Chapter 6

Peter Hope had a suspicion that Grindley junior had for the moment parted company with that sweet reasonableness that otherwise, so Peter Hope felt sure, was Grindley junior's guiding star.

"I mean it, sir," reasserted Grindley junior. "I am--" Grindley junior was about to add "well educated"; but divining that education was a topic not pleasing at the moment to the ears of Helvetia Appleyard, had tact enough to substitute "not a fool. I can earn my own living; and I should like to get away."

"It seems to me--" said the sub-editor.

"Now, Tommy--I mean Jane," warned her Peter Hope. He always called her Jane in company, unless he was excited. "I know what you are going to say. I won't have it."

"I was only going to say--" urged the sub-editor in tone of one suffering injustice.

"I quite know what you were going to say," retorted Peter hotly. "I can see it by your chin. You are going to take their part--and suggest their acting undutifully towards their parents."

"I wasn't," returned the sub-editor. "I was only--"

"You were," persisted Peter. "I ought not to have allowed you to be present. I might have known you would interfere."

"--going to say we are in want of some help in the office. You know we are. And that if Mr. Grindley would be content with a small salary--"

"Small salary be hanged!" snarled Peter.

"--there would be no need for his going to Africa."

"And how would that help us?" demanded Peter. "Even if the boy were so--so headstrong, so unfilial as to defy his father, who has worked for him all these years, how would that remove the obstacle of Mr. Appleyard's refusal?"

"Why, don't you see--" explained the sub-editor.

"No, I don't," snapped Peter.

"If, on his declaring to his father that nothing will ever induce him to marry any other woman but Miss Appleyard, his father disowns him, as he thinks it likely--"

"A dead cert!" was Grindley junior's conviction.

"Very well; he is no longer old Grindley's son, and what possible objection can Mr. Appleyard have to him then?"

Peter Hope arose and expounded at length and in suitable language the folly and uselessness of the scheme.

But what chance had ever the wisdom of Age against the enthusiasm of Youth, reaching for its object. Poor Peter, expostulating, was swept into the conspiracy. Grindley junior the next morning stood before his father in the private office in High Holborn.

"I am sorry, sir," said Grindley junior, "if I have proved a disappointment to you."

"Damn your sympathy!" said Grindley senior. "Keep it till you are asked for it."

"I hope we part friends, sir," said Grindley junior, holding out his hand.

"Why do you irate me?" asked Grindley senior. "I have thought of nothing but you these five-and-twenty years."

"I don't, sir," answered Grindley junior. "I can't say I love you. It did not seem to me you--you wanted it. But I like you, sir, and I respect you. And--and I'm sorry to have to hurt you, sir."

"And you are determined to give up all your prospects, all the money, for the sake of this--this girl?"

"It doesn't seem like giving up anything, sir," replied Grindley junior, simply.

"It isn't so much as I thought it was going to be," said the old man, after a pause. "Perhaps it is for the best. I might have been more obstinate if things had been going all right. The Lord has chastened me."

"Isn't the business doing well, Dad?" asked the young man, with sorrow in his voice.

"What's it got to do with you?" snapped his father. "You've cut yourself adrift from it. You leave me now I am going down."

Grindley junior, not knowing what to say, put his arms round the little old man.

And in this way Tommy's brilliant scheme fell through and came to naught. Instead, old Grindley visited once again the big house in Nevill's Court, and remained long closeted with old Solomon in the office on the second floor. It was late in the evening when Solomon opened the door and called upstairs to Janet Helvetia to come down.

"I used to know you long ago," said Hezekiah Grindley, rising. "You were quite a little girl then."

Later, the troublesome Sauce disappeared entirely, cut out by newer flavours. Grindley junior studied the printing business. It almost seemed as if old Appleyard had been waiting but for this. Some six months later they found him dead in his counting-house. Grindley junior became the printer and publisher of _Good Humour_.

