Cousin Cinderella

by Sara Jeanette Duncan

  “That extraordinarily mild week we had, you recollect, at the beginning of the month.”

  “Oh, yes!” I said. “Do you remember the lilacs in the Park?”

  “I do not. They weren’t in bloom, were they? But they must have been extraordinary, for someone else was speaking of them to me not long ago in exactly the same way. Who could it have been? Ah, to be sure—my nephew Peter. Well, I don’t know how foolish the lilacs were, but they couldn’t have suffered more than I did for leaving off my chamoisleather vest. At my age I should really have known better, whatever the weather was. ‘Change ne’er a clout till May be out!’ is no new saying in my ears, whatever it may be in yours.”

  “Lord Doleford is in Ireland, I—I hear,” I said.

  “Oh, yes, in Ireland—more or less. But he looks us up now and again. He talks of cutting short his leave and getting back again to India—great nonsense, I tell him. But with no home to go to ”

  “Oh!” I exclaimed. “But ”

  “You mustn’t pick me up too literally. The place is there, of course, but who do you suppose has taken it? Who but Miss Evelyn!”

  “Taken it!” I cried. “Graham never told me! Why——Duchess! Taken Pavis Court—Evelyn!”

  “Oh, for no great period—only six months, I believe. Your poor foolish brother has been most anxious that Cecilia and Barbara should stay on there for the present. He seems to have the most extraordinary ideas of what is possible. And into the breach steps Miss Evelyn, with her long purse. Mind you, I don’t say what he’s getting for it. No great sum, I daresay, for our little friend has quite a notion of a stroke of business.”

  “Then Evelyn ” I gasped, deprived of words by the new situation.

  “Is mistress of Pavis Court—after all!” completed the Duchess, not without a chuckle. “And that fool Cecilia Doleford gratefully accepts until May, thinking no doubt—well, that is neither here nor there. When she learns that she has driven her son back to those intolerable climates before there was the least need, perhaps she will realise her folly.”

  “It does seem a pity!” I murmured.

  “I was sure you would think so. Meanwhile,” continued the Duchess with the last accent of disgust, “we are to have the pleasure of welcoming Henry Q. or Thomas K., or whatever his alphabetical distinction may be, to Pavis Court next month for as long as he cares to stay. His daughter told Barbara, who told me, that she could not imagine anything that would entertain him more. So there he is to be.”

  “James P.,” I ventured. “He isn’t a bad little man.”

  “Oh, don’t praise him to me. Not a bad little money-bag, I daresay.”

  “I can’t think,” I repeated, “why Graham didn’t tell me.”

  “He is still considering it, I believe, though there can be no kind of doubt as to his agreeing in the end. He must think himself lucky to get people to stay there upon any terms, with the place full of workmen. He couldn’t go off to his native wilds with a very tranquil mind, leaving such a house to the care of two or three servants, could he?”

  “Yes,” I said, “I think he could.”

  “Then,” said the Duchess severely, “he must be very indifferent to what is rare and old and beautiful. And quite the wrong person to have bought the place.”

  “There I do agree,” I hastened to say.

  “He was led into it, no doubt, poor fellow,” continued the Duchess, relenting, “by his infatuation for Barbara. Perhaps it was not unnatural, considering the undoubted encouragement he received. This is very frank of me, but we have all been, haven’t we, so much behind the scenes together? And if Barbara has suffered any mortification in being obliged to dismiss him, I consider that it was entirely her own fault. The Pavisays have always treated marriage a great deal too light-heartedly. However, it is much better to repent a whimsical choice before it is too late—better for all parties.”

  “I think so, too,” I said, “and I am afraid Graham wouldn’t have repented—at all events in time.”

  I felt exactly like David and Goliath, and I am almost sure I got the Duchess, just a little to the right of her Early Victorian hair-parting. Perhaps it was lucky for me that the butler at that moment re-entered the room.

  “You may tell the cook, William, for the third time this month, that I will not have cold mutton cockered up in any form,” said the Duchess.

