THE SECOND MRS. PIPER.
BELLA was reigning at the Park in all the glory of new-fledged royalty,
her husband fascinated and subservient, her step-children all packed
off to school, the sober old Georgian barrack transformed by new
furniture and improvements of all kinds. At his wife’s urgent desire
Mr. Piper had bought the estate from Sir Philip Dulcimer, who, never
having liked it, was very glad to turn it into money, which, carefully
invested in railway shares, might bring him in five or six per cent.,
instead of the scanty two and a half which his paternal acres had
yielded. Mr. Piper was therefore now Mr. Dulcimer’s patron, as Bella
reflected with a thrill of pride. She had ascended a good many steps
above poor Mrs. Dulcimer, who had been so patronizingly good-natured to
her in the days of her poverty.
For the brief three months of his wedded life Ebenezer Piper had been
living in a state of chronic astonishment. ‘This little woman,’ as
he called his wife, absolutely took his breath away. Her coolness,
her self-assurance, her air of having been used to the possession of
unlimited wealth from her babyhood, her insolence to people of higher
rank--Lady Jane Gowry, for instance, and the Pynsents, and all the
notabilities of Little Yafford--these things filled him with admiring
surprise. She was not at all the kind of wife he had expected to find
her. He had chosen her for her softness and pliability, and he found
her hard and bright as some sparkling gem. He had expected to rule and
govern her as easily as a little child, and behold! she was ruling and
governing him. He was too much under the spell of her fascination to
complain yet awhile; but this kind of thing was not at all what he had
intended. He held himself in reserve.
Never was there such a change in any household. A butler in solemn
black, with a powdered footman for his assistant, took the place of
the decent parlourmaid, in her starched cap and apron.
The first Mrs. Piper had never consented to have indoor men-servants.
‘My dear, why don’t you keep a man?’ Mr. Piper had sometimes inquired.
‘He’d do much better than these girls of yours, who never quite know
their business.’
‘Piper,’ his wife had answered solemnly, ‘I am not going to bring you
to ruin. The girls are bad enough, what with their extravagance and
their followers, but a man would eat us out of house and home before we
knew where we were.’
‘Please yourself, my dear,’ returned Mr. Piper, ‘and you’ll please me.’
Thus it was that the Piper establishment had been conducted upon a
strictly middle-class footing.
Now everything was on an aristocratic level. The present Mrs. Piper had
a Frenchwoman for her own maid. She had a groom in top boots to sit
behind her pony carriage. When she drove in her barouche the groom sat
beside the coachman, and the two pairs of top-boots had a dazzling
effect. Mr. Piper was rather astonished at the bootmaker’s bill.
‘My pet, here’s no end of money to pay for top-boots,’ he remarked. ‘I
can’t say I see the use of ’em. Poor Moggie got on very well without
top-boots.’
‘I hope you don’t expect me to go out with a coachman in trousers,’
exclaimed Bella. ‘I might as well have a fly from the “Crown” at once.’
‘My love, I should have thought that any kind of conveyance would have
been a novelty to you, and that you’d hardly have been so particular
about the livery,’ suggested Mr. Piper.
‘I could have gone on foot all my life,’ said Bella, ‘but if I am to
have a carriage I must have it decently appointed. I don’t want to hang
between heaven and earth, like Mahomet’s coffin.’
Mahomet’s coffin extinguished Mr. Piper. It had been flung at his head
a good many times upon his venturing to object to his young wife’s
extravagance.
‘And after all I am proud to see how well she does it,’ he said to
himself, smiling an uxorious smile. ‘She’s a regular little duchess.’
And henceforward in familiar conversation Mr. Piper was apt to speak of
his wife as the ‘Duchess.’
The house--which had now become his freehold--was made so fine that Mr.
Piper hardly knew himself in it. Persian carpets of vivid and various
hues were spread on the black and white marble of the hall, brocaded
satin curtains, violet lined with amber, veiled the doors between hall
and conservatory. The drawing-room was pale blue and gold, rich in
easy chairs and tall gilded stands supporting Sèvres vases filled with
flowers.
The chief bedroom was apple-green. Everything was radiant and smiling,
dazzling with gold and colour.
