Somehow Good Part 28

"How often am I to tell you, Sally dear, that there was really no _row_, property speaking. If you were to say there had been comments at breakfast yesterday, then recrimination overnight, and a stiffness at breakfast again this morning, you would be doing more than justice to it. You'll see now if mamma isn't cold and firm and disinherity and generally detestable about it."

"But what _was_ it? That's what _I_ want to know."

"My dear--it was--absolutely nothing! Why should it be stranger for Mr. Bradshaw to drive me home to save two hansoms than for you and Dr. Vereker and the Voyseys to go all in one growler?"

"Because the Voyseys live just round the corner, quite close. It came to three s.h.i.+llings because it's outside the radius." The irrelevancy of this detail gives Laet.i.tia an excuse for waiving the cab-question, on which her position is untenable. She dilutes it with extraneous matter, and it is lost sight of.

"It doesn't matter whether it's cabs or what it is. Mamma's just the same about everything. Even walking up Holland Park Lane after the concert at Kensington Town Hall. I am sure if ever anything was reasonable, that was." She pauses for confirmation--is, in fact, wavering about the correctness of her own position, and weakly seeking rea.s.surance. She is made happier by a nod of a.s.sent from Miss Sally.

"Awfully reasonable!" is the verdict of the latter. Whatever there is lacking seriousness in the judge's face is too slight to call for notice--a mere twinkle to be ignored. Very little self-deception is necessary, and in this department success is invariable.

"I knew you would say so, dear," Tishy continues. "And I'm sure you would about the other things too ... well, I was thinking about tea in Kensington Gardens on Sunday. We have both of us a perfect right to have tea independently, and the only question is about separate tables."

"Suppose I come--to make it square."

"Suppose you do, dear." And the proposal is a relief evidently.

A very slight insight into the little drama that is going on at Ladbroke Grove Road is all that is wanted for the purposes of this story. The foregoing dialogue, ending at the point at which the two young women disappear into the door of No. 287, will be sufficient to give a fairly clear idea of the plot of the performance, and to point to its _denouement_. The exact details may unfold themselves as the story proceeds. The usual thing is a stand-up fight over the love-affair, both parties to which have made up their minds--becoming more and more obdurate as they encounter opposition from without--followed by reconciliations more or less real. Let us hope for the former in the present case, and that Miss Wilson and Mr. Bradshaw's lot may not be crossed by one of those developments of strange inexplicable fury which so often break out in families over the schemes of two young people to do precisely what their parents did before them; and most ungovernably, sometimes, on the part of members who have absolutely no suggestion to make of any alternative scheme for the happiness of either.

CHAPTER XIX

HOW FENWICK KNEW ALL ABOUT THE Ma.s.s. AND HOW BARON KREUTZKAMMER RECOGNISED MR. HARRISSON. LONDON AGAIN!

"Why do they call it the _messe des paresseux_?" The question must have been asked just as Sally looked at her watch because she saw the clock had stopped. But the nave of the Cathedral of Rheims was very unlike that of St. Satisfax as the bride and bridegroom lingered in out of the suns.h.i.+ne, and the former took the unwarrantable liberty, for a heretic, of crossing herself from the Holy Water at the foot of the column near the door. But she made up for it by the amount of _sous_ she gave to the old blind woman, who must have been knitting there since the days of Napoleon at least, if she began in her teens.

"You haven't done it right, dearest. I knew you wouldn't. Look here."

And Fenwick crosses himself _secundum artem_, dipping his finger first to make it valid.

"But how came you to know?" His wife does not say this; she only thinks it. And how came he to know about the _messe des paresseux_? She repeats her question aloud.

"Because the lazy people don't come to Ma.s.s till ten," he replies. They are talking under their breath, as English folk do in foreign churches, heedless of the loud gabble and resonant results of too much snuff on the part of ecclesiastics off duty. Their own salvation has been cultivated under a list slipper, cocoanut matting, secretive pew-opener policy; and if they are new to it all, they are shocked to see the snuff taken over the heads and wooden _sabots_ of the devout country-folk, whose ancestors knelt on the same hard stone centuries ago, and prayed for great harvests that never came, and to avert lean years that very often did. The Anglican cannot understand the real aboriginal Papist. Sally's mother was puzzled when she saw an old, old kneeling figure, toothless and parchment-skinned, on whose rosary a pinch of snuff _ut supra_ descended, shake it off the bead in evidence, and get on to the next _Ave_, even as one who has business before her--so many pounds of oak.u.m to pick, so many bushels of peas to sh.e.l.l. It was a reality to her; and there was the Blessed Virgin herself, a visible certainty, who would see to the recognition of it at headquarters.

