Directly his wife’s letter reached him he telegraphed and packed. This was business. He was not a man to lose time when it came to business; nor was he a man to jeopardize a chance by neglecting to be amiable. He met his wife perfectly amiably, aware that amiability under such circumstances was wisdom. Besides, he actually felt amiable — very. For once, Lotty was really helping him. He kissed her affectionately on getting out of Beppo’s fly, and was afraid she must have got up extremely early; he made no complaints of the steepness of the walk up; he told her pleasantly of his journey, and when called upon, obediently admired the views. It was all neatly mapped out in his mind, what he was going to do that first day — have a shave, have a bath, put on clean clothes, sleep a while, and then would come lunch and the introduction to Lady Caroline.
In the train he had selected the words of his greeting, going over them with care — some slight expression of his gratification in meeting one of whom he, in common with the whole world, had heard — but of course put delicately, very delicately; some slight reference to her distinguished parents and the part her family had played in the history of England — made, of course, with proper tact; a sentence or two about her eldest brother Lord Winchcombe, who had won his V.C. in the late war under circumstances which could only cause — he might or might not add this — every Englishman’s heart to beat higher than ever with pride, and the first steps towards what might well be the turning-point in his career would have been taken.
And here he was . . . no, it was too terrible, what could be more terrible? Only a towel on, water running off his legs, and that exclamation. He knew at once the lady was Lady Caroline — the minute the exclamation was out he knew it. Rarely did Mr. Wilkins use that word, and never, never in the presence of a lady or a client. While as for the towel — why had he come? Why had he not stayed in Hampstead? It would be impossible to live this down.
But Mr. Wilkins was reckoning without Scrap. She, indeed, screwed up her face at the first flash of him on her astonished sight in an enormous effort not to laugh, and having choked the laughter down and got her face serious again, she said as composedly as if he had had all his clothes on, “How do you do.”
What perfect tact. Mr. Wilkins could have worshipped her. This exquisite ignoring. Blue blood, of course, coming out.
Overwhelmed with gratitude he took her offered hand and said “How do you do,” in his turn, and merely to repeat the ordinary words seemed magically to restore the situation to the normal. Indeed, he was so much relieved, and it was so natural to be shaking hands, to be conventionally greeting, that he forgot he had only a towel on and his professional manner came back to him. He forgot what he was looking like, but he did not forget that this was Lady Caroline Dester, the lady he had come all the way to Italy to see, and he did not forget that it was in her face, her lovely and important face, that he had flung his terrible exclamation. He must at once entreat her forgiveness. To say such a word to a lady — to any lady, but of all ladies to just this one . . .
“I’m afraid I used unpardonable language,” began Mr. Wilkins very earnestly, as earnestly and ceremoniously as if he had had his clothes on.
“I thought it most appropriate,” said Scrap, who was used to damns.
Mr. Wilkins was incredibly relieved and soothed by this answer. No offence, then, taken. Blue blood again. Only blue blood could afford such a liberal, such an understanding attitude.
“It is Lady Caroline Dester, is it not, to whom I am speaking?” he asked, his voice sounding even more carefully cultivated than usual, for he had to restrain too much pleasure, too much relief, too much of the joy of the pardoned and the shriven from getting into it.
“Yes,” said Scrap; and for the life of her she couldn’t help smiling. She couldn’t help it. She hadn’t meant to smile at Mr. Wilkins, not ever; but really he looked — and then his voice was the top of the rest of him, oblivious of the towel and his legs, and talking just like a church.
“Allow me to introduce myself,” said Mr. Wilkins, with the ceremony of the drawing-room. “My name is Mellersh-Wilkins.”
And he instinctively held out his hand a second time at the words.
“I thought perhaps it was,” said Scrap, a second time having hers shaken and a second time unable not to smile.
