the very latest product in professional nurses. But when she found that
the nurse had theories in the bringing up of babies that by no means
accorded with her own sentimental views, and that Jasmine was inclined
to support the nurse, she began to be a little resentful of her niece.
"You don't understand, my dear," she said. "You see you aren't a
mother."
"Well, but nor are you," Jasmine pointed out. This retort so much
annoyed Aunt Cuckoo that she began to hint, much more obviously than she
had hinted at future prosperity, at the inconvenience of Jasmine's
presence in The Cedars.
Possibly Aunt Cuckoo's desire to be relieved of any responsibility for
her niece's future might not have matured so rapidly had not Uncle Eneas
been converted if not to the baby's religion at any rate of its company
by the obvious pleasure his entrance into the room caused the creature.
No man is secure against flattery; the cult of the dog as a domestic
animal proves that. No doubt if on its adopted father's entrance into a
room the baby had shrieked, turned black in the face or vomited, he
would have been tempted to take refuge in the society of his niece from
such implied contempt. But the baby always demonstrated rapture at the
approach of Uncle Eneas. Its toes curled over sensuously; its fingers
clutched at strings of celestial music; it dribbled and made that odd
noise which is called crowing. It said La-la-la-la-la very rapidly and
tried to leap in the air. Probably it was fascinated by a prominent and
brilliantly coloured red wen on Uncle Eneas' cheek, because if ever he
bent over to pay his respects the baby would always make distinct
efforts to grasp this wen with one hand, while with the other it would
try to grasp his tie-pin, a moderately large single ruby not unlike the
wen. Luckily for itself the baby could not express what exactly kindled
its young enthusiasm, and Uncle Eneas naturally began to believe that
the infant was exceptionally intelligent. His wife encouraged this
opinion; all the servants encouraged this opinion; even the professional
nurse encouraged this opinion. It was obvious that the baby would be
henceforth ineradicable. Moreover by acquiring a baby already ten months
old, what Uncle Eneas called the early stewed raspberry stage of
babyhood had been passed elsewhere, and the exciting first attempts at
conversation and locomotion were already in sight. As yet neither Uncle
Eneas nor Aunt Cuckoo had gone beyond hints about the problem of
Jasmine's future, but she began to feel sensitive about staying longer
at The Cedars and to ask herself what she was going to do presently. At
this point the baby, with what had it not been a baby might have been
called cynical coquetry, roused the demons of jealousy by suddenly
making shameless advances to Jasmine. Nothing would please the infant
now but that Jasmine should play with it continually: Uncle Eneas and
Aunt Cuckoo were greeted with yells of disapproval. With Spring rapidly
coming to the prime it was felt that such an unnatural preference
indicated the need for a change of air. Jasmine sensed an exchange of
diplomatic notes among her relatives. She shrank within herself at the
thought that none too much willingness was anywhere being displayed to
receive her.
"I thought it would be rather nice for you to go down to Curtain Wells
and stay with your Uncle Alexander for a while in this beautiful spring
weather," said Aunt Cuckoo. "But it appears that the only spare room is
in the hands of the decorators."
And on another day she said: "I am rather surprised that your Aunt May
doesn't invite you to stay with her in Harley Street for the season.
They have become so ultra-fashionable nowadays that one might have
supposed that they would have invited you to Harley Street to share in
the general atmosphere of gaiety. I do hope that dear little Frank is
not going to grow up quite so self-absorbed as Lettice and Pamela."
"If you want me to go away," said Jasmine desperately, "why don't you
say so? I never wanted to come to England. I'll go back to Sirene with
what massage I know and earn my living there."
"But who has given you the least idea that you are unwelcome?" said Aunt
Cuckoo. "It was of you I was thinking. I am afraid that dear baby's
arrival has made us less able to amuse you than we were. And I don't
like to suggest that you should take entire charge of him."
At this moment Uncle Eneas came blustering into the room.
"I've had a letter from Uncle Matthew," he proclaimed. "He's got an idea
into his head that he wants to go down to the seaside. Some fool of a
doctor's been stuffing him up with that notion. He says he thinks we
ought to go to the seaside, and says it would be a good idea to share
expenses, we paying two-thirds and he paying one-third. The mean old
screw! How like him that is! And if we take baby he'll only want to pay
a quarter."
