by E. F. Benson
“Perhaps I’m altogether wrong,” she said. “Perhaps it was only the inventions which I insisted on that made me think you had said the same sort of things before, only less so, about ‘The Croft’.”
“Far better ask Mrs. Oxney, if you’re not sure about it,” said Alice, repeating the master-stroke, “or best of all ask Colonel Chase. Tell him all about it.”
“How could I do anything of the kind?” asked Florence. “How can you think me so disloyal?”
“It isn’t very loyal to think those things of me at all,” said Alice.
Florence’s heart gave a crow of triumph, for her reason gave one convulsive struggle and expired.
“I must have been entirely mistaken,” she said. “Oh, how dreadful of me. And I’ve hurt you: that’s worst of all.”
“A little,” said Alice huskily. “Not much. It doesn’t matter.”
“But it does matter. It matters terribly. Oh, do forgive me.”
The reconciliation, though now certain, was not fully accomplished. Florence, in contrition, had to abase herself further, and Alice to concede that perhaps, unthinkingly, she had said things about The Croft which might lead imaginative minds to think that it was something of larger scale than a semi-detached villa in the Station Road. She could not think what they were, but there might have been something. . . . Then they turned with kisses and caresses to consider the dangers and exposures that still threatened.
“There’s nothing in The Times,” said Florence, “and I don’t think it is likely to have anything tomorrow.”
“But there are the evening papers, that Evening Gazette which the Colonel takes in,” said Alice. “It has columns of little paragraphs.”
“That’s true. But he’s usually out when it comes, and I will lie in wait and glance through it.”
“And if there is?” asked Alice.
“Steal it, darling,” said Florence, “like his morning paper.”
“How brave you are! But won’t he think it odd if both his papers go wrong to-day?”
“I shouldn’t wonder if he did,” said Florence. “But he would think it odder if he saw about ‘The Croft’. And after to-day, there won’t really be any risk, and tomorrow we go. Oh, what a lovely time we shall have in London now that we’re at one again.”
“You dear!” said Alice. “By the way, ‘The Croft’ is fully insured. And what shall we do now? Shan’t we go out?”
“Let’s! And may I come and sit with you in the golf field while you finish your sketch? I shall sit just where the Colonel sat and make love to you.”
Alice pressed her hand.
“And when my sketch is finished,” she said, “it shall be your’s. I thought of calling it ‘Home Sweet Home’, and giving it to Mrs. Oxney. But now it shall be ‘Blessings on the falling-out’. No one will understand that but you and I.”
They went out together in a stiff gale of renewed tenderness, with linked skippings and gambollings, Florence carrying the satchel with the painting utensils for the falling-out picture, and Alice gaily warbling. Careful though they had been in providing against future perils by the plot of stealing Colonel Chase’s evening paper, they forgot, like most criminals, the most obvious precaution of destroying the two copies of the incriminating Morning Standard. The consequences might have been dire, for Mabel, hurrying in with duster and slop-pail to ‘do’ Florence’s room, found them there, and bethought herself to take one to the Colonel. Then, luckily, she remembered how odiously disagreeable he had been about the cataracts of walnuts last night, and decided not to gratify him. Instead, she took them away, and tossed them on to the store of paper used for kindling in the kitchen cupboard. There for the present they lay innocuous, but like mines charged with deadly matter, they needed only a touch of blundering circumstance to cause a devastating explosion.
The thieves spent a tuneful, artistic and affectionate morning. Now that the catastrophe had happened, Alice felt greatly relieved, for all anxiety over Florence’s discovering the truth about ‘The Croft’ was over, and so well and pathetically had she herself managed that the crisis had only brought them closer together. The sketch promised to be one of the artist’s most successful pieces, and the paint-brush dripped with sentiment, for the window of Florence’s room, where the endearing falling out had occurred was visible above the shrub, and Alice attempted to portray her figure standing there. But her face would not look otherwise than like the globe of a lamp, and so she drew a blue curtain over it, and obstinate Flo was now behind the blue curtain just as she had been yesterday morning, when Colonel Chase made his declaration. Then there were plans to be made for the future: the fortnight in London became a firm month, after which Florence must spend Christmas with her father, and Alice would go to Torquay for sea-air and marine material for artistry.
