Cousin Cinderella

by Sara Jeanette Duncan

  “We did indeed, dearest Agnes. Though I’m sure the poor man hadn’t a suspicion into whose ears he was pouring that most distressing story. And we do indeed mean to win their hearts if it can be done,” Lady Lippington went on plaintively. “That is my great anxiety always—the social side. I make one strict rule—no favouritism. If I dance with one Minister I have a little talk with another, or sit out with the Leader of the Opposition—ordinary tact, and it’s really quite easy.”

  “And what,” asked the Duchess, “do the Canadians pay you for all this? What’s Amherst’s princely salary?”

  “I’m ashamed to say I don’t remember,” said Lady Lippington; and I do not think she did. The Duchess turned to me.

  “I’m ashamed to say I do remember,” I murmured, “but nothing would induce me to tell. It’s so ridiculously small,” I added to Lady Lippington, “compared with what you think you ought to do for us—I’m humiliated.”

  “Ah, well!” said the Duchess; “you mustn’t expect too much of us. We’re only human, you know.”

  I longed for the audacity to say: “Dear Duchess, you are far too modest!” but I didn’t find it; and presently, as more people arrived, the air became so thick with condolence that I felt compelled to come away. All this is only important because it explains why I had taken a short cut into Piccadilly on my way home on that particular afternoon. That’ is what I am leading up to, my being exactly in front of Apsley House, walking, with a drove of Londoners, toward a lovely sunset that was going on in the direction of Hammersmith, thinking how little matters are ever arranged in this world to our entire satisfaction, and coming unexpectedly face to face once again with Peter.

  He had turned round and was walking beside me before either of us realised, it seemed to me, quite what had happened, exactly as if we had met by appointment, instead of its being the most astonishing thing that could possibly have taken place, as I said it was.

  “I thought you were in Ireland,” I remarked.

  “One can’t always be in Ireland,” he explained.

  “Shall we——?”

  “Yes,” I said. He meant should we turn into the Park, out of the noise of the traffic. We went rather a long way in, where it was almost green with lilac-bushes, and then turned west again. The landscape, I remember, seemed to slip away on both sides, and the path to disappear under us and behind us, by the mechanical necessity of walking. It was a heavenly exercise, walking, that had very little to do with the ground, and yet enormously helped the real matter in hand, whatever it was. Whatever it was seemed more possible and easier with every step, and yet every step had a rhythmic value of its own that made it, looking back, indescribable.

  I learned from Lord Doleford that he had just been seeing Mrs. Jerome Jarvis at the flat.

  “I generally look her up,” said he, “when I’m in town. But she said you were out. So it doesn’t seem so very wonderful, meeting you here.”

  “No,” I said; “it doesn’t. Not now.”

  It is incidental to the Serpentine that little boys throw sticks into it and that brown and white spaniel dogs plunge in and get the sticks. Or else it is one of those things that you remember from a previous existence; I think, however, that we spoke about the brown spaniel dogs; I am almost certain we did. If you take it for granted that what we said was very clever I shall be pleasantly surprised, but should hardly think it mattered. The actual quality of a conversation may have so little to do with its importance. I know I mentioned having been at the Lippingtons’, but forgot to explain how amusing it had been there. One doesn’t remember everything at the time.

  We passed a number of people sitting upon the benches, mostly young people, sitting there in pairs. Some of them would not bear looking at—at least they would bear it, that was the horrid fact—but I was fascinated by the aspect of one group of two. She was nice-looking and tastefully dressed; and she had a pathetic expression, and poked the gravel path with her umbrella, while he, at a proper distance, as melancholy as she, hung upon her slightest movement. It seemed even more reposeful and beatific than walking to elucidate whatever it was, and I had an instant of wishing that Peter would suggest sitting down somewhere so that I might poke the gravel with my umbrella and he might watch me doing it. Presently, however, I saw that this was no isolated case. The gravel was being poked in all directions to such an extent that I wondered the caretakers didn’t interfere; and I perceived a confession in the poking that made it impossible to dwell upon even in thought. The melancholy, however, we could make our own, and we did, walking along as if our hearts were breaking instead of being simply too full for utterance, as they were, at least for more than utterance about the dogs.