  “Yes, your Grace,” said William, without blenching. “Sweetbreads, your Grace.”

  Oh, dear, how funny it was! I can’t describe how funny it was. I despair. I mean not myself at all, just the Duchess and William. The way William, coming innocently in at the door, received this broadside, sacrificed his proper person to enable the Duchess to recover her equanimity—it was feudal. I realise that nobody could find it quite so amusing as I did. Only I must be forgiven if, looking back, I laugh irrelevantly and to myself, which is, perhaps, not good literary manners.

  “But he is young, and we have every reason to hope he will soon get over it,” she resumed easily, as William disappeared to ricochet into the cook.

  “Every reason,” I agreed.

  “And I think, candidly, he would be wiser to marry in his own part of the world. We are not intended to know everything, and for some inscrutable reason it does not seem desirable that the men of younger countries should look for wives to England. Providence does not appear to approve of such unions. Look at the Billingers—Lady Marjorie married Australian mutton. They have no family. Nature is against it,” pronounced the Duchess.

  “Dear me!” I said.

  “It is different with women. I am no traitor to my own sex, but with women I admit the case is different. It is my opinion, as you know, that American marriages have been grossly overdone; but a certain number of the daughters of our own kith and kin beyond the seas”—the Duchess smiled at me benevolently—“might very well help to replen—might very well make good English wives. I should not object to being quoted as thinking so, if it would do any good. And if such ideas seem in any way sordid or grasping, it should be remembered that the Colonies pay nothing, or almost nothing, for the protection afforded them by the British navy.”

  “Yes, indeed.”

  “And I understand,” continued the Duchess, “that the preference they are supposed to give us commercially does not amount to a row of pins.”

  “Oh, yes, it does. It does really, Duchess. Ask Graham,” I urged. “He can tell you.”

  “Oh, well,” said the Duchess skilfully, “all the mere reason for a little Colonial preference on our part when a choice is to be made; that is my view. Now shall we go upstairs for our coffee?”

  My day with the Duchess was memorable even in detail, and I must here note that I was sent to lie down before the party, while her Grace was engaged, I believe, with her secretary. I understood that she wore out secretaries as other people did boots and shoes, but to repeat the simile she used on her own behalf, she always sent them to be mended. She had two, she told me, at the cobbler’s at that moment. I saw the current secretary later. She had a distracted air, having just dropped a sheaf of dinner invitations out of a Blue-book at the head of the stairs, on her way to tell a deputation that the Duchess would be with it shortly. I have forgotten what the deputation wanted, but the Duchess dealt with it between three and four, and by the time people began to arrive it was quite cleared away.

  CHAPTER XXVIII

  THE Empire First tea-party was really a function, with flowers and lackeys in profusion and refreshments on a lavish scale, although the Duchess declared that her Imperialism stopped short of strawberries, with which she told us the American Ambassador had already announced the coming of June. “Things like spring chickens,” said she, “that one had to carve.” There were no strawberries, but there was everything else, and the Blue Hungarian Band, and the Duchess, imposing in grey silk and cameos, doing her duty as England expected her at the head of the staircase.

