MRS. PIPER’S TROUBLES.
BEATRIX HAREFIELD’S spirits improved in the society of her friend. She was fond of Bella, and believed in Bella’s faithfulness and affection. Her reticence on the subject of Cyril Culverhouse had not arisen from distrust, but from a reserve natural in a girl reared in solitude, and with a mind lofty and ardent enough to make first love sacred as religion.
But when Bella, with every evidence of fondness, entreated to be taken into her friend’s confidence, Beatrix was not so stoical as to refuse the comfort of sympathy.
‘I know you are hiding something from me, Beatrix,’ said Bella, as they were walking in the wintry garden on the first morning of her visit. ‘There is a reason for your father’s forbidding your visits to the Vicarage—and a reason for your pale cheeks and sleepless nights. Why are you afraid to trust me?’
‘I am not afraid to trust you. But there are things one does not care to talk about.’
‘Does not one? What are those things, dear? Do you mean that you don’t care to talk about Mr. Culverhouse?’
Beatrix started, and flushed crimson.
‘How do you know—did any one tell you?’
‘My dear Beatrix, I have eyes and ears, and they told me. I have seen you together. I have heard him speak of you.’
‘And you found out——’
‘That you adore each other.’
‘It is true, Bella. I love him with all my heart and soul—and we are to be married as soon as I am of age.’
‘With your father’s consent?’
‘With or without it. That matters very little to me.’
‘But if you offend him he may leave his estate to a hospital,’ suggested Bella, who knew a great deal more about Mr. Harefield’s property than Beatrix.
‘He may do what he likes with it. Cyril will not marry me for my fortune.’
‘Of course not, but fortune is a very good thing, and Mr. Culverhouse, who is poor, must think so.’
This arrow glanced aside from the armour of Beatrix’s faith. No one could have made her believe that her lover had any lurking greed of wealth.
‘Then it is all settled,’ said Bella, cheerfully. ‘You will be of age in two years, and then you are to be married, whether Mr. Harefield likes or not. I really can’t see why you should be unhappy.’
‘I am not to see Cyril, or hear from him, for two years. He is going to leave this place in the spring. He might be ill—dying—and I should know nothing, till I took up the Times some morning and saw the advertisement of his death.’
‘He is young and strong,’ replied Bella. ‘There is nothing less likely than that he should die. I don’t think you need make yourself unhappy in advance about that.’
Her cold hard tone wounded Beatrix, who had expected more sympathy.
‘Don’t let us talk about him, Bella,’ she said.
But Bella was determined to talk about him till she had found out all that there was for her to know. She assumed a more sympathetic tone, and Beatrix was induced to tell of Cyril’s interview with her father, and of the letter which her lover wrote to her after that interview.
The clocks struck eleven a few minutes after this conversation was ended.
‘And now I must run to the Park and spend an hour with poor Mrs. Piper,’ said Bella. ‘I promised to go over every day to make myself useful. She is so wretched about her servants, if there is no one to look after them.’
‘How painful to have servants that require to be looked after!’ said Beatrix, who was accustomed to a household that went as if by clockwork, conducted by a butler and housekeeper who were trusted implicitly.
‘It is rather dreadful,’ replied Bella. ‘I think I would sooner have our maid-of-all-work, with her sooty face and red elbows, than poor Mrs. Piper’s staff of smart young women, who study nothing but their own comfort, and come and go as if the Park were an hotel; for our poor Sarah is at least faithful, and would no more think of leaving us than of going to the moon. Good-bye, darling, I shall be back before luncheon.’
Beatrix went back to her quiet room, and her books. Her mind had been much widened by her intercourse with Mr. Dulcimer and his library, and good books were a consolation and delight to her. She had marked out a line of serious study, which she fancied might make her fitter to be Cyril’s wife, and was resolved not to be led astray by any flowers of literature. Hard reading was a little difficult sometimes, for her thoughts would wander to the lover from whom cruel fate had parted her; but she persevered bravely, and astonished Miss Scales by the severity of her self-discipline.
