CHAPTER III
I HAVE forced George’s hand, so I am told, and neither he nor mother take any notice of me.
But Aunt Gerty hugged me all over when she heard what I had done, and scolded Mother for not being nice to me.
“I don’t see why you need put that poor child in Coventry?” she said. “You had more need to be grateful to her than not. How much longer was it going to go on, I want to know? Hiding away his lawful wife like an old Bluebeard, and me Sister Anne boiling over and wanting to call it all from the house-tops!”
“Well, Gerty, you seem to have got it a bit mixed!” said Mother. “But, talking of Bluebeard, I always envied the first Mrs. B. the lots of cupboard room she must have had! I wonder if she was a hoarder, like me, who never have the heart to throw anything away? If I do happen to see the plans for the new house, I will speak up for lots of cupboards, and that is all I care about.”
“See the plans! Why, of course you will! Isn’t it your right? You must make a point of seeing them and putting your word in. Look after your own comfort in this world or you will jolly well find yourself out in the cold, and ‘specially with a husband like you’ve got!”
“Bother moving!” said Mother, in her dreary way that comes when she has been overdoing it, as she has lately. “It is an odious wrench; just like having all one’s teeth out at once.”
“Hadn’t need! Yours are just beautiful. One of your points, Lucy, and don’t you forget it.”
“The life here suited me well enough; I had got used to it, I suppose.”
“You can get used to something bad, can’t you, but that’s no reason you are not to welcome a change? Oh, you’ll like the new life that’s to be spent up-stairs in the daylight, above-board like, instead of this kind of ‘behind the scenes’ you have been doing for eighteen years. And a pretty woman still, for so you are. Cheer up! You are going to get new scenery, new dresses, new backcloth–”
“You see everything through the stage, Gerty. I must say it irritates one sometimes, especially now, when–”
“I know what you mean. No offence, my dear old sis. And you can depend on me not to be bringing the smell of the footlights, as they call it—it’s the only truly pleasant smell there is, to my idea!—into your fine new house. Pity but He can’t get a little whiff of it into his comedies, and some manager would see his way to putting them on, perhaps? No, beloved, me and George don’t cotton to each other, nor never shall. He isn’t my sort. I like a man that is a man, not a society baa-lamb! Baa! I’ve no patience with such–”
“Sh’, Gerty. You seem to forget his child sitting messing away with her paints in a corner so quietly there!”
That was me. Aunt Gerty stopped a minute, and then they went on just the same.
“We have never minded the child yet” (which was true), “and I don’t see why we should begin now. Tempe is getting quite a woman and able to hold her tongue when needful. And she knows her way about her precious father well enough. What you’ve to think of now, Lucy, is getting your hands white, and the marks of sewing and cooking off. Lemons and pumice! Cream’s good, too. You have been George Taylor’s upper servant too long—Gracious, who’s that at the front-door?”
Aunt Gerty nearly knocked me over in her rush to the window. We were all three sitting in the front bedroom, which is George’s, when he is at home, and Mother had been washing my hair. It was a dreadfully hot day—a dog-day, only we haven’t any dogs, but the kittens were tastefully arranged in the spare wash-basin all round the jug for coolness. They had put themselves there. We humans had got very little clothes on, partly for heat and also having got out of the habit of dressing in the afternoons, for no callers ever came to The Magnolias. But there were some now. There was a big, two-horsed thing at the door such as I have often seen driving out to Hampton Court, but never, never had I seen one stop at our gate before. It was most exciting. I hoped Jessie Hitchings and her mother saw.
There were two ladies inside, one of them old and frumpy, the other was Lady Scilly, whom I knew, though Mother didn’t. I haven’t got to her yet in my story. A footman was taking their orders, and Sarah was standing at the door holding on to her cap that she’d forgotten to put a pin in. Lucky she had a cap on at all! Mother doesn’t like her to leave her caps off to go to the door, even when George isn’t here, out of principle, and for once it told.
“For goodness sake get your head in, Gerty, you have got the shade a bit too strong to-day,” cried Mother, pulling my aunt in by her petticoats, and nearly upsetting the mirror on the dressing-table. Aunt Gerty came in with a cross grunt, and we all sat well inside till we heard the carriage drive away and Sarah mounting the stairs all of a hop, skip and a jump.
“Please m’m!” she cried almost before she got into the room, “there’s a carriage-and-pair just called–”
“Anything in it?” Mother said.
“Two ladies, m’m, and here’s their cards.”
I took one and Aunt Gerty the other.
“Dowager Countess of Fylingdales!” Aunt Gerty read, as if she was Lady Macbeth saying, “Out, dammed spot!”
The card I held was for Lady Scilly, and there was one for Lord Scilly, but it had got under the drawers.
“I said you wasn’t dressed, ma’am,” Sarah said, looking at Mother’s apron all over egg, and her rolled-up sleeves.
“No more I am,” said Mother, laughing. “Don’t look so disappointed, Gerty. I couldn’t have seen them.”
“But you shouldn’t have said your mistress wasn’t dressed, Sarah,” said Aunt Gerty. “It isn’t done like that in good houses. You should have said, ‘My mistress is gone out in the carriage.’”
“But that would have been a lie!” argued Sarah, “and I’m sure I don’t want to go to hell even for a carriage-and-pair.”
“Oh, where have you been before, Sarah,” Aunt Gerty sighed, “not to know that a society lie can’t let any one in for hell fire? Well, it is too late now; they have gone. And it was rather a shabby turnout for aristocratic swells like that, after all.”
“They didn’t really want to see me,” said Mother. “They only called on me to please George. He sent them probably. I have heard him speak of Lady Fylingdales. He stays there. She is one of his oldest friends. She is lame and nearly blind. Lady Scilly I shall never like from what I have heard of her. Tempe, run in the garden in the sun and dry your hair. Off you go!”
“And get a sunstroke,” thought I. “Just because she wants to talk to Aunt Gerty about the grand callers!”
So I stayed, and they have got so in the habit of not minding me that they went on as if I really had been out broiling in the sun.
Mother began to talk very fast about the new house, and getting visiting-cards printed, and taking her place in Society. These ladies coming had given her thoughts a fresh jog. She nearly cried over the bother of it all, and what George would now go expecting of her, and she with no education and no ambition to be a smart woman, as Aunt Gerty was continually egging her on to be, saying it was quite easy if you only had a nice slight figure, like she has.
“Bead chains and pince-nezs won’t do it as you seem to think,” Mother said. “And even if I get to be smart, I shall never get to be happy!”
“Happy!” screamed my Aunt Gertrude. “Who talked of being happy? You don’t go expecting to be happy, unless it makes you happy, as it ought, to put your foot down on those stuck-up cats who have been leading your husband astray all these years, and giving them a good what-for. It would me, that’s all I can say. Happiness indeed! It is something higher than mere happiness. What you have got to do, my dear Lucy, is just to take your call and go on—not before you’ve had a trip to Paris for your clothes,