Part 13

It was really Gerty who kept the Mayoress going; not by the crude method of personal admonition, however forcible its use, but by the subtle spur that one mind may exert upon another. Maria had to choose between showing spirit and allowing the odious Gerty to wear the dubious mantle of her grandeur.

Hard was the choice, but Mother Eve prevailed in the weak flesh of the lawful Mayoress. She made a silent vow that Gerty should not marry Josiah if she could possibly help it. Yes, she would show spirit. Cruel as the alternative was, she would be Mayoress a second year. Even if she died of it, and in her present frame of mind she rather hoped she would, she alone should sit in the chair of honor at the Annual Meeting of the British Women's Tribute to the Memory of Queen Boadicea, she alone should take precedence of the local duchess and the county ladies at the annual bazaar in aid of the Society for Providing Black and White Dogs with Brown Biscuits.

Maria, however, in her present low state, consented to Gerty deputizing for her at the review of the Girl Scouts in the Arboretum. She was reluctant to make even that minor concession--it was the thin end of the wedge!--but it had been intimated to Josiah that the Mayoress was always expected to say a few words on this spirited occasion. This was altogether too much for Maria in the present condition of her health.

Before the Girl Scouts, Gerty bore herself in a manner that even Miss Heber-Knollys, the august principal of the High School for Young Ladies, who was present, a perfect dragon of silent criticism, could hardly have improved upon. The Mayor at any rate was delighted with his sister-in-law's performance, drove her back in triumph to Strathfieldsaye and insisted on her staying to dinner.

The hapless Maria, after nearly three weeks of the peace and sanctity of her chamber, had struggled down to tea for the first time. She sat forlornly in the drawing-room, a white woolen shawl over her ample shoulders. It had been a real relief to allow Gerty to deputize for her, but now that the hour of trial was past Maria was inclined to despise, for the moment at any rate, the human weakness that had played into the hands of a highly dangerous schemer. It would have been so easy to have done it oneself, after all; it was such a simple thing, now that it was safely over!

Gerty consumed a pickelet and drank two cups of tea with an air of rectitude, while Josiah recited the story of the afternoon for the delectation of Maria. He was so well satisfied with the performance of the deputy that the lawful Mayoress began to scent danger. "Gert says," the Mayor informed her, "that if you don't feel up to it she'll distribute the prizes on the Fifth, at the Floral Hall."

The Mayoress drew in her lips, a sign that she was thinking. She _might_ be able to manage the Fifth, as "a few words" were not expected, although, of course, they were always welcome.

Josiah, however, was not inclined to press the matter. Maria seemed rather worried by her duties as Mayoress and Gerty having had greater experience in that kind of thing and having already done extremely well in the Arboretum, it now occurred to the Mayor that it might be possible to arrange with the Town Clerk for her to take over the duties permanently in his second year of office. "I don't say the Council will consent," said Josiah. "It may be a bit irregular. But they know you're not strong, Mother. I was careful to tell them that when I consented to keep the job on. So the way is paved for you, as you might say, if you really don't feel up to it. Anyhow, I'll hear what Aylett has to say about it. No man in England, they tell me, is a safer guide in matters of municipal practice. If Aylett thinks it will be all right, I'm sure Gerty won't mind acting as Mayoress."

"Delighted, Josiah!" Gerty's bow and smile were positively regal; they were modeled, in point of fact, upon those of Princess Mawdwin of Connemara, the most celebrated bazaar-opener of the period.

The Mayoress drew in her lips still further. She began to think very seriously. No human Mayoress could have been in lower spirits or have felt less equal to her duties than did Maria at that moment, but if Gerty was allowed to usurp the honors and the dignities so indubitably hers it would be very hard to bear. The whole thing was so like Gerty. Always a schemer; in spite of her soft manners and her pussy-cat ways, always at heart a grabber. The Mayoress felt that if the weak state of her health called for a deputy, and really it seemed to do so, she would have preferred the Queen of Sheba herself to the designing Gertrude. For years she had been able to twist Josiah round her little finger. So like a man to be taken in by her! So like a man not to be able to see what a Fox of a woman she really was.

