We were able to relate a good deal, by taking turns, and we poured it all out about Towse and the flat and the Crown Jewels and Thomas Carlyle’s house in Chelsea, and the waxworks in Westminster Abbey, and how we had been admitted to go over the Admiralty’s docks and Scotland Yard and Greenwich Observatory, and had heard Mr. A. Balfour speak the night before, and Evelyn listened with great patience and good humour.
“I’m keeping those things for my old age,” she said. “I suppose you’ll absolutely despise me, but I haven’t done one of them yet—not so much as the Poets’ Corner or the National Gallery. I don’t see how you get time for them.”
“But what are we here for?” I asked.
“Oh, for tons of other things! Haven’t you been going anywhere—no society?”
“Why, yes,” said Graham—“a little. We have met Mrs. Jerome Jarvis, and others; and we hope to see some of the others again.”
“We had a delightful evening last week at the Colonial Institute,” I said, “and we are asked to a conversazione of the Royal Geographical Society; and we’ve had three invitations to private views of picture exhibitions, sent by friends of the artists. We are enjoying ourselves very much indeed.”
I didn’t see why Evelyn shouldn’t know.
“But, my dear lambs,” cried Evelyn, “you ought to be having the time of your lives! Do you realise that you represent between you a good quarter of the mining interests of Nova Scotia, and enough New Brunswick timber to buy a county town with?”
“I expect we’re having as good a time as that gives us any claim to,” said Graham.
“Oh, you don’t know this country! Of course you’re not American,” said Evelyn, considering us thoughtfully, “but you’re next door to it.”
“That’s more of an advantage when we are at home, Miss Dicey,” said Graham, but Evelyn was reflecting.
“We are hoping to get tickets for the House before long,” he went on, “but it seems about the hardest show on earth to get admittance to. Were you thinking of going?”
“I went the day the King did,” said Evelyn. “I thought it would be livelier; and it was. When Edward is really dressed, he’s a dear. We’ve got nothing on our side like him, have we?”
“We’ve got him!” I protested, and Evelyn laughed.
“To be sure; I forgot. He’s got you. But the House is easy enough—I can work that for you. Our Minister is always ready to oblige.”
“Thanks, very much,” said Graham; “we haven’t a Minister, being more or less at home, but there’s a fellow they call the High Commissioner for our part of the world, who has undertaken to see us through. He’s pretty slow, but I expect we can depend on him.”
“Well, if you have any difficulty, apply to me,” said Evelyn; and we thanked her again.
“I can’t get over it,” she went on. “You and Towse and the flat, and your happy hours in crypts and places. It’s ridiculous. Look at the time we have, and the—and the ”
“And the duchesses you become,” put in Graham gravely.
“Why, yes,” said Evelyn. “The American duchess is a deservedly popular institution—good for the Duke and improving for the American. Do you know any?”
We both shook our heads.
“I expect Canadians are something new over here—that’s what it is. Americans were new once, and frequented Bloomsbury boarding-houses and brought introductions from Emerson and Thoreau, and wrote their experiences afterwards in the magazines. Now you are.”
“We were discovered by J. Cartier in 1535. One Wolfe planted firm Britannia’s flag on us about two centuries and a quarter later,” responded Graham. “I imagine we are known to their leading ethnologists, and perhaps to Lord Elgin.”
“I just love to hear you talk,” said Evelyn again, though he was chaffing her head off. “The fact is you haven’t become foreigners yet—you still belong to them, so of course they think you’re of no importance. Become foreigners, get Mr. Ambassador Bryce to come over and write you a Declaration of Independence, start a President, and take no further notice of them. They’ll adore you. I don’t mind giving you the tip.”
“It’s awfully good of you!” said Graham.
“Well, anyhow I’m going to introduce you in a minute to my very greatest friends here, Barbie Pavisay and her mother, Lady Doleford. Such a place they’ve got, poor darlings—pure Tudor—and not a penny. You remember Lord Doleford’s death a couple of years ago, and how he had eight jockeys to bear him to the tomb, and nobody could prevent it?”
