§ 7
So it was that Mr. Grimes, acting for Lady Charlotte, set about the rescue of Joan and Peter from, as she put it, “the freaks, faddists and Hill-Top philosophies of the Surrey hills,” and their restoration to the established sobrieties and decorums of English life. Very naturally this sudden action came as an astonishing blow to the two advanced aunts. At nine o’clock that evening Miss Murgatroyd was called down to see Miss Phyllis Stubland, who had ridden over on her bicycle. “Where are the children?” asked Aunt Phyllis.
“You sent for them,” said Miss Murgatroyd.
“Sent for them!”
“Yes. I remember now. The young man said it was Lady Charlotte Sydenham. Didn’t you know? She is going abroad tomorrow or the next day.”
“Sent for them!” Aunt Phyllis repeated....
Two hours later Aunt Phyllis was telling the terrible news to Mary. Aunt Phœbe was in London for the night to see Mr. Tree play Richard II, and there were no means of communicating with her until the morning. The Ingle-Nook was much too Pre-Raphaelite to possess a telephone, and Aunt Phœbe was sleeping at the flat of a friend in Church Row, Hampstead. Next morning a telegram found her still in bed.
“Children kidnapped by Lady Charlotte consult Sycamore Phyllis”
said the telegram.
“No!” cried Aunt Phœbe sharply.
Then as the little servant-maid was on the point of closing the door, “Tell Miss Jepson,” Aunt Phœbe commanded....
Miss Jepson found Aunt Phœbe out of bed and dressing with a rapid casualness. It was manifest that some great crisis had happened. “An outrage upon all women,” said Aunt Phœbe. “I have been outraged.”
“My dear!” said Miss Jepson.
“Read that telegram!” cried Aunt Phœbe, pointing to a small ball of pink paper in the corner of the room.
Miss Jepson went over to the corner with a perplexed expression, and smoothed out the telegram and read it.
“A Bradshaw and a hansom!” Aunt Phœbe was demanding as she moved rapidly about the room from one scattered garment to another. “No breakfast. I can eat nothing. Nothing. I am a tigress. A maddened tigress. Maddened. Beyond endurance. Oh! Can you reach these buttons, dear?”
Miss Jepson hovered about her guest readjusting her costume in accordance with commonplace standards while Aunt Phœbe expressed herself in Sibylline utterances.
“Children dedicated to the future.... Reek of ancient corruptions.... Abomination of desolation.... The nine fifty-three.... Say half an hour.... Remonstrance.... An avenging sword.... The sword of the Lord and of Gideon.”
“Are you going to this Mr. Sycamore?” asked Miss Jepson suddenly.
Aunt Phœbe seemed lost for a time and emerged with, “Good God!—No! This is an occasion when a woman must show she can act as a man. This tries us, Amanda. I will have no man in this. No man at all! Are women to loll in hareems for ever while men act and fight? When little children are assailed?...”
“Chastlands,” said Aunt Phœbe to the cabman, waving Miss Jepson’s Bradshaw in her hand.
The man looked stupid.
“Oh! Charing Cross,” she cried scornfully. “The rest is beyond you.”
And in the train she startled her sole fellow-traveller and made him get out at the next station by saying suddenly twice over in her loud, clear contralto voice the one word “Action.” She left Miss Jepson’s Bradshaw in the compartment when she got out.
She found Chastlands far gone in packing for Lady Charlotte’s flight abroad. “I demand Lady Charlotte,” she said. She followed up old Cashel as he went to announce her. He heard her coming behind him, but his impression of her was so vivid that he deemed it wiser not to notice this informality. And besides in his dry, thin way he wanted to hear why she demanded Lady Charlotte. He perceived the possibilities of a memorable clash. He was a quiet, contemplative man who hid his humour like a miser’s treasure and lived much upon his memories. Weeks after a thing had happened he would suddenly titter, in bed, or in church, or while he was cleaning his plate. And none were told why he tittered.
For a moment Aunt Phœbe hovered on the landing outside the Chastlands drawing-room.
“I can’t see her,” she heard Lady Charlotte say, with something like a note of terror. “It is impossible.”
“Leave her to me, me Lady,” said a man’s voice.
“Tell her to wait, Cashel,” said Lady Charlotte.
Aunt Phœbe entered, trailing her artistic robes. Before her by the writing-table in the big window stood Lady Charlotte, flounced, bonneted, dressed as if for instant flight. A slender, fair, wincing man in grey stood nearer, his expression agitated but formidable. They had evidently both risen to their feet as Aunt Phœbe entered. Cashel made insincere demonstrations of intervention, but Aunt Phœbe disposed of him with a gesture. A haughty and terrible politeness was in her manner, but she sobbed slightly as she spoke.
“Lady Charlotte,” she said, “where are my wards?”
“They are my wards,” said Lady Charlotte no less haughtily.
“Excuse me, Lady Charlotte. Permit me,” said Mr. Grimes, with soothing gestures of his lean white hands.
“Please do not intervene,” said Aunt Phœbe.
“Mr. Grimes, madam, is my solicitor,” said Lady Charlotte. “You may go, Cashel.”
Cashel went reluctantly.
Mr. Grimes advanced a step and dandled his hands and smiled ingratiatingly. Italian and Spanish women will stab, he had heard, and fishwives are a violent class. Otherwise he believed all women, however terrible in appearance, to be harmless. This gave him courage.
