Works of E F Benson

by E. F. Benson

  About the result of his suit he had no real doubt, for that would imply an absurd lack of self-respect, and, thank God, he had plenty of that. In the early days at Wentworth, before he had contemplated matrimony or had heard about the little place in Kent, he had been obliged several times to take no notice of Miss Howard’s hints that she could ride a bicycle too with great speed, for he had not wanted to encourage false hopes. Now he regretted not having encouraged this, for they had ceased to be false, and the great plunge would have been easier to take: he would have slid into the water. Then that matter of the tenants must be looked into: he did not at present know what lease they held: a short one, he hoped, but if not it might be possible to get a clever lawyer to find a hole somewhere in it. Lawyers were all rascals: that was why you paid them so high: the convenient fellows did dirty work for a clean man.

  He took a turn at the cross-word puzzle: the glimpse he had got at Mrs. Oxney’s paper supplied some useful clues, and before the dressing-bell sounded he had finished with it, and sat down in front of his fire to think over the new life that was soon to open for him. He could not imagine why he had delayed to get married for so long, for, now that he was absolutely face to face with it, matrimony presented great attractions. Comfortable as he was at Wentworth, really remarkably comfortable, a home of his own would suit him better especially such a home as was waiting for him. He had debated at one time whether he should not give Mrs. Oxney the opportunity of providing one for him, but pleasant though that might be, he had never steadily regarded that prospect, and had shied away from matrimony in vague apprehension that it would entail loss of liberty and alarming obligations. But on approaching it now in a businesslike manner, these terrors quite faded: he saw that instead of being bound to take care of a wife, it was her duty to take care of him. The idea of marrying a girl who had romantic notions and expected ecstasies of conjugal tenderness would have been a positive nightmare, but this was quite a different business. He felt himself indeed in luck, and Miss Howard was in luck too. To capture a fine upstanding honourable man like himself, with no blot on his scutcheon but several medals on his coat and a comfortable competence was more than any woman could expect at her age. She need be under no apprehension of frailties and infidelities on his part, which so often wrecked matrimony, nor need he, for they were both well past the skittish age.

  With the closing of the Green Salon and the despatch of the purchased pictures to their owners, Miss Howard was now at liberty to paint more, or do anything else that presented itself as an agreeable pastime. She had still to settle what disposition to make of those pieces that remained unsold: of these there were some twenty-five. Christmas presents would absorb some; her bedroom walls would absorb more, or Florence would ecstatically absorb them all. But next morning was warm and tranquil, and instead of tackling the heap of frames that were piled up in her bedroom, she decided to get hand and eye in touch again (for she had not taken up a paint-brush at all for a fortnight) and from the felled tree on the Colonel’s golf links, of which a substantial trunk still remained, to make a little picture of Wentworth which, under the title of ‘Home, Sweet Home’, she would present to Mrs. Oxney as a reward for having bought ‘Pussy-dear.’ But though this kind scheme was sufficient excuse for her spending the morning in so wonted a manner, it was not the reason for it. The reason she had talked over with Florence, and they had settled that the Colonel was ripe.

  They were right about that, for he came down to breakfast, strung up and resolute, and had dreamed he dwelt in marble halls. Alice had moved over to Florence’s table after Mr. Kemp’s departure and when he appeared they were both demurely eating eggs. He ignored Kemp, but asked Alice what she was going to do on this lovely morning which was quite like spring. She thought she would do a sketch of the house from the links, and he figured her sitting there with Kemp holding her hand or her brushes. For his part, he was going to have a spin on his bicycle: wouldn’t she join him? Regretfully she wouldn’t: she was going to be very industrious. The girls finished their breakfast first, and as they went out with waists and arms entwined, Alice certainly gave him a little sweet smile. Not a great joyous grimace like Mrs. Bliss; that would have meant nothing, but something secret with a quiver at the corner of her mouth and a quiet glance, which seemed highly propitious. When he had finished his breakfast he found the lounge empty and the smoking-room empty, and the drawing-room empty, and supposed that they had gone out together. He damned Kemp and sat down to look through the illustrated Morning Standard which he had been taking in lately. After that he would start for a stupendous pedalling and bring home fresh laurels. Miss Howard reverenced these records. He felt quite up to proposing to her this minute, but he made sure that Kemp was with her. There were advertisements in the paper showing entrancing young ladies in corsets and knickerbockers and of fine stalwart men in plus fours. He thought the plus fours would suit him, and imagined seeing his wife in just such an elegant corset.