Unfortunately Maria had reason to fear that she was very ill, indeed. She was afraid of her heart. It is true that three times within the past fortnight Horace, Doctor Cockburn, had solemnly assured his mother-in-law that there was nothing the matter with it. But thinking the matter over, as day after day she lay in her miserable bed, she had come to the conclusion that Horace was a modern doctor and that a modern doctor could hardly be expected to understand that old-fashioned organ, the heart.

She had made up her mind, therefore, to have a second opinion. She would go to a heart specialist, a man who really knew about hearts. As a fact she had already made up her mind to have the opinion of Dr. Tremlett who humored her, who understood her system and its ways. Horace, who was so modern, rather smiled at Dr. Tremlett--he was careful not to go beyond a smile at Doctor Tremlett, although his demeanor almost suggested that he might have done so had not etiquette intervened.

The Mayoress, therefore, was now placed in a difficult position by the success of a base intriguer. She didn't know what to do. Three days ago her mind had been made up that she would put herself in the hands of Doctor Tremlett, but if she did that she was quite sure that Doctor Tremlett, a physician of the old school who knew how important the heart was in every human anatomy and therefore treated it with the utmost respect, would not allow her to go overdoing it. Her time would be divided between her bed and the drawing-room sofa; he would most probably insist on a trained nurse--Doctor Tremlett really respected the heart--and the trained nurse would mean, of course, that the Mayoress had abdicated and that the way was open for the treacherous Gertrude with her pussy-cat ways to take over the duties permanently.

It was a dilemma. And it was made needlessly painful for the Mayoress by the blindness and folly of the Mayor; in some ways so very able, in others he was such a shortsighted man! Really, he ought to have seen what Gerty was up to. So like a man to be completely taken in by her. One of her own sex would have seen at a glance that Gertrude was a Deep one.

It was a most difficult moment for the Mayoress. Either she must be false to Doctor Tremlett and give up her heart or she would have to submit tamely to the rape of her grandeur and have it flaunted in her face by a Designing creature. Heaven knew that she had no taste herself for grandeur, but Gerty had a very decided taste for it and there was the rub!

"Have a piece of this excellent pickelet, Josiah!" That smile and that manner were very winning to some eyes no doubt, but those of Maria were not of the number. That coat and skirt, how well they hung upon her! Gerty had always had a slim figure. Some people thought her figure very genteel, but again Maria was not of the number. Some people also thought her voice was very ladylike--Josiah did for one. La-di-da the Mayoress called it. Simpering creature! Even if the pickelet was excellent it didn't need her to say so. What had she to do with the pickelet? And there was Josiah submitting to her like a lamb and talking to her about the Town Clerk and the City Council and wondering whether she would mind giving him a hand on the Fifth at the Floral Hall.

"I'll be delighted, Josiah--simply delighted. Anything to help. If I can be the slightest use to you--and to Maria."

That precious, "And to Maria," brought a curl to the lip of the lawful Mayoress. Designing hussy! So like a man not to see through her. Maria felt herself slowly turning green. The heart has been known to take people that way.

"Gert is staying to dinner, Mother. Hope Billing sent up that salmon."

Billing had sent up the salmon, the Mayor was meekly informed by the Mayoress.

"Chose it myself. Looked a good fish."

"It is wonderful to me, Josiah"--affected mouncing minx!--"how you manage to get through your day. You seem to have time for everything. Why, your work as mayor alone would keep most people fully occupied. Yet you always seem able to attend personally to this and that and the other."

"Oh, I don't know, Gert." Some of the great man's critics were inclined to think that since he had made so good in his high office his amazing self-confidence had abated a feather or two. "I've always tried to be what I call a prattical man. If you want a thing done right do it yourself--that's my motto."

"But you get through so much, Josiah."

