At this point in her smiling reminiscences, the wardress clanged open the door and slammed down a mug of cocoa and a slab of brown bread; and rapped out some orders in such a martinet utterance that they were difficult to understand. (Don't be alarmed! She isn't about to be executed for having deceived the Benchers of the Inner Temple in 1905; she is only in prison for a suffragist offence).]
I can't wind up this chapter somehow without more or less finishing the story of Beryl Claridge. She has been a source of anxiety to my wife—who has read these chapters one by one as they left my typewriter. "Was it wise to bring her in?" "Well, but my dear, she was rather a common type of the New Woman in the early nineteen hundreds." "Yes—but—"
Of course the latent anxiety was that she might end up respectably. And so she did. In 1906, the first Mrs. Storrington died at Ware (Ware was where the architect husband had his legitimate home). She had long been ill, increasingly ill of some terrible form of anæmia which had followed the birth of her fourth child. She slowly faded away, poor thing; and about the time David was returning from a triumphant Christmas and New Year at Pontystrad—the Curate and his young wife had made a most delightful partie carrée and David had kissed the very slightly protesting Bridget under the native mistletoe—Mrs. Storrington breathed her last, while her faithless yet long forgiven Francis knelt by her bedside in agonies of unavailing grief.
Well: she died and was buried, and her four children, ranging from nine to sixteen, sobbed very much and mourned for darling Mummie without the slightest suspicion ("'twas better so," she had always thought) that Dad had poisoned her wells of happiness ever since he took up with that minx at Cambridge in the very year in which long-legged Claribel was born. A few months after the poor lady was consigned (under a really lovely cenotaph designed by her husband) to Ware Churchyard—no, it was to Ware cemetery; Dad introduced them all to a very sprightly and good-looking widow, Mrs. Claridge, who had also been bereaved years ago and left with two perfect ducks of children, four and five years old, to whom Claribel took instinctively (the elder ones sniffed a little, disliking "kids").
Then about Christmas time, 1906, Dad told them that Mrs. Claridge was going to make him happy by coming to tend his motherless children; was going to be his wife. Francis, the eldest, stomped about the garden at Ware and swore he would go back to Rugby during the holidays; Elspeth, the gaunt girl of fourteen and Agnes, a dreamy and endearing child, cried themselves to sleep in each other's arms. Claribel, however, quite approved. And whether they liked it or not, in January, 1907, the marriage took place—at the Registrar's—and Beryl came to live for a short time at Ware, bringing ducksome Margery and adorable Podge. In less than a month Beryl had won over all her step-children, except Francis, who held out till Easter, but was reduced to allegiance by the hampers she sent to him at Rugby—; in three months they had all moved to a much sweller house on the Chelsea Embankment. Father—Beryl voted "Dad" a little lower-middle class—Father had somehow become connected with some great business establishment of which Mother was the head. Together they were making pots of money. Francis would go to Sandhurst, Elspeth to a finishing school in Paris (her ambition), and the others would spend the fine months of the year rollicking with Margery and Podge on the Sussex coast.
In 1907, also, they became aware that their new mother was not alone in the world. A stately lady whose eyes seemed once to have done a deal of weeping (they were destined alas! to do much more, for three of her gallant, handsome sons were killed in the War, and that finally killed the poor old Dean of Thetford), who wore a graceful Spanish mantilla of black lace when in draughty places, came to see them after they had moved to Garden Corner on the Chelsea Embankment. She turned out to be the mother of Mrs. Beryl and was quite inclined to be their grandmother as well as Margery's and Podge's. But her husband the Dean was—it appeared—too great an invalid to come up to town.
The second Mrs. Storrington, who was a woman of boundless energy, could work all day with secretaries, and could dance all night, gave brilliant parties in the season at her large Chelsea house. But she never invited to them Mr. David Vavasour Williams, that rising young barrister who had become so famous as a pleader of the causes of friendless women.