  Along the landing upstairs came familiar warbling noises and tripping feet. He scarcely looked up from his paper because he felt so certain that he would see the ubiquitous Kemp following Alice with her painting-satchel. Instead there was Alice alone carrying the implements of her craft herself. Alone — was it with a heightened colour that she perceived him? — she went out of the front door, and of Kemp there was no sign. He stole to the window and observed her figure — really a very neat figure for her age — flitting in and out of the shadows of the trees in the garden. She went out of the gate into the golf field, and an obstructing shrub hid her further progress. She had said she was going to sketch there.

  Mrs. Oxney, who had been very late that morning came out of the dining-room.

  “What a lovely morning you’ve got for your bicycle ride, Colonel,” she said. “Like April, isn’t it? I remember your saying that we often got April mornings in November, and November nights in April. So true. Will you be taking your lunch with you? A sandwich or two of that capital cold turkey now.”

  “No, I shan’t be out for lunch,” said he. “Just a good spin and home again.”

  “And a fresh record, please, or I shall be sadly disappointed,” said Mrs. Oxney going through to her sitting-room.

  The sitting-room looked out the same way as the lounge: they both looked out on to the golf field. Mrs. Oxney was fond of birds and as she stood for a moment in the pale but genial sunshine, that poured in at the window, before ordering the bus that was to take Mr. Bullingdon to the station, she thought she saw a green woodpecker fussing about on the grass near one of the holes. It proved to be only a starling which was less interesting, but the same glance shewed her bits of Miss Howard through the edge of the shrub that had hid her movements from the Colonel in the lounge, seated on the trunk of the felled tree. She was facing the house and was evidently going to sketch.

  She heard the front door bang (that would be the Colonel going out) and waited a moment more for the pleasure of seeing him set forth on his bicycle. Such vigour, such legs, such a mastery of the vehicle. There he was, but not on his bicycle whirling down the drive, but crossing it in the direction of the garden and the golf field. But he had not got his golf sticks with him: he was not meaning to play golf instead of going for his ride. Then in a flash the solution struck her. “I believe he’s going to do it,” she said to herself.

  But though a woman, she was still a house-keeper, and she hurried to the bell, and ordered the bus to come round at 10.45 sharp for the London train. When she returned to the window Colonel Chase had vanished behind that tiresome shrub, and she wished she had had it cut down. But specks of him appeared at its edge, and they ranged themselves by those of Miss Howard, and Mrs. Oxney felt certain what his business was. Florence in her bedroom directly overhead knew it too and she had the advantage of being able to see over the tiresome shrub.

  Miss Howard seated on her tree-trunk of course saw his approach but quite unaware of it, measured the height of a Wentworth chimney against her pencil. When
his advancing presence was too large to disregard, she looked up brightly.

  “Not gone for your ride, Colonel?” she asked. “I call that lazy. Not like you.”

  A suitor’s knees, he reflected, ought to tremble. His knees did not: they were as firm as oak-posts.

  “No one can accuse you of laziness,” said he. “Doing one of your charming sketches I see. A sketch of Wentworth is it? Dear old Wentworth. Ha! Dreams of happiness I’ve had here.”

  That was an excellent gambit: an improvisation worthy of Miss Howard.

  “Oh, how pleasant,” said she. “Tell me about them.”

  Any suitor would have considered that promising: it sounded like an invitation, like an assured welcome. She appeared quite calm too, though surely she must have known that as he had abandoned his bicycle ride and had come to the golf field, without his clubs, he must have had some special and unusual mission. He thought it would have been more like a lady of true delicacy and refined instincts to have bent her head over her drawing, unable to check the trembling of her fingers, but her hand was as steady as his knees. Or could it be that she had no idea that she was presently to promise to be his wife? Or did she guess his mind more subtly yet, and know that in the approaching alliance, regard and respect were to fill the place of tumultuous passion? In any case she went on drawing the cowl of the chimney with calm precision.

  This direct invitation to tell her about his happy dreams encouraged him to sit down on the trunk beside her. Perhaps it was better, in case she was still unaware of her destiny, to make a few more remarks that would lead up to the revelation.