STORY THE FOURTH--Miss Ramsbotham gives her Services

To regard Miss Ramsbotham as a marriageable quantity would have occurred to few men. Endowed by Nature with every feminine quality calculated to inspire liking, she had, on the other hand, been disinherited of every attribute calculated to excite passion. An ugly woman has for some men an attraction; the proof is ever present to our eyes. Miss Ramsbotham was plain but pleasant looking. Large, healthy in mind and body, capable, self-reliant, and cheerful, blessed with a happy disposition together with a keen sense of humour, there was about her absolutely nothing for tenderness to lay hold of. An ideal wife, she was an impossible sweetheart. Every man was her friend. The suggestion that any man could be her lover she herself would have greeted with a clear, ringing laugh.

Not that she held love in despite; for such folly she was possessed of far too much sound sense. "To have somebody in love with you--somebody strong and good," so she would confess to her few close intimates, a dreamy expression clouding for an instant her broad, sunny face, "why, it must be just lovely!" For Miss Ramsbotham was prone to American phraseology, and had even been at some pains, during a six months' journey through the States (whither she had been commissioned by a conscientious trade journal seeking reliable information concerning the condition of female textile workers) to acquire a slight but decided American accent. It was her one affectation, but assumed, as one might feel certain, for a practical and legitimate object.

"You can have no conception," she would explain, laughing, "what a help I find it. 'I'm 'Muriken' is the 'Civis Romanus sum' of the modern woman's world. It opens every door to us. If I ring the bell and say, 'Oh, if you please, I have come to interview Mr. So-and-So for such-and-such a paper,' the footman looks through me at the opposite side of the street, and tells me to wait in the hall while he inquires if Mr. So-and-So will see me or not. But if I say, 'That's my keerd, young man. You tell your master Miss Ramsbotham is waiting for him in the showroom, and will take it real kind if he'll just bustle himself,' the poor fellow walks backwards till he stumbles against the bottom stair, and my gentleman comes down with profuse apologies for having kept me waiting three minutes and a half.

"'And to be in love with someone," she would continue, "someone great that one could look up to and honour and worship--someone that would fill one's whole life, make it beautiful, make every day worth living, I think that would be better still. To work merely for one's self, to think merely for one's self, it is so much less interesting."

Then, at some such point of the argument, Miss Ramsbotham would jump up from her chair and shake herself indignantly.

"Why, what nonsense I'm talking," she would tell herself, and her listeners. "I make a very fair income, have a host of friends, and enjoy every hour of my life. I should like to have been pretty or handsome, of course; but no one can have all the good things of this world, and I have my brains. At one time, perhaps, yes; but now--no, honestly I would not change myself."

Miss Ramsbotham was sorry that no man had ever fallen in love with her, but that she could understand.

"It is quite clear to me." So she had once unburdened herself to her bosom friend. "Man for the purposes of the race has been given two kinds of love, between which, according to his opportunities and temperament, he is free to choose: he can fall down upon his knees and adore physical beauty (for Nature ignores entirely our mental side), or he can take delight in circling with his protecting arm the weak and helpless. Now, I make no appeal to either instinct. I possess neither the charm nor beauty to attract--"

"Beauty," reminded her the bosom friend, consolingly, "dwells in the beholder's eye."

"My dear," cheerfully replied Miss Ramsbotham, "it would have to be an eye of the range and capacity Sam Weller frankly owned up to not possessing--a patent double-million magnifying, capable of seeing through a deal board and round the corner sort of eye--to detect any beauty in me. And I am much too big and sensible for any man not a fool ever to think of wanting to take care of me.

"I believe," remembered Miss Ramsbotham, "if it does not sound like idle boasting, I might have had a husband, of a kind, if Fate had not compelled me to save his life. I met him one year at Huyst, a small, quiet watering-place on the Dutch coast. He would walk always half a step behind me, regarding me out of the corner of his eye quite approvingly at times. He was a widower--a good little man, devoted to his three charming children. They took an immense fancy to me, and I really think I could have got on with him. I am very adaptable, as you know. But it was not to be. He got out of his depth one morning, and unfortunately there was no one within distance but myself who could swim. I knew what the result would be. You remember Labiche's comedy, _Les Voyage de Monsieur Perrichon_? Of course, every man hates having had his life saved, after it is over; and you can imagine how he must hate having it saved by a woman. But what was I to do? In either case he would be lost to me, whether I let him drown or whether I rescued him. So, as it really made no difference, I rescued him. He was very grateful, and left the next morning.