“I’m afraid I don’t remember,” said Graham.
“Oh, it was in all the New York papers—didn’t you see it? Well, anyhow, the present Lord Doleford is in India with his regiment. He got a decoration of some sort the other day for something he did that had to do with plague; and they think he’s a perfect angel because he won’t let them send him any of the money they make by selling the ancestral cauliflowers. They get a house in town lent to them sometimes, but generally they live in about two rooms of Pavis Court to save fires—it’s in Crosshire—and grow things for the market. It can’t be sold, and it’s too dilapidated to let; but the fruit there has a tremendous reputation, and it’s pretty nearly all they’ve got to live on. I want to know if you ever heard of anything so sad?”
“Oh, yes! Lots of sadder things,” I said. “I should love market-gardening.”
“Not if you were a Countess,” said Evelyn. “And a real one, mind. The best blood in England, as they used to say in novels. You’ll see it’s so, too, the minute they come into range—none of those cases you’ve got to take on trust over here. I’m not advertising the Earl, for I haven’t seen him yet, though I thirst and long to. There’s every sort of evidence that he’s an absolute lamb, a dear and precious lamb. We are to meet at Christmas—he comes home then, and I don’t get half my sleep wondering what he’ll think of this American. Here they are!”
The shop door was darkened at that moment by two tall ladies. They looked about them with a kind of vague assurance, they were evidently unfamiliar with the place; but that, you saw at once, was its misfortune. Evelyn darted out and seized them, and the elder lady showed the same sort of relief that strangers do when you find the place for them in the Church Service. One would think Evelyn Dicey many degrees higher in rank than a mere Countess by the way Lady Doleford acted to her, instead of being just—well, just Evelyn Dicey. Lady Barbara took her more for granted; but you would think her mother was under every kind of obligation on earth to Evelyn. It seemed to me almost docile, the way they came along with her to the table where we were sitting, Lady Doleford talking and hesitating and explaining and excusing, her daughter following as if nothing in the course of nature could matter very much. They both looked a little pulled up when Evelyn introduced us.
“Two Northern friends of mine,” she said, “that I’ve just encountered in the most wonderful way here in this shop. They stepped in here out of the past just as I did out of the future—I mean they had had tea and I was going to have it; and here we all are, aren’t we, in the present, and what will you have, dearest Lady Doleford? I know you can’t endure anything sticky.”
Lady Barbara looked at us with more interest than her mother did. Lady Doleford accepted us graciously; but in her eye I thought I saw the recognition of us as attendant circumstances which she might well have been spared; and as to our consequence it was simply not decipherable.
“Oh, pray, dear Evelyn, no fresh tea for us!” she pleaded; “I am sure what you have there will be delightful. You know I like the merest water bewitched, and so does Barbara.”
“No, mamma, really,” said Barbara, “I like a cup of tea.”
“Oh, very well, then,” retreated Lady Doleford, “and a little bread-and-butter, dearest Evelyn, thank you,” though if she could have asked for the bread without the butter I believe she would have preferred it.
“What, nodings!” cried Evelyn. “Nodings in all this variety? No chocolate cake, walnut cake, caramel ca
ke—no éclairs, macaroons, petit fours! Do be a little more hospitable, Lady Doleford—more imaginative, Barbara.”
“I’ll have anything there is,” said Barbara, “and mother will have a rusk, I know, Evelyn, if there are any. She adores rusks.”
“Heaven send rusks,” said Evelyn; and Heaven did send them, Lady Doleford subsiding after one more faint protest.
“It is really too good of you,” she said, “to give us tea, after our proposing to have it elsewhere. But we found that my sister-in-law had been obliged to go out earlier than she expected, to see about getting her secretary, who has suddenly collapsed with nervous breakdown, into a rest cure. How dreadfully common these cases seem to have become.”
My mind flew to Lady Doleford’s sister-in-law; and I longed for the conversation to unfold why she had a secretary.
