Part 5

She made the response elementary, and shortened her line.

“But your friends will be sorry to lose you at all,” she replied, with a soft sparkle under her lashes. “I’m sure mother will.”

“Indeed?” I answered. “My friends conceal their desire for my presence with most generous consideration. I am allowed great liberty.”

“Oh, Mr. Butterfield, how can you say so?”

I ought not to have done it. I reproach myself for it. But the temptation! Miss Gibson was really nice, if not “quite nice.” It was unfair; but I am of no stronger fibre than my fellow-men. As I leaned forward, I knew that the landing-net was ready, and the gaff poised. I sought her eyes, and spoke low.

“Shall _you_ be sorry to lose me, Miss Gibson?”

The colour rose faintly on her cheek. She hesitated, her eyes cast down. She had not fallen in love with me. It was the mother’s doing.

Help came from outside. Mrs. Gibson blinked her vigilance for one short moment. Carrie crowded the last few bars of music into an accelerando that would have harrowed the soul of the composer, and she and Mrs. Loring were upon us.

“Oh, Miss Gibson,” said Carrie, with a sweetness of expression that astonished me, considering the real state of her feelings, “do please play again. Rollo and I must go very shortly, and we should so love to hear you. Won’t you, dear?”

“We cannot possibly leave without,” implored Mrs. Chatterton.

Nothing was possible but compliance, and Miss Gibson took her seat near the piano.

Mrs. Loring and Caroline mounted determined guard over me, one on each side, but didn’t speak. It was not until we were on the way home that the storm broke.

“Rollo Butterfield,” said Mrs. Loring icily, “I’m deeply surprised at you.”

“And why, my dear Mrs. Loring?” I asked blandly.

“Did you propose to that--that Gibson girl?”

“Proposal, Mrs. Loring,” I replied, “is an excitement that would be of more general indulgence but for the risk of acceptance. It is a valuable sensation, and I greatly regret its attendant danger.”

“You have no more perception than a child. Don’t you know that those people are doing all they can to catch you? I never saw anything so shameless.”

She had asked for it, and she should have it.

“Mrs. Loring,” I replied slowly and distinctly, “your ingenuousness charms me. You call Mrs. Gibson’s conduct shameless: yet you yourself would empty half the bachelors’ clubs in London. I forget precisely the number of years it is since you first endeavored to curtail my own celibate freedom, but I believe you have devoted no small part of your attention to my poor case.”

“Millie Dixon is different,” she retorted.

Of course Millicent was different, but I held her to the logic.

“We are not discussing Millicent, but the ethics of angling. I am surprised that you should not recognise your own position in the matter. You do not want me to be more precise?”

“I don’t want you to be anything but moderately sane,” she returned. “If you can’t see the difference between the Gibsons and Millicent Dixon----”

She left me to conclude the sentence for myself. Mrs. Loring Chatterton was in a bad temper, and evaded the argument pettishly. I turned to Caroline.

“Has my little sister anything to say?” I asked, in a “come one come all” tone.

She hadn’t. She cuddled her face against my shoulder, and pulled nervously at her glove fingers.

“But, Rol, dear,” she said anxiously, “what _were_ you and Miss Gibson talking about?”

I took her hand.

“Nothing, Caroline,” I replied, “but a few observations on the trout, his habits, and the method of his capture.”

“Exemplifying the fact,” Mrs. Loring struck in crossly, “that he is a cold-blooded creature.”

Mrs. Loring scored a bye.

X

AN UNDRESS REHEARSAL

Millicent Dixon had called on me unexpectedly, soaked from neck to ankle. I had been watching the vertical downpour from my window--long, heavy slate-pencils of water, that rebounded from the pavement in a mist a foot high,--and listening to the hurrying runnels that sluiced the gutters. It was full, uncompromising rain, and it thrashed steadily from the invisible cullender that had been a sky an hour ago. Millicent stood before me with her hand on the door, half vexed, but laughing out of her sodden garments.

“Now don’t sit there looking at me, Mr. Butterfield,” she exclaimed, as I admired at her plight with eyes half closed; “get me some things.”

I considered weightily.

“I have in the house at present,” I replied, “several morning suits, a Norfolk jacket, evening wear, pink silk----”

She tapped impatiently with her foot, shaking a sliver of little drops from the hem of her gown.

