At the time of her marriage, Mrs. Darcey-Jacobs (Miss Foljambe she was then) was a dowerless girl with two admirers, Major Jacobs and Mr. Morgan. Not being, it would seem, a young lady of very deep affections, her choice of a husband was decided entirely by the extent of the worldly prospects he could offer, and the Major, being the better match of the two, was accepted. But how cruel are the tricks that fate will sometimes play! Not long after her marriage Mr. Morgan not only inherited a large fortune, but shortly afterwards left this world for a better, and Mrs. Darcey-Jacobs is in the habit of remarking, with a good deal of feeling, "If I had only chosen the other I might have been a happy widow now!"
Mrs. Darcey-Jacobs lives in our quiet country neighbourhood during the greater part of the year, on the distinct understanding that she loathes every hour of it. When she goes abroad or to London she talks quite cheerfully of having had one breath of life. So fraught with happy successes are these pilgrimages in her brocaded satin gowns into the outer world that she often says that were she but free she might have the world at her feet to-morrow. And she has been known to refer to the Major, still in the tone of cheerful resignation and with her emphasizing tap of the fan, as "a dead weight round her neck."
The Major himself is a guileless person, whose very simplicity causes his wife more exquisite suffering than even a husband of keen, vindictive temper could inflict.
Does Mrs. Jacobs give a dinner-party, it is not unusual for the master of the house to remark in a congratulatory tone from his end of the table, "What has Mullens been doing to the silver, my dear? it looks unusually bright;" while his greeting to his friends as they arrive at his house, though distinctly cordial, often takes the form of a hearty "I had no idea that we were going to see you to-night." As Mrs. Darcey-Jacobs always sends some kind message from the Major in her notes of invitation, this of course is most disconcerting, both for her and for her guests. This year when they were in Italy a friend of ours in the same hotel overheard a lady ask the Major if he were related to the Darceys of Mugthorpe. "I really can't tell you," said the Major; "the Darcey was my wife's idea."
"Four Jamiesons," I said, "and the Darcey-Jacobs, and our two selves. Isn't it humiliating to think that we have invariably to invite the same two men to balance our numbers at a dinner-party? I can't help remarking that Anthony Crawshay and Ellicomb are present at every dinner-party in this neighbourhood, as surely as soup is on the table."
"We might ask Mrs. Fielden," said Palestrina; "she is sure to have some colonels with her. Besides, I love Mrs. Fielden, though people say she is a flirt. I think most men are in love with her; some propose to her, and some do not, but they all love her."
"Even when she refuses to marry them?"
"I have heard Mrs. Fielden say that an offer of marriage should be refused artistically," said Palestrina. "She says young girls hardly ever do it properly, and that they are brusque and brutal. I suppose she herself has some charming way of her own of refusing men which does not hurt their feelings. I believe," said Palestrina, "that she would marry Sir Anthony Crawshay if he could play Bridge."
"Anthony is an excellent fellow," I said.
Mr. Ellicomb is a young man of High Church principles and artistic tastes who has taken an old Tudor farmhouse in the neighbourhood, and has furnished it very well. He waxes eloquent on the monstrous inelegance of modern dress, and the decadence of Japanese art, and he says he would rather sit in the dark than burn gas in his house, and he dusts his own blue china himself. In his house it is a sign of art to divert anything from its proper use, and to use it for another purpose than that for which it was originally intended. Poor Ellicomb uses a cabbage-strainer as a fern-pot, a drain-tile for an umbrella-stand, his mother's old lace veils as antimacassars, bed-posts as palm-stands, a linen press as a book-case, and a brass spittoon for growing lilies. It is almost like playing at guessing riddles to go over his house with him, and to try and discover for what purpose some of his things were originally created. Their conversion to another use is, I am sure, a very high form of art.