  It might be thought that one special topic would have absorbed us, that we would have rushed to discuss the engagement of our several brother and sister. The event had happened since we met; it had been thought interesting and important by all our friends, widely talked of, and celebrated in the newspapers. It was impossible to deny its interest and importance to us as well, and equally impossible to suppose that for one moment we forgot it, yet the difficulty of approaching it seemed insuperable. It ought also, in the nature of things, to have drawn us cordially together, yet when at last we managed to drag it in, we mentioned it allusively and looked at it askance, as if, once it were fully recognised, it would have rather the effect of keeping us apart. But it could not, of course, be ignored, taken for granted, or treated with other indignity, indefinitely.

  “I think it was uncommonly sharp of them to discover that they liked one another,” said Peter. “Uncommonly sharp. I never saw any traces of it,—did you?”

  Then Peter suspected, Peter understood, Peter criticised, too. I cannot explain the unexpected comfort and support that there was in this discovery, or the insight and power of arriving at just conclusions upon very slight data that it seemed to reveal in Peter. Compared with mine his opportunities of observing what I suppose I must call the love affair of Graham and Barbara had been very small indeed, yet here he was saying things, venturing in his unvarnished, British way to say things of exactly the kind that I had for weeks been thinking. Yet I did not agree, immediately.

  “Oh, well,” I said, “so long as they have discovered it!”

  Why I took the line of appearing to suppose they had is inexplicable to me to this day. I may have wanted Peter to insist that I was wrong. But he is one of those Englishmen who always suppose that people mean exactly what they say; he never gives them the benefit of the doubt.

  “Then you think it’s all right? Good business?” he said gloomily.

  “I’m afraid that’s a very proper way of describing it,” I replied, with prudence.

  “You’re afraid—oh, I see! Well, personally, I hope there’s more in it than that. Your brother’s such a good chap—I should be sorry ”

  “And Barbara is such a dear,” I responded. “One would hate to think ”

  “It’s so fundamental, isn’t it?” said Peter.

  “Yes,” I said, “I think so, too.” I did think so.

  “Barb isn’t much of a judge of human nature,” he went on thoughtfully, “but she ought to like him.”

  “And I don’t believe Graham is much of a judge of—of love,” I said, quite clearly, “but he ought to adore her, of course. Darling Barbara.”

  We passed three lilac-bushes in silence, during which I felt that Peter was perceiving the situation in a further aspect. I wondered if he would find it improved.

  “Then do you mean to say,” he said at last, “that you think neither of them ”

  “Oh, never mind!” I replied recklessly. “I daresay it will come out all right in the end.”

  “But in that case,” he went on seriously, “what, in heaven’s name, are they doing it for?”

  “Don’t ask me!” I disclaimed.

  Peter turned red, I could see without looking that he did. “I suppose I’ve got to understand it from Barbara’s point of view,” he said un
willingly; “but what Trent is thinking of—what is he thinking of?”

  I reflected for a moment. “Graham is simply charmed!” I said.

  “I do not understand that,” he replied obstinately, “and I’m pretty sure poor old Barb doesn’t either. I won’t believe that of her, anyhow. She must imagine he wants her more than that.”

  “I daresay she does,” I said cheerfully. “I am sure Graham could do a courtship that would take them both in beautifully.”

  As Lord Doleford considered that, our eyes met.

  “It hasn’t taken us in,” he observed; and I did not know whether I wanted most to laugh or to cry as I answered “No.”

  CHAPTER XXIV

  “EVELYN seems to be taking it very much to heart,” said Mrs. Jarvis, whom I must, before it is too late, begin to call Janice, as I had been doing on and off chapters ago in real life; she liked it so much better. As I had met Mr. Jarvis only twice, she excused me from calling him Jerry—it wasn’t really unfriendly in me, she knew, only shy and silly and Colonial. Mrs. Jarvis—Janice—was never at a loss to explain anything, especially by adjectives.