"It is my destiny. No man has ever fallen in love with me, and no man ever will. I used to worry myself about it when I was younger. As a child I hugged to my bosom for years an observation I had overheard an aunt of mine whisper to my mother one afternoon as they sat knitting and talking, not thinking I was listening. 'You never can tell,' murmured my aunt, keeping her eyes carefully fixed upon her needles; 'children change so. I have known the plainest girls grow up into quite beautiful women. I should not worry about it if I were you--not yet awhile.' My mother was not at all a bad-looking woman, and my father was decidedly handsome; so there seemed no reason why I should not hope. I pictured myself the ugly duckling of Andersen's fairy-tale, and every morning on waking I would run straight to my glass and try to persuade myself that the feathers of the swan were beginning at last to show themselves." Miss Ramsbotham laughed, a genuine laugh of amusement, for of self-pity not a trace was now remaining to her.

"Later I plucked hope again," continued Miss Ramsbotham her confession, "from the reading of a certain school of fiction more popular twenty years ago than now. In these romances the heroine was never what you would call beautiful, unless in common with the hero you happened to possess exceptional powers of observation. But she was better than that, she was good. I do not regard as time wasted the hours I spent studying this quaint literature. It helped me, I am sure, to form habits that have since been of service to me. I made a point, when any young man visitor happened to be staying with us, of rising exceptionally early in the morning, so that I always appeared at the breakfast-table fresh, cheerful, and carefully dressed, with, when possible, a dew-besprinkled flower in my hair to prove that I had already been out in the garden. The effort, as far as the young man visitor was concerned, was always thrown away; as a general rule, he came down late himself, and generally too drowsy to notice anything much. But it was excellent practice for me. I wake now at seven o'clock as a matter of course, whatever time I go to bed. I made my own dresses and most of our cakes, and took care to let everybody know it. Though I say it who should not, I play and sing rather well. I certainly was never a fool. I had no little brothers and sisters to whom to be exceptionally devoted, but I had my cousins about the house as much as possible, and damaged their characters, if anything, by over-indulgence. My dear, it never caught even a curate! I am not one of those women to run down men; I think them delightful creatures, and in a general way I find them very intelligent. But where their hearts are concerned it is the girl with the frizzy hair, who wants two people to help her over the stile, that is their idea of an angel. No man could fall in love with me; he couldn't if he tried. That I can understand; but"--Miss Ramsbotham sunk her voice to a more confidential tone--"what I cannot understand is that I have never fallen in love with any man, because I like them all."

"You have given the explanation yourself," suggested the bosom friend--one Susan Fossett, the "Aunt Emma" of _The Ladies' Journal_, a nice woman, but talkative. "You are too sensible."

Miss Ramsbotham shook her head, "I should just love to fall in love. When I think about it, I feel quite ashamed of myself for not having done so."

Whether it was this idea, namely, that it was her duty, or whether it was that passion came to her, unsought, somewhat late in life, and therefore all the stronger, she herself would perhaps have been unable to declare. Certain only it is that at over thirty years of age this clever, sensible, clear-seeing woman fell to sighing and blushing, starting and stammering at the sounding of a name, as though for all the world she had been a love-sick girl in her teens.

Susan Fossett, her bosom friend, brought the strange tidings to Bohemia one foggy November afternoon, her opportunity being a tea-party given by Peter Hope to commemorate the birthday of his adopted daughter and sub- editor, Jane Helen, commonly called Tommy. The actual date of Tommy's birthday was known only to the gods; but out of the London mist to wifeless, childless Peter she had come the evening of a certain November the eighteenth, and therefore by Peter and his friends November the eighteenth had been marked upon the calendar as a day on which they should rejoice together.

"It is bound to leak out sooner or later," Susan Fossett was convinced, "so I may as well tell you: that gaby Mary Ramsbotham has got herself engaged."

"Nonsense!" was Peter Hope's involuntary ejaculation.

"Precisely what I mean to tell her the very next time I see her," added Susan.

