by Grant Allen
Bernard Hume’s lip curled. This was what the Church knows as Invincible Ignorance. He had done his best for the man, and the old Adam had conquered. “And what are you going to do,” he asked with a contemptuous smile, “about ‘The Quest of the Ideal’?”
Ernest laid down his palette, and thrust his hand silently into his trousers pocket. He drew forth a knife, and opened it deliberately. Then, without a single word, he walked across the floor to the Study of the Elusive. With one ruthless cut he slashed the canvas across from corner to corner. Then he slashed the two cut pieces again transversely. After that he took down the drawing of the design from the smaller easel, and solemnly thrust it into the studio fire. It burnt by slow degrees, for the cardboard was thick. His heart beat hard. As long as it smouldered he watched it intently. As the last of the mailed knights disappeared in white smoke up the studio chimney he drew a long breath. “Good-bye,” he said in a choking voice; “Good-bye to the Ideal.”
“And good-bye to you,” Bernard Hume made answer, “for I call it desecration.”
Bernard Hume is now of opinion that he used once vastly to overrate Ernest Grey’s capabilities. The man had talent, perhaps — some grain of mere talent — but never genius. As for Ernest, he has toiled on ever since, more or less contentedly (probably less), at the hosiery business, and makes quite a decent living now out of his portraits of children and his domestic figure-pieces. The model considers them all really charming.
It’s everybody’s case, of course; but still — it’s a tragedy.
MELISSA’S TOUR.
Lucy looked across the table at me with a face of blank horror. “Oh, Vernon,” she cried, “what are we ever to do? And an American at that! This is just too ghastly!” It’s a habit of Lucy’s, I may remark, to talk italics.
I laid down my coffee-cup, and glanced back at her in surprise. “Why, what’s up?” I exclaimed, scanning the envelope close. “A letter from Oxford, surely. Mrs. Wade, of Christ Church — I thought I knew the hand. And she’s not an American.”
“Well, look for yourself!” Lucy cried, and tossed the note to me, pouting. I took it and read. I’m aware that I have the misfortune to be only a man, but it really didn’t strike me as quite so terrible.
“Dear Mrs. Hancock,
“George has just heard that your husband and you are going for a trip to New York this summer. Could you manage to do us a very great kindness? I hope you won’t mind it. We have an American friend — a Miss Easterbrook, of Kansas City — niece of Professor Asa P. Easterbrook, the well-known Yale geologist, who very much wishes to find an escort across the Atlantic. If you would be so good as to take charge of her, and deliver her safely to Dr. Horace Easterbrook, of Hoboken, on your arrival in the States, you would do a good turn to her, and, at the same time, confer an eternal favour on
“Yours very truly,
Emily Wade.”
Lucy folded her hands in melodramatic despair. “Kansas City!” she exclaimed, with a shudder of horror. “And Asa P. Easterbrook! A geologist, indeed! That horrid Mrs. Wade! She just did it on purpose!”
“It seems to me,” I put in, regarding the letter close, “she did it merely because she was asked to find a chaperon for the girl; and she wrote the very shortest possible note, in a perfunctory way, to the very first acquaintance she chanced to hear of who was going to America.”
“Vernon!” my wife exclaimed, with a very decided air, “you men are such simpletons! You credit everybody always with the best and purest motives. But you’re utterly wrong. I can see through that woman. The hateful, hateful wretch! She did it to spite me! Oh, my poor, poor boy; my dear, guileless Bernard!”
Bernard, I may mention, is our eldest son, aged just twenty-four, and a Cambridge graduate. He’s a tutor at King’s, and though he’s a dear good fellow, and a splendid long-stop, I couldn’t myself conscientiously say I regard guilelessness as quite his most marked characteristic.
“What are you doing?” I asked, as Lucy sat down with a resolutely determined air at her writing-table in the corner.
“Doing!” my wife replied, with some asperity in her tone. “Why, answering that hateful, detestable woman!”