“You must join me there for a bit,” said she. “Red sandstone cliffs, the blue, blue sea. Anstey’s Cove. Such lovely serpentine rocks.”
Florence did not reply for a moment, and Alice having made a blue, blue curtain, nudged her.
“Won’t you?” she said.
Florence drew a long breath. She felt her moment had come.
“Yes, of course I will,” she said, “but those are only little temporary plans. I want a permanent one. Mayn’t we make a permanent plan, darling? I mean, won’t you come to live with me altogether in London? The flat is mine, Mamma left it me, and I believe we should be so happy. Don’t say ‘Certainly not’, as you said yesterday to that absurd man. I would do all the housekeeping, or, if it amused you, you should. I think you’d like it better than Wentworth, and as for me, bliss. You shall subscribe to expenses or not just as you like. And Papa won’t want me again, for Nurse Babbit exactly suits him. I shall be quite alone otherwise, but that mustn’t influence you: I don’t appeal to you, though I should be miserable without you.”
The sketch, with Florence supposedly behind the blue curtain, slipped unregarded from Alice’s hand, for Florence had come out from behind all curtains.
“Oh, Florence, are you sure?” she asked.
“Positive,” said Florence.
“So am I, then,” said Alice.
The moment had grown quite solemn. They looked at each other in silence, they gravely kissed. Then Alice said:
“I told a heap of lies about that villa, I made it out to be grand and it was a horrible little place, and the shunting at the station used to keep me awake. The rent was fifty pounds a year.”
Florence appreciated that at its full value.
“Oh, I am glad you told me,” she said hurriedly, “and now it’s quite over. Darling, just think; yesterday the Colonel sat just where I’m sitting, when you said ‘Certainly not’, and now, bless you, you say ‘Certainly so’. I long to tell him you’re going to live with me instead of him. How he would hate me! Delicious! But then you’ll have to tell Mrs. Oxney that you’re not coming back here, so it will get round.”
The two went off next day on their honeymoon, but as their rooms were to be filled up at once, Mrs. Oxney resigned herself to their departure. She felt, too, that the Colonel would never settle down to his old ways while the constant reminder of his disappointment was there. Indeed the news that Wentworth would never again ring with Miss Howard’s bright little snatches of song was compensated for by the consideration that Colonel Chase would very likely have gone away if she had stopped, and of the two she vastly preferred him. A man, and such a fine big man, was a much more valuable social nucleus in the house, for in his robust hectoring way he kept things up to the mark, and told his grim or amusing stories, and laid down the law at bridge, and made it seem an honour to play with him. Of course he lost his temper, and had tantrums, but then he recovered it again and made a fresh record on his bicycle. He was an asset, a distinction, a Colonel was better than a plain Miss to rally round. She quite made up her mind to put in the extra bathroom when he went away for a fortnight at Christmas. It would be ready for his return, and that would be a nice surprise fo
r him.
Colonel Chase made a remarkable recovery after Miss Howard’s departure, and in the week or two that remained before his Christmas holiday, so well earned by his busy life at Wentworth, he established himself with the new paying guests, elderly and hobbling ladies, as an athlete and an authority on most subjects. There was some very pleasant bridge the night before he left, but he broke the table up at ten o’clock, as he was off quite early in the morning and had yet his packing to do.
“I never trust anybody to do my packing for me,” he said, “and if I had fifty valets I would still do it. In India, whatever the thermometer stood at, I invariably packed for myself. Give me plenty of paper to wrap my kit up in, and there’ll be no shaking about or breakages.”
“Nobody can pack like you, Colonel,” said Mrs. Oxney, “I always used to pride myself on my packing, till once I saw you doing it. Like a mosaic: everything fitting so that there wasn’t a chink anywhere. And the amount you get in, astonishing!”