"Just a habit. But there's a very busy year ahead. Being Mayor o' this city is not child's play in times like these. We're up against the food shortage now. Last year it was munitions. Next year it'll be coal. And the Army's always crying out for men. And any labor that isn't in khaki is that durned independent and very inefficient into the bargain. The papers are always writing up what they call democracy. Well, you can have all my share of democracy. Between you and me, Gert, it's mainly a name for a lot of jumped-up ignoramuses who have no idea of how little they do know. Yesterday I was over at Cleveley arranging with the Duke about a certain matter. Now he's prattical fellow, is that. He said, 'Mr. Munt, to be candid, I don't know anything about the subject, but I'm very willing to learn.' I tell you, Gert, you'd have to wait till the cows come home to hear one of our jumped-up Jacks-in-Office talking that way. There's nothing they don't know and they're not afraid to say so. Why, it even takes _me_ all my time to tell them anything."

XXXV

At this critical moment Ethel came in. Mrs. Doctor Cockburn was raging secretly. She had turned up at the Arboretum, dutifully prepared to help her mother through a situation a little trying perhaps to the nerve of inexperience and behold! there was Gertrude, smiling and pat, going through it all without turning a hair and palpably not in need of the least assistance from any one. The mortified Ethel, having missed a Sunday at Strathfieldsaye, had not been in a position to realize that her mother was going to be so weak as to allow Gerty, who as usual had masked her intentions very cleverly, to take her place. It was such a pity! Miss Heber-Knollys who was there, had said it was such a pity!

Ethel, an old and successful pupil of that distinguished lady, had been carried off to tea by her at the end of the proceedings. And Miss Heber-Knollys had expressed herself as a little disappointed. She was sure the Girl Scouts had been so looking forward to having the Mayoress with them that afternoon; at any rate, Miss Heber-Knollys had, although of course she had no pretensions to speak for the Girl Scouts; but speaking as a public, a semi-public woman of Blackhampton, although born in Kent and educated at Girham, speaking therefore, as a quasi-public and naturalized woman of Blackhampton with an M.A. degree, she looked to the Mayoress to take a strong lead in all matters relating to the many-sided activities of the City's feminine life.

Ethel quite saw that. And she now proceeded fully and pointedly to report Miss Heber-Knollys for the future guidance of her father, the admonition of her mother and for the confusion and general undoing of the designing Gertrude. Mrs. Doctor Cockburn was far from realizing the critical nature of the moment at which she had chanced to arrive, but the general effect of her presence was just as stimulating as if she had. The lawful Mayoress was in sore need of mental and moral support if she was to prevail against the Schemer.

Ethel was in the nick of time, but yet it was by no means certain that she was not too late to keep Gerty from the Floral Hall. The Floral Hall would depend on Doctor Tremlett, bluntly remarked Josiah.

"Doctor Tremlett!" said Mrs. Doctor Cockburn sternly.

"Your man has got the sack." The Mayor indulged in an obvious wink at Gerty who was looking as if butter would not melt in her mouth.

"But," said the horrified Ethel, "there's no comparison between Horace and Doctor Tremlett. Horace belongs to the modern school; Doctor Tremlett's an old fossil."

"Your Ma seems to think Doctor Tremlett understands her," said Josiah bluntly. "And Doctor Tremlett says she's got to be very careful of her heart or she'll have to lie up and have a trained nurse."

"But Horace declares there is nothing the matter with it."

"That's where Horace don't know his business as well as Doctor Tremlett. Your Ma has got to be very careful, indeed, and I'm going to arrange with Aylett for her to have a deputy for the whole of the coming year. You see if anything happened to her she'd _have_ to have a deputy, so it may be wise to take steps beforehand."

"Nonsense, Father! Horace says there's nothing the matter with her. He says it's stage fright. You ought not to encourage her. Certainly it isn't right that Gerty should be taking her place. Miss Heber-Knollys says it may make a bad impression."

"Don't know, I'm sure, what business it is of hers." His worship spoke with considerable asperity.

"Besides, if any one must deputize, surely it should be me."

