Madame Eulalie’s Rare PlumsGrand Magazine, December 1920
SYNOPSIS
Sir Derek Underhill, M.P., is engaged to Jill Mariner, who is charming, high-spirited and unconventional. His mother, known as the Family Curse, is antagonistic to Jill and equally so to Freddie Rooke, the good-natured young man about town, who has introduced the two young people.
At a fire in a theatre Jill is rescued by Wally Mason, whom she had known in her childhood, and allows him to take her to supper at the Savoy. There they find themselves face to face with Derek and his mother.
Jill further outrages Lady Underhill’s feelings by getting arrested for attacking a navvy whom she has caught ill-treating a parrot.
Sir Derek, urged by his mother that such a wife will harm his career, writes to break off the engagement. His letter reaches Jill just as she has learnt that her Uncle Chris has lost her fortune and his own.
CHAPTER XVII.
JILL SETS SAIL
“WHAT!” Uncle Chris leaped from the hearth-rug, as though the fire had suddenly scorched him. “What did you say?”
“Derek’s broken it off.”
“The hound!” cried Uncle Chris. “The blackguard! The—the—I never liked that man! I never trusted him!” He fumed for a moment. “But—but—it isn’t possible! How can he have heard about what’s happened? He couldn’t know. It’s—it’s—it isn’t possible.”
“He doesn’t know. It has nothing to do with that.”
“But . . .” Uncle Chris stooped to where the note lay. “May I? . . .”
“Yes, you can read it if you like.”
Uncle Chris produced a pair of reading-glasses, and glared through them at the sheet of paper as though it were some loathsome insect.
“The hound! The cad! If I were a younger man,” shouted Uncle Chris, smiting the letter violently, “if I were . . . Jill! My dear little Jill!”
He plunged down on his knees beside her, as she buried her face in her hands and began to sob.
“My little girl! Damn that man! My dear little girl! The cad! The devil! My own darling little girl! I’ll thrash him within an inch of his life!”
The clock on the mantelpiece ticked away the minutes. Jill got up. Her face was wet and quivering, but her mouth had set in a brave line.
“Jill, dear!”
She let his hand close over hers.
“Everything’s happening all at once this afternoon, Uncle Chris, isn’t it!” She smiled a twisted smile. “You look so funny! Your hair’s all rumpled, and your glasses are over on one side!”
Uncle Chris breathed heavily through his nose.
“When I meet that man . . .” he began, portentously.
“Oh, what’s the good of bothering! It’s not worth it. Nothing’s worth it!” Jill stopped and faced him, her hands clenched. “Let’s get away! Let’s get right away! I want to get right away, Uncle Chris! Take me away! Anywhere! Take me to America with you! I must get away!”
Uncle Chris raised his right hand and shook it. His reading-glasses, hanging from his left ear, bobbed drunkenly.
“We’ll sail by the next boat! The very next boat, dammit! I’ll take care of you, dear. I’ve been a blackguard to you, my little girl. I’ve robbed you and swindled you. But I’ll make up for it, by George! I’ll make up for it! I’ll give you a new home, as good as this, if I die for it. There’s nothing I won’t do! Nothing! By Jove!” shouted Uncle Chris, raising his voice in a red-hot frenzy of emotion, “I’ll work! Yes, by Gad, if it comes right down to it, I’ll work!”
He brought his fist down with a crash on the table where Derek’s flowers stood in their bowl. The bowl leaped in the air and tumbled over, scattering the flowers on the floor.
Years afterwards Jill could not bring herself to think of that brief but age-long period which lay between the evening when she read Derek’s letter and the morning when, with the wet sea wind in her face and the cry of the wheeling sea-gulls in her ears, she stood on the deck of the liner that was taking her to the land where she could begin a new life. It brooded behind her like a great, dank cloud shutting out the sunshine.
The conditions of modern life are singularly inimical to swift and dramatic action when we wish to escape from surroundings that have become intolerable. In the old days your hero would leap on his charger and ride out into the sunset. Now, he is compelled to remain for a week or so to settle his affairs—especially if he is an Uncle Chris, and has got those affairs into such a tangle that hardened lawyers knit their brows at the sight of them. It took one of the most competent firms in the metropolis four days to produce some sort of order in the confusion resulting from Major Selby’s financial operations: and during those days Jill existed in a state of being which could be defined as living only in that she breathed and ate and comported herself outwardly like a girl and not a ghost.