“Or perhaps fishing attire would be----?”

“Don’t be ponderous. Where’s Caroline?”

“Caroline, Miss Dixon, is out with Arthur, and will doubtless return in much the same state of rainwater as yourself.”

She disappeared towards Carrie’s quarters, her dress making a wet slap on the door as she whisked round. I rose to prepare brandy during her absence.

It should be mentioned that I was confined to my room with a slight attack of rheumatism, which my considerate friends persisted in regarding as gout. As a matter of fact the affection was purely muscular, and I indignantly repudiated the fuller flavour of the alleged complaint. My portliness must not be confounded with decadence.

Disconsolately enough, I had been fingering and sorting old letters, turning out drawer after drawer of forgotten trifles, and feeling none the younger in consequence. It was borne in upon me that I had a history, or some record of trivialities that passed as such; and these little drifted relics of the past had curiously discounted the glamour of what was going to happen to-morrow. Except for the unexpected shower, I should probably have been left to this melancholy occupation all day; and Millicent’s forced visit was very welcome.

She reappeared in garments of Caroline’s, passable in style, but with marked qualifications in the fit. She tops Caroline by three inches. I had often wondered idly where that three inches was accounted for, and how it was distributed. I knew now.

I surveyed her critically.

“Shoulders not bad,” I remarked, walking round her, while she stood at a laughing attention for kit inspection. “Waist--turn round--hm!--an inch and a half at most; all right so long as you don’t lean forward. Skirt--ah, the skirt--well, well, I’m past such things. Really, it’s not bad for an improvisation.”

“I couldn’t find Carrie’s slippers,” she said, putting forward a small foot.

The skirt had already revealed the silk-clad toes. I got her a particularly large pair of my own, brought her the brandy, which she drank like a sensible woman of twenty-eight, placed her an armchair near the fire, and resumed my own seat. Then I sought her eyes.

“It was most thoughtful of you, Miss Dixon, to remember an invalid, and to pay such a welcome call. I appreciate it. In the rain, too.”

Irony was wasted on this shameless woman. She looked at me boldly, and laughed.

“I assure you, Mr. Butterfield,” she replied, “the last thing I thought of when I left home was coming to see you. But oh, the rain! Look at it now.”

I was conscious of the fresh smell of wet pavement from where I sat--the window was open. The wheels of a hansom went past with a watery swish, the horse’s hoofs slapping clear in the deserted street, and the stones shone with a cleanness that they had not known for a month.

“At any rate,” I said magnanimously, “you’re here for an hour or two. It’s not going to stop yet. You may as well make a virtue of entertaining me.”

She bowed mockingly.

“It is I who am entertained,” she replied. “You have helped me in a watery dilemma. I am in your home. I wear your----”

I stopped her. They were not mine. They were Caroline’s.

“Slippers,” she continued, crossing them on the fender. “I think I’ll take Caroline’s place while she’s gadding about with Arthur.”

Again I stopped her. She was not in Caroline’s shoes.

“Besides, Miss Dixon,” I added, “are you not a little premature in offering to be a sister to me?”

“Never mind,” she replied, laughing; “call it housekeeper, if you like.”

“The imputation,” I answered, “is monstrous. I am a respectable bachelor, and never had such a thing. And if I had, she would have appeared before me in a fitting state--not a misfitting one.”

“Then we’d better make it sister after all,” she returned, “and my first duty is to demand what you were doing when I came in.”

I glanced at the half-sorted piles of notes, cards, ancient invitations, mementoes, and the hundred other matters which had doubtless been of more or less importance in their day, and shrugged my shoulders.

“I know,” said Miss Dixon, “it is rather dreadful. Seems like reading some one else’s letters. Let me help you.”

She put out her hand for the nearest packet. I placed my own firmly on hers.

“Miss Dixon,” I said slowly, “who are you that you would plunge thus recklessly into the tied-up part of a now reformed bachelor? That particular bundle is least of all fit for a sister’s perusal.”

“If Caroline neglected her duty,” she retorted, “that is no reason why I should do the same. I want to see them.”

“You had better take these instead,” I returned, pushing towards her a tray of wedding cards.

“I insist.”

“You insist?” I replied, in the tone of one speaking to a naughty child. “How old are you, Miss Dixon?”