Colonel Chase’s bed was piled up high with his clothes and other effects, waiting for his mosaic touch, but he had made very little progress in his astonishing art, when he saw that there was not nearly enough paper. Up came Mabel in answer to his summons, and down went Mabel, and up she came again with a pile of newspapers.
“Thankye,” said Colonel Chase, feeling in his pocket for some small change as Christmas was approaching. Three of the larger coins would be a generous tip, but then he remembered the cataract of nuts, and let one of them slip back into his pocket again.
His manual dexterity did not entirely occupy his mind: he could ruminate while he made his mosaic, and as he wrapped up boots and fitted Macaulay’s essays among them to keep them tight, he thought over his disappointment. It was still a bitter reflection that owing to a woman’s perverseness he could not now look forward to being the master of a fine Queen Anne Manor House with gardens and greenhouses and galleries, for he still felt that he was absolutely cut out to fill that post. Instead the misguided lady had gone off to live in frumpy spinster partnership with one of the most tiresome creatures he had ever come across. Together perhaps, for he understood that Kemp was well off, they would settle into ‘The Croft’, when Miss Howard’s tenants came to the end of their lease, and get cheated by the gardeners and never have a peach or a bunch of grapes for their own table. A woman could manage a house (he had fully intended his wife to manage her’s) but with an estate like that a man’s grasp and authority were required, or everything ran to seed. The county club, the comfortable little parties, the position of Squire Howard-Chase! Well, it was no use thinking about it, and after all Wentworth was very comfortable, and the newcomers seemed reverential women, and he hoped they would stop on.
He picked up one of the papers that had been brought him by Mabel, and his eye was arrested by a remarkable picture of a baboon on the first page, which was unfamiliar to him. Yet the paper was the Morning Standard which he saw every day, and he could not imagine how he had forgotten this grimacing ape. He turned the leaf, and found another picture he was sure he had not seen before, and at that fateful moment he remembered that some few mornings ago his Standard had not arrived. Then his eye fell on a headline: “Fire at Tunbridge Wells”, and in the ensuing paragraph on the words, “a semi-detached villa called ‘The Croft’.” He gave one loud raucous exclamation, and next moment, without pausing to put on his coat, which he had shed for his mosaic-work, he was bounding downstairs, with the pedometer clicking madly in his pocket. The smoking-room where they had played bridge, was empty and he hurried to Mrs. Oxney’s sitting-room, and entered without knocking. There she was with her skirt turned back over her knees, warming her shins at the fire and eating seed-cake.
“Why, whatever’s the matter, Colonel?” she cried, hastily putting down her skirt and her seedcake. “Nothing wrong, I hope?”
“Wrong?” he echoed, brandishing the Morning Standard. “Listen to this. Fire at Tunbridge Wells, Mrs. Oxney.”
“Gracious me, how dangerous! Not . . . not Miss Howard’s beautiful place?” she cried.
“You’ve guessed! You’re right! But there’s something you’ve not guessed. ‘The Croft’ was burned out, but what do you suppose ‘The Croft’ was? A semi-detached villa, Mrs. Oxney, a semi-detached villa in the Station Road!”
“It must be another one,” said Mrs. Oxney faintly.
“Not a bit of it. Tenants were occupying it: the Gradges. Don’t you remember the name? I do. Station Road: semi-detached villa. What a liar the woman is with her manor house and her shrubberies and her rose-gardens, and her gallery-room. Family portraits too: a couple of photographs I expect. I’ll tell you what I think: the descendant of the noble house made up all that swaggering nonsense just to entrap me into—”
On second thoughts that wouldn’t do, but the Colonel continued with no pause at all.
“ — she wanted to make us all think she was of the landed gentry. Swank! Lies! The painful necessity of letting her beautiful place, but no repining, brave girl, because it’s happened to so many of her class! But what’s the class, I ask you? The semi-detached class. Curates and apothecaries and chimney sweeps! Why my tailor’s name is Howard, though I never taxed Miss Howard with that. But to think of the escape I’ve had! ‘The Croft’, a semi-detached villa!”
