TEATIME IN ARCADIA.
It was long since Vansittart had been haunted by the face of a woman as
he was haunted by the face of Eve Marchant. He had not come to nine and
twenty years of age without one or two _grandes passions_, which had
begun out of a mere fancy, a glance--like one of those once fashionable
toys called Pharaoh’s Serpents--had swollen to colossal dimensions, and
had ended, like the serpent, in a puff of smoke. This time he wondered
at his own feelings when he found himself so deeply interested in the
girl he always thought of as Titania. He was inclined to ascribe this
sudden interest to the eccentric manner of their first meeting, the
three pretty faces springing out of a turn in the wooded road, like
sylphs in fairyland, the light, silvery laughter, and the something of
sadness in the fate of this bright, light-hearted girl which appealed
to his deeper feelings.
To whatever cause he might ascribe his interest, the fact remained that
he was interested; for he found himself thinking about Eve Marchant a
great deal more than he had ever thought of any one subject, except
that one fatal subject of his misadventure at Venice; and he found
himself very bad company for other people in consequence.
For ten days after the ball at Mandelford he lived in expectation of
seeing Miss Marchant again, somewhere, somehow; and to further that
desire of his heart he lived in a state of perpetual locomotion; now
driving one of the Hartley dog-carts to Mandelford or Midhurst,
Fernhurst or Haslemere, as the case might be; and anon patrolling
those towns and villages on foot, in the ardent expectation of meeting
Colonel Marchant’s daughters upon some shopping or visiting expedition.
Go where he would he drew blank. Could it be that the Colonel was so
deep in debt to the local tradespeople that his daughters dared not
show themselves in those rural streets, where, after all, as the local
gentry said condescendingly, one could really get almost everything one
wanted?
He walked, he drove, he haunted the great pond in Redwold Park, which
was thrown open to the public for skating, and where the men and
maidens of the neighbourhood came daily to disport themselves: but
vainly did he look for the Marchants.
“I thought the Miss Marchants were skaters,” he said to Miss Green, on
the third morning, as he helped her to put on her Mount Charles skates.
“So they are. They almost lived on this pond before Christmas. Perhaps
they have worn out their boots, and are obliged to stay at home.”
Those ten days of expectancy and disappointment made Jack Vansittart
desperate. It seemed to him ages since the night of the ball. He began
to think he should never see Eve Marchant again, and panic-stricken
at this idea, he started after a morning’s pheasant shooting to walk
to the Homestead, Fernhurst, to make a formal call upon the sisters.
Surely he had the right to call and inquire how they had survived
the fatigue of the dances, the perils of the cold drive home. He was
quick to make up his mind that he had such a right, and no walk taken
for pleasure or for health had ever been more exhilarating than that
tramp from the westward shoulder of Blackdown to the further side
of Fernhurst. The roads were hard and dry, the wind was north-west,
and the sun was going down in wintry splendour. It was late in the
afternoon to make a ceremonious visit, but there was all the better
hope that he would find Colonel Marchant’s daughters within doors.
The house stood high above the road, on a ridge of meadow-land which
had been encroached upon for half an acre of garden. It was a long, low
house, with steep gable ends, and a high slanting roof, red tiled and
lichen grown. Originally only a farm labourer’s cottage, it had been
expanded and improved by more than one tenant, the last addition being
made by Colonel Marchant, who at the beginning of his tenancy had built
a comfortable covered porch, which served as vestibule, and a large
room on the ground floor, which had been first known as the nursery,
then as the schoolroom, and which was now simply the parlour, or
general living-room for the whole family. The resident governess, that
element of respectability, had shaken the dust of Colonel Marchant’s
Bohemian dwelling-place off her feet a year ago, and had vanished into
space, leaving a long arrear of salary behind her.
It was twilight, the grey twilight of a frosty winter day. Vansittart
noted the snowdrops peeping over the box border as he walked up the
steep gravel path that made the only approach to the Marchant dwelling.
Carriage approach there was none. The Marchant girls’ cheap satin
slippers had to trip along that gravel path, in fine weather or foul,
when they went to a party, and the poor little feet inside the slippers
had to dance away any feeling of chilly dampness which the sodden
gravel might occasion.