  We were still in the flat, though Miss Game threatened on the horizon, and Towse kept an increasingly anxious eye upon the mantel ornaments. It wasn’t that she thought our honesty wouldn’t stand the final strain; it was, now we had got so far, that she didn’t want no cracks, ’ouse-agents, as we might or again we might not know, being that artful. Term had begun and Billy had once more gone “up.” Janice often said she was sure I missed him almost as much as she did, to which I agreed with pleasure. Peter had again disappeared, leaving, his and Evelyn’s friends were all afraid, no sort of doubt about the future. Graham was still at Pavis Court—there was so much to arrange—and the party there remained unchanged, with the exception of Lord Scansby, who had left again for Yorkshire.

  I asked Mrs. Jerome about Evelyn’s taking it to heart—if she really thought so.

  “Yes, I do,” said she. “It isn’t like an American to bury herself in the country. The hunting is no good to her, and the weather is beastly. She’s simply pining.”

  “If she were pining,” I remarked, “she wouldn’t pine there, Mrs. Jarvis—Janice. I think she’s just staying on to show that there never was, from her point of view, anything in it.”

  “Of course, so far as the general position is concerned, it matters less now than it did,” pursued Mrs. Jarvis serenely. “Peter has only now, one may say, his own interests to consider. Your dear lucky brother has set him free from any other obligation. By the way, aren’t we to see Graham to-day?”

  “Yes,” I said, “he has business in town, and I am to meet him at Euston. Evelyn is coming, too, but not Lady Doleford; and Barbara was doubtful.”

  It was the tenth, and we were all to rally at Euston to speed Lord and Lady Lippington on the Liverpool special for Canada. The hour of their departure had been duly published in the Court Circular column of the Times; and there was every prospect of one of those distinguished gatherings that are always reinforcing, at London railway-stations, the prestige of Greater Britain. I was looking forward to it with the interest one has for a typical occasion, as well as nursing a secret throb in the prospect of seeing off a Governor-General of my native land as if he were an ordinary person. Presently the Lippingtons would be as the sun in the heavens for splendour and remoteness; the dazzling consideration was whether it would make the least difference being distantly connected with them by marriage. Of one thing I was proudly certain—Senator and Mrs. John Trent would never impose upon that connection, or any member of their family.

  We rattled into the outer court of Euston in a line of shiny carriages and motors; there was a sense of informal function even there. The already drawn-up coachmen and footmen were enough by themselves to impart it—how representative they always are with their immobility and their decorum and their cockades! Almost capable, I could not help thinking, of conducting such an occasion with perfect propriety by themselves. However, they were putting down numbers of even more important-looking people—the unexpected legs of a Bishop descended just before us—in whose train we, too, presently found ourselves on the platform beside the steaming special, placarded “For the Canadian Pacific S.S. Empress of Britain.”

  The distinguished travellers had not yet arrived, but a quantity of luggage, luxurious yet travelstained, with a man-servant and a couple of maids hovering over it, seemed to speak with a high sense of duty of other viceregal departures, and to claim a certain precedence in the van. That and an ordinary first-class saloon carriage labelled in blue letters “Engaged” were the only outward and visible signs; the engine had not so much as a flag or a wreath on it. The station was full, too, of people who were obviously bent upon their own affairs and hardly aware of what was transpiring among them—running after porters, buying newspapers, or establishing mere relatives in corner seats. Among these the Lippingtons’ friends stood in groups of very chosen silk hats and frock-coats, groups that had greatly the air of being repositories, and of uttering permanent, undeniable truths to a heedless and struggling democracy. I picked out Graham at once, walking up and down with an Anglo-Canadian Liberal M.P., discussing perhaps the respective fields of usefulness for legislators in an old country and a new one, or perhaps just general political probabilities, as people do in England when they have finished the weather. I noticed what a difference sat upon Graham—something in his step and his shoulders and the outlook he expressed upon life—from the Lippingtons’ friends who were native to the island, and even from his fellow-Colonial member of Parliament, who seemed already, as they walked together, to have assumed the insular yoke. He, Graham, was more free than they, more free of a thousand things—traditions and conventions and responsibilities, privileges and commandments, interests and bores, advantages and disadvantages and fearful indispensable sign-manuals. That was the great thing that was published in him as he went swinging up and down the platform with the other man; and surely it was something as precious in its way, I reasoned, as any opportunity or any possession, something which gave even Pavis Court one aspect of a mess of pottage. That Graham should cherish his freedom seemed indispensable and necessary. My own sex, I found myself thinking, were more or less born into a state of bondage—it would not have mattered nearly so much if it had been me. I even—I might as well own and be done with it—had begun to wonder why, as things were turning out, it couldn’t have been me; but I can honestly, honestly say that I was sorry for Graham only on his own account.