  “Somehow I don’t seem to have had the opportunity of getting any quiet talk with you of late,” he said. “Your friend Miss Kemp—”

  “Sweet Florence!” said Miss Howard very unexpectedly. “She never knows when she’s not wanted, does she? Such a dear, and such a crashing bore.”

  That was splendid: he felt they understood each other.

  “I’ve found her so,” he said, “I’ve often wished she was at Bournemouth. Or I should have, if I had not thought she was a friend of yours whose presence always gave you pleasure.”

  Miss Howard held up her sketch at arm’s length and looked at the chimney: she had got it much too large. She looked at Wentworth, and saw the crashing bore at her bedroom window, peeping out from a half-drawn curtain.

  “Tell me about your happy dreams, Colonel Chase,” she said.

  The moment had come. There could not be a better opportunity, nor one more obviously meant for him. He cleared his throat.

  “Happy dreams about my future,” he said. “I’m getting to be a lonely man, Miss Howard, and though I’m not old yet, the years are passing. I want a companion, a dear companion with whom I can share my joys and my sorrows. One who will make me happy, and whom, I trust I shall make happy. I shall do my best. I’ve long wanted to tell you this, and ask you, in fact I do so now, to be that companion. Will you marry me, Miss Howard?”

  “Certainly not,” said Miss Howard.

  He jumped to his feet as if he had been pinched, and now he found his knees were trembling. He could hardly believe what he had heard, but there seemed no doubt as to what she had said.

  “You don’t mean that?” he asked.

  “Yes, I do,” said Miss Howard.

  The little place in Kent seemed to explode into a million fragments with Colonel Chase among them: he fell giddily through the air and found himself again in the golf field at Wentworth, where Miss Howard seated on a tree-trunk was just opening her paint-box. As the incredible truth branded itself on his brain, he found that next to his disappointment, his keenest emotion was the desire that nobody should know of his awful, his astounding humiliation.

  “I hope you will regard my proposal of marriage to you,” he said, “as absolutely private. I made it out of my regard for you and of affection—”

  Miss Howard put down her paint-box in a great hurry: her hand was trembling now as much as Colonel Chase’s knees.

  “That’s the finishing touch,” she said. “Are you ashamed of having wanted to marry me? Oh, Colonel Chase, you cut a very poor figure.”

  Three seconds later, Mrs. Oxney from her sitting-room window to which she had been glued, saw the Colonel reappearing on the left of the tiresome shrub, and her first mental ejaculation was ‘Well, he has been quick.’ Then, as he completely emerged, she saw he was alone and it looked as if Miss Howard had been quick. “I do believe she’s gone and refused him,” was her second ejaculation. “Well, I never! What will he be like?”

  As he came closer, she fled from the window and busied herself in household affairs, for she had seen enough to know what he would be like. His foot crunched the gravel and she heard the front door bang. Then came the sound of an electric bell ringing, and after a pause in which no parlour-maid, though winged like Mercury, could have answered it, a repeated and a longer summons. At the third peal she reinforced her courage with her curiosity, and went out into the lounge to see what he wanted.

  His hand was still on the bell-push.

  “My sandwiches, Mrs. Oxney,” he roared at her. “It’s half-past ten and there’s no sign of my sandwiches. Everything is disgracefully late this morning. Wentworth isn’t what it used to be.”

  “But you told me you wouldn’t take your lunch out, Colonel,” she faltered. “I’ll get it ready for you in a jiffy: turkey. But you did tell me—”

  “And am I not allowed to change my mind if I choose?” he interrupted. Off she flew to the kitchen, colliding with a parlour-maid who was running to answer the bell, for only Colonel Chase ever rang like that, and when the Colonel rang like that, O Lord!

  Mrs. Oxney sliced off the choicest morsels of turkey, the cook cut the most delicate slices of bread, the kitchen-maid tore the heart out of a lettuce, the scullery-maid polished up an apple, and in an incredibly short space of time Mrs. Oxney was hurrying back with a pile of these propitiatory offerings neatly tied up. She could not, being a woman, help glancing at his furious face with eager sympathy as he stored them in his pockets, and the awful conviction came over him that it mattered very little whether Miss Howard behaved like a woman of honour or not, since nothing could be more evident than that Mrs. Oxney, by some infernal feminine instinct, knew all about it. He scowled back at her sympathetic looks, and she saw him from the window recklessly careering down the drive.

