CHAPTER XV. THE HANDSOME STRANGER.
Chris went upstairs feeling uncomfortable and unhappy. Instead of opening a way out of the awkward position in which, as she had truly said, she found herself now that the Graham-Shutes had come down, she had drawn upon herself a proposal which had served only to complicate the situation. She had settled nothing, moreover. Mr. Bradfield had treated her suggestion of going away in the lightest manner, and she could scarcely doubt that his persuasions would be successfully exercised upon her mother, who was already strongly averse from the idea of her daughter’s departure. She knew also that her mother would be disappointed to hear that she had not given more encouragement to Mr. Bradfield’s hopes of marrying her. These thoughts all troubled her, but there was one other which distressed her still more, the remembrance of the unhappy madman, whose treatment at the hands of Mr. Bradfield and of Stelfox was as perplexing to her as his own conduct.
Everything in connection with Mr. Richard was a puzzle. She had herself witnessed one of his fits of fury, culminating in savage violence, and yet Mr. Bradfield, whose regard for her she could not help knowing to be real, had left her alone with him in the barn. She remembered seeing Stelfox come breathless, panting and disordered out of the east wing after a struggle with his charge, and yet he had scoffed at the notion that Mr. Richard would do her any harm, and had even offered to let her meet him again.
Mr. Richard’s own conduct was more bewildering still. At one moment he would seem to understand everything she said, the next he would pay no attention whatever to her words. For a little while he would be silent and perfectly gentle, then he would begin to frighten her by curious moans and incoherent sounds. Neither of the explanations offered was a satisfactory one. Stelfox had said that the language he talked was a South African one, but at the idea of this Mr. Bradfield had burst into uncontrollable laughter. His own explanation that Mr. Richard had not enough intelligence to pick up even the rudiments of speech, was more incredible still. The girl’s experience of madness in any form was very slight, but she had never heard of any idiot or lunatic who was not able to talk at all, and whatever his mental deficiencies in certain directions might be, whatever mania he might be suffering from, it was clear to Chris he was far from being utterly devoid of intelligence.
Rather luckily, so Chris thought a little later, Mrs. Abercarne was not upstairs, for the girl thus had an opportunity of thinking the events of the afternoon over carefully before she saw her mother, and decided not to mention any of them. Poor Mrs. Abercarne had quite enough to worry her, not only in accommodating the housekeeping arrangements to Mrs. Graham-Shute’s erratic habits and projects, but in parrying that lady’s persistent attempts to cast slights upon her and her daughter. If now she were to hear, all in one breath, as it were, of her daughter’s encounter with the madman, of her quarrel with “that most objectionable young person,” Donald, and her refusal of the rich Mr. Bradfield’s attentions, Chris felt that her poor mother would spend a Christmas even less merry than she expected to do.
So the girl kept her little secrets to herself, which proved easy enough to do, as the preparations for the tableaux kept her fully employed, and away from her mother.
The following day was a long, confused nightmare to Chris. The din of Mrs. Graham-Shute’s voice was in her ears all the morning, and until the time when the hastily-summoned guests began to arrive.
They had been invited for four, with a promise of tea. This, not being within the jurisdiction of Mrs. Graham-Shute, duly came to hand. The tableaux did not. So the guests “stood about,” cold, bored, and critical, and waited. They had assembled in the drawing-room, whence Mrs. Graham-Shute, at the last moment, had had most of the chairs removed to the barn, with a sudden and unnecessary spasm of fear that there would not be seats enough for the audience.
Mr. Bradfield, in whose name the invitations had been issued, was “not at home,” in his study. Mrs. Abercarne, whom he desired to play the part of hostess, was completely overshadowed by Mrs. Graham-Shute, who not only occupied a good deal of space, and made her voice resound to the furthest extremities of the rooms, but who had a way of looking over the heads of the assembly as if she was counting her flock, which suggested to the meanest intelligence that she considered them all to be for the time being her property.