I glanced over her shoulder, and followed her pen as she wrote —
“My Dear Mrs. Wade,
“It was indeed a delight to us to see your neat little handwriting again. Nothing would give us greater pleasure, I’m sure, than to take charge of your friend, who, I’m confident, we shall find a most charming companion. Bernard will be with us, so she won’t feel it dull, I trust. We hope to have a very delightful trip, and your happy thought in providing us with a travelling companion will add, no doubt, to all our enjoyment — especially Bernard’s. We both join in very kindest regards to Mr. Wade and yourself, and I am ever
“Yours most cordially,
Lucy B. Hancock.”
My wife fastened down the envelope with a very crushing air. “There, that ought to do for her,” she said, glancing up at me triumphantly. “I should think she could see from that, if she’s not as blind as an owl, I’ve observed her atrocious designs upon Bernard, and mean to checkmate them. If, after such a letter, she has the cheek to send us her Yankee girl to chaperon, I shall consider her lost to all sense of shame and all notions of decency. But she won’t, of course. She’ll withdraw her unobtrusively.” And Lucy flung the peccant sheet that had roused all this wrath on to the back of the fireplace with offended dignity.
She was wrong, however. By next evening’s post a second letter arrived, more discomposing, if possible, to her nerves than the first one.
“Mrs. Lucy B. Hancock, London.
“Dear Madam,
“I learn from my friend Mrs. Wade, of Oxford College, that you are going to be kind enough to take charge of me across the ocean. I thank you for your courtesy, and will gladly accept your friendly offer. If you will let me know by what steamer you start, I will register my passage right away in Liverpool. Also, if you will be good enough to tell me from what depôt you leave London, and by what train, I will go along with you in the cars. I’m unused to travel alone.
“Respectfully,
Melissa P. Easterbrook.”
Lucy gazed at it in despair. “A creature like that!” she cried, all horror-struck. “Oh, my poor dear Bernard! The ocean, she says! Go along with you in the cars! Melissa P. Easterbrook!”
“Perhaps,” I said tentatively, “she may be better than her name. And, at any rate, Bernard’s not bound to marry her!”
Lucy darted at me profound volumes of mute feminine contempt. “The girl’s pretty,” she said at last, after a long, deep pause, during which I had been made to realize to the full my own utter moral and intellectual nothingness. “You may be sure she’s pretty. Mrs. Wade wouldn’t have foisted her upon us if she wasn’t pretty, but unspeakable. It’s a vile plot on her part to destroy my peace of mind. You won’t believe it, Vernon; but I know that woman. And what does the girl mean by signing herself ‘Respectfully,’ I wonder?”
“It’s the American way,” I ventured gently to interpose.
“So I gather,” my wife answered with a profound accent of contempt. To her, anything that isn’t done in the purest English way stands, ipso facto, self-condemned immediately.
A day or two later a second letter arrived from Miss Easterbrook, in reply to one of Lucy’s, suggesting a rendezvous. I confess it drew up in my mind a somewhat painful picture. I began to believe my wife’s fears were in some ways well grounded.
“Mrs. Lucy B. Hancock, London” (as before).
“Dear Madam,
“I thank you for yours, and will meet you on the day and hour you mention at St. Pancras depôt. You will know me when you see me, because I shall wear a dove-coloured dress, with bonnet to match, and a pair of grey spectacles.
“Respectfully,
Melissa P. Easterbrook.”
I laid it down and sighed. “A New England schoolmarm!” I exclaimed with a groan. “It sounds rathe
r terrible. A dove-coloured dress, and a pair of grey spectacles! I fancy I can picture her to myself — a tall and bony person of a certain age, with corkscrew curls, who reads improving books, and has views of her own about the fulfilment of prophecy.”
But as my spirits went down, so Lucy’s went up, like the old man and woman in the cottage weather-glass. “That looks more promising,” she said. “The spectacles are good. Perhaps after all dear Bernard may escape. I don’t think he’s at all the sort of person to be taken with a dove-coloured bonnet.”