  Evelyn came up and greeted us in that happy expectant American way which always seems to say “What next?” in England.

  “Then Barbara hasn’t come?” I asked.

  “No, she hasn’t. We left her writing what she called an important letter to Peter. She complains fearfully about being out of touch with Peter, but so far as I can see nobody is in touch with him particularly at present. Nobody in his own family, at all events.”

  There was the funniest implication that Evelyn was involved in the family injury, took the family’s point of view; and I thought of all I had heard of the American power of adaptation.

  “Tell him, if you happen to see him, not to come back to Pavis Court next week, unless he specially enjoys the smell of fertilisers. Otherwise he may find it dull. Graham is coming into town and the rest of us go to Ponds from Monday till Saturday.”

  “To Ponds,” I said.

  “Christopher Scansby’s place in Yorkshire,” Evelyn explained. “Where I hope we shall not be compelled to live entirely upon grape-nuts. Poor darling Lady Doleford can do her duty on a crust but she loathes patent foods. Luckily, Barbara says, there’s always a chop to be had in the village.”

  “How is Barbara?” I asked. I had felt more than a usual interest in Barbara’s state since her engagement; I hung upon it as if I expected it to develop something critical, in spite of knowing that she was the most normal person it was possible to meet. However, it is natural enough to ask afte
r even the most normal person in her absence.

  “Oh, bursting with health as usual! She was quite funny about it the other day—for Barbara. Envied me, if you please, my American digestion. Said it was very hard not to be able to look interesting when you felt interesting.”

  “I wonder,” I said, “why she feels interesting?” without intending, in the least, to imply anything to her detriment.

  “Exactly! That’s what strikes me. Isn’t she engaged? She ought to be feeling as dull as ditch water. Once Graham said the fatal word the element of interest, in my opinion, dropped out. The rest is mostly candy, isn’t it? Candy and chaff,” said Evelyn pensively.

  “How late they are,” said Miss Pedlington, coming up. “I don’t think they ought to keep people waiting like this—they aren’t Governor-Generals yet.”

  “Perhaps they’re practising,” said Evelyn.

  “Well,” continued Miss Pedlington, “Margot has her heart’s desire at last. I wonder if she is really happy—I wonder if any of us are really happy when we obtain our heart’s desire.”

  “I don’t think one ought to want anything too much,” I remarked, “for fear of getting it.” The idea came to me quite suddenly, looking at Graham.

  “Oh, please say that again!” cried Miss Pedlington. “I must have it for my commonplace-book. Is it a quotation? To want a thing too much is to be sure of getting it! How true!”

  “Here they come,” said Evelyn; and at the booking-office end of the platform we made out the entry of Lord and Lady Lippington. A porter preceded them with light articles on a truck, and beside the truck danced a young man with a happy supervisory air, restoring matters, as he danced, to an inside pocket, no doubt tickets to Liverpool. By the fact that the luggage was in no possible danger one saw at once that this was the A.D.C. I could not, to my surprise, take much interest in him; but I thought he looked equal to all he would have to do.