Mrs. Abercarne, seeing that the message summoning the company to the barn tarried in its coming, ordered some chairs to be brought in from the dining-room, since people who are cold and shy and bored look more comfortable sitting than they do standing. Mrs. Graham-Shute countermanded the order.
So the guests continued to stand, and to try to talk, and to wonder whether the fat and fussy lady was in her right mind.
Even Mrs. Graham-Shute, happy as she was in the consciousness that she was doing “the right thing,” began to get rather “fidgety,” and to send messages to the performers to know whether they were ready.
And Lilith’s answers, more frantically worded every time, were always to the effect that they were not.
At last Mrs. Graham-Shute, telling the lady nearest to her, in the innocence of her heart, that “if they waited about any longer the affair would be completely spoilt,” insisted on “making a move” in the direction of the barn. And, it having by this time grown quite dark, while the wind had got up, and sleet begun to fall, the whole party provided themselves with such shelter as was to hand in the shape of waterproofs and umbrellas, and started on their way across the meadow.
When they reached the barn, they found the auditorium dimly lighted with a few lamps and candles, while sounds of hurrying and scuffling behind the curtains gave them a pleasing assurance that they had still some time to wait. It was very cold and very draughty, and the spirits of the miserable audience sank too low for the strains of “Il Trovatore,” arranged as a pianoforte duet, and very indifferently performed, to revive them.
For it had been discovered that Chris Abercarne was the only person who could be trusted to ring the curtain up and down, and to be scene-shifter, property-master, as well as wardrobe-mistress and dresser. Therefore the local amateur musical talent had been summoned in the shape of a young lady, whose performance was of the slap-dash order, for the treble, and a young gentleman, whose forte lay in a steady thumping power, for the bass. Mrs. Graham-Shute had followed the usual rule in such small musical affairs. When in doubt play pianoforte duets.
The fiction upon which this maxim is founded is probably that two bad performers are equal to one good one. Besides, there is always the chance that when one performer is wrong the other may be right, and that the sounds made by the one who is right may drown those made by the one who is wrong.
“Il Trovatore” having come to an end, there was a little faint applause, and then a long interval, filled up chiefly with coughs in front of the curtain, and loud, excited whispers behind it.
At last, when nobody had any hope left but the ever-buoyant Mrs. Graham-Shute, the curtain did at last wobble apart, and disclose a group of male performers, in nondescript attire, belonging to a period so vague that one could only say that it was not the present. They held in their hands sombrero hats, each adorned by a long ostrich feather; but this indication of the Stuart period was contradicted by the table-cloths which they wore round them after the fashion of the Roman toga. On a small table in the centre of the stage was a large open volume, on which the principal performer laid one hand, while he raised the other in the direction of the roof.
In the bewildered audience there was a rustle of programmes, which, written out hastily by Mrs. Graham-Shute while she was “superintending” some other work, were not too legible.
“Taking the Bath!” exclaimed a perplexed old lady plaintively, addressing Mrs. Graham-Shute, who hastened to explain that the tableau was meant to illustrate “Taking the Oath.”
But the unconscionable old lady was not yet satisfied.
“Oh, yes, of course. Very interesting, and very well done. And—let me see, I’m afraid my history is getting rather rusty,” she said, apologetically. “What oath was it?”
“Oh!” answered Mrs. Graham-Shute, with a little impatience in her voice—for really, you know, people might be contented with the pleasure you gave them, and take things for granted a little!—“it was the Covenanters or the Wyckliffites, or some of those people in the Middle Ages. They were always taking the oath for something or other then, you know!”
“Oh, yes, so they were, of course,” murmured the old lady, ashamed at her momentary thirst for exact knowledge.
“It makes an effective picture, you know,” said Mrs. Graham-Shute, relenting when she found her questioner so meek. “And we wanted to use the feathers and the hats.”
Then the curtains wobbled back again across the picture, and there was a little more applause, and another duet. Then another long interval before the curtains opened upon “The Sleeping Beauty.”