  “Well, he is taking it like a man,” she thought, and went to tell her sister.

  It was impossible not to be thrilled, but it was difficult not to be a little anxious about the social atmosphere when Colonel Chase returned. The company of paying guests at Wentworth was now diminished, and out of the four left in the house, one was a rejected swain, the second a rejecting mistress, and the third the mistress’s bosom friend. Wentworth prided itself on its harmonious existence for, given that the Colonel was in a good temper, they were all, as Mrs. Oxney often said, more like a happy family party than a collection of promiscuous guests. But it was stretching optimism to breaking point to suppose that he could possibly be in a good temper, and the prospect of a happy family party that evening was indeed small.

  Mrs. Bertram (though thrilled) shook her head sadly over the outlook.

  “I could almost wish the Colonel would catch one of his worst colds,” she said, “such as would keep him in his room till Miss Howard and Miss Kemp leave us, but that’s not till the day after to-morrow. Yet I’m afraid there’s little chance of that on such a mild day. I can see she’s sketching still, and Miss Kemp with her. I didn’t see the Colonel after his disappointment. Was he much cut up, Margaret?”

  “More as if he’d like to cut somebody else up, and I’m sure I don’t wonder,” said Mrs. Oxney. “The Colonel refused! It hardly bears thinking of. An awful tantrum I should call it. Such a ringing of bells and such scowls at me when I brought him ever so tasty a lunch.”

  “More angry than love-sick then?” asked Mrs. Bertram.

  “I never thought h
e was love-sick, Amy,” said Mrs. Oxney. “But when he expected a happy future in store for him in that beautiful place of Miss Howard’s, it must have been a slap in the face. Enough to make any man in a tantrum, if he’d counted on it. And such a pleasant arrangement for them both! I’m sorry.”

  “And then at dinner to-night,” said Mrs. Bertram. “Very awkward for Miss Howard sitting just opposite the man she’s refused. Luckily you can always count on her behaving like a perfect lady. I only hope that she and Miss Kemp won’t sit and whisper and giggle in a corner as they do sometimes, for the Colonel’s sure to think they’re whispering about him, and that’ll make him mad. I declare I shall be glad to see the two ladies’ backs when they leave us, and never yet have I been glad when a guest has gone from Wentworth.”

  An after-thought slowly struck her.

  “And yet we don’t know that the Colonel has proposed to Miss Howard,” she said, “or that she’s refused him. You only saw him go out into the golf field, and come back quick and alone in a tantrum.”

  Such a suggestion was not, of course, worth answering.

  Meanwhile the bright nickel-plated bicycle had been flashing along up hill and down dale with a speed unequalled in the establishment of any previous record, and its rider’s state of mind may be faintly indicated by the fact that he had forgotten to put the pedometer back to zero. Rage and humiliation spurred him on, and it was not till he had left familiar country far behind, and his ankles ached with pedalling, that he dismounted and, sitting on a convenient gate, that he attempted coherently to review the repulsive situation. Love-sick he certainly was not: in a tantrum, yes. He had paid Miss Howard the highest compliment a respectable man can pay a respectable woman, and in refusing to take him, she had not expressed the smallest regret: it was idle to suppose that she felt any. And then there was ‘The Croft’: in losing Miss Howard he had lost ‘The Croft’, and all the leisurely dignity of his imagined life there. He had vividly seen himself installed there, looking after his wife’s agreeable property and he could scarcely yet believe that there was no more chance of his becoming Squire Chase of ‘The Croft’, than there was of his being Archbishop of Canterbury. More than that, he had decided that matrimony in the abstract was preferable to bachelor life in the concrete, and now nobody, as far as he knew, was going to marry him at all. More than that, there was the return to Wentworth facing him, and just now he would almost sooner have faced the man-eater again. Wentworth, he unerringly divined, had been expecting him to honour Miss Howard, and in spite of his request to her that she should not mention her disdain of the honour, he already gathered that Mrs. Oxney knew. If Mrs. Oxney knew, Mrs. Bertram would know, and as Miss Howard certainly knew, Kemp would know. He might just as well not have asked her to keep silence on this painful subject, and have been spared the information that he cut a very poor figure. Thinking it over, he was afraid he saw what she meant and, unaccustomed as he was to find fault with himself, it was rather a pity to have said that. . . .