She laughed.

“I think I am a good deal older than you, Rollo, in this respect; I don’t keep letters as I did when I was a sentimental schoolgirl. I destroy _that_ kind.” And she nodded towards the bundle.

“Indeed?” I said. “And why did you not tell me sooner? That would have been valuable information to me at one time.”

“And why?”

“I might have written a good deal more than I did.”

“You never wrote anything unfitted for my sheltered youth,” she replied, quietly smiling, and burrowing one foot deeper into the cavernous recesses of a slipper.

“I don’t post all I write,” I corrected, “but I have written things that would have amazed a Bassishaw--and thought twice about it.”

“Bassishaw doesn’t say much in his letters,” she said musingly. She and Caroline were very good friends, and there had doubtless been a good deal of inter-feminine confidence between them.

“But why don’t you post them?”

“Oh,” I replied offhand, “they are experiments. It is another way of keeping a diary. Perhaps, after all, you may see them if you care to. They are merely studies in moods.”

I untied the packet.

“Here you are,” I continued. “Arthur Bassishaw, Esq., on the occasion of his engagement to Caroline. Good advice--but a little too late. It wouldn’t have been taken, anyway, from what I know of His Omnipotent Youthfulness. Never posted.”

“It might have been worth while to post it for the sake of reply,” Millicent returned smiling; “you’d have had something badly written, but very ardent.”

I shook my head.

“Bassishaw’s sword would be a good deal mightier than his pen,” I replied. “To see him in the throes of composition is a felicity I have hitherto missed. Now here’s another: to Caroline, on the same occasion. That, Millicent, cost me some trouble to write, and I am afraid it showed it--I have only one sister, you know. Unposted.”

“That was rather nice of you, Rollo,” she said.

“I should only have given myself away,” I returned. “Now this, to Mrs. Bassishaw, is one of two--the other one was posted. It was a hard alternative. I sent the usual nice thing; Mrs. Bassishaw would understand that. This”--I tapped the envelope--“would have appeared difficult to a widow still young, and still in the running with her own son.”

Millicent nodded. There were reasons for Mrs. Bassishaw’s conduct which her relatives approved and her friends condoned.

“These,” I continued, turning over two or three, “are small ebullitions that served their end in leaving me in a better temper; and in one at least of them I evaded a state of mind in which I was feeling very sorry for myself. It is a good game, don’t you think?”

“Excellent,” she returned, “from the point of view of your future biographer. I suppose you have one eye on the memoir-writer, Rollo. Is your statue to be equestrian?”

I waived reply magnanimously, and went on.

“Here is one to Mrs. Loring Chatterton; and not unconnected with it, one to yourself.”

“One to me?” she inquired, looking up. “Why to me? What mood did that exemplify?”

“I think, Millicent,” I replied, “that I must have felt rather a regard for you that evening.”

She bowed ironically.

“It is nice to be thought well of,” she replied, “even if the regard does stop at the posting point. It was a wet night, I suppose; or the servants had gone to bed?”

“The fires of the heart, Millicent,” I answered, in pompous periods, at which she only laughed, “are not quenched by rain. Yon gutters that run so musically could no more----”

“'Oh, Captain Shaw!’” she sang softly, “'type of true love kept under----’”

I leaned back, tapping the letter with the ends of my fingers, and signified my willingness to wait until her operatic fervour should have spent itself.

“It must have been ferverish,” she said, still laughing. “Did it take you long to write?”

“About eight years, Millicent,” I replied.

“And not to be posted after all? Never mind; I suppose I shall see it in the biography. I declare I’m almost curious, Rollo. Tell me, is it----?” She paused, and looked fairly and quietly at me, with an odd smile on her lips.

“It is,” I replied, returning her gaze. “Would you care to read it, Millicent?”

She rose and went to the window. A cold grey light that heralded the passing of the shower filled the room. The heavens were relenting, and already a corner of the leaden pall had lifted. Millicent would probably take the opportunity to leave.

“Would you care to read it?” I repeated, looking over my shoulder.

She faced round suddenly.

“No, Rollo,” she said, “I should not.”

“You are probably right,” I replied. “Proposal is a venerable formality; but the inevitable scene----”

She walked back from the window and stood before me, dignified in her heterogeneous attire and perfectly serious.