There was a little pause and then said Gerty in her meek and dovelike voice, "We all thought, dear, that just now you would not care to take part in a public display. Perhaps after Christmas ... when the new little one has safely arrived."

The other ladies realized that the Fox of a Gertrude had scored a bull's-eye. At Christmas it was fondly hoped in the family that the Mayor would at last have a grandson. Certainly, Mrs. Doctor could not be expected to take an active part at the Floral Hall.

There were occasions, however, when Mrs. Doctor was visited by some of her father's driving force and power of will. And this was one of them. If a calamity of the first magnitude was to be averted--Gerty as Deputy-Mayoress was unthinkable!--there must be no half measure. "Horace says it will do Mother good to distribute the prizes at the Floral Hall, and if she doesn't I am sure that quite a lot of people will be disappointed."

Even for Ethel this was rather cynical. She was well aware that she had greatly overrated the public's power of disappointment; at the same time it was clearly a case for strong action. "You'll go to the Floral Hall, Mother. And I'll come with you."

"_You_, dear?" Gerty spoke in a melodramatic whisper.

"I shall sit just behind her ... in the second row. We can't have people talking. And I shall put on my fur coat."

It was a blow on the sconce for the specious Gertrude, but she took it with disarming meekness, smiling, as Ethel mentally described her, "like a prize Angora" down her long, straight, rather adventurous nose.

"It's your duty, Mother." Mrs. Doctor proceeded to administer a mental and moral shaking. "The women of the city look up to you, they expect you to set an example. Miss Heber-Knollys feels that very strongly. And Horace, who is a far cleverer man than Doctor Tremlett, says all you have to do is to keep yourself up."

"In other words, Maria," cooed Gerty in the voice of the dove, "you must show Spirit. And that is what I always tell you."

There were times when Gerty was amazing. Her audacity took away the breath even of Ethel. As for Maria she felt a little giddy. She was fascinated.

The She serpent.

XXXVI

Maria went to the Floral Hall. And she was seen there to great advantage. She wore a new hat chosen for her by Ethel at the most fashionable shop in the city; she distributed the prizes to the Orphans' Guild in a manner which extorted praise from even the diminished Gertrude; she didn't actually "say a few words," but her good heart--speaking figuratively of course--and her motherly presence spoke for her; and as Miss Heber-Knollys said, in felicitously proposing a vote of thanks to the Mayoress on whose behalf the Mayor responded, she had brought a ray of sunshine into the lives of those who saw the sun too seldom.

This achievement was a facer for the designing Gertrude, also for the antiquated Doctor Tremlett. On the other hand, it was a triumph for Ethel and for the modern school of medicine. Horace, Doctor Cockburn, was reinstated. Maria would still have felt safer with some one who really understood the heart and its ways, but, as Ethel pointed out to her, she would earn the admiration of everybody if she could manage to postpone her really serious illness until the following year.

Maria, at any rate, was open to reason. For the sake of the general life of the community she would do her best. But it was very hard upon her; far harder than people realized. As she had once pathetically told Josiah, "she hadn't been brought up to that kind of thing," to which the Mayor promptly rejoined, "that he hadn't either, but he was as good as some who had."

Education was what the Mayor called a flam. In the main it wasn't prattical. He allowed that it was useful in certain ways and in carefully regulated doses, but of late years it had been ridiculously overdone and was in a fair way to ruin the country. Education didn't agree with everybody. He knew a case in point.

A classical instance of schooling misapplied would always remain in his mind. There were times when he brooded over this particular matter in secret, for he never spoke of it openly. His youngest girl, upon whose upbringing a fabulous sum had been lavished, had cast such a blot on the family escutcheon that it was almost impossible to forgive her. It was all very well for Ethel to talk of Sally's doings in Serbia. That seemed the best place for people like her. Yet, as a matter of strict equity, and Josiah was a just man, although a harsh one, he supposed that presently he would have to do something in the matter.