“You are Americanising too fast!” cried Evelyn. “It’s what I complain of. Where are we to go for our rest cures, at this rate?”
“You must all come to Canada,” remarked Graham. “We are doing very well; but there are still large areas in Canada that would be infallible for nervous disorders.”
“Senator Trent might accommodate a few thousand of us,” said Evelyn. “He might put us up, as they say over here, in one of those townships of his on the Restigouche, and never know we were there.”
Lady Doleford looked at Graham with a little more attention.
“Are you Canadian?” she asked. “I thought Miss Dicey described you as fellow-Americans.”
“I don’t think I did mention Canada,” said Evelyn, “but that was only my forgetfulness.”
“They are so forgetful,” I said. “It’s what we keep trying to explain.”
“But why should you mind?” asked Barbara.
“Why shouldn’t you be flattered?” demanded Evelyn humorously.
Graham made a funny little stiff bow.
“We are,” he said, “but our modesty shrinks from any category but our own.”
“Well, do you know,” said Barbara, looking at us thoughtfully, “I shouldn’t have been quite sure that you were Americans.”
“Alas!” said Graham, out of plain politeness to Evelyn; and he and Lady Barbara looked at one another kindly and laughed together. I am sure that was the beginning of it. He felt drawn to her for not being quite sure we were what we weren’t, and she felt curious about him for wanting to be what he was. We went away almost immediately then; but Evelyn must have given a very good account of us when our backs were turned, for the very next day she wrote and said that Lady Doleford had made her promise to bring us to see them in Beaufort Gardens.
CHAPTER VII
I HAVE often wondered what Evelyn conveyed—no, perhaps not that exactly, since about so frank a person there couldn’t be many guesses—but what language and methods she found by which to convey to Lady Doleford that we might be, when all was said and done, just worth looking at twice.
Lady Doleford didn’t know us; she hadn’t discovered our shining personal traits; she was as little curious about strangers as anyone you could imagine, and we had no earthly claim upon her. What grounds remained, then, upon which we could possibly be recommended to her except those that Evelyn had so clearly in her eye when she suggested, if I may put it so horridly, that we weren’t quite getting our money’s-worth in London? Perhaps she felt them solidly under her own feet; which may have made it easier. All I can say is that if these were the grounds of Evelyn’s acceptance she danced about on them with the most wonderful careless security. She showed a confidence in them that we certainly never could feel. Whatever the importance of money may be, it seems a strange thing to make one free of England. No, as soon as we had time to reflect we put away the unworthy thought, and decided that Evelyn was accepted because of the natural charm she possessed, and we invited because of the natural charm we might disclose. About my own share of that responsibility I was naturally nervous enough; but one could always depend upon Graham.
We began, of course, by going to tea.
“What do you expect?” I asked Graham in the hansom.
“What do you?” he replied; and we decided that we expected Lady Doleford, and Lady Barbara, and Evelyn, and perhaps Lady Doleford’s sister-in-law, the one with the secretary, who probably, we decided, had some way of earning her own living, since she had a secretary. The cake would be rusks, and there wouldn’t be much fire. We had already noticed that fire is the commonest economy in England—I suppose, because it can be carried out without any sacrifice of dignity. They put what they call cheeks into the grates. As Mr. Howells has explained, your back is seldom warm in England; and I would like to add never where there are cheeks. We thought Lady Doleford would revel in cheeks.
But in London you never can tell. The house in Beaufort Gardens was luxurious with that quality of luxury that nothing, oh! nothing can buy. The things in it were like books; one could stop before each of them, yet they had a subdued relationship that put them in the same type, allied them to the same standard of choice as the generations went on that had furnished the rooms. Mr. and Miss Trent were announced in a drawing-room that already held a quantity of people, people who sat about with opulent furs half-thrown off, and seemed to have known each other all their lives. Tea was being handed by a very old family servant indeed, and I never saw anything so overwhelmed with a sense of the importance of his function. He was as grave as a minister, at any rate as a pew-opener; and when you said milk and no sugar into the ear he bent toward you, there was a faithfulness in his bow of assent that made you feel that not for a king’s ransom would he bring you sugar and no milk.