Boards announcing that the house was for sale appeared against the railings through which Jane, the parlourmaid, conducted her daily conversations with the tradesmen. Strangers roamed the rooms, eyeing and appraising the furniture. Uncle Chris, on whom disaster had had a quickening and vivifying effect, was everywhere at once, an impressive figure of energy. One may be wronging Uncle Chris, but to the eye of the casual observer he seemed, in these days of trial, to be having the time of his life.
Jill varied the monotony of sitting in her room—which was the only place in the house where one might be sure of not encountering a furniture-broker’s man with a note-book and pencil—by taking long walks. She avoided, as far as possible, the small area which had once made up the whole of London for her, but even so she was not always successful in escaping from old acquaintances.
Once, cutting through Lennox Gardens on her way to that vast, desolate King’s Road which stretches its length out into regions unknown to those whose London is the West End, she happened upon Freddie Rooke, who had been paying a call in his best hat and a pair of white spats, which would have cut his friend Henry to the quick. It was not an enjoyable meeting. Freddie, keenly alive to the awkwardness of the situation, was scarlet and incoherent: and Jill, who desired nothing less than to talk with one so intimately connected in her mind with all that she had lost, was scarcely more collected. They parted without regret. The only satisfaction that came to Jill from the encounter was the knowledge that Derek was still out of town. He had wired for his things, said Freddie, and had retreated further north. Freddie, it seemed, had been informed of the broken engagement by Lady Underhill in an interview which appeared to have left a lasting impression on his mind. Of Jill’s monetary difficulties he had heard nothing.
After this meeting Jill felt a slight diminution of the oppression which weighed upon her. She could not have borne to have come unexpectedly upon Derek, and, now that there was no danger of that, she found life a little easier. The days passed somehow, and finally there came the morning when, accompanied by Uncle Chris—voluble and explanatory about the details of what he called “getting everything settled”—she rode in a taxi to take the train for Southampton. Her last impression of London was of rows upon rows of mean houses, of cats wandering in backyards among groves of home-washed underclothing, and a smoky greyness which gave way, as the train raced on, to the clearer grey of the suburbs and the good green and brown of the open country.
Then the bustle and confusion of the liner; the calm monotony of the journey, when one came on deck each morning to find the vessel so manifestly in the same spot where it had been the morning before, that it was impossible to realise how many hundred miles of ocean had really been placed behind one: and finally the Ambrose Channel light-ship, and the great bulk of New York rising into the sky like a city of fairyland, heartening yet sinister, at once a welcome and a menace.
“There you are, my dear!” said Uncle Chris indulgently, as though it were a toy he had made for her with his own hands. “New York!”
They were standing on the boat-deck, leaning over the rail. Jill caught her breath. For the first time since disaster had come upon her she was conscious of a rising of her spirits. It is impossible to behold the huge buildings which fringe the harbour of New York without a sense of expectancy and excitement. There remained in Jill’s mind from childhood memories a vague picture of what she now saw, but it had been feeble and inadequate. The sight of this towering city seemed somehow to blot out everything that had gone before. The feeling of starting afresh was strong upon her.
Uncle Chris, the old traveller, was not emotionally affected. He smoked placidly, and talked in a wholly earthy strain of grape-fruit and buckwheat cakes.
It was now, also for the first time, that Uncle Chris touched upon future prospects in a practical manner. On the voyage he had been eloquent but sketchy. With the land of promise within biscuit-throw, and the tugs bustling about the great liner’s skirts like little dogs about their mistress, he descended to details.
“I shall get a room somewhere,” said Uncle Chris, “and start looking about me. I wonder if the old Holland House is still there. I fancy I heard they’d pulled it down. Capital place. I had a steak there in the year . . . But I expect they’ve pulled it down. But I shall find somewhere to go. I’ll write and tell you my address directly I’ve got one.”
Jill removed her gaze from the skyline with a start.
“Write to me?”