Under the surface he was a good deal troubled by Sally. She was out of his will and he had fully made up his mind to have nothing more to do with her; she had had carte blanche in the matter of learning, and the only use she had made of it was to disgrace him in the eyes of the world.

All that, however, was before the war. And there was no doubt that the war had altered things. Before the war he lived for money and worldly reputation; but now that he was in the thick of the fight some of his ideas had changed. Money, for instance, seemed to matter far less than formerly; and he had come to see that the only kind of worldly reputation worth having didn't depend upon externals. His success as a public man had taught him that. It wasn't his fine house on The Rise, or the fact that he had become one of the richest men in the city, that had caused him to be unanimously invited to carry on for another year. Other qualities had commended him. He didn't pretend to be what he was not, and the people of the soundest judgment seemed to like him all the better on that account.

He was beginning to see now that the case of Sally would have to be reconsidered. In spite of the damnable independence which had always been hers from the time she was as high as the dining-room table, there was no doubt that she was now fighting hard for a cause worth fighting for. He had not reached the point of telling Mossop to put her back in his will, but the conviction was growing upon him that he would have to do so.

At the same time it was going to hurt. He could have wished now that he hadn't been quite so hasty in the matter. It was not his way to indulge in vain regrets or to pay much attention to unsolicited advice, but it seemed a pity that he had not listened to Mossop in the first instance. This business of Sally, in a manner of speaking, would be in the nature of a public climb down. And there had been one already.

As far as Melia and her husband were concerned his conscience pricked him more than a little. At first it had gone sorely against the grain to revoke the ban upon his contemptuously defiant eldest daughter and his former barman. But once having done so, it had come suddenly upon him that he had gone wrong in that affair from the outset. The provocation had been great, but he had let his feelings master him. Melia and Hollis were not exonerated. She ought to have shown more respect for his wishes, and a man in the position of Hollis ought to prove himself before he ventures to ask for his employer's daughter; but, if he had to deal with the episode again, he felt, in the light of later experience, that he would have acted differently.

However, by the end of November, Josiah had made up his mind to restore Melia and Sally to his will. It was only a question of when he should do so. But this was a matter in which his usual power of volition seemed to desert him. In other affairs of life to decide on a thing was at once to do it; but now he hesitated, putting off from day to day. It was a dose of particularly disagreeable medicine that there seemed no immediate need to swallow.

A day soon came, however, when he was rather bitterly to rue his vacillation. One morning Josiah arrived at the City Hall at a quarter to ten. A meeting of the Ways and Means Committee was called for a quarter past and he had to take the chair in the Mayor's parlor. When he entered the room he found the Town Clerk standing in front of a fire of the Best Blackhampton Bright, a twinkle in his eye and a formidable sheaf of documents in his hand.

"Good morning, Mr. Mayor." Perhaps a faintly quizzical greeting, respectful though it was. But this shrewd dog Aylett, with a pair of humorous eyes looking through gold-rimmed glasses which hung by a cord from his neck, had a slightly quizzical manner with everybody. He knew his value to the city of Blackhampton; he was the ablest Town Clerk it had ever had.

"Mornin', Aylett," said his worship in that official voice which seemed to get deeper and deeper at every meeting over which he presided.

"I suppose you've read your _Tribune_ this morning?" Aylett had an easy chatty way with everybody from the Mayor down. He was so well used to high affairs that he could be slightly jocular without impairing the dignity of a grandee and without loss of his own.

"As a matter of fact I haven't," said the Mayor. "The girl forgot to deliver it this morning at Strathfieldsaye. Don't know, Aylett, what things are coming to in this city, I don't really. We'll have to have an alteration if we are not going to lose the war altogether."

The Town Clerk smiled at this, and then he took the municipal copy of the _Tribune_ from among other works of reference on a side table, folded back the page and handed the paper to the Mayor. "That youngest girl of yours has been going it."

It was an unfortunate piece of phrasing on the part of one so accomplished as Aylett. Josiah started a little and then with an air of rather grim anxiety proceeded to read the _Tribune_.