"Oh, but I think Uncle Matthew would be too frightening for dear baby,"
said Aunt Cuckoo. "Why shouldn't Jasmine go and stay with him?" she
suggested.
"That wouldn't suit his plan," said Uncle Eneas. "If Jasmine went he
would have to pay for her as well as for himself."
"But don't you think that if Jasmine went to stay with him at Muswell
Hill, she would do as well as a change of air?"
"By Jove, that's quite a notion," said Uncle Eneas, looking at his niece
as people look at the sky to see if it is going to rain. Jasmine was
trying to remember what she knew about Uncle Matthew. He existed in her
mind as an incredibly old gentleman of boundless wealth who years ago
had bought a picture of her father.
"I think you would like Uncle Matthew so much," Aunt Cuckoo was saying
persuasively. "Of course he's very old and he's a little eccentric. I
think old people often are eccentric, don't you? But he's very well off,
and it really does seem a wonderful solution of the difficulty."
"You mean the difficulty of having me on your hands?" Jasmine bluntly
demanded.
"Please don't say that," Aunt Cuckoo begged. "Surely you heard what your
uncle said? Our difficulty is that we don't want to disturb Uncle
Matthew with precious Baboose. I don't think he would quite understand
how the little pet came to us."
So long as she was to be tossed about like a ball, Jasmine thought she
might just as well be tossed into an old gentleman's lap as anywhere
else, and soon after this, gathering from a fragment she overheard of a
low colloquy between her uncle and aunt that her introduction to Uncle
Matthew would intensely annoy the Hector Grants, she made up her mind
not to oppose, but even to press forward the proposed visit.
"Where is Muswell Hill?" she asked.
"Oh, it's on a hill," said Aunt Cuckoo vaguely. "I don't know what bus
you take. It's a large house, and as he has only one servant everything
gets a little dusty. Whenever I go there I always take a duster with
me, because Uncle Matthew so appreciates a little attention. At least
I'm sure he does really appreciate it, though of course he's reached
that age when people don't seem to appreciate anything. What do you
think, dear?" she turned to ask her husband. "We might invite him to
dinner."
It was extraordinary how much the baby's arrival had strengthened Aunt
Cuckoo's position in the household. In the old days she would never have
dreamed of asking anyone to dinner; but her vicarious maternity gave her
as much importance as if she had really borne a child at the age of
fifty-two. Eneas had correspondingly shrunk with regard to his wife,
though with everybody else he was as pompous as ever.
"Now I'm going to give you a few hints," said Aunt Cuckoo to Jasmine.
"Dear old Uncle Matthew is very fond of pictures."
"Yes, I remember he bought one of father's years and years ago."
"Oh, hush, hush!" Aunt Cuckoo breathed. "He's not at all fond of buying
anything now. You must _give_ him one of your father's pictures. In
fact, if I might suggest it, you had better give him all that you have
left. We shall send the brougham over to fetch him, and I don't see any
reason why you should not drive back with him to Muswell Hill after
dinner. We could put the pictures on the luggage rack, and your trunk
could be sent over by Carter Paterson the next day. You could put what
you wanted for the night in quite a small bag, which I will lend you."
Religion was making Aunt Cuckoo as practical as St. Teresa herself.
Perhaps it was lucky for Uncle Eneas that she had adopted a baby; he
would have found a new order of nuns much more expensive.
The invitation was sent to Uncle Matthew, and the next day the answer
came back written on the back of the same sheet of paper. In a
postscript he had added: "_I wish you wouldn't seal your envelopes to
me, as I cannot turn them so easily. People nowadays seem to have no
idea of economy. Every envelope should be used twice over._"
"It's really not avarice," Aunt Cuckoo explained. "It's only
eccentricity."
She was longing more than ever to get Jasmine out of the house. That
afternoon darling baby had pulled Uncle Eneas' moustache with a
suggestion of viciousness, and though Uncle Eneas had said in a fatuous
voice, "Poor little man, he doesn't know that it hurts," Aunt Cuckoo was
inclined to think that Baby did know it hurt, and that he had been
prompted to the outrage by Jasmine's influence.
