Part 7

Ermyntrude took no notice. “I made a pretence of going up to London on a visit,” she continued, “and I spent five days looking about, making inquiries, trying to get some notion of how girls who supported themselves made a beginning. I talked a little with such few girls that I knew as were in town, and I cared to see--guardedly, of course. They had no idea--save in the way of the governess or music teacher. I’d cut my throat before I’d be either of those--forced to dress like ladies on the wages of a seamstress, and to smile under the insults of tradesmen’s wives and their louts of children. An actress I might be, after I had starved a long time in learning my business--but before that mamma would have died of shame. Then there are typewriters, and lady journalists and telegraph clerks--I am surly enough sometimes to do that last to perfection--but they all have to have special talents or knowledge. As for saleswomen in the shops--there are a dozen poor genteel wretches standing outside ready to claw each other’s eyes out for every vacancy. I went over Euston Road way at noon, and I watched the work-girls come out of the factories and workshops, and they had such sharp, knowing, bullying faces that I knew I should be a helpless fool among them. And watching them--and watching the other girls on the street... in the Strand and Piccadilly--I told you I was going to talk seriously, my dear friend--it all came to seem to me like a nightmare. It frightened me. These were the girls whose fathers had failed to provide for them--that was absolutely all the difference between them and me. I had looked lazily down at marriage as a chance of escaping being bored here at Fernbank. They were all looking fiercely up at marriage as the one only chance of rescue from weary toil, starvation wages, general poverty and misery. In both cases the idea was the same--to find some man, no matter what kind of a man, if only he will take it upon himself to provide something different. You see what poor, dependent things we really are! Why should it be so? That’s what I want to know.”

“Oh, that’s all you want to know, is it?” I remarked, after a little pause. “Well, I think--I think you had better give me notice of the question.”

“I have tried to read what thinkers say about it,” she added; “but they only confuse one the more. There is a Dr Wallace whom the papers speak of as an authority, and he has been writing a long article this very week--or else it is an interview--and he says that everything will be all right, that all the nice women will marry all the good men, and that the other kinds will die off immediately, and everybody will be oh, so happy--in a ‘regenerated society.’ That is another thing I wanted to ask you about. He speaks--they all speak--so confidently about this ‘regenerated society.’ Do you happen to know when it is to be?”

“The date has not been fixed, I believe,” I replied.

The early winter twilight had darkened the room, and the light from the grate glowed ruddily upon the girl’s face as she bent forward, her chin upon her clasped hands, looking into the fire.

“There is another date which remains undetermined,”’ I added, faltering not a little at heart, but keeping my tongue under fair control. “I should like to speak to you about it, if I may take off my lamb’s-wool wig and Santa Claus beard, and appear before you once more as a contemporary citizen. It is this, Ermie. I am not so very old, after all. There is only a shade over a dozen years between us--say a baker’s dozen. My habits--my personal qualities, tolerable and otherwise, are more or less known to you. I am prosperous enough, so far as this world’s goods go. But I am tired of living----”

I stopped short, and stared in turn blankly at the mock coals. A freezing thought had just thrust itself into the marrow of my brain. She would think that I was saying all this because her father had regained and augmented his fortune. I strove in a numb, puzzled way to retrace what I had just uttered--to see if the words offered any chance of getting away upon other ground--and could not remember at all.

“Tired of living,” I heard Ermyntrude echo. I saw her nod her head comprehendingly in the firelight. She sighed.

“Yes, except upon conditions,” I burst forth. “I weary of living alone. There hasn’t been a time for years when I didn’t long to tell you this--and most of all at Clacton, if I had known you were at Clacton. You have admitted yourself that _nobody_ knew you were there.” The words came more easily now. “But always before I shrank from speaking. There was something about you too childlike, too innocent, too--too----”

“Too silly,” suggested Ermie, with an affable effect of helping me out.

Then she unlocked her fingers, and, still looking into the fire, stretched out a hand backward to me. “All the same,” she murmured, after a little, “it isn’t an answer to my question, you know.”

