Mr. Oliver Wick's ideas of courtship were primitive and unshakable. On
one or two clever, ingenious pretexts he visited "Happy House" twice
within the month after his first visit, in order, as he expressed it to
himself, to look over Miss Walbridge in the light of a possible wife.
That he was in love with her he recognised, to continue using his own
language, "from the drop of the hat," "from the first gun." But although
he belonged to the most romantic race under the sun, Mr. Wick was no
fool, and whereas anything like a help-meet would have displeased him
almost to the point of disgust, he had certain standards to which any
one with claims to be the future Mrs. Oliver Wick must more or less
conform. He didn't care a bit about money--he felt that money was his
job, not the girl's--but she'd got to be straight, she'd got to be a
good looker, and she'd got to be good-tempered. No shrew-taming for
him--at least not in his own domestic circle.
One evening, shortly after his third visit to "Happy House," the young
man was standing at the tallboys in his mother's room in Spencer
Crescent, Brondesbury, tying a new tie over an immaculate dress shirt.
"I'm going to do the trick to-night," he declared, filled with pleasant
confidence, "or bust."
Mrs. Wick, who looked more like her son's grandmother than his mother,
sat in a low basket chair by the window, stretching, with an old, thin
pair of olive-wood glove stretchers, the new white gloves that were to
put the final touch of splendour to the wooer's appearance.
She was a pleasant-faced old woman, with a strong chin and keen, clear
eyes, and when she smiled she showed traces of past beauty.
"Well, of course," she said, snapping the glove-stretchers at him
thoughtfully, "you know everything--you always did--and far be it from
me to make any suggestions to you."
He turned round, grinning, his ugly face full of subtle likeness to her
handsome one.
"Oh, go on," he jeered, "you wonderful old thing! Some day your pictures
will be in the penny papers as the mother of Baron Wick of Brondesbury.
Of course I know everything! Look at this tie, for instance. A
Piccadilly tie, built for dukes, tied in Brondesbury by Fleet Street.
What's his name--D'Orsay--couldn't do it better. But what were you going
to say?"
She laughed and held out the gloves. "Here you are, son. Only this. I
bet you sixpence she won't look at you. She'll turn you down; refuse
you; give you the cold hand; icy mit--what d'you call it? And then,
you'll come back and weep on my shoulder."
Mr. Wick, who had taken the gloves, stood still for a minute, his face
full of sudden thought.
"She may," he said, "she may. I don't care if she does. I tell you she's
lovely, mother. She'd look like a fairy queen if the idiots who paint
'em realised that fairies ought to be dark, and not tow-coloured. Of
course she'll refuse me a few times, but her father'll be on my side."
"Why?"
"Because he's a rather clever old scoundrel, and he'll know that I'm a
succeeder--a getter."
The old woman looked thoughtful. "I haven't liked anything you told me
about _him_, Olly. But, after all, he has paid up, and lots of good men
have been unfortunate in business."
The young fellow took up his dress-coat, which was new and richly lined,
and drew it on with care.
"Oh, I'm not marrying into this family because I admire my future
father-in-law," he answered. "I haven't any little illusions about him,
old lady. It's his wife who's done the paying, or I'm very much
mistaken. She's an honest woman--poor thing."
There was such deep sympathy in his voice that his mother, who had
risen, and was patting and smoothing the new coat into place on his
broad shoulders, pulled him round till he faced her, and looked down at
him, for she was taller than he.
"Why are you so sorry for her?"
He hesitated for a moment, and his hesitation meant much to her.
"I don't know. She never says anything, of course. She seems happy
enough, but I believe--I believe she's found him out----"
"God help her," Mrs. Wick answered.
The young man remembered this episode as he sat opposite his hostess at
dinner an hour and a half later. The dining-room had been re-papered
since he had drunk that glass of luke-warm wine in it the day of
Hermione's wedding, and his sharp eyes noticed the absence of several
ugly things that had been there then. Stags no longer hooted to each
other across mountain chasms over the sideboard, and one or two good
line drawings hung in their place.
"How do you like it?" Griselda asked him. "Paul and I have been cheering
things up a bit."
"Splendid," he replied promptly. "I say, how beautiful your sister is!"
