The Council of Seven

by J. C. Snaith

John, for one thing, was her ewe lamb. And she had no thought of surrendering him lightly. Far from approving his politics or his revolutionary coquettings with “new ideas,” of all things the most deadly in his mother’s opinion, she seemed to regard him still as only fit for the nursery. He knew little about life, he knew even less about women.

In their first quarter of an hour together over the drawing-room teacups Helen was amused, irritated, surprised, confounded by the calm assumptions of Lady Elizabeth Endor. All her standards of life and conduct were based on a rather remote past. John, who had humor enough to make due allowance for the old lady’s antique flavor, had done his best to prepare Helen for a shock; all the same, a lively sense of the comic was needed in Helen herself to make tolerable that first evening at Wyndham.

Not the least trying circumstance was Lady Elizabeth’s complete and resolute charge of the patient. If he were able to get a good night’s rest and his cut and bruised head became no worse, he might be allowed “up” for a short time on the morrow. Meanwhile, no one, not even his affianced, must venture to disturb the peace of his chamber.

Helen liked not the ukase but she had to submit. She had also to submit to dressing for dinner in a fireless but moldily magnificent bedroom. Moldy magnificence seemed, in fact, to be the note of that cheerless house. It even extended to the dinner itself. Long before that function was through, Helen felt that it was the most depressing and unsatisfying meal she had ever eaten.

Behind the old lady’s chair was a solemn pontiff in the form of a butler: a lord in waiting to a lady in waiting to Good Queen Victoria. A lovely bit of mahogany was before them; wonderful old silver, fine napery and divers articles of “bigotry and virtue” that excited Helen’s cupidity, lay all around; and yet the whole scheme had such an air of historical solidity that it might have come from Madame Tussaud’s, the Wallace Collection, or the Ark.

The fare was so scant that Helen would have had qualms about taking a full share had not her hostess appeared to subsist on hot water and dry toast. Moreover, it was ill cooked, sauceless, uninspired; and although claret was offered with an air that conferred the monarchy of all vintages upon it, the guest regretted that she had not been content with a humble but safe alternative in the form of barley water.

So much for the meal. As for the spirit which informed it, Helen soon found that it was hopeless for a mere “American newspaper person” of no particular social credentials, to penetrate the chevaux de frise of Lady Elizabeth’s class consciousness. To begin with, judging by a stray remark the old woman let fall, it seemed a source of mild surprise to find that “an American” was not necessarily “a nigger” and that “a newspaper person” was not necessarily “a printer.” All the same, when the best had been said and every allowance made for the march of progress for any woman to be actively engaged in earning her own living was to place her in the governess category if not actually to consign her to the lower depths with Mossop the butler, and his highly trained subordinates, Charles and John.

Had Helen been less troubled in spirit, a keen sense of humor would have been frankly charmed by this almost perfect specimen from the backwoods. John himself always alluded to his mother as “a genuine Die-hard.” It was her austere, yet not altogether unenlightened feudalism, he declared, that had made England the country it was. Cherishing her as he did, and the wonderful old island of which she was the flesh and the bone, he certainly claimed for her many fine qualities. She was honest, she was wise in her own generation, she was fearless, she had a downright way of expressing herself, and according to her lights, she was just. All the same, her limitations were many and they were abrupt.

Charm, beauty, information, wit, Helen had her share of these and she used them modestly, but so far as John’s mother was concerned, they made no impact. From his early days at Eton she had mapped out a matrimonial career for her only surviving son. Money he would need and money he should have, even if he must go outside his own class to look for it. No doubt some well-born heiress would come along—Lady Elizabeth might despair of the country but she was an invincible optimist in all matters relating to herself and family—she had heard, in fact, of a nice young heiress in the next county, and John, although his “radicalism” annoyed her deeply, being his mother’s son had merely to cast the handkerchief.

Poor Helen was to learn in the course of the evening that it would not be with the consent of her hostess if she ever became Mrs. John Endor. The wind was not tempered to the shorn lamb. John simply couldn’t afford to marry under ten thousand a year; he had a little, only a very little, of his own, and Wyndham was one of those ramshackle old places, although good of its kind, that was really so expensive to keep up.