“But it is to mine!” I made glad response, “and in my question all the others are enwrapped--always have been, always will be. And, oh, darling one----”

“That is mamma in the hall,” said Ermyntrude.

_Describing Impressions of a Momentous Interview, loosely gathered by One who, although present, was not quite In it_

Mrs Albert has smiled upon my suit to be her son-in-law.

The smile did not, however, gush forth spontaneously at the outset. When the opportunity for imparting our great news came, we three were in the drawing-room, and Mrs Albert, who had just entered, had been allowed to discover me holding Ermyntrude’s passive hand in mine. She cast a swift little glance over us both, and seemed not to like what she saw. I was conscious of the impression on the instant that Ermyntrude did not particularly like it either. An effect of profound isolation, absurd enough, but depressingly real, suddenly encompassed me. I began talking something--the words coming out and scattering quite on their own incoherent account--and the gist of what they made me say sounded in my ears as if it were a determined enemy who was saying it Why should I be speaking of my age, and the fact that I had held Ermie on my knee as a child, and even of my rheumatism? And did I actually allude to them? or only hear the clamorous echoes of conscience in my guilty soul, the while my tongue was uttering other matters? I don’t know, and the fear that Ermie would admit that she really hadn’t been paying attention has restrained me from asking her since.

But Mrs Albert was paying attention. She held me with a cool and unblinking eye during my clumsy monologue, and she continued this steady gaze for a time after I had finished. She stirred the small and shapely headgear of black velvet and bird’s-wing which she had worn in from the street, just by the fraction of a forward inch, to show that she understood what I had been saying--and also very much which I had left unsaid.

“Hm--m!” the good lady remarked, at length. “I see!”

“Well, mamma, having seen,” Ermyntrude turned languidly in her chair to observe, lifting the hand which still rested within mine into full and patent view, and then withdrawing it abruptly--“having seen, and been seen, there’s really nothing more to do, is there?”

“She is very young,” said the mother, in a tentative musing manner which suggested the thought that I, on the other hand, was very much the other way.

Ermyntrude sniffed audibly, and rose to her feet. “I am three-and-twenty,” she said, “and that is enough, thank you.” There was something in it all which I did not understand. The sensation of being out of place, as in the trying-on room of a dressmaker’s, oppressed me. The sex were effecting sundry manouvres and countermarchings peculiar to themselves--so much I could see by the way in which the two were talking with their eyes--hut what it was all about was beyond me. The mother finally inclined her head to one side, and pursed together her lips. Ermyntrude drew herself to her full stature, threw up her chin for a moment like one of Albert Moore’s superb full-throated goddesses, and then relaxed with that half-cheerful sigh which we express in types with “heigho!” It was at once apparent to me that the situation had lightened--but how or why I cannot profess to guess. Uncle Dudley, to whom I subsequently narrated what I had observed, abounded in theories, but upon reflection they do not impress, much less convince, me. Here is in substance one of the several hypothetical conversations which he sketched out as having passed in that moment of pre-occupied and surcharged silence:

Mother [_lowering brows_]. You may be sure that at the very best it will be Bayswater.

Daughter [_with quiver of nostrils_]. Better that than hanging on for a Belgravia which never comes.

Mother [_disclosing the tips of two teeth_]. It is a chance of a title going for ever.

Daughter [_curling lip_]. What chance is ever likely _here?_

Mother [_lifting brows_]. He’s as old as Methusaleh!”

Daughter [_flashing eyes_]. That’s my business!

Mother [_little trembling of the eyelashes_]. You will never know how I have striven and struggled for you!

Daughter [_smoothing features_]. Merely the innate maternal instinct, my dear, common to all mammalia.

Mother [_beginning to tip head sidewise_]. It is true that Tristram is docile, sheep-like, simple----

Daughter [_lifting her chin_]. And old enough to be enchained at my feet all his life.

Mother [_head much to one side_]. And he has always been extremely cordial with _me_----

Daughter [_chin high in air_]. And not another girl in my set has had a proposal for _years_.

Mother [_brightening eye_]. We shall be in time to buy everything at the January sales!