“I thought you knew better than that, Rollo,” she said. “I don’t think there would be any scene, and, anyway, I’m not in my first season, you know.” She smiled the same queer smile. “But if you think that I should be interested in such a matter merely as an--experiment in mood--you wrong me, Rollo; and if, on the other hand, I am to take it in the plainer sense, I should like something less warmed up and out of date. You can hardly call it fervid, can you?”

I admired Millicent in that moment. I rose and took her hand.

“Millicent,” I said, “I accept your rebuke. There is nothing further to be said--just now; but soon----”

She laughed her accustomed laugh, the same old Millicent again.

“I shall be perfectly willing to consider any representations you may have to make on the subject, Rollo, provided they are forwarded in the ordinary course. Will you ring for tea?”

XI

QUEEN OF LOVE AND BEAUTY

From what I was able to gather, the course of young Ted Carmichael’s love was highly meritorious in its constancy. His affection was a solid, reliable fact, and, to me, correspondingly uninteresting. His father, I remembered, had, years before, wooed little Alice Chatterton on much the same lines, between which two it had been what their friends called an “understood thing,” since the first bashful glances of adolescence. In both cases this trait was regarded as a highly commendable faithfulness, and invested with the usual attributes of true and undying love; but to me it had less of this positive quality than appeared, and argued rather a certain paucity of invention in the finer relations of amorous adventure. It was admirable, but the case was settled from the beginning, and offered little field for speculation, even its incidental tiffs and mischances being in their rise and end perfectly accountable. In the case of the son, his three terms at Eton, coming when they did, might have resulted in a break from this monotonous routine of laudable love; his father had been hopeless from the start.

But Miss Nellie Bassishaw bade fair for freer flights. During the occasional intervals of my seeing her she seemed to grow in sections and to develop in seasons, and now, emancipated from the last suggestion of governess, was gowned and coifed beyond the limit of girlhood. True, her neck still showed a whitish celery colour from the unhabitual exposure, and in the management of her feet and skirt the last trace of the tomboy was disappearing; but she displayed beneath an eminently suitable hat glances that promised in the near future a hundred roguishnesses and mischiefs. If anything could shake Ted’s devotion, Miss Nellie, I decided, had it.

Young Ted called on me one afternoon for no reason at all that I could discover during the first half-hour of his visit. He was clad _point-devise_, bore his gloves and cane with admirable instinct, and looked as fresh and trim a youth as ever received the half-motherly kiss of a widow. I greeted him with pleasure.

“And the match, Ted?” I asked, when he had sat down; “how do you feel?”--Ted was the youngest member of the Eton eleven, which was to meet Harrow in the annual match at Lord’s in a day or two.

A troubled look crossed his face.

“I don’t feel a bit up to it, Butterfield,” he replied. “I shall go and mess the confounded thing, I know I shall. A fellow who’s playing cricket shouldn’t have anything on his mind--that is----”

He paused, and flushed half angrily.

“Anything wrong?” I asked in an offhand tone.

“No,” he replied--an affirmative “no,”--“nothing that matters.”

“Only?” I prompted.

“Only this,” he answered with another flush, “that women oughtn’t to have anything to do with cricket.”

“From my experience,” I returned, “they are invariably proud to see their sons playing.”

“Sons!” he replied. “Oh, it isn’t that--I know my mother is all right. But it doesn’t matter--much,” he concluded, in a tone that was _not_ intended as a hint to let the matter drop.

“Ah, I see,” I replied sympathetically. “Sorry, Ted. Of course, that does make a difference. When you said 'women,’ I thought for a moment you----Yes, it’s very awkward. To know that in such a crowd two eyes are aching with anxiety that you should acquit yourself well must be extremely trying to the nerves. I should try to forget it.”

He fidgeted with his gloves, and then turned sharp round.

“And suppose they were not anxious?” he retorted. “Suppose they didn’t care whether you came off or not? Hang it, Butterfield,” he continued, “you can imagine what it’s like--they think because a fellow hasn’t a moustache--it’s enough to make a fellow go and drink rotten stuff. I shan’t stand it.”

It was Nellie. I got it all out of him. He had evidently come to tell me. The rude health of public school life had not knocked the fancy out of him, and he had come back to find her grown up and with a tendency to be interested in men ten years her senior. How he had managed to get into the first eleven and to remain in love was to me one of the mysteries of constancy.