‘My word! it’s like living in a bower,’ said Mr. Piper, and he hummed a
song that was then not quite forgotten--
‘There’s a bower of roses by Bendemeer’s stream.’
Having made her house beautiful, Mrs. Piper’s next desire naturally was
to exhibit her splendour to the envious eyes of people with inferior
houses. She therefore began to issue invitations on as large a scale
as the neighbourhood allowed. These were not all responded to as
cordially as she would have wished. Lady Jane Gowry had honoured Bella
with a condescending call, but she flatly declined Mr. and Mrs. Piper’s
invitation to dinner, on the ground that at her age she could not
afford to extend the circle of her visiting acquaintance.
‘The people I dine with are people I have known for half a century,’
she wrote to Mrs. Piper. ‘I am too old to go out often, so I only go to
very old friends. But if you and Mr. Piper like to come and take a cup
of tea with me any Tuesday evening I shall be very happy to see you.’
‘After all, Lady Jane’s chestnut wig and violet-powdered complexion are
not much loss,’ said Bella.
‘No, they ain’t, but I should like to have taken the old woman to
dinner upon my arm, before the Porkmans and the Wigzells,’ remarked Mr.
Piper. ‘I don’t believe they ever sat down to dinner with a title in
the whole course of their natural lives. Wouldn’t old Timperley have
stared! Earls’ daughters don’t come his way often, I reckon.’
Bella found that she would have to content herself in a great measure
with the society of the Timperleys, the Porkmans, the Wigzells, and
all the ramifications of those family trees. Everybody in this set was
rich, and the chief struggle of everybody’s life seemed to be to spend
more money upon display than his or her neighbour. The men boasted of
their cellars, and vied with each other in giving high prices for their
wines. A few loftier spirits bought pictures, and talked patronizingly
of their favourite Royal Academicians. They seemed to think that Frith
and Millais had been created for them, like Holbein for Henry the
Eighth, or Vandyke for Charles the First. They all lived in brand-new
houses within a few miles of Great Yafford, houses built by themselves,
all spick and span and fresh from the builder’s hand, with not so much
as an elderly apple-tree on the premises.
The county people had been condescendingly civil to the new Mrs.
Piper; but that was all. They called upon her, and contemplated her
curiously, as if she had been something to wonder at, like the only
living gorilla. She was asked to three large dinners, at which she felt
herself less than nobody--though she wore laces and jewels enough for a
dowager of ancient lineage. Bella, clever as she was, found that these
people’s thoughts were not her thoughts, nor their ways her ways--and
that all the distance between the east and west was not wider than the
gulf between her and the county families. But this was a surmountable
difficulty, she told herself. She was quick at learning languages,
and would learn the jargon of the county families as easily as she
had learned Italian. These scraps of social slang, these continual
allusions to people she did not know, and pleasures she had never
shared, could hardly be so difficult as Dante.
Mr. Piper looked on and admired, while his young wife wasted his money,
laughed at his friends, and made light of his opinions; but he was not
altogether satisfied or easy in his mind. It would not be always so,
he thought. There would come a day! The Duchess was carrying things
with a high hand. It was perhaps just as well to let her have her
fling. She was so unaccustomed to the command of money, poor little
woman, that she might be forgiven for spending it somewhat recklessly.
And, after all, this increased expenditure was pleasanter than poor
Moggie’s carefulness and perpetual lamentations about butcher’s bills
and pounds of butter. Mr. Piper liked his new butler, and was even in
his heart of hearts not displeased with the powdered footman or the
top-booted groom, though he affected to despise those follies. He felt
himself on a level with the Timperleys in their scarlet Tudor mansion,
with its jutting windows and leaden lattices, its deep porch and
iron-studded door, its gilded vane and many gables, at once intensely
old and dazzlingly new. He was living as became his wealth and social
status, living like the Porkmans and the Wigzells, and the rest of his
purse-proud acquaintance. The first Mrs. Piper had hung upon him like a
log on a hobbled donkey, and had deprived him of all freedom, with her
ever-lasting economical scruples. He had been afraid to give a dinner
party, knowing that for a month after there would be ceaseless wailings
about the expense of the feast.