[Mother _smiles;_ Daughter _sighs relief. The imaginations of both wander pleasantly off to visions of sublimated Christmas shopping, in connection with the trousseau and betrothal gifts. General joy._]

As I have said, this is Uncle Dudley’s idea, not mine. My own fancy prefers to conjure up a tenderer dialogue, in which the mother, all fond solicitude, bids the maiden search well her heart, and answer only its true appeal, and the sweet daughter, timid, fluttering, half-frightened and wholly glad, flashes hack from the depths of her soul the rapt assurance of her fate. But Dudley was certainly right about the ending, as the first words Mrs Albert uttered go to show.

“Don’t forget to remind me, then, about presents for the Gregory children,” she said all at once, in a swift sidelong whisper at Ermyntrude. Then she turned, and as I gazed wistfully upon her face, it melted sedately, gracefully, a little at a time, into the smile I sought.

“My dear Tristram,” she began, and her voice took on a coo of genuine kindliness and warmth as she went on, “of course Albert and I have had other views--and the dear girl is perfectly qualified to adorn the most exalted and exclusive circles--if I do say it myself--but--but her happiness is our one desire, and if she feels that it is getting--I _would_ say, if you and she are quite clear in your own minds--and we both have the greatest confidence in your practical common-sense, and your _honour_--and we have all learned to be fond of you--and--and I am really very glad!”

“Most of all things in the world, dear lady, I hoped for this,” I had begun to say, with fervour. I stopped, upon the discovery that Mrs Albert was not listening, but had turned and was conferring with her daughter in half-audible asides.

“Mercy, no!” the mother said. “They’d know in a minute that it had been a present to us. That old Mrs Gregory is a perfect _lynx_ for detecting such things. I suppose their boys are too big for tricycles, else your father knows a dealer who----”

My own Ermie looked thoughtful. “It won’t seem queer, you think, our bursting in upon them with Christmas presents like this--without provocation?” she asked.

“My dear child, queer or not queer,” said Mrs Albert, “it is imperative. You know how much depends upon it--there are plenty of others who would be equally useful in various ways, but not like the _Gregorys_--and if there were there’s no time now. If this could have happened, now, a fortnight ago, or even last week----”

“Yes, but it didn’t,” replied Ermyntrude. “It only happened to-day.” She turned to me, with a little laugh in her eyes. “Mamma complains that we delayed so long. We have interfered with the Christmas arrangements.”

“If I had only known! But--I claim to be treated as one of the family, you know--I couldn’t quite grasp what you were saying about the Gregorys. I gather that our--our betrothal involves Christmas presents for them, but I confess I don’t know why. Or oughtn’t I to have asked, dear?”

For answer Ermyntrude looked saucily into my face, twisted her dear nose into a pretty little mocking grimace, and ran out of the room. Mrs Albert vouchsafed no explanation, but talked of other matters--and there were enough to talk about.

It was not, indeed, till late in the evening, when Uncle Dudley and I were upon our last cigar, that I happened to recall the mystifying incident of the Gregorys.

“That’s simplicity itself,” said Uncle Dudley. “The Gregorys own one of the tidiest country seats in Nottinghamshire--lovely old house, sylvan arbours, high wall, fascinating rural roads--in the very heart of county society, too--O, a most romantic and eligible place!”

“Well, what of it? What has that to do with Ermyntrude and me and Santa Claus?”

“If you will read the _Morning Post_ the day after your wedding, my dear, dull friend, you will learn that Colonel Gregory has placed at the disposal of a certain bridal couple for their honeymoon his ideal country residence. The paper will not state why, but I will tell you in confidence. It will be because the bride’s mother is a resourceful and observant woman, who knows how to plant at Christmas that she may gather at Easter.”

“I hate to have you always so beastly cynical, Dudley,” I was emboldened to exclaim.

Uncle Dudley regarded me attentively for an instant. He took a thoughtful sip at his drink, and then began smiling at his glass. When he turned to me again, the smile had grown into a grin.

“You are belated, my boy,” he said. “You ought to have married into the Grundys years ago. You were just born to be one of the family.”