Uncle Matthew was apparently a difficult person to entertain at dinner
because he liked to be well fed and at the same time he did not like to
see anything wasted. If the least bit too much was given him, he would
overeat himself rather than let anything be wasted, which often made him
ill afterwards. Aunt Cuckoo's dinners in the past had usually been
failures, because in those days her temperament was far too vague to
calculate nicely the necessary quantity of food. The development of her
practical qualities promised greater success now. Besides, now that
Jasmine was here, she could not make a mistake, because if there was too
much Jasmine could be given a larger helping than she wanted, and if
there was too little Jasmine could be given less. It was debated whether
it would be wise to warn Uncle Matthew in advance of Jasmine's
existence, of which he was probably unaware, inasmuch as the Hector
Grants had every interest in not telling him; and it was finally decided
to say nothing about her until she was introduced to him. Aunt Cuckoo
was anxious to explain that Jasmine had come all the way from Sirene to
lay at his feet her father's dying wish in the shape of four pictures;
but Uncle Eneas' more cautious consular nature did not approve of this
plan. There was also some discussion whether anything should be said
about Baby. Aunt Cuckoo in the pride of maternity had no doubts; but
Uncle Eneas with the approach of Uncle Matthew's visit was feeling more
and more like a nephew and less and less like a father.
"I don't think the old boy will understand our deliberately procuring a
child in that way. I know he has always regarded children as unpleasant
accidents."
"But suppose darling Baboose cries?"
"Well, he mustn't," the adopted father decided. "Or if he does, we must
say that it's a baby in the street outside. It's impossible really to
arrange a suitable reception in advance. That last tooth has been giving
him a good deal of trouble, you know, and he may ... well, he may in
fact take it out of the old gentleman. No, I feel sure that a meeting
between them would be most inappropriate."
Aunt Cuckoo gave way. She was too anxious to palm off Jasmine on Uncle
Matthew not for once to sacrifice Baby's dignity as the heir of The
Cedars.
_Chapter Six_
Uncle Matthew Rouncivell was not of course so old as his relatives
boasted that he was, but he was old enough to be considered incapable of
lasting much longer and old enough to justify any member of the family
in adding a few years to the correct total, which was seventy-six. He
had been fifteen years younger than the wife of the Bishop of Clapham,
and though he had scoffed at his sister for marrying a parson, he had to
admit in the end that Andrew had made the most of a poor profession.
Uncle Matthew's mean and acquisitive boyhood had been the consolation of
his father's declining years, and he started life with a comfortable
fortune notwithstanding what had been robbed from him as a dowry to
marry off his sister. Their father, Samuel Rouncivell, had invested
largely in property that seemed likely to put difficulties in the way of
far-off municipal improvements, or as he preferred to put it, lay along
the lines of future urban development. He and his son after him had a
remarkable flair for buying up decrepit slums that would afterward turn
out to be the only possible site for a new town hall or public library.
And then the keen eye old Samuel had for the arteries of traffic! Why,
it was as keen as an anatomist's for the arteries of the human body. In
whatever direction tramlines or railroads desired to flow, there stood
Samuel ready to apply his tourniquet, which was sometimes nothing more
than one tumbledown cottage plastered with signs of ancient lights. This
sense of direction was transmitted to Matthew, who when one of the big
London termini had to be enlarged trebled his fortune at a stroke. Now,
at seventy-six, he could not be worth less than fifteen thousand a year,
and as he did not spend five hundred, every year he lived was making him
wealthier. Long ago he had married a beautiful young woman who a few
months later was killed in a riding accident. Since then he had spent a
solitary and misanthropic life, grinding his tenants, amassing a
quantity of unusual walking-sticks and bad modern pictures, and
collecting what he called antiques. His only amusement was the malicious
delight he took in leading the various groups of his relations to
suppose one after another that he was contemplating them as his
beneficiaries. Thin-lipped and beaky, he had a fat flabby back and pale
flabby cheeks, and the skin of his neck was mottled and scaly as a
snake's slough. He usually wore a frock-coat that resembled the green
slime on London railings in wet weather; but when he dined out he took
with him a black velvet smoking cap worked in arabesques of yellow silk
and a pair of slippers made of leopard's fur to which moth had given a
mangy appearance. He liked to dine early, and it was six o'clock of a
fine evening in early May when he arrived at The Cedars, his frock-coat
reinforced by a grey muffler long enough and thick enough to have kept a
Zulu moderately warm at the North Pole. He did not seem in a good
temper, and when Niko helped him to disengage himself from the muffler,
he asked with a growl if the fool thought he was spinning a top.