For some days after Bernard came home from Cambridge we chaffed a good deal among ourselves about Miss Melissa Easterbrook. Bernard took quite my view about the spectacles and dress. He even drew on an envelope a fancy portrait of Miss Easterbrook, as he said himself, “from documentary evidence.” It represented a typical schoolmarm of the most virulent order, and was calculated to strike terror into the receptive mind of ingenuous youth on simple inspection.
At last the day came when we were to go to Liverpool. We arrived at St. Pancras in very good time, and looked about on the platform for a tall and hard-faced person of Transatlantic aspect, arrayed in a dove-coloured dress and a pair of grey spectacles. But we looked in vain: nobody about seemed to answer to the description. At last Bernard turned to my wife with a curious smile. “I think I’ve spotted her, mother,” he said, waving his hand vaguely to the right. “That lady over yonder — by the door of the refreshment-room. Don’t you see? That must be Melissa.” For we knew her only as Melissa already among ourselves: it had been raised to the mild rank of a family witticism.
I looked in the direction he suggested, and paused for certainty. There, irresolute by the door and gazing about her timidly with inquiring eyes, stood the prettiest, tiniest, most shrinking little Western girl you ever saw in your life — attired, as she said, in a dove-coloured dress, with bonnet to match, and a pair of grey spectacles. But oh, what a dove-coloured dress! Walter Crane might have designed it — one of those perfect travelling costumes of which the American girl seems to possess a monopoly; and the spectacles — well, the spectacles, though undoubtedly real, added just a touch of piquancy to an otherwise almost painfully timid and retiring little figure. The moment I set eyes on Melissa Easterbrook, I will candidly admit, I was her captive at once; and even Lucy, as she looked at her, relaxed her face involuntarily into a sympathetic smile. As a rule, Lucy might pose as a perfect model of the British matron in her ampler and maturer years— “calmly terrible,” as an American observer once described the genus: but at sight of Melissa she melted without a struggle. “Poor wee little thing, how pretty she is!” she exclaimed with a start. You will readily admit that was a great deal, from Lucy.
Melissa came forward tentatively, a dainty blush half rising on her rather pale and delicate little cheek. “Mrs. Hancock?” she said in an inquiring tone, with just the faintest suspicion of an American accent in her musical small voice. Lucy took her hand cordially. “I was sure it was you, ma’am,” Melissa went on with pretty confidence, looking up into her face, “because Mrs. Wade told me you’d be as kind to me as a mother; and the moment I saw you I just said to myself, ‘That must be Mrs. Hancock: she’s so sweetly motherly.’ How good of you to burden yourself with a stranger like me! I hope indeed I won’t be too much trouble.”
That was the beginning. I may as well say, first as last, we were all of us taken by storm “right away” by Melissa. Lucy herself struck her flag unconditionally before a single shot was fired, and Bernard and I, hard hit at all points, surrendered at discretion. She was the most charming little girl the human mind can conceive. Our cold English language fails, in its roughness, to describe her. She was petite, mignonne, graceful, fairy-like, yet with a touch of Yankee quaintness and a delicious espièglerie that made her absolutely unique in my experience of women. We had utterly lost our hearts to her before ever we reached Liverpool; and, strange to say, I believe the one of us whose heart was most completely gone was, if only you’ll believe it, that calmly terrible Lucy.
Melissa’s most winning characteristic, however, as it seemed to me, was her perfect frankness. As we whirled along on our way across England, she told us everything about herself, her family, her friends, her neighbours, and the population of Kansas City in general. Not obtrusively or egotistically — of egotism Melissa would be wholly incapable — but in a certain timid, confiding, half-childlike way, as of the lost little girl, that was absolutely captivating. “Oh no, ma’am,” she said, in answer to one of Lucy’s earliest questions, “I didn’t come over alone. I think I’d be afraid to. I came with a whole squad of us who were doing Europe. A prominent lady in Kansas City took charge of the square lot. And I got as far as Rome with them, through Germany and Switzerland, and then my money wouldn’t run to it any further: so I had to go back. Travelling comes high in Europe, what with hotels and fees and having to pay to get your baggage checked. And that’s how I came to want an escort.”