Fenwick pa.s.sed up the aisle, dreamily happy in the smell of the incense, beside his bride of yesterday's making--she intensely happy too, but in another way, for was not her bridegroom of yesterday her husband of twenty years ago--cruelly wrenched away, but her husband for all that. Still, there was always that little rift within the lute that made the music--pray Heaven not to widen! Always that thought!--that he might recollect. How could he remember the _messe des paresseux_, and keep his mind a blank about how he came to know of it? It was the first discomfort that had crossed her married mind--put it away!

It was easy to put it all away and forget it in the hush and gloom of the great church, filled with the strange intonation from Heaven-knows-where--some side-chapel unseen--of a Psalm it would have puzzled David to be told was his, and a scented vapour Solomon would have known at once; for neither myrrh nor frankincense have changed one whit since his day. It was easy enough so long as both sat listening to _Gloria in excelsis Deo, et in terra pax_. Carried _nem. con._ by all sorts and conditions of Creeds. But when the little bobs and tokens and skirt-adjustments of the fat priest and his handsome abettor (a young fellow some girl might have been the wife of, with advantage to both) came to a pause, and the congregation were to be taken into confidence, how came Gerry to know beforehand what the fat one was going to say, with that stupendous voice of his?

"_Hoc est corpus meum, et hic est calix sanguinis mei._ We all kneel, I think." Thus the bridegroom under his breath. And his companion heard, almost with a shudder, the selfsame words from the priest, as the kneeling of the congregation subsided.

"Oh, Gerry--darling fellow! How _can_ you know that, and not know...."

"How I came by it? It's very funny, but I _can't_, and that's the truth. I don't feel as if I ever _could_ know, what's more. But it all seems a matter of course."

"Perhaps you're a Catholic all the while, without knowing it?"

"Perhaps I am. But I should like to know, because of going to the other place with you. I shouldn't care about purgatory without you, Rosey dearest. No--not even with a reversionary interest in heaven."

And then the plot thickened at the altar, and the odour of myrrh and frankincense, and little bells rang to a climax, and the handsome young priest, let us hope, felt he had got value for the loss of that hypothetical girl.

That little incident in the great church at Rheims was the first anxiety of Rosalind Fenwick's married life--the first resumption of the conditions she had been so often unnerved by during the period of their betrothal. She was destined to be crossed by many such. But she was, as we have said, a strong woman, and had made up her mind to take these anxieties as part of the day's work--a charge upon her happiness that had to be paid. It was a great consolation to her that she could speak to her husband about the tension caused by her misgivings without a.s.signing any special reasons for anxiety that would not be his as much as hers. She had to show uneasiness in order to get the relief his sympathy gave her; but there were unknown possibilities in the Bush enough to warrant it without going outside what was known to both. No need at all that he should know of her separate unseen burden, for that!

But some of the jolts on the road, as we might call them, were to be sore trials to Rosalind. One came in the fourth week of their honeymoon, and quite spoiled for her the last three days of her holiday. However, Fenwick himself laughed about it--that was one comfort.

It was at Sonnenberg. You know the Great Hotel, or Pension, near the Seelisberg, that looks down on Lucerne Lake, straight over to where Tell shot the arrow? If you do not, it does not matter. Mr. and Mrs.

Fenwick had never been there before, and have never been there since.

And what happened might just as easily have happened anywhere else.

But it was there, as a matter of fact; and if you know the place, you will be able to imagine the two of them leaning on the parapet of the terrace that overlooks the lake, watching the steamer from Lucerne creeping slowly to the landing-place at the head of a white comet it has churned the indescribable blue of the lake to, and discussing whether it is nearest to Oriental sapphire or to green jasper at its bluest.

