CHAPTER XXVII. A HOUSE-WARMING.
It was about six weeks after Christmas when Mrs. Graham-Shute again descended upon Wyngham, not for mere invasion, but with a view to settling in the conquered country.
By the luckiest chance in the world (so she said) there was by this time a house to be let absolutely within sight of Wyngham House. It was an ugly brand-new dwelling, built of yellow brick, standing in a very small scrap of immature garden, on the west side of Wyngham House, and therefore a little way further from the town than Mr. Bradfield’s residence. It had been built by the local poet, a gentleman who turned out a large amount of verse, mostly very bad, and always very dull, some of which occasionally found its way into the dullest and heaviest of the old established magazines. Overweighted by the burden of his own celebrity (at least this was the construction put upon his action by the neighbours) he had built a high wall round his house and tiny garden, to shield himself from the public gaze; although nobody wanted to look at him. Then, suddenly tiring of his dwelling when he had finished spoiling it, he put up a board announcing that it was to let, just in time for it to be pounced upon by the fair Maude, who was charmed by the dignified seclusion offered by the high wall, and by its near neighbourhood to dear cousin John. Furthermore the house had what she described as a “magnificent entrance,” which meant that a great deal of the space which ought to have been utilised in enlarging the poor little dining-room, was wasted on a big draughty hall, in which the four winds found a charming playground from which to distribute themselves up and down and around into every corner of the house. There was also a good-sized drawing-room, which was to be the scene of certain functions which were to bring a breath of Bayswater into benighted Wyngham.
Long before the harmless, necessary plumber was out of the house, long before the carpets were down or the new papers were dry, Mrs. Graham-Shute had resolved upon most of the details of a house-warming, which was to be remembered as an epoch in the local annals. In honour of the occasion, Lilith had fortunately discovered a talent for dramatic authorship, and had fashioned a play which was to be the chief feature of the evening’s entertainment. Having got as far as this, Mrs. Graham-Shute, long before the moving was accomplished, proceeded to send out invitations to all those people whose acquaintance she had made, or had not made, as the case might be, during her week’s stay at dear cousin John’s. The next thing to be done was to call upon the editor of The Wyngham Observer (with which is incorporated The Little Wosham Times), to ask him to insert, under the heading of “A Distinguished Arrival,” an account of the proposed function which she had thoughtfully written out beforehand. But the editor had, as she afterwards expressed it, “no enterprise, no manners, no anything,” for he mildly informed the lady that if he inserted her contribution it must be paid for as an advertisement.
Then began the first of the poor lady’s difficulties. Of course she sent an invitation to dear cousin John. Equally, of course, she sent none to the housekeeper or the housekeeper’s daughter. Then she received a blunt note from Mr. Bradfield, informing her that unless Mrs. and Miss Abercarne came too, he shouldn’t come. Remonstrances followed, but were unavailing; then Mrs. Graham-Shute made a feeble stand; but the thought of what life would be at Wyngham without the countenance of the Great Man prevailed, and Mrs. and Miss Abercarne got their invitation, which Mr. Bradfield then put pressure on them to accept.
What a frantic state of excitement pervaded “The Cottage” on the day of the “function!” What skirmishes there were among the performers! What rushes into the town on the part of the younger members of the family for a pound of sweet biscuits, a packet of candles, sixpennyworth of daffodils, and two syphons of lemonade! Not to speak of a running stream of messengers to cousin John’s, with pressing requests for the loan of a dozen chairs, a bottle of whisky and a tea-tray! As Mrs. Graham-Shute feelingly said, “It was quite lucky, as it happened, those wretched Abercarnes had been invited, you know!”
And so indeed it was. But when at last the evening came, Mrs. Graham-Shute felt that her exertions had met with their reward, for there was not a space sufficient for the accommodation of one person which did not hold two. This was the very height of enjoyment to the good lady, who received each guest with a fixed, galvanic smile, and said she was “so delighted that you could come, you know,” the while she looked over the shoulder of the guest whose hand she held, too obviously occupied in counting the number of people who pressed in behind. It was indeed, as she afterwards said, a most successful function. Number of guests, eighty—seats for thirty-five. Sandwiches for five-and-twenty; tea for all those enterprising and muscular enough to make their way into the dining-room, where Rose, feeble and frightened, drifted round the tea-table rather than presided at it.
There was some delay before the entertainment of the evening began; this is inevitable when you have to wait until the last guest has passed safely in before you can set your stage. By-the-bye, there was no stage proper, a space being railed off merely from the hall-door to about half-way up the hall, so that it was exceedingly disconcerting when the two Misses Blake, elderly and slow both of movement and understanding, knocked at the door at the most thrilling moment of the drama, and had to be let in right between the villain and the lady he was trying to murder. To avoid a second contretemps of the same kind, one of the younger children was told off to stand in the cold outside, to show late comers in by the back door.