He was about to proceed to the first of the graceful tributes he had prepared in the train, oblivious, as he could not see himself, that he was without his clothes, when the servants came running up the stairs and, simultaneously, Mrs. Fisher appeared in the doorway of her sitting-room. For all this had happened very quickly, and the servants away in the kitchen, and Mrs. Fisher pacing her battlements, had not had time on hearing the noise to appear before the second handshake.
The servants when they heard the dreaded noise knew at once what had happened, and rushed straight into the bathroom to try and staunch the flood, taking no notice of the figure on the landing in the towel, but Mrs. Fisher did not know what the noise could be, and coming out of her room to inquire stood rooted on the door-sill.
It was enough to root anybody. Lady Caroline shaking hands with what evidently, if he had had clothes on, would have been Mrs. Wilkins’s husband, and both of them conversing just as if —
Then Scrap became aware of Mrs. Fisher. She turned to her at once. “Do let me,” she said gracefully, “introduce Mr. Mellersh-Wilkins. He has just come. This,” she added, turning to Mr. Wilkins, “is Mrs. Fisher.”
And Mr. Wilkins, nothing if not courteous, reacted at once to the conventional formula. First he bowed to the elderly lady in the doorway, then he crossed over to her, his wet feet leaving footprints as he went, and having got to her he politely held out his hand.
“It is a pleasure,” said Mr. Wilkins in his carefully modulated voice, “to meet a friend of my wife’s.”
Scrap melted away down into the garden.
Chapter 15
The strange effect of this incident was that when they met that evening at dinner both Mrs. Fisher and Lady Caroline had a singular feeling of secret understanding with Mr. Wilkins. He could not be to them as other men. He could not be to them as he would have been if they had met him in his clothes. There was a sense of broken ice; they felt at once intimate and indulgent; almost they felt to him as nurses do — as those feel who have assisted either patients or young children at their baths. They were acquainted with Mr. Wilkins’s legs.
What Mrs. Fisher said to him that morning in her first shock will never be known, but what Mr. Wilkins said to her in reply, when reminded by what she was saying of his condition, was so handsome in its apology, so proper in its confusion, that she had ended by being quite sorry for him and completely placated. After all, it was an accident, and nobody could help accidents. And when she saw him next at dinner, dressed, polished, spotless as to linen and sleek as to hair, she felt this singular sensation of a secret understanding with him and, added to it, of a kind of almost personal pride in his appearance, now that he was dressed, which presently extended in some subtle way to an almost personal pride in everything he said.
There was no doubt whatever in Mrs. Fisher’s mind that a man was infinitely preferable as a companion to a woman. Mr. Wilkins’s presence and conversation at once raised the standard of the dinner-table from that of a bear garden — yes, a bear garden — to that of a civilized social gathering. He talked as men talk, about interesting subjects, and, though most courteous to Lady Caroline, showed no traces of dissolving into simpers and idiocy whenever he addressed her. He was, indeed, precisely as courteous to Mrs. Fisher herself; and when for the first time at that table politics were introduced, he listened to her with the proper seriousness on her exhibiting a desire to speak, and treated her opinions with the attention they deserved. He appeared to think much as she did about Lloyd George, and in regard to literature he was equally sound. In fact there was real conversation, and he liked nuts. How he could have married Mrs. Wilkins was a mystery.
Lotty, for her part, looked on with
round eyes. She had expected Mellersh to take at least two days before he got to this stage, but the San Salvatore spell had worked instantly. It was not only that he was pleasant at dinner, for she had always seen him pleasant at dinners with other people, but he had been pleasant all day privately — so pleasant that he had complimented her on her looks while she was brushing out her hair, and kissed her. Kissed her! And it was neither good-morning nor good-night.
Well, this being so, she would put off telling him the truth about her nest-egg, and about Rose not being his hostess after all, till next day. Pity to spoil things. She had been going to blurt it out as soon as he had had a rest, but it did seem a pity to disturb such a very beautiful frame of mind as that of Mellersh this first day. Let him too get more firmly fixed in heaven. Once fixed he wouldn’t mind anything.