“But I thought you would have forgotten almost, Ted,” I said, in the maturity of our confidence. “It’s a year since you went away.”

“A fellow never forgets,” he replied sulkily. “It’s the girls who forget. Could you?”

I passed the point, and speculated on the validity of pledges on eternity.

“And she has--pardon me--snubbed you?” I inquired, after a while.

“Well, no,” he rejoined dubiously, “it isn’t quite that; but she always seems to have engagements or something. She must always 'be going now,’ and she’s altered so. I told her so, and she said we were silly then; and if I muff this match it will be worse than ever.”

I couldn’t help thinking that if I had organised the female mind I should have done it more consistently; but then there would probably have been no comedy in the world. I was willing to help Ted all I could, and advised a spontaneous gaiety in her presence--Ted shook his head--or failing that, a desperate counter-movement with a married woman; a notion he also rejected.

The only suggestion Ted had to make was that I should go to the match, contrive to sit next to Miss Nell, and--what, he didn’t say; a delicate reserve I admired.

“You’re a good chap, you know, Butterfield,” he added. “I’ve told lots of our fellows what a good chap you are. Harrop major says so too--he met you once, you know, Butterfield.”

I fear I had forgotten Harrop major in the multiplicity of my affairs, but I was properly touched. I smiled at my own goodness.

“Well, thanks awfully, Butterfield”--he rose to go--“it’s awfully good of you really. You’re a brick.”

“Thanks, Ted,” I returned. “I hope you’ll come off all right in the match.”

His lips twitched queerly; I forbore to press the alternative contingency, and he took his leave.

My duty, apparently, was to keep an eye on Miss Nell, to diagnose her condition when Ted went in to bat, to mark how, as should befall, his success or failure was received, and to exercise a discretionary supervision over the state of her heart as revealed by the vicissitudes of the game. It was doubtful of what precise use I should be, but--it was interesting, and Ted was a pleasant-mannered youth.

It was peculiarly interesting in view of the fact that the Carmichaels were a cricketing family. Now the purely abstract part of the game was a cult to which I had never aspired, my only interest being in such personal cases as that of my young friend Ted. I was convinced that the progress of Carmichael senior’s love, if it had had a progress, was accelerated by the fact that he had, in _his_ Eton match, made fifty on a wet wicket; and the question whether a similar performance on the son’s part would please Nellie, or whether Nellie would be merely pleased to see Ted pleased with himself, was a speculation which I followed into the nicer nuances.

Our party accounted for a considerable segment of bench space, the apex of which, I contrived it, consisted of Miss Nell and myself. We were backed by tiers of Carmichaels, Chattertons, and Bassishaws, and penetrated wedge-wise into half a division of Eton younglings, with close-cropped hair and large ears, which looked frank admiration at Nellie. One keeper of the public manners with freckles and an even greater extent of white collar than the rest cuffed his neighbour for saying that she was stunning. Nellie heard and laughed. She sat provokingly upright, and shot enfilading glances to left and right beneath the brim of a hat remarkably adapted to such proceedings. A pretty, slim thing she was, and the careless white flash between her lips unsettled Ted considerably, who was paying uneasy flying visits.

“I think the Harrow boys _look_ nicer,” she said, with a look of illicit pleasure from the shade of that eminently suitable hat; and Ted left with ill-feigned unconcern. I remembered my mission, and leaned towards her.

“Nellie,” I said, “do you consider that an encouraging remark to a young man whose happiness depends on his playing a straight bat and keeping his head cool?”

“Oh, Ted’s all right,” she returned with, I was pleased to observe, a touch of shame; “besides, what does it matter? It’s only a game.”

She might have had her answer from the group of Eton juvenility surrounding us, which broke into excited babble.

“Yes, you can.” “No, you can’t.” “You can’t be caught off your pads. Fat lot you know about cricket.” “Silly ass.” And so forth.

“But, Mr. Butterfield,” she said after a moment, “he will be so unbearable if he makes a lot of runs. He’s important enough already at being in the eleven.”

She stooped and spoke to young Eton on her right, who blushed at the distinction, but answered with bashful coldness.

“Besides,” she continued, “they say his average is thirty, and I’m sure I don’t care who wins.”