Vansittart looked about him in the evening grey as he waited for the
opening of the door. He had rung a bell that sounded twice too loud
for the size of the house, and had set up much barking of indoor and
outdoor dogs.
There were two long strips of grass sloping down to the holly-hedge
that shut off the road, and a long flower border on either side of the
gravel path. This was the garden, so far as ornamental garden went,
but beyond the grass strip on one side of the house there were cabbage
rows, and the usual features of a vegetable garden. Beyond, right and
left, stretched meadow-land, away to the dark background of copse and
hillside.
The house, even after all its improvements, had a humble and homely
aspect; walls roughly plastered, small lattice windows, and that steep
slant of the roof, which Vansittart could have touched with his hand.
The porch was a square enclosure, with a sloping thatch, and two little
windows, right and left. An old woman, in a blue stuff gown and white
cap and apron, opened the door, and even as it opened Vansittart heard
again that ripple of silver-clear laughter which he had heard on the
hilltop in the snowy night, nearly ten days ago.
Ten days. Only ten! Until ten days ago he had lived in happy ignorance
that there was such a woman as Eve Marchant in the world. It seemed to
him now as strange not to have known of her as it would be not to know
of her namesake--the universal mother.
The same sweet laughter, not loud or boisterous, but soft and clear!
Her laugh! He would have known it amidst a chorus of laughing girls.
Miss Marchant was at home, the old woman told him, and thereupon led
him through a small, dark room--the original cottage parlour--through
another room, faintly lit by a low fire, into a third and much larger
room, which was bright with fire and lamp light.
Here the whole Marchant family, except the Colonel, were assembled at
afternoon tea, which in this establishment had come to be the most
enjoyable meal of the day.
Happily Vansittart had lunched lightly in the woods with the shooters,
so was hungry enough to find the odour of toasting bread rather a
comfortable addition to the atmosphere; or, at any rate, he was in
a humour to be pleased with everything, even the sprawling attitude
of a tall overgrown girl in a yellow cotton pinafore, sitting on the
hearthrug, and making toast, watched and assisted by a smaller sister.
The three grown-up Miss Marchants sat at the table, two of them
with their elbows on the board, where a large home-made cake--in
north-country phraseology, a plum-loaf--a glass dish of marmalade and
another of jam, and a pile of thick bread and butter, testified to the
serious purpose of the meal.
Eve, the tea-maker and mistress of the feast, rose as Mr. Vansittart
was announced, and came forward two or three steps to greet him, half
in firelight, half in lamplight, brilliant and full of colour as an
early Italian picture. Her gown was bright red merino, which set off
the fairness of her complexion, and the pale gold in her brown hair;
such a cheap gown, if he had only known, bought at one of the sales for
half its value, timid beauty being afraid of the strong colour.
The other two girls were in somewhat tawdry attire, skirts of one
colour, bodices of another; but they were fond of colour at the
Homestead, and girls with scanty purses cannot bend to the iron rule of
fashion.
To Vansittart’s admiring eyes, Eve’s red gown was the most exquisite
and artistic of garments. He who was generally so much at his ease in
all kinds of company found himself hesitating a little as he said that
he had come to ask them if they had quite recovered from the fatigue
of the dance; and, if so, how it was they had not been on the ice in
Redwold Park.
“But perhaps you are tired of skating.”
“Tired? Why, we all adore it,” cried Eve. “But we have been dreadfully
busy, making our winter gowns.”
The second week in January seemed to Mr. Vansittart a late date at
which to set about the making of winter raiment. He did not know that
for many young women with slender purses the January and July sales
are the only periods for the purchase of drapery. Twice a year the
Marchant girls treated themselves to third-class tickets from Haslemere
to Waterloo, and spent a long day going from shop to shop to secure the
utmost value for their poor little stock of cash.
“Yes; it’s really dreadful to lose a week of this delicious hard frost,
ain’t it?” exclaimed Sophy, much readier of speech this evening than
her elder sister.
“Run to the kitchen and get me another teapot, Peggy,” whispered Eve;
whereupon the youngest girl started up from the rug and bounded off on
her errand.
“Just as we were all improving in our skating,” said Jenny. “We had
conquered the outside edge, and Sophy and I were beginning to grasp the
right idea of the Dutch roll, and were even aspiring to the grape vine.”