Bella tripped briskly across the fields to Little Yafford Park, which was about half a mile from the village, and only a little less distant from the Water House. It was Saturday morning, and she knew that Mrs. Piper would be worried about the weekly bills, which had an unvarying tendency to be heavier than she expected to find them.
Mrs. Piper was propped up with pillows in her easy chair by the fire, while all the youthful Pipers—including a couple of apple-cheeked ungainly boys from an expensive boarding-school—were making havoc of her handsomely furnished morning-room—a process eminently calculated to shorten the brief remnant of her days.
‘Cobbett, if you don’t leave that malachite blotting book alone directly, I’ll ring for your pa,’ exclaimed the invalid, as Bella entered.
Mr. Piper was a man who had read books in his time—not many, perhaps, but he remembered them all the better on that account. He was a man who boasted of thinking for himself; which meant that he asserted second-hand opinions so forcibly as to make them pass for new, and put down other people’s arguments with the high hand of a self-conscious capitalist.
He had christened his two elder boys Cobbett and Bentham. The chubby little plague in pinafores was Horne Tooke, the bony boy in knickerbockers was Brougham. The two girls were living memorials of Elizabeth Fry and Mary Wolstencroft. His ambition was to see these children all educated up to the highest modern standard, and able to occupy an intellectual eminence from which they could look down upon everybody else.
‘Money and dulness are sometimes supposed to go hand in hand,’ said Mr. Piper. ‘I shall take care that my children may be able to exhibit the pleasing spectacle of capital allied with intelligence.’
Unhappily the young Pipers did not take to education quite so kindly as their father expected them to do. They had no thirst for the Pierian spring, and, instead of drinking deeply, imbibed the sacred waters in reluctant sips, as if the fount had been some nauseous sulphur spring offered to them medicinally. Poor Bella had laboured almost hopelessly for the last year to drag Brougham through that Slough of Despond, Dr. Somebody’s first Latin grammar, and had toiled valorously in the vain effort to familiarize Horne Tooke with words of one syllable. Elizabeth Fry, whom her mother designed for greatness in the musical world, had not yet mastered the mysteries of a common chord, or learned the difference between a major and minor scale. Mary Wolstencroft was a sullen young person of eleven, who put her chubby fingers in her mouth at the least provocation, and stubbornly refused to learn anything.
‘Oh, my dear, I am very glad you have come,’ cried Mrs. Piper. ‘These children are positively maddening. I like to have them with me, because it’s a mother’s duty, and I hope I shall do my duty to the last hour of my life. But they are very trying. Bentham has spilt the ink on the patchwork table-cover, and Mary has been pulling the Angola’s tail most cruelly.’
The animal which Mrs. Piper insisted on calling the ‘Angola’ was a magnificent white Angora cat, and really the handsomest living creature in the Piper household; indeed the Piper children seemed to have been invented as a foil to the grace and beauty of the cat, to which they were inferior in every attribute, except the gift of speech, a privilege they systematically abused.
Bella examined the injured table-cover, and stroked the offended cat, and then sat down by Mrs. Piper’s sofa.
‘I dare say the children are tiresome, dear Mrs. Piper,’ she said, whereupon Bentham secretly put out his tongue at her, ‘but it must be a comfort to you to see them all in such good health.’
‘Yes, my dear, it is. But I really think there never were such boisterous children. I am sure when they were all down with the measles the house was like ‘eaven. The way they use the furniture is enough to provoke a saint. I sometimes wish Piper hadn’t bought so many ‘andsome ornaments for my boodwar.’
And Mrs. Piper gave a heavy sigh, inwardly lamenting the ten-roomed villa in the broad high road outside Great Yafford—the best parlour which no one was allowed to enter—save on special occasions and under most restrictive conditions—and the everyday parlour, in which the shabby old furniture could hardly be the worse for ill-usage.
‘And now, Bella, we’ll go to the books,’ said Mrs. Piper, ‘they’re something awful this week. There’s fine goings on downstairs now that I can’t get about.’
‘The boys being home from school must make a difference,’ suggested Bella.