Bernard smiled good-naturedly. “Then you had only a fixed sum,” he asked, “to make your European tour with?”
“That’s so, sir,” Melissa answered, looking up at him quizzically through those pretty grey spectacles. “I’d put away quite a little sum of my own to make this trip upon. It was my only chance of seeing Europe and improving myself a piece. I knew when I started I couldn’t go all the round trip with the rest of my party: but I thought I’d set out with them, any way, and go ahead as long as my funds held out; and then when I was through I’d turn about and come home again.”
“But you put away the money yourself?” Lucy asked, with a little start of admiring surprise.
“Yes, ma’am,” Melissa answered sagely. “I know it. I saved it.”
“From your allowance?” Lucy suggested, from the restricted horizon of her English point of view.
Melissa laughed a merry little laugh of amusement. “Oh no,” she said; “from my salary.”
“From your salary!” Bernard put in, looking down at her with an inquiring glance.
“Yes, sir; that’s it,” Melissa answered, all unabashed. “You see, for four years I was a clerk in the Post Office.” She pronounced it “clurk,” but that’s a detail.
“Oh, indeed!” Bernard echoed. He was burning to know how, I could see, but politeness forbade him to press Melissa on so delicate a point any further.
Melissa, however, herself supplied at once the missing information. “My father was postmaster in our city,” she said simply, “under the last administration — President Blanco’s, you know — and he made me one of his clerks, of course, when he’d gotten the place; and as long as the fun went on, I saved all my salary for a tour in Europe.”
“And at the end of four years?” Lucy said.
“Our party went out,” Melissa put in, confidentially. “So, when the trouble began, my father was dismissed, and I had just enough left to take me as far as Rome, as I told you.”
I was obliged to explain parenthetically, to allay Lucy’s wonderment, that in America the whole personnel of every local Government office changes almost completely with each incoming President.
“That’s so, sir,” Melissa assented, with a wise little nod. “And as I didn’t think it likely our folks would get in again in a hurry — the country’s had enough of us — I just thought I’d make the best of my money when I’d got it.”
“And you used it all up in giving yourself a holiday in Europe?” Lucy exclaimed, half reproachfully. To her economic British mind such an expenditure of capital seemed horribly wasteful.
“Yes, ma’am,” Melissa answered, all unconscious of the faint disapproval implied in Lucy’s tone. “You see, I’d never been anywhere much away from Kansas City before; and I thought this was a special opportunity to go abroad, and visit the picture-galleries and cathedrals of Europe, and enlarge my mind, and get a little culture. To us, a glimpse of Europe’s an intellectual necessary.”
“Oh, then, you regarded your visit as largely educational?” Be
rnard put in, with increasing interest. Though he’s a fellow and tutor of King’s, I will readily admit that Bernard’s personal tastes lie rather in the direction of rowing and football than of general culture; but still, the American girl’s point of view decidedly attracted him by its novelty in a woman.
“That’s so, sir,” Melissa answered once more, in her accustomed affirmative. “I took it as a sort of university trip. I graduated in Europe. In America, of course, wherever you go, all you can see’s everywhere just the same, purely new and American. The language, the manners, the type don’t vary: in Europe, you cross a frontier or a ribbon of sea, and everything’s different. Now, on this trip of ours, we went first to Chester, to glimpse a typical old English town — those Rows, oh! how lovely! — and then to Leamington, for Warwick Castle and Kenilworth. Kenilworth’s just glorious, isn’t it? — with its mouldering red walls and its dark green ivy, and the ghost of Amy Robsart walking up and down upon the close-shaven English grass-plots.”