“And then the hockey,” interjected Sophy; “the hockey was too
delightful.”
Again the fair head bent itself towards the hearthrug. There was
another whisper, and the elder girl bounced up and ran off.
“She has gone for a cup and saucer, and I am going to give you some
fresh tea,” said Eve, smiling at the visitor as he sat in the Colonel’s
chair, in that corner of the room which bore no traces of girlish
litter. “I hope you don’t mind our waiting upon ourselves. We have
only our old Yorkshire Nancy, and a little parlour-maid; and as it is
the little maid’s afternoon out, here we are, five intelligent young
people, ready to help each other.”
“I cannot conceive a more delightful spectacle. But why make fresh tea,
Miss Marchant? I am sure there is some of your last brew which would do
capitally for me.”
“If I did not know you are saying that for kindness, I might think you
one of those unsympathetic people who don’t care for tea.”
“Do tea and sympathy go together?”
“I think most nice people are tea-drinkers. Indeed, it seems to me that
tea is the link that holds society together. Oh, what should we do with
our afternoons--however could we go and call upon people--if it were
not for afternoon tea?”
“And I see that afternoon tea, with you young ladies, is a somewhat
serious function,” said Vansittart, with a glance across the
well-spread table to the pile of toast which Sophy was buttering.
The younger girls had come back, one with a china teapot, the other
with a cup and saucer, and Eve was busy with her second brew.
“Please don’t laugh at us. We are a very irregular family in the matter
of luncheon, and this is our hungriest meal.”
The youngest girl, who had resumed her seat on the hearthrug, was at
this juncture seized with a giggling fit, which she vainly endeavoured
to suppress, and which speedily communicated itself to the youngest but
one, also seated on the rug.
“Those children are too absurd,” exclaimed Sophy, after trying to frown
them into propriety. “They are always laughing at nothing.”
“Happy age,” said Vansittart; “the time so soon comes when we can’t
laugh at anything.”
“She said it was our hungriest meal!” gasped Hetty, of the yellow
pinafore, in convulsions of undisguised laughter; “I should rather
think it was.”
“I suppose these young ladies are not yet promoted to late dinners?”
hazarded Vansittart, wondering a little why this question of afternoon
tea could afford such scope for mirth.
“No, we don’t dine late,” protested Hetty, more and more hilarious.
“_We_ don’t, do we, Peggy?”
Peggy, the white-pinafored youngest, was speechless with laughter.
Vansittart began to divine the mystery. In this household of narrow
means there was no late dinner for the ladies of the family. There
was doubtless a dinner for the Colonel. Man cannot long support life
without the regulation evening meal; but for this household of girls
bread and jam and plum-loaves were an all-sufficient repast. Was low
living--this diet of innocent bread and butter--one of the causes of
Eve’s peerless complexion, he wondered? All the girls were more or less
pretty. It might be that this Arcadian fare had something to do with
their prettiness.
Never had he enjoyed a meal so much as that afternoon tea in the
Marchants’ parlour. As he sat looking at the room in the lamplight
he began to think he had never seen a prettier room for a family to
live in. The fireplace was wide and spacious, an open hearth, with a
high projecting mantelpiece, and narrow shelves over that, slanting
upward to the ceiling, and dotted about with trumpery blue teacups,
and yellow and red vases from the Riviera. The Colonel had begun with
the intention of making an ingle nook, but being told, in the rustic
builder’s phraseology, that an ingle nook would run into money, he
had contented himself with a wide fireplace and a projecting chimney.
There was only black and white on the walls, a few etchings, and a good
many photographs of pictures, against a dark red paper. There was a
cottage piano in a corner, draped with a Bellagio rug of vivid amber,
and there were other Bellagio rugs on the sofa, and on the Colonel’s
armchair. For the rest the furniture was of the shabbiest; clumsy
substantial old chairs and tables that suggested the hindermost dens
of the second-hand furniture dealer, those yards and back premises in
which he keeps his least attractive goods. The room was uncarpeted,
but crudely coloured Indian rugs of the cheaper kind brightened the
oak-stained floor here and there, and gave a suggestion of luxury.