‘After allowing amply for the boys, the bills are awful. Look at the baker’s book, Bella. It will freeze your blood.’
Bella looked, and was not actually frozen, though the amount was startling. The household expenses seemed to have been upon an ascending scale from the beginning of Mrs. Piper’s illness. That careful housewife’s seclusion had certainly relaxed the stringent economy by which larder and kitchen had been hitherto regulated.
The tradesmen’s books were gone through one by one, Mrs. Piper lamenting much, and doubtful of almost every item. Why so much lard and butter, why so many eggs? There were mysterious birds in the poulterer’s book, inexplicable fish in the fishmonger’s. When they came to the butcher’s book things grew desperate, and the cook was summoned to render an account of her doings.
Cook was a plausible young woman in a smart cap, and she proved too much for Mrs. Piper. She had an explanation for every pound of meat in the book, and her mistress dared not push inquiry to the verge of accusation, lest this smart young woman should take advantage of the impending season and resign her situation then and there, leaving Mrs. Piper to get her Christmas dinner cooked as she might. Piper was particular about his dinner. It was the one sensual weakness of a great mind, and if his meals fell in any way short of his requirements and expectations, his family circle suffered. The simoom in the desert was not more sudden or devastating than the whirlwind of Mr. Piper’s wrath in the dining-room, when the fish was sodden and sloppy, or the joint presented an interior stratum of rawness under an outer crust of scorched flesh.
‘Piper is so particular,’ his wife would remark piteously, ‘and good cooks are so hard to get.’
The fact of the case was that no good cook would endure Mrs. Piper’s watchfulness and suspicion, and those scathing denunciations which Mr. Piper sent out by the parlour-maid when the dishes were not to his liking.
‘I might have borne Mrs. Piper’s petty prying ways,’ remarked one of the Park cooks, after giving her mistress warning, ‘or I might have put up with Mr. Piper’s tempers; but I couldn’t stand him and her together. That was too much for Christian flesh and blood.’
The cook was dismissed, with inward groanings on the part of Mrs. Piper, and the money for the tradesmen was entrusted to Bella, who was to pay the bills on her way through the village, and to make divers complaints and objections which the cook might have omitted to deliver.
‘I never let a servant pay my bills if I can help it,’ said Mrs. Piper, ‘it gives them too much power.’
And Mrs. Piper gave another sigh for the days of old, when her villa in the Great Yafford Road had been kept as neat as a pin by two servants, and those two servants had been completely under their mistress’s thumb, when she herself had given her orders by word of mouth to the tradespeople, and not so much as a half-quartern loaf had come into the house without her knowledge and consent. The transition from the tight economies of mediocre comfort to the larger splendour of unlimited wealth had been a sore trial to Mrs. Piper. The change had come too late in her life. She could not reconcile herself to the cost of her grandeur, although her husband assured her that he was not spending half his income.
‘It may be so now, Piper,’ she replied, dubiously, ‘but when the children grow up you’ll find yourself spending more money. They’ll eat more, and their boots will come dearer. I feel the difference every year.’
‘When I find myself with less than fifty thousand surplus capital, I shall begin to grumble, Moggie,’ said Mr. Piper, ‘but I ain’t going to make a poor mouth till then.’
‘Well, Piper, of course it’s nice to live in a big place like this, and to feel oneself looked up to, and that the best of everything is hardly good enough for us; but still there are times when I feel as if you and me had been sent into the world to feed a pack of extravagant servants.’
‘We can’t help that, my dear,’ answered Piper, cheerily. ‘Dukes and duchesses are the same.’
‘Ah, but then you see dukes and duchesses are born to it. They’ve not been used to have their housekeeping in their own hands, as I have. I suppose it’s when I’m a little low that it preys upon me,’ mused Mrs. Piper, ‘but I do feel it very trying sometimes. When I think of the butter and lard that are used in this house it seems to me as if we must come to the workhouse. No fortune could be big enough to stand against it.’
‘Don’t be a fool, Moggie,’ retorted the manufacturer, unmoved by this pathetic suggestion. ‘When I was in business I’ve lost five thousand pounds in a morning by the turn of the market, and I’ve come home and eat my dinner and never said a word to you about it. What’s your butter and lard against that?’