“Miss Stubland, I believe,” he said. “These young people, young Stubland and his foster-sister to wit, are at present in my charge—under instructions from Lady Charlotte.”
“Where?” asked Aunt Phœbe.
“Our case, Miss Stubland, is that they were not being properly educated in your charge. That is our case. They were receiving no sound moral and religious training, and they were being brought up in—to say the least of it—an eccentric fashion. Our aim in taking them out of your charge is to secure for them a proper ordinary English bringing up.”
“Every word an insult,” panted Aunt Phœbe. “Every word. What have you done with them?”
“Until we are satisfied that you will consent to continue their training on proper lines, Miss Stubland, you can scarcely expect us to put it in your power to annoy these poor children further.”
Mr. Grimes’ face was wincing much more than usual, and these involuntary grimaces affected Aunt Phœbe in her present mood as though they were deliberate insults. He did not allow for this added exasperation.
“Annoy!” cried Aunt Phœbe.
“That is the usual expression. We are perfectly within our rights in refusing you access. Having regard to your manifest determination to upset any proper arrangement.”
“You refuse to let me know where those children are?”
“Unless you can get an order against us.”
“You mean—go to some old judge?”
Mr. Grimes gesticulated assent. If she chose to phrase it in that way, so much the worse for her application.
“You won’t—— You will go on with this kidnapping?”
“Miss Stubland, we are entirely satisfied with our present course and our present position.”
Lady Charlotte endorsed him with three great nods.
Aunt Phœbe stood aghast.
Mr. Grimes remained quietly triumphant. Lady Charlotte stood quietly triumphant behind him. For a moment it seemed as if Aunt Phœbe had no reply of any sort to make.
Then suddenly she advanced three steps and seized upon Mr. Grimes. One hand gripped his nice grey coat below the collar behind, the other, the looseness of his waistcoat just below the tie. And lifting him up upon his toes Aunt Phœbe shook him.
Mr. Grimes was a lean, spare, ironical man. Aunt Phœbe was a well-developed woman. Yet only by an enormous effort did she break the instinctive barriers that make a man sacred from feminine assault. It was an effort so enormous that when at last it broke down the dam of self-restraint, it came through a boiling flood of physical power. It came through with a sort of instantaneousness. At one moment Mr. Grimes stood before Lady Charlotte’s eyes dominating the scene; at the next he was, as materialists say of the universe, “all vibrations.” He was a rag, he was a scrap of carpet in Aunt Phœbe’s hands. The appetite for shaking seemed to grow in Aunt Phœbe as she shook.
From the moment when Aunt Phœbe gripped him until she had done shaking him nobody except Lady Charlotte made an articulate sound. And all that Lady Charlotte said, before astonishment overcame her, was one loud “Haw!” The face of Mr. Grimes remained set, except for a certain mechanical rattling of the teeth in a wild stare at Aunt Phœbe; Aunt Phœbe’s features bore that earnest calm one may see upon the face of a good woman who washes clothes or kneads bread. Then suddenly it was as if Aunt Phœbe woke up out of a trance.
“You make—you make me forget myself!” said Aunt Phœbe with a low sob, and after one last shake relinquished him.
Mr. Grimes gyrated for a moment and came to rest against a massive table. He was still staring at Aunt Phœbe.
For a moment the three people remained breathing heavily and contemplating the outrage. At last Mr. Grimes was able to raise a wavering, pointing finger to gasp, “You have—you have—yes—indeed—forgotten yourself!”
Then, as if he struggled to apprehend the position, “You—you have assaulted me.”
“Let it be—let it be a warning to you,” said Aunt Phœbe.
“That is a threat.”
“Agreed,” panted Aunt Phœbe with spirit, though she had not meant to threaten him at all.
“If you think, madam, that you can assault me with impunity——”
“I shouldn’t have thought it—before I took hold of you. A bag of bones.... Man indeed!” And then very earnestly—“Yes.”
She paused. The pause held all three of them still.
“But why—oh, why!—should I bandy words with such a thing as you?” she asked with a sudden belated recovery of her dignity. “You—”
She sought her word carefully.
“Flibber-gib!”
And forgetting altogether the mission upon which she had come, Aunt Phœbe turned about to make her exit from the scene. It seemed to her, perhaps justly, that it was impossible to continue the parley further. “Legalized scoundrel!” she said over her shoulder, and moved towards the door. In that first tremendous clash of the New Woman and the Terrific Old Lady, it must be admitted that the New Woman carried off, so to speak, the physical honours. Lady Charlotte stood against the fireplace visibly appalled. Only when Aunt Phœbe was already at the door did it occur to Lady Charlotte to ring the bell to have her visitor “shown out.” Her shaking hand could scarcely find the bell handle. For the rest she was ineffective, wasting great opportunities for scorn and dignity. She despised herself for not having a larger, fiercer solicitor. She doubted herself. For the first time in her life Lady Charlotte Sydenham doubted herself, and quailed before a new birth of time.
Upon the landing appeared old Cashel, mutely respectful. He showed out Aunt Phœbe in profound silence. He watched her retreating form with affectionate respect, stroking his cheek slowly with two fingers. He closed the door.
He stood as one who seeks to remember. “Flibber-jib,” he said at last very softly, without exultation or disapproval. He simply wanted to have it exactly right. Then he went upstairs to have a long, mild, respectful look at Mr. Grimes, and to ask if he could do anything for him....