The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman Part 13

THE WORLD ACCORDING TO SIR ISAAC

--1

Her marriage had carried Ellen out of the narrow world of home and school into another that had seemed at first vastly larger, if only on account of its freedom from the perpetual achievement of small economies. Hitherto the urgent necessity of these had filled life with irksome precautions and clipped the wings of every dream. This new life into which Sir Isaac led her by the hand promised not only that release but more light, more colour, more movement, more people. There was to be at any rate so much in the way of rewards and compensation for her pity of him.

She found the establishment at Putney ready for her. Sir Isaac had not consulted her about it, it had been his secret, he had prepared it for her with meticulous care as a surprise. They returned from a honeymoon in Skye in which the attentions of Sir Isaac and the comforts of a first-cla.s.s hotel had obscured a marvellous background of sombre mountain and wide stretches of s.h.i.+ning sea. Sir Isaac had been very fond and insistent and inseparable, and she was doing her best to conceal a strange distressful jangling of her nerves which she now feared might presently dispose her to scream. Sir Isaac had been goodness itself, but how she craved now for solitude! She was under the impression now that they were going to his mother's house in Highbury. Then she thought he would have to go away to business for part of the day at any rate, and she could creep into some corner and begin to think of all that had happened to her in these short summer months.

They were met at Euston by his motor-car. "_Home_," said Sir Isaac, with a little gleam of excitement, when the more immediate luggage was aboard.

As they hummed through the West-End afternoon Ellen became aware that he was whistling through his teeth. It was his invariable indication of mental activity, and her attention came drifting back from her idle contemplation of the shoppers and strollers of Piccadilly to link this already alarming symptom with the perplexing fact that they were manifestly travelling west.

"But this," she said presently, "is Knightsbridge."

"Goes to Kensington," he replied with attempted indifference.

"But your mother doesn't live this way."

"_We_ do," said Sir Isaac, s.h.i.+ning at every point of his face.

"But," she halted. "Isaac!--where are we going?"

"Home," he said.

"You've not taken a house?"

"Bought it."

"But,--it won't be ready!"

"I've seen to that."

"Servants!" she cried in dismay.

"That's all right." His face broke into an excited smile. His little eyes danced and shone. "Everything," he said.

"But the servants!" she said.

"You'll see," he said. "There's a butler--and everything."

"A butler!" He could now no longer restrain himself. "I was weeks," he said, "getting it ready. Weeks and weeks.... It's a house.... I'd had my eye on it before ever I met you. It's a real _good_ house, Elly...."

The fortunate girl-wife went on through Brompton to Walham Green with a stunned feeling. So women have felt in tumbrils. A nightmare of butlers, a galaxy of possible butlers, filled her soul.

No one was quite so big and formidable as Snagsby, towering up to receive her, upon the steps of the home her husband was so amazingly giving her.

The reader has already been privileged to see something of this house in the company of Lady Beach-Mandarin. At the top of the steps stood Mrs.

Crumble, the new and highly recommended cook-housekeeper in her best black silk flounced and expanded, and behind her peeped several neat maids in caps and ap.r.o.ns. A little valet-like under-butler appeared and tried to balance Snagsby by hovering two steps above him on the opposite side of the Victorian mediaeval porch.

a.s.sisted officiously by Snagsby and amidst the deferential unhelpful gestures of the under-butler, Sir Isaac handed his wife out of the car.

"Everything all right, Snagsby?" he asked brusquely if a little breathless.

"Everything in order, Sir Isaac."

"And here;--this is her ladys.h.i.+p."

"I 'ope her ladys.h.i.+p 'ad a pleasent journey to 'er new 'ome. I'm sure if I may presume, Sir Isaac, we shall all be very glad to serve her ladys.h.i.+p."

(Like all well-trained English servants, Snagsby always dropped as many h's as he could when conversing with his superiors. He did this as a mark of respect and to prevent social confusion, just as he was always careful to wear a slightly misfitting dress coat and fold his trousers so that they creased at the sides and had a wide flat effect in front.)

Lady Harman bowed a little shyly to his good wishes and was then led up to Mrs. Crumble, in a stiff black silk, who curtseyed with a submissive amiability to her new mistress. "I'm sure, me lady," she said. "I'm sure----"

There was a little pause. "Here they are, you see, right and ready,"

said Sir Isaac, and then with an inspiration, "Got any tea for us, Snagsby?"

Snagsby addressing his mistress inquired if he should serve tea in the garden or the drawing-room, and Sir Isaac decided for the garden.

"There's another hall beyond this," he said, and took his wife's arm, leaving Mrs. Crumble still bowing amiably before the hall table. And every time she bowed she rustled richly....

"It's quite a big garden," said Sir Isaac.

--2

And so the woman who had been a girl three weeks ago, this tall, dark-eyed, slightly perplexed and very young-looking lady, was introduced to the home that had been made for her. She went about it with an alarmed sense of strange responsibilities, not in the least feeling that anything was being given to her. And Sir Isaac led her from point to point full of the pride and joy of new possession--for it was his first own house as well as hers--rejoicing over it and exacting grat.i.tude.

"It's all right, isn't it?" he asked looking up at her.

"It's wonderful. I'd no idea."

"See," he said, indicating a great bra.s.s bowl of perennial sunflowers on the landing, "your favourite flower!"

"My favourite flower?"

"You said it was--in that book. Perennial sunflower."

She was perplexed and then remembered.

She understood now why he had said downstairs, when she had glanced at a big photographic enlargement of a portrait of Doctor Barnardo, "your favourite hero in real life."

He had brought her at Hythe one day a popular Victorian device, a confession alb.u.m, in which she had had to write down on a neat rose-tinted page, her favourite author, her favourite flower, her favourite colour, her favourite hero in real life, her "pet aversion,"

and quite a number of such particulars of her subjective existence. She had filled this page in a haphazard manner late one night, and she was disconcerted to find how thoroughly her careless replies had come home to roost. She had put down "pink" as her favourite colour because the page she was writing upon suggested it, and the paper of the room was pale pink, the curtains strong pink with a pattern of paler pink and tied with large pink bows, and the lamp shades, the bedspread, the pillow-cases, the carpet, the chairs, the very crockery--everything but the omnipresent perennial sunflowers--was pink. Confronted with this realization, she understood that pink was the least agreeable of all possible hues for a bedroom. She perceived she had to live now in a chromatic range between rather underdone mutton and salmon. She had said that her favourite musical composers were Bach and Beethoven; she really meant it, and a bust of Beethoven materialized that statement, but she had made Doctor Barnardo her favourite hero in real life because his name also began with a B and she had heard someone say somewhere that he was a very good man. The predominance of George Eliot's pensive rather than delightful countenance in her bedroom and the array of all that lady's works in a lusciously tooled pink leather, was due to her equally reckless choice of a favourite author. She had said too that Nelson was her favourite historical character, but Sir Isaac with a delicate jealousy had preferred to have this heroic but regrettably immoral personality represented in his home only by an engraving of the Battle of Copenhagen....

She stood surveying this room, and her husband watched her eagerly. She was, he felt, impressed at last!...

Certainly she had never seen such a bedroom in her life. By comparison even with the largest of the hotel apartments they had occupied it was vast; it had writing-tables and a dainty bookcase and a blus.h.i.+ng sofa, and dressing-tables and a bureau and a rose-red screen and three large windows. Her thoughts went back to the narrow little bedroom at Penge with which she had hitherto been so entirely content. Her own few little books, a photograph or so,--they'd never dare to come here, even if she dared to bring them.

"Here," said Sir Isaac, flinging open a white door, "is your dressing-room."