However, when he entered the dining-room and saw poor Sholto Grant's
pictures all aglow in the rich horizontal sunlight, he cheered up for a
moment, until a suspicion that his nephew Eneas was proposing to sell
him the pictures intervened and spoilt his pleasure. He at once began to
criticize and cheapen the pictures so ruthlessly that Jasmine could
hardly keep back her tears. In Crispano's Cafe at Sirene she had once
heard a futurist painter criticizing her father's pictures, and she had
been so angry that she had upset the coffee over him on her way out. To
hear Uncle Matthew one might suppose that such bad pictures had never
been painted since the world began; yet she could say nothing.
"I'm sorry you don't like them," said Aunt Cuckoo, "because Jasmine has
brought them back for you all the way from Sirene."
"Eh? What's that?" demanded Uncle Matthew, twisting round on one of his
sticks and thumping the floor with the other. "Who's Jasmine?"
"Jasmine is poor Sholto's daughter."
"What? Another?" the old gentleman growled.
"No, he only had one."
"I can't think why people want to have children at all," Uncle Matthew
sniffed. Eneas congratulated his wife with a complacent glance on their
reserve about Baby. "So you brought back these pictures for me, did
you?" the old gentleman continued. "Humph! I did buy one of your
father's pictures a long time ago, and I don't say it was bad, but he
asked too much for it. And now if I accept these I shall have to buy
frames for them," he concluded indignantly.
But the insistency of Sholto's pictures, the indubitable, the positive
proclamation of their being what they were, the full value they gave of
blue water, bright flowers, and rosy cheeks, softened the old
gentleman's heart. They really did express for him his own taste in art,
and inasmuch as they were a present he could not quite conceal his
gratification.
"I hope you haven't gone and ordered a very extravagant dinner for me,"
he said gruffly to hide as far as possible the least amenity in his
manner.
Aunt Cuckoo reassured him, and, the gong ringing at that moment, they
moved toward the dining-room. Uncle Matthew disdained an arm, preferring
to rely upon his two sticks.
"Wonderful how he bears himself for an old gentleman, isn't it?"
whispered Uncle Eneas to Jasmine. "We're a long-lived family. There's no
doubt about that." He was too anxious for the success of the evening to
brag more particularly about his own athletic qualities.
The dinner consisted of various Eastern dishes, on all of which the old
gentleman looked with an approving eye, because each dish gave the
impression of being a hash of something unfinished the day before. The
richness of their flavouring appealed to his palate, and the zest with
which his nephew filled up his own plate had its effect upon his own
appetite. Jasmine got into disgrace early in the meal by leaving half a
plate of _pilau_ untouched, but she was able to recover some of her lost
ground by refusing wine.
"Good girl!" Uncle Matthew exclaimed, and turning to his nephew he asked
why there was wine on the table when he knew that there was nothing of
which he disapproved so much as wine. Eneas glared angrily at his wife.
It was only since Father Maloney had been dining with them occasionally
that wine had been seen at The Cedars. The offending decanter was
removed, and everybody finished what water was left in his tumbler with
an expression of critical enjoyment.
"Have you written about those rooms yet?" Uncle Matthew asked
presently.
Eneas shook his head weightily. "The trouble is I shall have to stay in
London until the end of July. I've been asked by the Foreign Office to
do some work for them--expert work in Turkish which nobody else can do
at present." Then he wavered. "But perhaps Cuckoo...."
His wife cut him short. "I shan't be able to get away until July," she
said; but she went on roguishly: "So we thought that perhaps if you were
very good, Uncle Matthew, we'd lend you Jasmine for a little while."
Eneas could not withhold a glance of admiration; he even resolved not to
allude to the mistake over the wine when Uncle Matthew was gone. He
admitted to himself that he should never have thought of suggesting that
Jasmine was a loan, or of putting Uncle Matthew in the position of a
little boy being given a treat.
"Lend me Jasmine?" the old gentleman repeated. "And what am I to do with
Jasmine, pray?"
"She's invaluable," said Aunt Cuckoo, leaning across the dining-table
and squeezing her niece's hand. "And I wouldn't lend her to anybody else
but you. Everybody's clamouring for her."
Uncle Matthew looked at his great-niece with the expression that for
many years he had been wont to accord to proffered bargains.