  It interested me very much to notice the different kinds of people wi
th whom the Empire was first. There were so many—it seemed to place our Imperial future on a very various foundation. One had not expected them, of course, all to be Duchesses, but one had looked somehow for a certain similarity of demeanour among them, an appearance of concern that would correspond at least with her grey silk and sense of responsibility. And there were several examples of this. I remember two or three ladies whose mien and whose bonnets showed them to be of an importance quite different from anything recognised in smart circles, whose high-bridged noses spoke distinctly and austerely for principle and for that alone; and in whose hands I felt sure all national issues would be safe. They were trenchantly Gothic, those ladies; they abased the most sumptuous in their neighbourhood; one was glad to think that they were still here to reckon with. But there were hardly enough of them to make a back-bone for the gathering, which fell away from them in every direction. The men, I thought, were no doubt solid for the ends of Greater Britain, though some of them looked young to have made up their minds. The Bishop of Medicine Hat was a natural prelate to the movement—the Duchess was unaffectedly proud of him—and an ex-Viceroy of India unconsciously appropriated the occasion wherever he happened to be. I was shown lieutenant governors in retirement, who seemed to shrink from publicity, and somebody very important from the War Office. There was also a tailor-made type of elderly young woman with pleasant, rather short manners and “interests” written plainly all over her, moving about in small numbers, and a sprinkling of impressed, alarmed, delighted persons whom I recognised by these feelings to be fellow-Colonials. But most of the ladies must have considered Imperial interests from very complicated points of view; they were so charming and so deeply interested in quite different subjects. They must always, for instance, have had before them or behind them their adorable clothes; and from those of one radiant being who had the courage—so gracefully—to embrace the Duchess, I for one could never have permitted my mind to stray to the Bengalis or the Rand.

  It was too new a party, I feel, to introduce at the very end. No Lippingtons, no Mrs. Jerome Jarvis—and how one missed her in the few places in which she didn’t appear!—no Billy or Barbara, not even Graham or Evelyn. But that is quite like London; up to the last minute there is always a new party. I felt a little lonely and lost in it, though several people asked me in a friendly way how I was enjoying myself in England. It seemed to me too that I did not want to meet so many strangers, or even any strangers, at the very point of departure. For me too this story was to end on the very next day as for you on the very next page; and I wasn’t at all keyed up to the Empire; I wanted more than anything else in the world to see my mother. There, I remembered, all this time had been the dear shelter of my own home in Minnebiac, and the fact that it was in Greater Britain did not thrill me in the least. I only wondered whether I had not been rather silly in staying so long away. It seemed to me that I was in that house in London, that had been a great house in London for three centuries, on a kind of false advantage, and that it would be easier, if that was my lot, to be rich in Minnebiac where it mattered so very much less. Perhaps this showed the advantage not to have been wholly false; but when one is very depressed one is not always strictly logical. I could not imagine why I was at the party, why I was being introduced as the Duchess’s little Canadian, like something she had just caught, why I was not in mourning with Graham somewhere, as a sister should. And then—the party was almost over—a door opened from the more private part of the house and admitted—Peter.

  There is no use in pretending that I was quite composed and nodded nonchalantly, as I longed to do. There is no use in pretending anything. My heart suddenly began to pound so violently as almost to drown the Blue Hungarians, and it seemed to me that if I should by any chance meet Lord Doleford’s eye he could not help hearing it. The prospect of meeting his eye was terrifying; I could not and would not face it. I turned my back and risked, with a pang, his again disappearing into Ireland. Fortunately there were still twenty or thirty people left; and near me stood a tall, lanky girl with a nice face, wearing a white fox boa and waiting to be taken home, the way they do wait in England. Her I hurriedly addressed.

  “I have just remembered,” I said, “that the Duchess wanted me to tell people about Newfoundland.”

  “Have you ever been there?” asked the tall girl.

  “No, never.”

  “I was born there,” said the lanky girl. “My father had a post there.”

  “What kind of a post?” I asked with unnatural curiosity.

  “He was the Governor of the island. There was constant trouble with the Americans even then.”

  “Was there?” I asked.

  “Yes, indeed. They would come within the three-mile limit for bait. There always was a Bait Act of sorts, you know.”

  “I’m afraid I didn’t,” I said, “know, you know.”

  “Oh, yes. The trouble was our people would sell to the Americans. We were always prosecuting our own fishing-smacks. But trespass and illegal recruiting are as old as Newfoundland politics, father says.”

  “Oh, really.”

  “And so are these purse seines they will persist in using. They catch the baby herrings as well as the grown-ups—isn’t it horrid?” said the nice girl. “How do you do, Peter? This is my cousin, Lord Doleford—I’m afraid I didn’t hear your name.”