The lamp in the middle of the round table was subdued by a large
shade of art muslin, daintily frilled and ribboned, evidently a home
production; the German tablecloth was of white and red damask, the
crockery was white, cheap but pretty, and there were a few winter
flowers and bright berries in brown glass vases. Altogether that
tea-table had a delightful aspect to John Vansittart. The room, the
firelight, the fresh young faces, with that one fairest face shining
like a star among the others, the hoydens upon the hearthrug giggling
at the idea of a dinnerless household, made up a scene of homely
enchantment. Even a white fox-terrier which had begun by snapping at
him, and which was now at his knee begging for toast, seemed part
and parcel of the pleasant homeliness. It was teatime in a domestic
fairyland; a fairyland where people eat slices of buttered plum-loaf
and hot frizzling toast; a fairyland odorous of strawberry jam; a
land where young women put their elbows on the table, and had no
need of a chaperon to keep them in countenance during the visit of a
young man; in a word, the fairyland of Bohemia. To Vansittart, who in
England had known only the respectabilities, the everlasting laws and
conventionalities of smart people, differing in detail with the fashion
of the hour, but fundamentally the same--to Vansittart, the young man
of property and position, this glimpse of an unconventional household
was as novel as it was fascinating. Pretty as Eve Marchant was, he
would not have admired her half so much at a ball in Grosvenor Square.
It was the touch of pathos, the touch of comedy in the girl’s history
and surroundings which interested him.
He sat long at the tea-table, and eat more buttered toast than he had
eaten at a sitting since he was an undergraduate. He forgot even to
ask if Colonel Marchant were at home, and had almost forgotten the
existence of that gentleman when Hetty, the youngest but one, on being
reproved for noisy utterance, replied, “It don’t matter, father can’t
hear me at the Rag.”
“Colonel Marchant is in town, I conclude,” said Vansittart.
“He went up by the afternoon train,” Eve answered with a stately air.
“He is dining with some old chums to-night, and I don’t think he’ll be
home before Saturday.”
“I have not been fortunate enough to meet him yet.”
“I’m afraid he’s rather unsociable,” answered Eve, suddenly serious,
while over all the young faces there spread a shadow of seriousness.
“He lets us accept invitations--and I’m sure people are very kind to go
on asking us when we can’t pay them the proper respect of new frocks.”
“What do people care about frocks?” exclaimed Jenny, the third
daughter, with a Republican air. “If we are asked out it is because we
are liked, in spite of our old frocks.”
“Or because people are sorry for us,” said Eve, gravely.
“I don’t think people are ever sorry for youth and beauty,” said
Vansittart. “Both are objects of envy rather than of compassion.”
“Oh, I can’t follow you there,” answered Eve; “everybody is young once.
Youth is as common as chickweed or groundsel, and it lasts such a short
time; and if one has to spend that one bright little bit of life in
a state of perpetual hard-uppishness, I am sure one deserves to be
pitied.”
She talked of her poverty with an alarming frankness. Most people
hide their indigence as if it were an ugly sore, or if they speak of
it, speak softly, apologetically, or with an assumed lightness, as if
their poverty were not really poverty, but only a genteel limitation of
means, implying none of the shortcomings of actual want. But this girl
talked of her old frock and her father’s poverty, without a blush.
“Father won’t visit anywhere now,” she said. “He can’t forget that he
once lived in a big house, and had a thousand acres of shooting, and
bred his own pheasants. He can hardly bring himself to shoot other
people’s birds, even when they ask him to their big shoots.”
“Your old home was in the North, I think?” said Vansittart, delighted
at being let into the family secrets.
“In Yorkshire--within ten miles of Beverley. Do you know Beverley?”
“Yes; I was there once--a queer sleepy old place, once renowned for
its corruption; now from a political point of view _nil_. A town with
a Bar--a Bar which did something to Charles the First, I believe. Did
Beverley shut him out, or did Beverley let him in after Hull had shut
him out? My common or Gardiner history is at fault there.”
“Beverley is a dear old town,” asserted Eve. “I haven’t seen it since
I was twelve years old, but I can remember the countenance of every
house in the market-place, and the colouring of every window in the
Minster. Father won a cup at the races when I was eleven, and I took it
home in the carriage with me. I remember having it in my lap, a great
gilt cup. I thought it was gold till my governess told me it was only
silver-gilt. Heaven knows what became of that cup! Father despised
it. The race was a paltry affair, I believe, and his horse was a poor
creature. He had won ever so many better cups at bigger races; but I
only remember the cup I carried home, and the broad, bright common,
and the blazing July day, and the happy-looking people. It was my last
summer in Yorkshire, my last summer in the house where I was born.