‘Piper, have you any idea what grouse were when you asked Mr. Timperley
to dinner last August?’ Mrs. Piper would demand.
‘I know the brace we had were uncommonly tough, and precious badly
cooked,’ Mr. Piper would retort.
‘They were twelve shillings a brace, Piper. Here’s the poulterer’s bill
to prove it to you. I call it sinful to eat game at such a price. You
know _you_ ordered them, Piper. I should have inquired what they were
to cost--but you never do.’
‘I wanted to give Timperley a decent dinner,’ Mr. Piper would reply.
‘Hang it, Moggie! when I go to Timperley’s he feeds me on the fat of
the land. Besides, we can afford it.’
‘Nobody can afford wanton extravagance,’ Mrs. Piper would groan; and
this kind of conversation would occur daily.
Thus it was a new thing to Mr. Piper to have his domestic life
administered with liberal-handed luxury, to hear no complaints about
the misconduct of servants or the price of provisions, not to be
awakened abruptly from his after-dinner nap to be told that bread had
gone up a halfpenny, or that Scrogfield was charging thirteen-pence for
fillet of veal.
‘Upon my word, little woman,’ he exclaimed one day, delighted with his
wife’s cleverness, ‘you have made the house a paradise.’
It was still more a paradise after Christmas, for the second Mrs.
Piper, having found out that her step-daughters were sadly in want of
dancing and calisthenics, which they could not be taught properly at
home, and would be much benefited by being transplanted to Miss Turk’s
boarding school, on the outskirts of Great Yafford, the school at which
Mrs. Dulcimer and all the best people in the neighbourhood had been
educated, under the aunts and predecessors of the reigning Miss Turk.
Mr. Piper was rather disappointed, just at first, by this idea of
Bella’s. He had hoped to have his daughters always at home. They were
troublesome, rude, and noisy, but still Mr. Piper loved them, as the
gladiator loved his young barbarians.
‘I thought you would have gone on teaching the girls, little woman,’
he said, with a chap-fallen air.
‘My dear Mr. Piper, what time should I have for society, or for you, if
I did that? Quite impossible. Besides, the girls will be a great deal
better at a first-rate school. They are too high-spirited to obey me,
and now I am their mamma they would laugh at my attempts to teach them.’
Mr. Piper sighed and submitted. The boys went to school, as a matter
of course. He had no objection to that. But he had hoped that his
daughters would stay at home, and cheer his breakfast-table with their
chubby common-place faces and small second-hand jokes, and thump their
pianoforte duets of an evening for his delectation.
One evil which Mr. Piper had feared in taking Bella for his wife had
not befallen him. He had fancied that the Park would be overrun with
Scratchells, that Bella, as an affectionate member of a large family,
would want to make his house a free warren for her father and mother,
brothers and sisters.
But this apprehension of Mr. Piper’s was in no manner realized. Bella
sent her family ceremonious invitations to her second best parties,
and made a duty call upon her mother after church every Sunday, a time
at which Mrs. Scratchell was less distracted by thoughts about the
kettle or the kitchen generally than at other periods of her existence;
for the Scratchells always had a cold dinner on the Sabbath, not so
much from piety as from a conviction of Mrs. Scratchell’s that cold
meat went further than hot.
This kind of intercourse was not what the Scratchells--especially
Clementina and Flora--had expected; but they were fain to be thankful
for the favours they received, and never carried their murmurs further
than the sacred home circle, where, sitting round the winter fire, they
discoursed at their ease upon Bella’s worldliness and want of natural
feeling.
‘I was so glad when Lady Jane refused to go to her dinner party,’ said
Clementina. ‘We weren’t asked to that party. Oh no. We were not good
enough to meet Lady Jane--nor the Timperleys either. And Lady Jane
wrote and told Bella that she only went out to dine with old friends.
Wasn’t that splendid?’
‘Did Bella tell you?’ asked Mr. Scratchell.
‘Catch her! She’s too proud to tell me she’s been snubbed. Lady Jane
told Mrs. Dulcimer, and Mrs. Dulcimer told me, and I’ve no doubt
everybody in the village knows all about it by this time.’
‘No doubt,’ sighed Mrs. Scratchell, in her doleful way. ‘It was a pity
Bella put herself so forward.’