“Didn’t I tell you about that?” said Uncle Chris cheerily—avoiding her eye, however, for he had realised all along that it might be a little bit awkward breaking the news. “I’ve arranged that you shall go and stay for the time being down at Brookport—on Long Island, you know—over in that direction—with your Uncle Elmer. Daresay you’ve forgotten you have an Uncle Elmer, eh?” he went on quickly, as Jill was about to speak. “Your father’s brother. Used to be in business, but retired some years ago, and goes in for amateur farming. Corn and—and corn,” said Uncle Chris. “All that sort of thing. You’ll like him. Capital chap! Never met him myself, but always heard,” said Uncle Chris, who had never, to his recollection, heard any comments upon Mr. Elmer Mariner whatever, “that he was a splendid fellow. Directly we decided to sail I cabled to him, and got an answer saying that he would be delighted to put you up. You’ll be quite happy there.”
Jill listened to this programme with dismay. New York was calling to her, and Brookport held out no attractions at all. She looked down over the side at the tugs puffing their way through the broken blocks of ice that reminded her of a cocoa-nut candy familiar to her childhood.
“But I want to be with you,” she protested.
“Impossible, my dear, for the present. I shall be very busy, very busy indeed for some weeks, until I have found my feet. Really, you would be in the way. He—er—travels the fastest who travels alone! I must be in a position to go anywhere and do anything at a moment’s notice. But always remember, my dear,” said Uncle Chris, patting her shoulder affectionately, “that I shall be working for you. I have treated you very badly, but I intend to make up for it. I shall not forget that whatever money I may make will really belong to you.” He looked at her benignly, like a monarch of finance who has ear-marked a million or two for the benefit of a deserving charity. “You shall have it all, Jill.”
He had so much the air of having conferred a substantial benefit upon her that Jill felt obliged to thank him. Uncle Chris had always been able to make people grateful for the phantom gold which he showered upon them. He was as lavish a man with the money he was going to get next week as ever borrowed a five-pound note to see him through till Saturday.
“What are you going to do, Uncle Chris?” asked Jill curiously. Apart from a nebulous idea that he intended to saunter through the city picking dollar-bills off the sidewalk, she had no inkling of his plans.
Uncle Chris toyed with his short moustache. He was not quite equal to a direct answer on the spur of the moment. He had a faith in his star. Something would turn up. Something always had turned up in the old days, and doubtless, with the march of civilisation, opportunities had multiplied. Somewhere behind those tall buildings the Goddess of Luck awaited him, her hands full of gifts, but precisely what those gifts would be he was not in a position to say.
“I shall—ah—how shall I put it——?”
“Look round?” suggested Jill.
“Precisely,” said Uncle Chris gratefully. “Look round. I daresay you have noticed that I have gone out of my way during the voyage to make myself agreeable to our fellow-travellers? I had an object. Acquaintances begun on ship-board often ripen into useful friendships ashore. When I was a young man I never neglected the opportunities which an ocean voyage affords. One meets influential people on a liner. You wouldn’t think it to look at him, but that man with the eye-glasses and the thin nose I was talking to just now is one of the richest men in Milwaukee!”
“But it’s not much good having rich friends in Milwaukee when you are in New York.”
“Exactly. There you have put your finger on the very point I have been trying to make. It will probably be necessary for me to travel. And for that I must be alone. I must be a mobile force. I should dearly like to keep you with me, but you can see for yourself that for the moment you would be an encumbrance. Later on, no doubt, when my affairs are more settled. . . .”
“Oh, I understand. I’m resigned. But, oh dear! it’s going to be very dull down at Brookport.”
“Nonsense, nonsense! It’s a delightful spot.”
“Have you been there?”
“No! But of course everybody knows Brookport! Healthy, invigorating. . . . Sure to be! The very name. . . . You’ll be as happy as the days are long!”
“And how long the days will be!”
“Come, come! You mustn’t look on the dark side.”
“Is there another?” Jill laughed. “You are an old humbug, Uncle Chris. You know perfectly well what you’re condemning me to! I expect Brookport will be like a sort of Southend in winter. Oh, well, I’ll be brave. But do hurry and make a fortune, because I want to come to New York.”
