of pleasure. It is
doubtful if any man was ever more happily placed than was Canon
Wrottesley in the considerable village of which he was the esteemed
vicar. In a larger place he might have been overlooked, in spite of
his many excellent qualities; and in a smaller one he would not have
had so many social advantages nor so many opportunities for usefulness.
His vicarage was large and well-furnished, his sons were well-grown and
well-educated, and he himself had many friends. The part of the
country where he found himself was known to house-agents as being a
good neighbourhood; and it was not so far away from London that the
canon felt himself cut off from the intellectual life of his day.
Canon Wrottesley belonged to the London Library and liked to converse
on books, even when he had read only a portion of the volumes which he
discussed. He often fingered them with true scholarly affection as
they lay on his library table, and he discussed erudite points of
learning with a light touch which his hearers, in a parish not renowned
for its culture, found truly impressive. Even his vanity was of the
refined and dignified order of things, and seemed to accord pleasantly
with his handsome, clean-shaven, aristocratic features. Perhaps his
one weakness was to be the centre of every group which he adorned. And
he held this position skilfully, not only by a well-bred display of
tact, such as he showed upon all occasions, but by a certain gift which
he possessed of appearing in different roles at different times,
according to his mood. Still, in spite of a tendency to a
self-convincing form of masquerading, one is fain to admit that the
village of Culversham would have lacked one of its most pleasing
figures had Canon Wrottesley been removed from it. He bore an
untarnished name, he had always a pleasant, if pompous greeting for
every one, and he preached and lived like a gentleman. He was
well-dressed and amiable, and his only display of temper or touchiness
took the rather curious form of adopting some impersonation not in
accordance with the circumstances in which for the moment he found
himself.
Mrs. Wrottesley appeared from the house, still clad in her black mantle
which had evidently not been removed while she looked over the guild
work, for it bore traces thereof upon it in morsels of cotton and the
fluff of unbleached calico.
'Come and sit beside me, love,' said her husband, indicating one of
Miss Abingdon's garden-seats in close proximity to his own cushioned
chair, 'and I will take care of you.'
Miss Abingdon smiled and looked admiringly at him. Conscience
frequently protested against her giving way to the thought, but in her
heart Miss Abingdon was convinced that Mrs. Wrottesley was not quite
worthy of her husband.
'I think I must go back to the house and finish the guild work,' said
Mrs. Wrottesley. 'I have been very slow over it this morning, but I
have got a little headache, and I have been counting up everything
wrong, which is very stupid of me.'
'How often have I told you not to work when you are tired?' said the
canon, shaking his finger reprovingly at her.
'I 'll finish the guild work,' exclaimed Jane, 'and I 'll make Peter
come and help me.'
Miss Erskine, who had been sitting upon one of her feet and swinging
the other, rose impulsively from the garden-seat and covered the lawn
in a series of hops, until her shoe, which had become hopelessly
entangled in the laces of her petticoat, released itself with a rending
sound. Then she removed her hand from Peter's shoulder, upon which she
had been supporting herself, and together they went into the house.
'And this,' thought Miss Abingdon ruefully, 'is courtship as it is
understood in the present day!'