‘Oh, Piper, I wonder you ever lived through it.’
‘I wasn’t a fool,’ answered Piper, ‘and I knew that where there’s big gains there must be big losses, now and again. A man that’s afraid to lose a few odd thousands will never come out a millionaire.’
Ebenezer Piper had a high opinion of his children’s governess. He had heard Bella grinding Latin verbs with Brougham, and admired her tact and patience. He liked to see pretty faces about him, as he acknowledged with a noble candour, and Bella’s face seemed to him particularly agreeable. That pink and white prettiness was entirely to his taste. Something soft and fresh and peachy. The kind of woman who seemed created to acknowledge and submit to the superiority of man. Mrs. Piper had been a very fair sample of this pink and white order of beauty, when the rising manufacturer married her; but time and ill-health and a natural fretfulness had destroyed good looks which consisted chiefly of a fine complexion and a plump figure, and the Mrs. Piper of the present was far from lovely. Her Ebenezer was not the less devoted to her on that account. He bought her fine dresses, and every possible combination of ormolu and malachite, mother-o’-pearl and tortoiseshell, for her boudoir and drawing-room; and he told everybody that she had been a good wife to him, and a pretty woman in her time, ‘though nobody would believe it to look at her now.’
On her way from Mrs. Piper’s boudoir to the hall Miss Scratchell encountered the master of the house, coming out of the billiard-room, where he had been knocking the balls about in a thoughtful solitude.
‘How did you find the missus?’ he asked, after saluting Bella with a friendly nod.
‘Pretty much the same as usual, Mr. Piper. I’m afraid there is no change for the better. She looks worn and worried.’
‘She will worry herself when there ain’t no call,’ said Piper. ‘She’s been bothering over those tradesmen’s books this morning, I’ll warrant, just as she used fifteen years ago when I allowed her five pounds a week for the housekeeping. She never did take kindly to a large establishment. She’s been wearing her life out about fiddle-faddle ever since we came here—and yet she had set her heart on being a great lady. She’s a good little woman, and I’m uncommonly fond of her, but she’s narrer-minded. I ain’t so blind but what I can see that.’
‘She is all that is kind and good,’ said Bella, who had always a large balance of affection at call for anybody who was likely to be useful to her.
‘So she is,’ assented Ebenezer, ‘and you’re very fond of her, ain’t you? She’s fond of you, too. She thinks you are one of the cleverest girls out. And so you are. You’ve had a hard job with Brougham’s Latin. He don’t take to learning as I did. I was a self-taught man, Miss Scratchell. I bought a Latin grammar at a bookstall, when I was a factory hand, and used to sit up of a night puzzling over it till I taught myself as much Latin as many a chap knows that’s cost his parents no end of money. My education never cost anybody anything, except myself—and it cost me about a pound, first and last, for books. I don’t know many books, you know, but them I do know I know thoroughly. The Vicar himself couldn’t beat me at an argument, when it comes to the subjects I’m up in. But I don’t pretend to know everything. I ain’t a many-sided man. I couldn’t tell you what breed of tomcats was ranked highest in Egypt, or where’s the likeliest spot in the sky to look for a new planet.’
‘Everybody knows that you are very clever,’ said Bella, safely.
‘Well, I hope nobody has ever found me very stupid. But I want my children to know a deal more than me. They must be able to hold their own against all comers. I should like ’em to read off the monuments in Egypt as pat as I can read the newspaper. Like that French fellow Shampoleon, we heard so much of when I was a young man. Come and have a look at the conservatory, and take home some flowers for your mar.’
‘You are very kind, Mr. Piper; but I’m rather in a hurry. I am not going home. I am on a visit to the Water House.’
‘The deuce you are!’ exclaimed Mr. Piper. ‘There’s not many visitors there, I take it. You must be uncommon dull.’
‘Other people might find it dull, perhaps; but I am very happy there. I am very fond of Beatrix Harefield.’