Before the next summer we all came here. Mother, and the governess, and
the rest of us. Peggy was a baby in long clothes, and mother was only
just beginning to be seriously ill.”
“And if you could have seen this place when we first came to it you
would have pitied us,” said Sophy. “A parson’s family had been living
in it, an overgrown family like us, but without the faintest idea of
the beautiful. The parson’s wife kept poultry, and there were horrid
wired enclosures close to the parlour window, and there was no porch,
and no possibility of saying ‘Not at home’ to callers. There were only
vegetables in the garden, potatoes and scarlet-runners, where we have
made lawns.”
“She calls those long strips of grass lawns,” interjected Peggy,
irreverently disposed towards a dictatorial grown-up sister who was not
the eldest. Against Eve no one rebelled.
“And think how squeezed we all must have been till father built this
room, and picture to yourself the mess and muddle we had to endure all
the time it was being built. It didn’t matter to him, for he was out of
the worst of it.”
“He had to take mother to the South that winter,” explained Eve. “She
had been in weak health for ever so long before we left Yorkshire. A
weakly plant can’t bear being torn up by the roots, can it? I think
that change in our fortunes broke her heart--added to--to other things.”
She did not say what the other things were, and he could not ask her;
nor would he ask her what had brought about the Colonel’s ruin. He
could make a shrewd guess upon the latter point. The value of landed
property had gone down, and the man had kept a racing stud. Between
those two facts there was ample room for change of fortune.
“Mother never came back to us,” said Eve, with a gentle sigh. “She is
lying in the cemetery at Cannes. People have told me about her grave,
and that it is in a lovely spot. There is some comfort in being able to
think of that, after all these years.”
“I know that resting-place well,” said Vansittart. “There is no
lovelier home for the dead.”
There was a brief silence. Even the children on the hearthrug were
dumb, and there was no sound but the contented purring of Hetty’s
colossal cat, a brindled grey, with a fluffy white breast, a cat that
was satiated with the worship of pretty girls, and gave himself as many
airs as if he had been kittened in Egypt, and ranked among gods.
“Dear as Beverley was, I hope you all like your Sussex home,” said
Vansittart.
“Sussex is well enough, but when one is used to a big stone house, with
a picture-gallery, and one of the finest Jacobean staircases in the
East Riding, it is rather hard to come down to a labourer’s cottage
that has been dodged and expanded into the most inconvenient house
in the neighbourhood,” said Sophy, with a grand air, and tilting her
retroussé nose a little higher than usual.
Again the girls on the hearthrug burst into inextinguishable laughter.
“What a snob you are, Sophy!” cried the outspoken Hetty. “You say all
that as if you had learnt it by heart; and as for coming down, you
came down to the labourer’s cottage when you were eleven years old. You
ought to be used to it now you are twenty.”
Twenty. Sophy, the second, was twenty--and there was only a year
between her and Vansittart’s incomparable she, who had migrated to
Sussex when she was twelve. One and twenty, in the fair majority of her
girlish charms. He thought it the most delightful period in woman’s
life--fair as in her teens, but wiser: mature for love and wisdom.
All earthly blisses must end. The blissfullest five o’clock tea cannot
last for ever; but Vansittart was determined to make this endure as
long as he could. The meal was finished. Even those long, lean hands of
the youngsters had ceased to be stretched harpy-like towards the table
for more bread and jam, or another slice of cake, which an elder sister
dispensed with somewhat offensive comments upon the ravenous maw of
youth.
“Oh, come now,” cried the offended Peggy. “Suppose I do eat a lot; I
haven’t stopped growing yet. You have, yet I’ve heard you say you could
sit and eat one of Nancy’s plum-loaves all the evening. But that was
when there was no one here but ourselves.”
Sophy blushed furiously, and Vansittart came laughingly to the rescue.
“I can vouch for the seductiveness of Nancy’s plum-loaf,” he said. “I
think I must coax her to impart the recipe to my mother’s cook. Is your
Nancy a coaxable person?”