"Who to?" demanded Tommy.

"You mean 'to whom.' The preeposition governs the objective case," corrected her James Douglas McTear, commonly called "The Wee Laddie," who himself wrote English better than he spoke it.

"I meant 'to whom,'" explained Tommy.

"Ye didna say it," persisted the Wee Laddie.

"I don't know to whom," replied Miss Ramsbotham's bosom friend, sipping tea and breathing indignation. "To something idiotic and incongruous that will make her life a misery to her."

Somerville, the briefless, held that in the absence of all data such conclusion was unjustifiable.

"If it had been to anything sensible," was Miss Fossett's opinion, "she would not have kept me in the dark about it, to spring it upon me like a bombshell. I've never had so much as a hint from her until I received this absurd scrawl an hour ago."

Miss Fossett produced from her bag a letter written in pencil.

"There can be no harm in your hearing it," was Miss Fossett's excuse; "it will give you an idea of the state of the poor thing's mind."

The tea-drinkers left their cups and gathered round her. "Dear Susan," read Miss Fossett, "I shall not be able to be with you to-morrow. Please get me out of it nicely. I can't remember at the moment what it is. You'll be surprised to hear that I'm _engaged_--to be married, I mean, I can hardly _realise_ it. I hardly seem to know where I am. Have just made up my mind to run down to Yorkshire and see grandmamma. I must do _something_. I must _talk_ to _somebody_ and--forgive me, dear--but you _are_ so sensible, and just now--well I don't _feel_ sensible. Will tell you all about it when I see you--next week, perhaps. You must _try_ to like him. He is _so_ handsome and _really_ clever--in his own way. Don't scold me. I never thought it possible that _anyone_ could be so happy. It's quite a different sort of happiness to _any_ other sort of happiness. I don't know how to describe it. Please ask Burcot to let me off the antequarian congress. I feel I should do it badly. I am so thankful he has _no_ relatives--in England. I should have been so _terribly_ nervous. Twelve hours ago I could not have _dreamt_ of it, and now I walk on tiptoe for fear of waking up. Did I leave my chinchilla at your rooms? Don't be angry with me. I should have told you if I had known. In haste. Yours, Mary."

"It's dated from Marylebone Road, and yesterday afternoon she did leave her chinchilla in my rooms, which makes me think it really must be from Mary Ramsbotham. Otherwise I should have my doubts," added Miss Fossett, as she folded up the letter and replaced it in her bag.

"Id is love!" was the explanation of Dr. William Smith, his round, red face illuminated with poetic ecstasy. "Love has gone to her--has dransformed her once again into the leedle maid."

"Love," retorted Susan Fossett, "doesn't transform an intelligent, educated woman into a person who writes a letter all in jerks, underlines every other word, spells antiquarian with an 'e,' and Burcott's name, whom she has known for the last eight years, with only one 't.' The woman has gone stark, staring mad!"

"We must wait until we have seen him," was Peter's judicious view. "I should be so glad to think that the dear lady was happy."

"So should I," added Miss Fossett drily.

"One of the most sensible women I have ever met," commented William Clodd. "Lucky man, whoever he is. Half wish I'd thought of it myself."

"I am not saying that he isn't," retorted Miss Fossett. "It isn't him I'm worrying about."

"I preesume you mean 'he,'" suggested the Wee Laddie. "The verb 'to be'--"

"For goodness' sake," suggested Miss Fossett to Tommy, "give that man something to eat or drink. That's the worst of people who take up grammar late in life. Like all converts, they become fanatical."

"She's a ripping good sort, is Mary Ramsbotham," exclaimed Grindley junior, printer and publisher of _Good Humour_. "The marvel to me is that no man hitherto has ever had the sense to want her."

"Oh, you men!" cried Miss Fossett. "A pretty face and an empty head is all you want."

"Must they always go together?" laughed Mrs. Grindley junior, _nee_ Helvetia Appleyard.

"Exceptions prove the rule," grunted Miss Fossett.

"What a happy saying that is," smiled Mrs. Grindley junior. "I wonder sometimes how conversation was ever carried on before it was invented."