Unluckily the play, a harmless charade of the forcible-feeble order, took place under some disadvantages. In the first place, as the stage was on the same level as the auditorium, only the people in the first two rows could see anything of what was going on. In the second place, the performers, although they were all dead-letter perfect, and had been pretty well rehearsed, had not mastered the acoustics of the hall, and were seldom heard. In the third place, the seats were put so close together that everybody was on somebody else’s toes, or else on somebody else’s gown; and in the fourth place, the hall was so bitterly cold, and draughts blew in so steadily from under all the doors, that, compared with this improvised theatre, Mr. Bradfield’s barn had been a warm and cosy place. The only things which everybody heard were the rat-tat-tats at the door, and subsequently the voice of the eldest Miss Blake, who sat in the front row, and inquired from time to time, plaintively, “What they were saying,” and the answers which her obliging companion bawled in her ear.
However, Lilith, though not histrionically great, looked very pretty in grey hair, which made her young face look fresher than ever; and the place was crammed to suffocation. So Mrs. Graham-Shute who panted complacently at the remotest end of the hall, and tried to console those who could neither see nor hear, and who were restrained by her presence from the solace of conversation, was quite satisfied. And when the play was over, and everybody jumped up and fled frantically in search of fire to thaw themselves, she received, in perfect good faith, their vague congratulations.
There was only one drawback to her happiness; this was the persistency with which cousin John devoted himself to “those Abercarnes.”
Wherever Chris went, Mr. Bradfield followed, until, as Mrs. Graham-Shute said to Mrs. Browne:
“It really was quite a scandal, you know, and she could not understand how any right-minded girl could let herself be compromised like that!”
But Mrs. Browne, who was a good-natured old soul, only said that Chris was such a very pretty girl, that if Mr. Bradfield didn’t follow her about somebody else would, and that she didn’t seem to encourage his attentions much. But this seemed to Mrs. Graham-Shute only a fresh injury, and she presently asked Donald, rather snappishly, to go and talk to that Abercarne girl, and distract her attention for a few moments, so that cousin John might have a few minutes to himself.
But Donald was angry, and said, sulkily, that he wasn’t going to be snubbed again. The fact was that, presuming a little upon his knowledge of her receipt of the letter which he had found in the garden, he had already tried to force a tête-à-tête upon her. She had avoided it, and even spoken to him rather coldly; and Donald, who was neither young enough nor old enough for chivalry to be a strong point with him, had sworn revenge. So now he rushed at his opportunity.
“Snubbed!” echoed Mrs. Graham-Shute, scandalised; “a housekeeper’s daughter to dare to snub you—a Graham-Shute—my son! No, no, Donald, you must have misunderstood her, you must really!”
“I know jolly well that I didn’t misunderstand,” blurted out Donald, in the usual highly-pitched family voice. “She simply dismissed me as if she’d been a princess, and I nobody at all, when all the time I could, if I liked——”
Here Donald paused, significantly, wishing to yield, with apparent reluctance, to his burning desire to betray the girl’s little secret.
Mrs. Graham-Shute’s face woke at once into eager interest. She was not at heart an ill-natured woman, and it would have given her no satisfaction to hear anything very dreadful to the girl’s discredit. But some trifling indiscretion, some girlish escapade, which it would annoy John Bradfield, and, perhaps, disgust him to know, that Mrs. Graham-Shute would have dearly liked to hear about.
“What is it! What is it she has done?” she asked, quickly. “You may tell your mother, you know. It is nothing serious, of course?”
“Well, I don’t know,” grumbled Donald, in a surly tone. “Some people might think it serious for a girl to keep up a correspondence with some fellow, who daren’t send his letters by post!”
“What!” cried Mrs. Graham-Shute. “Ah!—are you sure of this, Donald?”
Nothing could be better than this, if it were only true. There was no great harm in it, but it was just the sort of thing to put an elderly admirer on his guard.
“Has she got you to take letters for her, then?” she asked in horror.
“Me? No—not such a fool!” returned Donald, shortly.
The lad was uneasy, being ashamed of himself for having betrayed the girl’s confidence, forced though it had been, and afraid of the use his mother might make of it.
“Now, you won’t go and make any mischief, will you, mother?” he said earnestly, alarmed by the expression of satisfaction on her face.
“I should think you might trust me,” she said haughtily, as she moved away, anxious to make use, without delay, of her new weapon.