“Not very. She adores us, but she is rather gruff and grim to the
outside world. She was in father’s service as kitchen-maid when she was
fourteen, at the time of his marriage, ages before I was born,” said
Eve.
Ages. Yet she was the eldest. What did that word ages mean? Three
years, perhaps, in a young lady’s vocabulary.
“And she followed your fortunes from the old house, and she is as
faithful as Caleb Balderstone, I dare say,” said Vansittart, and felt
in the next moment that it was precisely one of those things he had
better have left unsaid.
“She is just like Caleb,” replied Eve, frankly accepting the
suggestion, “just as faithful and true. I feel sure that if it were
suddenly put upon us to give a dinner, and there were a saddle of
mutton or a fore-quarter of lamb hanging conveniently before a
neighbour’s fire, Nancy would elope with it just as audaciously as
Caleb made off with the cooper’s spit--all for the credit of the
family. She works like a slave for us from morning till night. She is
a splendid manager, and she makes tea-cakes as only a Yorkshirewoman
can.”
“And in cooking she could give points to many of your professed
cooks,” said Jenny. “Father is a difficult man in the matter of dinner.”
“And dinner is a difficult matter for poor people,” laughed Eve, to
the annoyance of Sophy, who had not yet taken to heart the foolishness
of the ostrich family, and who was always anxious to slur over an
impecuniousness which was visible to the naked eye. It was only Eve who
had learnt to grasp the nettle. Perhaps it was her country life, among
green fields and blackthorn hedgerows, and chestnut copses, and the
barren heather-clad hills, which had kept her free from the age’s worst
fever, the sickly longing for wealth. Had she been reared in Pimlico or
Brompton, she too might have been spoilt, her nature warped, her mind
tainted with the sordid thirst for gold, the desire for finery and fine
living, the aching envy of rich men’s daughters. The people she knew
and mixed with were county people, who wore their old gowns, and lived
simple, old-fashioned lives when they were in the country, and left
their modern vices behind them in London ready for use next season.
Vansittart glanced at a cheap little American clock ticking among the
cups and vases on the chimney-piece. A quarter past six, and his watch
had told him that it was a quarter before five as he approached the
Homestead.
“I don’t know how to apologize for staying so long,” he faltered, as he
rose from the Colonel’s comfortable chair and extricated his hat from
the reluctant paws of the grey cat.
“Don’t apologize,” said Jenny, who was the pertest of the sisters;
“there is nothing so unflattering to one’s amour propre as a short
visit. And then there are so many of us. A visitor must stay a longish
time in order to give each of us a civil word.”
Vansittart’s conscience smote him at this remark. He feared that he had
addressed his conversation exclusively to Eve. He had no consciousness
of having spoken to any one else. For him the room had held only Eve;
only that one salient figure. The others were faintly sketched in the
background. She was the picture.
He got out of the room somehow, after shaking hands all round, and
even in his deep trance of love he was conscious that the two youngest
hands were sticky with traces of strawberry jam. There being no one
else to show him out--for who could disturb Nancy, remote in the
kitchen, with futile ringing of a ceremonial bell?--the whole bevy of
sisters accompanied him to the outer door, the youngest carrying a
tall candle, which threatened to topple over and sprinkle her with a
shower of ozokerit. He had time to notice the rooms through which they
went--one shabbily furnished as a dining-room, with an old harpsichord
for sideboard; the other evidently the Colonel’s den for books, boots,
and tobacco. He had time to note the porch or vestibule, where there
hung much outer apparel, feminine and masculine, hats, scarves, fishing
basket, sticks of all shapes and thicknesses, mostly from native woods
and hedgerows. He had time to note everything during that lingering
departure, protracted by idle talk about the roads and the weather:
and yet while his eye took in the shabbiness and smallness of those
two rooms, the rustiness of the Colonel’s overcoats, mind and eye both
were filled with but one image--the figure of a tall, fair girl, whose
fluffy head overtopped her sisters, and shone conspicuous among them
all (as it would have shone, he thought, amidst a thousand), by its
fresh and innocent beauty.
“And that is the girl I love; and that is the girl I mean to marry,”
he said to himself, as he walked briskly along the footpath towards
Blackdown.
After such dawdling in Armida’s parlour he would have to walk his
fastest to be in time to dress for the eight o’clock dinner.