"De man who would fall in love wid our dear frent Mary," thought Dr. Smith, "he must be quite egsceptional."

"You needn't talk about her as if she was a monster--I mean were," corrected herself Miss Fossett, with a hasty glance towards the Wee Laddie. "There isn't a man I know that's worthy of her."

"I mean," explained the doctor, "dat he must be a man of character--of brain. Id is de noble man dat is attracted by de noble woman."

"By the chorus-girl more often," suggested Miss Fossett.

"We must hope for the best," counselled Peter. "I cannot believe that a clever, capable woman like Mary Ramsbotham would make a fool of herself."

"From what I have seen," replied Miss Fossett, "it's just the clever people--as regards this particular matter--who do make fools of themselves."

Unfortunately Miss Fossett's judgment proved to be correct. On being introduced a fortnight later to Miss Ramsbotham's fiance, the impulse of Bohemia was to exclaim, "Great Scott! Whatever in the name of--" Then on catching sight of Miss Ramsbotham's transfigured face and trembling hands Bohemia recollected itself in time to murmur instead: "Delighted, I'm sure!" and to offer mechanical congratulations. Reginald Peters was a pretty but remarkably foolish-looking lad of about two-and-twenty, with curly hair and receding chin; but to Miss Ramsbotham evidently a promising Apollo. Her first meeting with him had taken place at one of the many political debating societies then in fashion, attendance at which Miss Ramsbotham found useful for purposes of journalistic "copy." Miss Ramsbotham, hitherto a Radical of pronounced views, he had succeeded under three months in converting into a strong supporter of the Gentlemanly Party. His feeble political platitudes, which a little while before she would have seized upon merrily to ridicule, she now sat drinking in, her plain face suffused with admiration. Away from him and in connection with those subjects--somewhat numerous--about which he knew little and cared less, she retained her sense and humour; but in his presence she remained comparatively speechless, gazing up into his somewhat watery eyes with the grateful expression of one learning wisdom from a master.

Her absurd adoration--irritating beyond measure to her friends, and which even to her lover, had he possessed a grain of sense, would have appeared ridiculous--to Master Peters was evidently a gratification. Of selfish, exacting nature, he must have found the services of this brilliant woman of the world of much practical advantage. Knowing all the most interesting people in London, it was her pride and pleasure to introduce him everywhere. Her friends put up with him for her sake; to please her made him welcome, did their best to like him, and disguised their failure. The free entry to a places of amusement saved his limited purse. Her influence, he had instinct enough to perceive, could not fail to be of use to him in his profession: that of a barrister. She praised him to prominent solicitors, took him to tea with judges' wives, interested examiners on his behalf. In return he overlooked her many disadvantages, and did not fail to let her know it. Miss Ramsbotham's gratitude was boundless.

"I do so wish I were younger and better looking," she sighed to the bosom friend. "For myself, I don't mind; I have got used to it. But it is so hard on Reggie. He feels it, I know he does, though he never openly complains."

"He would be a cad if he did," answered Susan Fossett, who having tried conscientiously for a month to tolerate the fellow, had in the end declared her inability even to do more than avoid open expression of cordial dislike. "Added to which I don't quite see of what use it would be. You never told him you were young and pretty, did you?"

"I told him, my dear," replied Miss Ramsbotham, "the actual truth. I don't want to take any credit for doing so; it seemed the best course. You see, unfortunately, I look my age. With most men it would have made a difference. You have no idea how good he is. He assured me he had engaged himself to me with his eyes open, and that there was no need to dwell upon unpleasant topics. It is so wonderful to me that he should care for me--he who could have half the women in London at his feet."

"Yes, he's the type that would attract them, I daresay," agreed Susan Fossett. "But are you quite sure that he does?--care for you, I mean."

"My dear," returned Miss Ramsbotham, "you remember Rochefoucauld's definition. 'One loves, the other consents to be loved.' If he will only let me do that I shall be content. It is more than I had any right to expect."

"Oh, you are a fool," told her bluntly her bosom friend.

"I know I am," admitted Miss Ramsbotham; "but I had no idea that being a fool was so delightful."