[CHAPTER XII]
APRIL EVENING
Elizabeth was sitting in the drawing-room window of the little house that her mother and she had taken in Oakley Street on a warm, uncertain afternoon of April in the following year. The window was wide open and the breeze that blew in from the south-west ruffled the leaves of the music that stood open on the piano. It seemed to the girl's indolent mood that there was quite a good chance of their not blowing on to the floor, and since that was so, she much preferred going to pick them up if this happened rather than disturb herself for fear of its happening. Outside there was a small brick-walled enclosure, with strips of flower-bed, bright, nodding with daffodils, and a fig-tree, rather sooty in foliage, and hopelessly incapable of bearing any fruit at all, was thrusting out broad handlike leaves from its angled boughs. This enclosure Mrs. Fanshawe was accustomed to call "that dreadful little backyard" when she felt like that, but in more cheerful moods alluded to it as "that dear little garden." For some days past it had been a dreadful little backyard.
Colonel Fanshawe had left his widow and daughter in circumstances that admitted of comfort and demanded care, and Mrs. Fanshawe sometimes complained of, sometimes rather enjoyed the practice of economy. Elizabeth was rather afraid of those bouts of economical enjoyment, for they meant that Mrs. Fanshawe was apt to order more coal than the cellar would possibly hold, as she got a cheaper quotation for large quantities, or would take a taxicab to some far-distant shop in Oxford Street, keep it waiting an hour and drive back in it bursting with innumerable packages. She would then gleefully reckon up the saving she had effected by not buying the same goods at the shop just round the corner; sometimes it amounted to as much as two shillings, in which case she would give Elizabeth quite a little homily on the virtue of thrift and the immense importance of looking after the pence. The shillings apparently as represented by the taxi were capable of looking after themselves. After this thrifty afternoon she would feel that a little treat was owing to them, and she would take Elizabeth to a concert. At other times, still enjoying it, she would help in the housework, and, putting on a very pretty grey apron, dust the china on the chimney-piece in the drawing-room, or even clean the handle of the front door with some sample that had been sent her which was of unrivalled merit in polishing brasswork. She still required a great deal of rest to recuperate her from labours past, and fit her for those to come, and always had breakfast in bed. Apart from this necessary repose and the fatigue engendered by the practice of economies, her time for the last two months had been largely taken up in collecting materials for a "Short Memoir" of her late husband.
"I feel that I who know him best," she said to Elizabeth, "owe it to his large circle of friends at home and abroad, who loved him, to tell them what I can about him. It is my duty, dear. In addition to that, his public service as a soldier was never properly appreciated by the War Office, and it is right that they should know what they have lost, now that it is too late."
Elizabeth felt as if a file had been drawn across her front teeth, and her stepmother went on with a certain degree of complacency, with a sense of importance, and yet not without sincerity.
"It is so beautiful, that passage in 'In Memoriam,'" she said, wiping her eyes, "where Tennyson says that to write about Mr. Hallam is a 'sad narcotic, numbing pain.' I know he would have understood my feeling about it, which is just that. I shall, of course, state in the preface my reasons for writing the memoir, and say that, though it is like tearing open a wound that will never heal, I owe it to my dear husband's memory."
She paused a moment.
"It will be privately printed, of course," she said, "and I shall give it to all his friends. I was thinking of having a purple cloth binding with gilt lettering."