Lady Doleford welcomed us with the same permissive, acquiescent air she had at Stewart’s, but very kindly. “What and who are these,” she seemed to say, “that the tide of the time has washed to my feet?” but she quite saw it her duty to pick us up and make us comfortable. One gets so often, in London, that impression of being dreadfully adventitious; more adventitious, according to Graham, than one has any business to be. Graham said afterwards that one felt, with Lady Doleford. that one mattered so little, it was rather a shame one should matter at all. He had a moment, he said, of wishing just to relieve her of any effort she might feel called upon to make to take him in, just to efface himself, telling her ever so gently, “Don’t bother! I’m gone.” I had no such moment. I was delighted to be there, and so I told Evelyn. As we stood talking to her Graham’s glance wandered round the room; and I, too, remembered that we hadn’t seen Lady Barbara.
Evelyn at once took charge of us, which was right and kind of her, in view of Lady Doleford’s apparent helplessness with anyone whom she had not known from infancy. She took it for granted that we would want to hear immediately and all about everybody in the room; and she proceeded to tell us. It was simply astonishing the amount of information Evelyn had concerning them, their ranks and their titles and the way nearly half of them were related to Lady Doleford, their aims and ambitions, and other things, too, that one couldn’t have been supposed to know about them. She had been hardly longer in the country than we had, yet she had obtained the fluent biographical detail of a lifetime. And with a minuteness and show of accuracy that compelled respect, I must say. She must have tackled it with distinct purpose, and given it the most concentrated attention, made it simply her business, to have acquired so much; such thoroughness almost gave one the impression that that, really, was what she was there for. Graham said it was the virgin soil of the American mind, in which family trees would naturally take root and spread and flourish; but I couldn’t help thinking there was more in it than that.
“The dark, good-looking man talking to Lady Doleford,” said Evelyn, “is John Pontex.”
“The man who wrote ‘The Anglo-Saxon’?” asked Graham.
“That’s right. It has sold, hasn’t it—I mean, for anything that isn’t a novel? And I hear he let the American rights go for a thousand dollars! He’s a son of Lord Maberly of Derry. It’s an Irish peerage, but carries a
seat in the Lords. And the eldest son is distinctly wanting—isn’t it odd?”
“Why, that’s a great fellow!” said Graham. “That book of his is a searchlight right into the next century, and no funny fiction, either—cold probability.”
“Well,” said Evelyn, “his poor brother Guy’s really, I believe, a confirmed epileptic, so he’s quite likely to succeed. Money, too—through the mother. She was a Miss Zweitiger, the Vienna branch. That lovely thing on the sofa is the Countess of Garsings. You may believe just about half of what you’ve heard about her—she’s really gone very straight since she brought her girl out.”
“But we haven’t heard anything,” said I.
“Well, of course, you wouldn’t—in the British Museum. And—don’t look both at once—the little grey-headed man with his hands in his pockets on the hearth-rug is the Duke of Dulwich.”
“Oh!” I said. “Graham, have you done looking?”
“Yes,” said Graham. “Is he an interesting person?”
“Why, Graham, what a question!” I exclaimed, taking my turn.
“Well, sometimes they are,” he defended himself.
“I guess pretty nearly always,” said Evelyn; “even when they’re as hard up as poor little Dulwich. They’re so scarce. There aren’t more than sixteen or seventeen in England, you know; eight in Scotland, and only two in Ireland. Not counting the Royal ones.”
“Historically speaking,” said Graham, “no doubt they are scarce; but I’ve always understood that there were circles, in this country, where you couldn’t get away from them.”
“I don’t want to get away from them,” I put in. “And I shall always love to remember, Evelyn, that I saw my Duke on a hearth-rug instead of in a procession.”
Cousin Cinderella Page 6