Her face sparkled with delight at the instantaneous effect of San Salvatore. Even the catastrophe of the bath, of which she had been told when she came in from the garden, had not shaken him. Of course all that he had needed was a holiday. What a brute she had been to him when he wanted to take her himself to Italy. But this arrangement, as it happened, was ever so much better, though not through any merit of hers. She talked and laughed gaily, not a shred of fear of him left in her, and even when she said, struck by his spotlessness, that he looked so clean that one could eat one’s dinner off him, and Scrap laughed, Mellersh laughed too. He would have minded that at home, supposing that at home she had had the spirit to say it.
It was a successful evening. Scrap, whenever she looked at Mr. Wilkins, saw him in his towel, dripping water, and felt indulgent. Mrs. Fisher was delighted with him. Rose was a dignified hostess in Mr. Wilkins’s eyes, quiet and dignified, and he admired the way she waived her right to preside at the head of the table — as a graceful compliment, of course, to Mrs. Fisher’s age. Mrs. Arbuthnot was, opined Mr. Wilkins, naturally retiring. She was the most retiring of the three ladies. He had met her before dinner alone for a moment in the drawing-room, and had expressed in appropriate language his sense of her kindness in wishing him to join her party, and she had been retiring. Was she shy? Probably. She had blushed, and murmured as if in deprecation, and then the others had come in. At dinner she talked least. He would, of course, become better acquainted with her during the next few days, and it would be a pleasure, he was sure.
Meanwhile Lady Caroline was all and more than all Mr. Wilkins had imagined, and had received his speeches, worked in skillfully between the courses, graciously; Mrs. Fisher was the exact old lady he had been hoping to come across all his professional life; and Lotty had not only immensely improved, but was obviously au mieux — Mr. Wilkins knew what was necessary in French — with Lady Caroline. He had been much tormented during the day by the thought of how he had stood conversing with Lady Caroline forgetful of his not being dressed, and had at last written her a note most deeply apologizing, and beseeching her to overlook his amazing, his incomprehensible obliviousness, to which she had replied in pencil on the back of the envelop, “Don’t worry.” And he had obeyed her commands, and had put it from him. The result was he was now in great contentment. Before going to sleep that night he pinched his wife’s ear. She was amazed. These endearments . . .
What is more, the morning brought no relapse in Mr. Wilkins, and he kept up to his high level through out the day, in spite of its being the first day of the second week, and therefore pay day.
It being pay day precipitated Lotty’s confession, which she had, when it came to the point, been inclined to put off a little longer. She was not afraid, she dared anything, but Mellersh was in such an admirable humour — why risk clouding it just yet? When, however, soon after breakfast Costanza appeared with a pile of very dirty little bits of paper covered with sums in pencil, and having knocked at Mrs. Fisher’s door and been sent away, and at Lady Caroline’s door and been sent away, and at Rose’s door and had no answer because Rose had gone out, she waylaid Lotty, who was showing Mellersh over the house, and pointed to the bits of paper and talked very rapidly and loud, and shrugged her shoulders a great deal, and kept on pointing at the bits of paper, Lotty remembered that a week had passed without anybody paying anything to anyone, and that the moment had come to settle up.
“Does this good lady want something?” inquired Mr. Wilkins mellifluously.
“Money,” said Lotty.
“Money?”
“It’s the housekeeping bills.”
“Well, you have nothing to do with those,” said Mr. Wilkins serenely.
“Oh yes, I have—”
And the confession was precipitated.
It was wonderful how Mellersh took it. One would have imagined that his sole idea about the nest-egg had always been that it should be lavished on just this. He did not, as he would have done at home, cross-examine her; he accepted everything as it came pouring out, about her fibs and all, and when she had finished and said, “You have every right to be angry, I think, but I hope you won’t be and will forgive me instead,” he merely asked, “What can be more beneficial than such a holiday?”