‘Ah! she’s a fine grown young woman; but she ain’t my style. Looks as if there was a spice of the devil in her. Come and have a look at the conservatory. You can take Miss Harefield some flowers.’
The conservatory opened out of the hall, to which they had descended by this time. Bella could not refuse to go in and look at Mr. Piper’s expensive collection of tropical plants, with long Latin names. His conservatory was an object of interest to him in his present comparatively idle life. He knew all the Latin names, and the habits of all the plants. He cut off some of the blossoms that were on the wane, and presented them to Bella, talking about himself and his wife and children all the while. She had a hard struggle to get away, for Mr. Piper approved of her, just as Dr. Johnson approved of Kitty Clive, as a nice little thing to sit beside one, or, in other words, a good listener.
Bella got back to the Water House in time for luncheon, a meal which the two girls took together in a snug breakfast parlour on the ground floor. The dining-room was much too large for the possibility of cheerfulness.
‘You have hardly eaten anything, Beatrix,’ remarked Bella, when they had finished; ‘and you had only a cup of tea at breakfast time. No wonder you are ill.’
‘I dare say if I could sleep better I should eat more,’ answered Beatrix, listlessly, ‘but the nights are so long—when day comes I feel too worn out to be hungry.’
‘It is all very bad and very foolish,’ said Bella. ‘Why should you have these sleepless nights? It can’t be grief. You have nothing to grieve about. Your way lies clear before you. It is only a question of time.’
‘I suppose so,’ assented Beatrix; ‘but I can’t see myself happy in the future. I can’t believe in it. I feel as if all my life was to be spent in this loveless home—my father holding himself aloof from me—Cyril parted from me. How can I be sure that he will always love me—that I shall be the same to him two years hence that I am now? It is a long time.’
‘A long time to be parted without even the privilege of writing to each other, certainly,’ said Bella; ‘but there is no fear of any change in Mr. Culverhouse’s feelings. Think what a splendid match you are for a poor curate.’
‘Why do you harp upon that string, Bella?’ cried Beatrix, angrily. ‘You know that if I marry Cyril I shall forfeit my father’s fortune. Cyril knows it too. It is a settled thing. I shall go to him penniless.’
‘Oh, no, you won’t, dear! Things will never go so far as that. Your father will get reconciled to the idea of your marrying Mr. Culverhouse. You must both look forward to that.’
‘We neither of us look forward to it. There is no question of fortune between us. Never speak of such a thing again, Bella, unless you wish to offend me. And now I am going to drive you to Great Yafford, to do some shopping. We must buy some Christmas presents for your mamma and brothers and sisters.’
‘Oh, Beatrix, you are too good.’
Puck, the pony, was one of the finest specimens of his race, a thick-necked, stout-limbed animal, and a splendid goer. He would have dragged his mistress all round England, and never asked for a day’s rest. He never was sick nor sorry, as the old coachman said approvingly, when summing up Puck’s qualifications. On the other hand, he had a temper of his own, and if he was offended he kicked. He would have destroyed a carriage once a week if he had got into bad hands. But he understood Beatrix, and Beatrix understood him, and everything went smoothly between them.
Great Yafford on a December afternoon was about as ugly a town as one need care to see; but it was busy and prosperous, and seemed to take an honest pride in its ugliness, so stoutly did its vestry and corporation oppose any movement in the direction of beauty. There was one street of ample breadth and length, intersected by a great many narrow streets. There was a grimy looking canal, along which still grimier coal barges crept stealthily under the dull gray sky. There were great piles of buildings devoted to the purposes of commerce; factories, warehouses, gas works, dye works, oil works, soap works, bone works, all vying with one another in hideousness, and in the production of unsavoury odours.
Ugly as Great Yafford was, however, there was nothing Bella Scratchell enjoyed so much as a visit to Tower Gate, the broad street above-named, and a leisurely contemplation of the well-furnished shop windows, where the fashions, as that morning received from Paris, were to be seen gratis by the penniless gazer. Banbury and Banburys’, the chief drapers, afforded Bella as much delight as a lover of pictures derives from a noble gallery. She would have seen the Venus of Milo for the first time with less excitement than she felt on beholding ‘our latest novelties in Paris mantles,’ or ‘our large importation of silks from the great Lyons houses.’