This was a mistake. Mrs. Oxney, horrified as she was (for she had been talking only this evening to some of the new guests, with regret that Miss Howard, who had that lovely place in Kent, had just gone) could not think so ill of the Colonel as to imagine that he had been “after” the exploded and now burned-out ‘Croft’, instead of its mistress. Yet his words did lend themselves to such an interpretation.
“Why, you speak as if it was The Croft that had enticed you, Colonel,” she said. “To be sure, it does look as if Miss Howard had made it out a bit grander than it was, but surely it was she you wanted. I should hate to believe otherwise of you, though to be sure it was disappointing to think that you’d lost all that beautiful property as well as your young lady.”
Colonel Chase thought for the moment that he was in a hole. But his excitement had sharpened his wits to an extraordinary acuteness, and he saw a loophole.
“I repeat that I’ve had an escape,” he said weightily. “When I proposed, as I did, to the lady you designate as young, I thought her an accomplished woman within limits, and not without charm, but above all an honourable and truthful woman. This information, which I stumbled on by accident, shows me that her idea of truth is different from mine, and long may it remain so. That’s what I mean by an escape. Sooner or later, it would have turned out that she had grossly lied about ‘The Croft’. I could never have trusted her again, and misery would have followed on marriage. And when I think of all I have done for her, the pictures I have bought, the offer of a name which though no doubt obscure is yet honourable: then I repeat, as often as you like, that I have had an escape. Ha!”
Mrs. Oxney, pored over the fatal paragraph, sadly clicking her tongue against her teeth.
“It does look as if she had deceived us,” she said. “I wouldn’t have thought it of her.”
“Then I would, Mrs. Oxney,” said Colonel Chase. “I never really trusted her. That improvisation at which she had been practising for days! I could have whistled it before she played it at the entertainment. It’s all of a piece.”
Mrs. Oxney felt that Miss Howard could not be so black as the Colonel was painting her. She had to stand up for her sex.
“But you knew that before you proposed to her,” she said. “Besides, where’s the harm?”
“I did know it: you are right,” said Colonel Chase. “I hoped that these little superficial fibs were no part of her real nature. But now! Instead of the Queen Anne manor house, and the grape-house and the peach-house and the bathing-pool—”
“No! Not bathing-pool?” asked Mrs. Oxney.
“Bathing-pool. She bathed there when a girl — and the shrubberies and ancestralcies, we have a semi-detached v
illa in the Station Road. Ha, ha, ha! Stupendous I repeat. Enough. Dear me, I am talking to you in my shirt-sleeves. Very remiss of me; I hope I have a better idea of what is due to the other sex than Miss Howard has. The peaches and the Muscat grapes! If a peach or a grape ever found its way into ‘The Croft’, it came from a barrow in the Station Road. We should have had a banana-grove next. However, I wish Miss Howard well, and I shall certainly send her a sympathetic note, condoling with her on the loss of her semi-detached villa, and hoping that its treasures are amply insured.”
So happy a mixture of essential spite and apparent magnanimity could hardly be believed, and, hoarse with rhetoric Colonel Chase ceased foaming at the mouth and straddling in front of the fire-place, and sat down as calm as the centre of a cyclone. Mrs. Oxney he supposed, had got used to the informality of his shirt-sleeves by now, and if she hadn’t, she never would.
“Well, I’m sure you’re very forgiving, Colonel,” she said, “after the way Miss Howard has treated you. I’ve often noticed how large-minded soldiers are. Mr. Oxney was, though, to be sure, he was only in the Militia. And I quite misunderstood you, I see. I thought at first that you meant that you’d had an escape because ‘The Croft’ wasn’t quite what you thought it, now I see you weren’t such a mercenary. Poor Miss Howard, what she’s lost when you gave her the chance. It all comes of not being quite truthful.”