Having managed to detach cousin John momentarily from the Abercarnes, who were, in truth, glad of a little relief from his attentions, Mrs. Graham-Shute asked her cousin to get her a cup of tea. He complied, and would immediately have escaped, but she detained him by bringing her fan down with a sharp snap on his arm.
“One moment, John; I think you might spare me one moment, especially as I want to talk to you about your favourites,” she said, rather snappishly, as he reluctantly waited.
“Oh, if you’re going on again about them,” said John shortly, “you may save yourself the trouble. They are my favourites, and there’s an end of it.”
“Quite so,” rejoined his cousin sweetly. “It’s because of the great interest I know you take in them, that I want to speak to you. Who is this young fellow that Miss Abercarne is going to marry?”
This question, serenely put, though not without a strong touch of what a woman would have recognised as malice, had the desired effect of startling John Bradfield, as well as of making him very angry.
“What—what do you mean?” he asked shortly. “I’ve heard nothing about it. It’s some d—d nonsense somebody’s put into your head, and there’s not a word of truth in it, I’ll be bound.”
“My dear John, don’t be angry. Perhaps there is nothing; very likely not. If there had been anything in it, no doubt you would have heard. But as there’s no doubt she’s carrying on a correspondence with someone who does not send his letters by post, I naturally thought that it must be with someone she thought about rather seriously. I daresay I was wrong. So sorry if I’ve made any mischief!” she added, as if in sudden surprise at the effect of her words. “But really, you know, girls shouldn’t do these things, now should they?”
Loud voices were the rule in the house, but Mrs. Graham-Shute was startled by the loudness of her cousin’s angry reply:
“It isn’t true!” roared he. “It isn’t true. It’s one of your infernal concoctions of a spiteful woman. I’ll go and ask her.”
“My dear John,” cried Maude, without temper, for she could not afford to quarrel with him, “my dear John, just consider a moment? What possible object could I have in saying it if it were not true? I should expose myself to all sorts of horrid things, and really deserve to be called spiteful—and nobody can say that of me, really—if I said a thing like that when it was not true. Can’t you see that for yourself?”
But John was blunt to the verge of rudeness.
“I can see that somebody’s been telling lies,” he said abruptly, as he turned on his heel, and fought his way back to where Chris was standing near her mother, who, having obtained one of the much-sought-after chairs, was lost to sight in the crowd of guests who had not been so lucky.
“Miss Christina!” said John Bradfield, not attempting to hide the fact that he was angry, “I’ve got something to say to you. Is it true that you’re carrying on a correspondence with someone?”
Chris turned deadly white, and every spark of animation suddenly left her face. Her mother, who was of necessity so close to her that not a look nor a word could escape her, broke in sharply:
“Chris! why don’t you answer? Ask who said such a thing. But of course I know who it was!”
And Mrs. Abercarne threw a steely glance towards the spot where Mrs. Graham-Shute’s large head could be seen bobbing amongst the throng, like a cork on a surging sea.
Still Chris made no answer, and her mother, suddenly perceiving how white she had grown, grew alarmed.
“Why don’t you deny it, child?” she asked in a low voice, quivering with earnestness, as she rose to whisper in her daughter’s ear.
The tears were in the girl’s eyes. She turned to her mother, and under the pretence of drawing round her shoulders the China crape shawl which Mrs. Abercarne wore as a wrap, she whispered:
“Mother, don’t be worried. But I can’t deny it; it’s true.”
Poor Mrs. Abercarne was thunder-struck. If she had been told ten minutes before that it was possible for her Chris, her little girl, as she persisted in calling her, to be guilty of keeping a secret from her, she would have treated the idea with scorn. So that at the first moment she was absolutely at a loss for words, and could only murmur:
“You, Chris! You!” with quite pathetic amazement and grief.
As for John Bradfield, who stood near enough in the crush to catch the purport of their words, his amazement had given place to a great fear. He did not dare to ask any details concerning her correspondence; being deterred, not so much by the knowledge that he had no right to do so, as by an alarming suspicion as to the identity of the unknown lover.
Fortunately the assembled guests were now beginning to carry out their long-felt wish to be gone; so Mrs. Abercarne and her daughter took advantage of the thinning of the crowd around them to make their escape also.
Mrs. Graham-Shute was bidding her guests farewell with the bored look which comes of the consciousness of duty fulfilled. As she shook hands and listened to their stereotyped words of thanks, she expressed the hope that they had enjoyed themselves, though she might have known they hadn’t. Then they all trooped out, and drove or walked home, exchanging comments which would have taken the poor lady’s breath away, and made her forswear the world for its base ingratitude.