‘Drive slowly, please, Beatrix,’ said Bella, as they entered Tower Gate; ‘I should like to have a look at Banburys’, though it can’t make any difference to me, for I have bought my winter things.’
‘You can look as long as you like, Bella. I am going in to buy some gloves, and a few little things. Perhaps you would like to go in with me.’
‘I should very much, dear. They have always such lovely things inside.’
Puck was given over to the care of the groom, while the two young ladies went into Banburys’. It was a very busy time just now. ‘Our latest novelties’ were being scrutinized and pulled about by an eager throng of buyers, and the patience of Banburys’ young men was tried to the verge of martyrdom by ladies who hadn’t quite made up their minds what they wanted, or whether they wanted anything at all. An ordinary individual would have had ample time to study the humours of Banburys’ before being served; but Miss Harefield was known as an excellent customer, and the shop-walker was in a fever till he had found a young man to attend upon her. He was a pale young man, in whose face all the colour had run into pimples, and he had a wild and worried look, which was not unnatural in a youth whose mind had been tortured by all kinds of fanciful objections to, and criticisms upon Banburys’ stock, from nine o’clock that morning, and who had run to and fro over the face of Banburys’, like a new Orestes driven by the Furies, in search of articles that never answered the requirements of his customers, proving always just a little too dear, or too common, too thick or too thin, too dark or too light, too silky or too woolly for the fair buyer. To this tormented youth Beatrix seemed an angel of light, so easily was she pleased, so quickly did she decide upon her purchases. She bought a dozen pairs of gloves, a pile of ribbons, laces, and other trifles in the time that an elderly female in black, a little lower down the counter, devoted to the thrilling question of which particular piece out of a pile of lavender printed cotton would best survive the ordeal of the washtub.
‘What is your sister Clementina’s size?’ inquired Beatrix, looking over a box of gloves.
‘Oh, Beatrix, you mustn’t buy any for her,’ whispered Bella.
‘Yes, I must. And you must tell me her number.’
‘Six and three-quarters.’
‘The same as yours. I’ll take a dozen of the six and three-quarters.’
A large Honiton collar and cuffs, after the fashion of the period—a dark age in which rufflings and fichus and all the varieties of modern decorative art were unknown—were chosen for Miss Scales—neck ribbons for the women servants—warm clothing for certain goodies in the village—a noble parcel altogether. The pale and haggard youth felt that he need not quail before the awful eye of Banbury when the day’s takings came to be summed up.
After leaving Banburys’, Miss Harefield drove to a chemist’s, and got out alone to make her purchases.
‘I couldn’t get what I wanted there,’ she said, and then drove into one of the narrow streets and pulled up at another chemist’s.
She went in this way to no less than six chemists’ shops, entering each alone, and remaining for about five minutes in each. She had a good many little daintily sealed white parcels by the time she had finished this round.
‘Are you going to set up as a doctor?’ Bella asked, laughing.
‘I have got what I wanted at last,’ Beatrix answered evasively.
‘What can you have in all those little parcels?’
‘Perfumery—in most of them. And now I am going to the Repository to buy something for your small brothers and sisters.’
The Repository was a kind of bazaar in Tower Gate, where there was a large selection of useless articles at any price from sixpence to a guinea. Beatrix loaded herself with popular parlour games, Conversation Cards, Royal Geographical Games, and Kings of England—games which no one but a drivelling idiot could play more than once without being conscious of a tendency to softening of the brain—for the young Scratchells. She bought a handsome workbasket for the industrious house-mother. She bought scent bottles and thimble cases for the girls, knives and pocket-books for the boys.
‘Upon my word, Beatrix, you are too good,’ exclaimed Bella, when she heard the destination of these objects.
‘Do you suppose that money can give me any better pleasure than to make other people happy with it, if I can?’ answered Beatrix. ‘It will never make me happy.’