Griselda's rather hard little face softened charmingly as she looked
across the table, where the bride was sitting. Hermione Gaskell-Walker
was a very handsome young woman in an almost classical way, and her
short-sighted, clever-looking husband, who sat nearly opposite her,
evidently thought so too, for he peered over the flowers at her in
adoration that was plain and pleasing to see.
"They've such a jolly house in Campden Hill. His father was Adrian
Gaskell-Walker, the landscape painter, and collected things."
Mr. Wick nodded, but did not answer, for he was busy making a series of
those mental photographs, whose keenness and durability so largely
contributed to his success in life. He had an amazing power of storing
up records of incidents that somehow or other might come in useful to
him, and this little dinner party, which he had decided to be a
milestone on his road, interested him acutely in its detail.
By candlelight, in perfect evening dress, Ferdinand Walbridge's slightly
dilapidated charms were very manifest. On his right sat an elderly lady
about whom Mr. Wick's apparatus recorded only one word--pearls.
Next to her came Paul Walbridge, looking older than his twenty-nine
years--thin, delicate, rather high shouldered, with remarkably glossy
dark hair and immense soft, dove-coloured eyes. He looked far better
bred, the young man decided, than he had any right to look; his hands,
in particular, might have been modelled by Velasquez.
"Supercilious----" Wick thought, and then paused, not adding the "ass"
that had come into his mind, for he knew that Paul Walbridge was not an
ass, although he would have liked to call him one.
Next Paul came the beautiful Hermione, with magnificent shoulders white
as flour, and between her and her mother sat a man named Walter
Crichell, a portrait painter, one of the best in the secondary school--a
man with over-red lips and short white hands with unpleasant, pointed
fingers.
"That fellow's a stinker," Wick decided, never to change his mind.
Next came the hostess, thin, worn, rather silent, in the natural
isolation of an old woman sitting between two young men, each of whom
had youth and beauty on his far side.
Then, of course, came Oliver himself and Grisel. Next to Grisel,
Gaskell-Walker, the lower part of whose face was clever, but who would
probably find himself handicapped by the qualities belonging to too
high, too straight a forehead; and next him, consequently on the host's
left, sat Crichell's wife. Young Wick could not look at her very
comfortably without leaning forward, but he caught one or two glimpses
of her face as Walbridge bent over her, and promised himself a good look
in the drawing-room. She was worth it, he knew. A soft, velvety brown
creature, a little on the fat side, but rather beautiful. It was plain,
too, that the old man admired her.
Mr. Wick studied his host's face for a moment as he thus completed his
circle of observation, and so strong were his feelings as he looked at
Mr. Walbridge that quite unintentionally he said "Ugh!" aloud.
"What did you say?" It was Mrs. Walbridge who spoke--her first remark
for quite a quarter of an hour--and in her large eyes was the anxious,
guilty look of one who has allowed herself to wool-gather in public.
Wick started, blushed scarlet, and then burst out laughing at his
dilemma.
"I didn't say anything," he answered. "I was only thinking. I beg your
pardon, Mrs. Walbridge."
Her worn face softened into a kind smile, and he noticed that her teeth
were even and very white.
"It is awful, isn't it," she said, "to--to get thinking about things
when one ought to be talking? I'm afraid I'm very dull for a young man
to sit next."
"Oh, come, Mrs. Walbridge," he protested, "when you know how they all
lapped up that article I wrote about you."
She bridled gently. "It was a very nice article." After a minute she
added anxiously, her thin fingers pressing an old blue enamel brooch
that fastened the rather crumpled lace at her throat: "Tell me, Mr.
Wick, do you--do you really think that--that people like my books as
much as they used to?"
"You must have a very big public," he answered, wishing she had not put
the question.
"Yes, I know I have, but--you see, of course I'm not young any more, and
the children--they know a great many people, and bring some of them here
and--I've noticed that while they are all very kind, they don't seem to
have--to have really read my books."
"Don't they?" said Wick, full of sympathy. "Dear me!"
She shook her head. "No, they really don't, and I've been wondering
if--if it is that they're beginning to find me--a little old-fashioned."
What he wanted to say in return for this was: "But, bless your heart,
you _are_ old-fashioned, the old-fashionest old dear that ever lived!"