As Beauty herself and her Court ladies were all in low-necked light dresses, and as the tableau had taken some time to arrange, they shook so much from cold, and looked so blue and pinched, that they set the teeth of the whole audience chattering for sympathy.
The next tableau, “Mary Queen of Scots on her way to Execution,” was a more ambitious one, the effect being heightened by a recitation from a gentleman with a slight lisp. It would have gone very well but for the fact that something had amused Her Majesty, Lilith, Queen of Scots, who shook with laughter as long as the picture lasted.
Then followed an illustration of Millais’s picture “Yes.” This was easy, though it was not very like the original; for, as all the male talent among the performers was occupied in making itself up for the next and more ambitious tableau, the gentleman who makes the lady say “Yes” had to be impersonated by Miss Browne, in her brother’s ulster and a burnt-cork moustache.
Then followed “The Fall of Wolsey.” This was a great success, and nobody minded that Wolsey wore a moustache, thickly coated with flour indeed, but yet perfectly visible to the naked eye. The only contretemps was the failure of memory on the part of the reciter, who spoke Wolsey’s speech from Henry VIII., got hopelessly “mixed” in the middle of it, and had to be audibly prompted by Cromwell.
The last tableau of all was, unhappily, too ambitious. It was an attempt to illustrate Long’s “Babylonian Marriage-Market”; but the presence of the realistically blacked Africans unluckily suggested a nigger entertainment on the sands to the unthinking minds among the audience, and, the contagion rapidly spreading, the curtains were hastily drawn amid a chorus of titters impossible to repress.
Then everybody, anxious to get home to eat the dinners which would, undoubtedly, be spoiling, made a rush for Mrs. Graham-Shute, and told her they had enjoyed themselves so much, and that the tableaux were beautifully done, and that she must be quite proud to have such clever daughters, and such a clever son.
And Mrs. Graham-Shute, quite happy, said, in her best Bayswater manner, that she thought they were rather good, “considering they were got up quite in a hurry, you know, and with no help at all.” And she kindly added that she was coming to live at Wyngham, and that she would get up “a lot more things” when she had settled down among the delighted inhabitants.
In the meantime, Lilith, who had had an opportunity, while posing as one of the beauties in the marriage-market, to survey the audience as well as the dim lights would allow, was running to Chris in great excitement.
“Do you know who the very handsome man is, sitting near the door?” she asked eagerly.
Chris, who was tired out, and past interest in mundane affairs, answered, wearily, that she did not know anybody, that if there was a handsome man among the audience he didn’t belong to Wyngham, where there were only ugly ones. Then Rose, who was present, spoke sedately:
“Oh, you don’t know Lilith, Miss Abercarne! She’s always in love with somebody or other, and as she’s had time to forget the man she was in love with when we left town, she is obliged to fall in love with somebody here to fill up the time.”
However, Chris could give no information, and would not interest herself in the matter. Her head ached; she had been too hard at work to spare the time for a proper luncheon, but had had a sandwich brought out to her, which she had scarcely found time to eat. Nobody had thought of bringing her a cup of tea. She had promised her mother, who was in dread lest the barn should be set on fire, as the result of the afternoon’s entertainment, not to leave the building until everybody else had gone away, and a servant had been sent to put out the lights.
While the performers were changing their dress, therefore, in the screened-off spaces on either side of the stage, which had been fitted up as dressing-rooms, she occupied herself in putting out such of the footlights as had not put themselves out, and in taking down the curtains and folding them up.
By the time this was done, the performers were leaving the building in a body, tired and rather cross, smarting as they were with the sense that the whole thing had been something like a failure, and that they had not been well treated by somebody. Donald, who had not dared to come near Chris since the severe snub he had received on the previous day, hung about for a brief space in the rear of the rest, talking loudly, though somewhat vaguely, and pushing about the chairs, in the hope of attracting her attention.
But Chris never once looked round; so he presently followed the others, feeling more bitterly than they, that he had been made a fool of, and rendered ridiculous to the eyes of the world.