  Peter had already bowed to me distantly, so distantly that I wondered why he had come within bowing range. At the lanky girl’s introduction, however, he smiled with apparent relief, and warmly shook hands with me.

  “We are old friends,” he said, as if he dared me to deny it. “What are you two talking about so solemnly?”

  “Herrings,” said the girl who was waiting to be taken home.

  “I was telling—I mean your cousin was telling me about Newfoundland,” I said. “I know what you think—you think I ought to know myself. But Newfoundland isn’t Canada, you know. They won’t belong to us, so we don’t pay much attention to them and their herrings.”

  “Quite right too,” said Peter earnestly, looking at me with the most extraordinary scrutiny.

  “My father always opposed the idea of Newfoundland’s entering the Dominion,” said Peter’s cousin, “because, you see, it would have abolished us. Nobody likes to be abolished. My father thought it was much more likely to be well governed as a Crown Colony.”

  “I’m sure he was right,” I replied vaguely.

  “Rather,” Peter assented, with an absent hand on his moustache; and together we bent upon the lanky girl a serious and preoccupied gaze.

  “Between the Americans and the French,” she continued, “father used to say the Governorship was no bed of roses. France had special fishing and drying privileges on some parts of the coast, secured to her by the Treaty of Utrecht. Very annoying it was.”

  “Fishing and drying?” I repeated, for politeness’ sake.

  “The Treaty of Utrecht, eh?” said Peter. “Most mischievous things, these treaties.”

  “Very annoying indeed, it must have been,” I assured her.

  “But that is all settled up now. There is only the question of the herrings and the Americans. And, of course, other fish.”

  “Odd fish,” said Peter.

  “Well, principally cod. The other principal feature about Newfoundland,” continued his cousin cheerfully, “curiously enough, is ponds. It is said that about a third of the whole island is covered with fresh water.”

  “Fresh-water ponds?” said Peter, with a renewed effort at attention.

  “Yes. But don’t think that I know all this of my own knowledge. We came away while I was a baby! But I have heard father talk about it ever since I can remember. And I hope you won’t mind my saying the Americans are—that about the Americans. Father says he is sure it will straighten out somehow,” and the cousin gave me a friendly apologetic smile.

  There was an instant of silence. I saw what she thought; but it didn’t seem worth while to explain.

 
“Are there any fresh fish in the ponds?” I asked weakly.

  “Ah, there you have me! I’ve never heard papa say. I should suppose so—shouldn’t you? But I see mamma making signals—good-bye! It has been so nice meeting someone from the part of the world I was born in.”

  And there she left us stranded. Such is the consistency of human nature that I at once longed for her back again. While she was there I was at least not obliged to look at Peter.

  “I’m late,” said he—“unavoidably. It was almost impossible getting here at all; but Aunt Agnes sent me a reminder, and she doesn’t do that unless she really wants a fellow to turn up. She’s fearfully keen on these Imperialist shows of hers. Do you think they do any good?”

  “Oh, yes,” I said. “Don’t you?”

  Peter looked at me with sudden enquiry, and we exchanged recognisances in a smile. After that there was no use in saying, “I don’t mean what you think I mean,” was there? Especially as I did.

  “Let us go and sit down,” he said. “Unless you are just off too?”

  “No,” I said. “I have my hat on because I happen to look better in it, but I am spending the day here.”

  “Oh, are you?” We had gone and sat down.

  “Yes. To help the Duchess with this party, and tell people about Newfoundland. I don’t know why I’m dining here, unless it’s to tell them about Alaska.”

  “I’m dining too,” said Peter. “I understood I was to meet the Aga Khan. You were not mentioned.”

  “No,” I said. “Why should I be?” We exchanged another recognisance.

  “People have such queer ideas of comparative attractions,” said Peter, after doing this. “Though the Aga Khan is a very good sort. I don’t know why Aunt Agnes should have found him so formidable.”

  Here the part of intelligence would have been to ask to be informed about the Aga Khan; but what I said was, “It’s our last day, you know. We sail to-morrow.”