Rosalind had got used to continual wonderment as to when and where Fenwick had come to know so well this thing and that thing he spoke of so familiarly; so she pa.s.sed by the strange positiveness of his speech about the shades of jasper, the scarcity of really blue examples, and his verdict that the bluest possible one would be just the colour of that water below them. She was not going to ask him how he came to be so mighty wise about chalcedony and chrysoprase and sardonyx, about which she herself either never knew or had forgotten. She took it all as a matter of course, and asked if the Baron's cigar was a good one.

"Magnificent!" Fenwick replied, puffing at it. "How shall we return his civility?"

"Give _him_ a cigar next time you get a chance."

Fenwick laughs, in derision of his own cigars.

"G.o.d bless me, my dearest love! Why, one of the Baron's is worth my whole box. We must discover something better than that." Both ponder over possible reciprocities in silence, but discover nothing, and seem to give up the quest by mutual consent. Then he says: "I wonder why he cosseted up to us last night in the garden so!" And she repeats: "I wonder why!"

"I don't believe he even knows our name," she continues; and then he repeats: "_I_ don't believe he knows our name. I'm sure he doesn't."

"And it was so dark, he couldn't have seen much of us. But his cigar's quite beautiful. Blow the smoke in my face, Gerry!" She shuts her eyes to receive it. How handsome Sally would think mamma was looking if she could see her now in the light of the sunset! Her husband thinks much to that effect, as he turns to blow the smoke on order into the face that is so close to his, as they lean arm-in-arm on the parapet the sun has left his warmth on, and means to take his eyes off in half an hour. They really look quite a young couple, and the frivolity of their conduct adds to the effect. n.o.body would believe in her grown-up daughter, to see that young Mrs. Algernon Fenwick.

"I am ferry root, Mrs. Harrisson. If I introot, you shall say I introot." It is the Baron, manifestly. His form--or rather his bulk, for he cannot be said to have a form; he is amorphous--is baronial in the highest degree. His stupendous chest seems to be a huge cavern for the secretion of gutturals, which are discharged as heavy artillery at a hint from some unseen percussion-cap within.

Mrs. Fenwick starts, a little taken aback at the Baron's thunderclap; for he had approached unawares, and her closed eyes helped on the effect. When they opened, they looked round, as for a third person. But the Baron was alone.

"Where is Mrs. Harrisson?" She asks the question with the most absolute unconsciousness that she was herself the person addressed. The Baron, still believing, presumably, that Fenwick is _Mr._ Harrisson, is not a person to be trusted with the position created. He develops an offensive waggery, shakes the forefinger that has detected an escapade, and makes of his lips the round _O_ of shocked propriety, at heart in sympathy with the transgressor. His little grey eyes glare through his gold-rimmed spectacles, and his huge chest shakes with a substratum of laughter, only just loud enough to put in the text.

"O-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho! No, do not be afraight. She is not here. We unterzdant. It is all unterzdoot. We shall be ferry tizgreet...." And then the Baron pats s.p.a.ce with his fingers only, not moving his hand, as a general indication of secrecy to the universe.

Probably the slight flush that mantles the face he speaks to is less due to any offence at his fat, good-humoured German raillery than to some vague apprehension of the real nature of the position about to develop. But Fenwick imputes it to the former. If Rosey was inclined to treat the thing as a harmless joke, he would follow suit; but she looks hurt, and her husband, sensitive about every word that is said to her, blazes out:

"What on earth do you mean? What the devil do you mean? How dare you speak to my wife like that?" He makes a half-step towards the burly ma.s.s of flesh, still shaking with laughter. But his wife stops him.

"Do be patient, Gerry darling! Don't flare up like that. I'll have a divorce. I'll tell Sally...." a threat which seems to have a softening effect. "Can't you see, dear, that there is some misunderstanding?"

Fenwick looks from her to the Baron, puzzled. The latter drops his jocular rallying.

"I saw last night you did not know me, Mr. Harrisson. That is straintch! Have you forgotten Diedrich Kreutzkammer?" He says his name with a sort of quiet confidence of immediate recognition. But Fenwick only looks blankly at him.

"He does not know me!" cries the German, with an astonished voice.

"'Frisco--the Klond.y.k.e--Chicago--the bridge at Brooklyn--why, it is not two years ago...." He pauses between the names of the places, enforcing each as a reminder with an active forefinger.

Fenwick seems suddenly to breathe the fresh air of a solution of the problem. He breaks into a sunny smile, to his wife's great relief.