What he did say was: "Well, I suppose lots of people think Thackeray and
Dickens old-fashioned----" But when Grisel turned just then and fired
some question at him, he felt a weak longing to mop his brow. It had
been a narrow escape, and he would not have hurt the old lady's feelings
for worlds. Something about this faded, exhausted-looking little old
literary bee touched the young fellow in a quite new way.
"Gosh!" he thought; "now if it was mother, she wouldn't let people think
her old-fashioned; she wouldn't _be_ old-fashioned. My word, wouldn't
she just sit up at night and write something to beat Wells, and Elinor
Glyn, and the rest of them into a cocked hat!"
Grisel, in white--white that would have done very well, he thought, in
Grosvenor Square or St. James's--was in her best mood that night, and as
they talked he felt himself slipping lower and lower into the
abyss--that pleasant abyss on the edge of which he had hovered so many
times before without letting himself go.
It was then that the question of Bruce Collier's book rose. It was
Crichell who brought up the subject, and as he described the book he
enthusiastically waved his peculiarly white hands, which Mr. Wick
thought, with some disgust, looked as if they were on the point of
sprouting into horrid white tubers like potatoes in a dark cellar.
"The finest book I've read for years," he declared. "Magnificent piece
of work."
"Walter's quite mad about it," his wife put in, leaning forward and
making motions with her hand and throat like those of a sunning pigeon.
"He dined with us last night--Mr. Collier--and he's an extraordinary
creature. Never touched a drug in his life, yet he knows all about
it--and as for the other things----" she shrugged her shoulders and
laughed. Her husband shook his fist at her.
"Now, Clara," he said, "curb that tongue of yours, my dear, or you'll
shock Mrs. Walbridge. Have you read the book, Mrs. Walbridge, 'Reek'?"
The little writer shook her head. "No, I haven't very much time for
reading. I've just read 'The Rosary.' What a delightful book it is!"
Grisel stretched her hand across Wick and took hold of her mother's.
"Never mind, darling, you shan't be teased, and you mustn't read 'Reek.'
I shouldn't dream of allowing you to."
Walbridge, in whose handsome, swollen eyes a new little flame was
showing, looked up from a whispered talk with Mrs. Crichell and smiled
at his wife.
"No, darling," he agreed, "I can't have you reading such books. It would
ruin your style. I'm sure Mr. Wick agrees with me, don't you, Mr. Wick?
Mr. Wick is a great admirer of your books," he added in an insufferable
way.
She didn't speak, but Wick saw her thin lips quiver a little, and
hastened to answer:
"I'm only a business man, Mr. Walbridge, and know nothing at all about
literature, but I know this much--I bet the chap who wrote 'Reek' would
give his eye-tooth to have Mrs. Walbridge's sales!"
Hermione Gaskell-Walker raised her heavy-lidded eyes and smiled at him
gratefully, as she murmured, "Darling mum," and, stimulated by his
success, Mr. Wick ended the conversation by saying firmly, as Mrs.
Walbridge caught the eye of the pearl lady: "Filthy book, anyhow; not
fit to be read by ladies----"
* * * * *
Some hours later a not very crestfallen young man sat in the small
dining-room of 11, Spencer Crescent, Brondesbury, and ate poached eggs
on toast--he was always ready for poached eggs--and announced to his
dressing-gowned and beslippered mother that the lady of his choice had
rejected him.
"Couldn't dream of it," he announced cheerfully, reaching for butter
with his own knife in a way only permissible at such out-of-hour meals.
"She pretended to be surprised, you know, and then, when that didn't
work, she tried to assume that I was mad. Pretty little piece, she is,
mother. Dimples in her lovely face she's got, and eyes like two little
black suns, shining away----"
His mother coughed drily. "You don't seem remarkably cast down," she
observed, rubbing her nose with her thumb--a broad and capable thumb,
"and here was I wasting my tissue in an agony of fear about my
broken-hearted boy."
He cocked his head as little snub-nosed dogs do, indeed, he all but
cocked one ear, and his eyes twinkled.
"You and your tissue, indeed! You don't think I thought she was going
to jump down my throat, do you? I'd hate a girl who took me first time.
I like being refused--looks well. I hope she'll refuse me three or four
times more."
"If she could see you eat poached eggs in your shirt-sleeves, with all
the varnish off your hair, she'd go on refusing you to the crack o'
doom," retorted the old lady.
Then they went to bed, and in five minutes the rejected one was snoring
comfortably.