"You told us you wanted a change," Aunt Cuckoo persisted. "And as soon
as you told us we made up our minds that whatever it cost us _you_
should have Jasmine."
Throughout the evening Aunt Cuckoo made it appear that Jasmine really
was indispensable, and by dint of never committing herself to anything
without asking Jasmine if she agreed with her and of never formulating
any plan without asking Jasmine first if she approved of it and of
never wanting anything without asking Jasmine if she would fetch it for
her, she really did manage to impress Uncle Matthew that by taking away
Jasmine from The Cedars he would be robbing a nephew and niece. This was
too keen a pleasure for the old gentleman to deny himself, and when he
left that evening he went away with a solemn promise that Jasmine should
be delivered to him at eleven o'clock the following morning.
"We don't usually let the carriage go out two days running," said Aunt
Cuckoo in a final burst of abnegation, "but for dear Jasmine's sake we
will."
"A very successful evening, my dear," Uncle Eneas observed when the
visitor was gone.
"And that precious lamb upstairs never made a sound."
"The young rascal! He knew. _He_ knew," the adoptive father idiotically
chuckled.
Jasmine wondered what he was supposed to know--perhaps, she thought with
a shade of malice, that he might one day inherit Uncle Matthew's fortune
if Uncle Matthew died in ignorance of his existence. She could not bring
herself to imagine that any money would be left to Lettice and Pamela.
Ah, but there were others whom she had not yet seen, those six boy
cousins at Silchester, and Uncle Alexander with his lunatic prince. Why
had she ever consented to leave Sirene? Whichever way she looked in
England there was nothing to be seen except an endless vista of
servitude. Girls in books always struck out for themselves, but perhaps
they were the only girls who were written about. There must be hundreds
of others like herself who remained slaves. Not at all, they finally got
married; they worked hard and....
"It's really a ghastly prospect," she exclaimed aloud.
"_Usciro pazza!_ I'm like some cheap novel in a circulating library
gradually getting more and more dog's-eared, more and more dirty and
greasy, and all the time being passed on and on--oh! I can't stand it
much longer...."
Jasmine did not set out to Muswell Hill with much hope in her heart. She
felt as if she was being posted to Matthew Rouncivell, Esq., and the
kisses of her uncle and aunt remained on her cheeks like postage stamps.
Rouncivell Lodge was a double-fronted, two-storied house which was built
of brown brick in the first quarter of the nineteenth century, probably
by some prosperous city merchant, as a country residence. It had
remained what was practically a country residence until a few years ago,
when old Matthew Rouncivell sacrificed the couple of acres of garden
behind the house and built on the site large blocks of bright red flats,
leaving no land to his own house except the shrubbery in front, which
was divided into three segments by a semicircular drive; in the largest
of these stood a Doric summer-house converted by Mr. Rouncivell into a
smoking-room. The proximity of the flats and the amount of sky they cut
off added to the gloom of the shrubbery, which was a mass of rank ivy
and euonymus bushes, of American rhododendrons, lilacs that never
flowered, privets, and Portuguese laurels. Moreover, although the flats
were what the agent called high-class residential flats, the landlord,
possibly with the vague notion of guarding what was left of the privacy
he had himself destroyed, had had them planned to present to anybody
entering the gates of Rouncivell Lodge their domestic windows, which,
with dish-cloths drying on every sill, gave them the squalid appearance
of tenement buildings.
The old gentleman himself, when, wearing his velvet smoking-jacket, his
tasselled smoking-cap, and a pair of goloshes over his fur slippers, he
visited the smoking-room to smoke his weekly cigar, found the flavour of
the cigar was enhanced by calculating how much a year each window in
sight brought him in. This meditation was so comforting that he used
really to enjoy his smoke, although the cigars, which were of poor
quality when he bought them, had not been improved by their storage in
the damp Doric summer-house. However, he smoked them literally to the
bitter end; this bitter end he used to stick upon a penknife, and even
when each puff nearly blistered his tongue he still enjoyed it, because
he had made a calculation that merely by the amount more of a cigar he
smoked than anyone else he had gained on the whole year two complete
cigars. He was always making calculations. He would even calculate how
much each spine of the shark's backbone that was the only decoration of
the walls of his smoking-room cost him. And as for the cost of Jasmine's
food, he could have told you to a spoonful of soup.