Whereupon she put her arm through his and held it tight and said, “Oh, Mellersh, you really are too sweet!” — her face red with pride in him.
That he should so quickly assimilate the atmosphere, that he should at once become nothing but kindness, showed surely what a real affinity he had with good and beautiful things. He belonged quite naturally in this place of heavenly calm. He was — extraordinary how she had misjudged him — by nature a child of light. Fancy not minding the dreadful fibs she had gone in for before leaving home; fancy passing even those over without comment. Wonderful. Yet not wonderful, for wasn’t he in heaven? In heaven nobody minded any of those done-with things, one didn’t even trouble to forgive and forget, one was much too happy. She pressed his arm tight in her gratitude and appreciation; and though he did not withdraw his, neither did he respond to her pressure. Mr. Wilkins was of a cool habit, and rarely had any real wish to press.
Meanwhile, Costanza, perceiving that she had lost the Wilkinses’ ear had gone back to Mrs. Fisher, who at least understood Italian, besides being clearly in the servants’ eyes the one of the party marked down by age and appearance to pay the bills; and to her, while Mrs. Fisher put the final touches to her toilette, for she was preparing, by means of putting on a hat and veil and feather boa and gloves, to go for her first stroll in the lower garden — positively her first since her arrival — she explained that unless she was given money to pay the last week’s bills the shops of Castagneto would refuse credit for the current week’s food. Not even credit would they give, affirmed Costanza, who had been spending a great deal and was anxious to pay all her relations what was owed them and also to find out how her mistresses took it, for that day’s meals. Soon it would be the hour of colazione, and how could there be colazione without meat, without fish, without eggs, without —
Mrs. Fisher took the bills out of her hand and looked at the total; and she was so much astonished by its size, so much horrified by the extravagance to which it testified, that she sat down at her writing-table to go into the thing thoroughly.
Costanza had a very bad half-hour. She had not supposed it was in the English to be so mercenary. And then la Vecchia, as she was called in the kitchen, knew so much Italian, and with a doggedness that filled Costanza with shame on her behalf, for such conduct was the last one expected from the noble English, she went through item after item, requiring and persisting till she got them, explanations.
There were no explanations, except that Costanza had had one glorious week of doing exactly as she chose, of splendid unbridled licence, and that this was the result.
Costanza, having no explanations, wept. It was miserable to think she would have to cook from now on under watchfulness, under suspicion; and what would her relations say when they found the orders they received were whittled down? They would say she had no influence; they would despise her.
Costanza wept, but Mrs. Fisher was
unmoved. In slow and splendid Italian, with the roll of the cantos of the Inferno, she informed her that she would pay no bills till the following week, and that meanwhile the food was to be precisely as good as ever, and at a quarter the cost.
Costanza threw up her hands.
Next week, proceeded Mrs. Fisher unmoved, if she found this had been so she would pay the whole. Otherwise — she paused; for what she would do otherwise she did not know herself. But she paused and looked impenetrable, majestic and menacing, and Costanza was cowed.
Then Mrs. Fisher, having dismissed her with a gesture, went in search of Lady Caroline to complain. She had been under the impression that Lady Caroline ordered the meals and therefore was responsible for the prices, but now it appeared that the cook had been left to do exactly as she pleased ever since they got there, which of course was simply disgraceful.
Scrap was not in her bedroom, but the room, on Mrs. Fisher’s opening the door, for she suspected her of being in it and only pretending not to hear the knock, was still flowerlike from her presence.
“Scent,” sniffed Mrs. Fisher, shutting it again; and she wished Carlyle could have had five minutes’ straight talk with this young woman. And yet — perhaps even he —
She went downstairs to go into the garden in search of her, and in the hall encountered Mr. Wilkins. He had his hat on, and was lighting a cigar.
Delphi Collected Works of Elizabeth von Arnim (Illustrated) Page 282