“My dear,” said Uncle Chris solemnly, “if there is a dollar lying loose in this city rest assured that I shall have it! And, if it’s not loose, I will detach it with the greatest possible speed. You have only known me in my decadence, an idle and unprofitable London clubman. I can assure you that lurking beneath the surface there is a business acumen given to few men. . . .”
“Oh, if you are going to talk poetry,” said Jill, “I’ll leave you. Anyhow, I ought to be getting below and putting my things together. Subject for an historical picture—The Belle of Brookport collecting a few simple necessaries before entering upon the conquest of America.”
CHAPTER XVIII.
UNCLE ELMER
If Jill’s vision of Brookport as a wintry Southend was not entirely fulfilled, neither was Uncle Chris’s picture of it as an earthly paradise. At the right time of the year, like most of the summer resorts on the south shore of Long Island, it is not without its attractions: but January is not the month which most people would choose for living in it. It presented itself to Jill, on first acquaintance, in the aspect of a wind-swept railroad station, dumped down far away from human habitation in the middle of a stretch of flat and ragged country that reminded her a little of parts of Surrey. The station was just a shed on a foundation of planks which lay flush with the rails. From this shed, as the train clanked in, there emerged a tall, shambling man in a weather-beaten overcoat. He had a clean-shaven, wrinkled face, and he looked doubtfully at Jill with small eyes. Something in his expression reminding Jill of her father, as a bad caricature of a public man will recall the original, she introduced herself.
“If you’re Uncle Elmer,” she said, “I’m Jill.”
The man held out a long hand. He did not smile. He was as bleak as the east wind that swept the platform.
“Glad to meet you again,” he said in a melancholy voice. It was news to Jill that they had met before. She wondered where. Her uncle supplied the information. “Last time I saw you you were a kiddy in short frocks running round and shouting to beat the band.” He looked up and down the platform. “I never heard a child make so much noise!”
“I’m quite quiet now,” said Jill encouragingly. The recollection of her infant revelry seemed to her to be depressing her relative.
It appeared, however, that it was not only this that was on his mind.
“If you want to drive home,” he said, “we’ll have to ’phone to the Durham House for a hack.” He brooded awhile, Jill remaining silent at his side, loath to break in upon whatever secret sorrow he was wrestling with. “That would be a dollar,” he went on. “They’re robbers in these parts! A dollar! And it’s not over a mile and a half. Are you fond of walking?”
Jill was a bright girl, and could take a hint.
“I love walking,” she said. She might have added that she preferred to do it on a day when the wind was not blowing quite so keenly from the east, but her uncle’s obvious excitement at the prospect of cheating the rapacity of the sharks at the Durham House restrained her. Her independent soul had not quite adjusted itself to the prospect of living on the bounty of her fellows, relatives though they were, and she was desirous of imposing as light a burden upon them as possible. “But how about my trunk?”
“The expressman will bring that up. Fifty cents!” said Uncle Elmer in a crushed way. The high cost of entertaining seemed to be afflicting this man deeply.
“Oh, yes!” said Jill. She could not see how this particular expenditure was to be avoided. Anxious as she was to make herself pleasant, she declined to consider carrying the trunk to their destination. “Shall we start, then?”
Mr. Mariner led the way out into the ice-covered road. The wind welcomed them like a boisterous dog.
“Your aunt will be glad to see you,” said Mr. Mariner at last, in the voice with which one announces the death of a dear friend.
“It’s awfully kind of you to have me to stay with you,” said Jill. It is a human tendency to think, when crises occur, in terms of melodrama, and unconsciously she had begun to regard herself somewhat in the light of a heroine driven out into the world from the old home, with no roof to shelter her head. The promptitude with which these good people, who, though relatives, were after all complete strangers, had offered her a resting-place touched her. “I hope I shan’t be in the way.”
“Major Selby was speaking to me on the telephone just now,” said Mr. Mariner, “and he said that you might be thinking of settling down in Brookport. I’ve some nice little places round here which you might like to look at. Rent or buy. It’s cheaper to buy. Brookport’s a growing place. It’s getting known as a summer resort. There’s a bungalow down on the shore I’d like to show you to-morrow. Stands in a nice large plot of ground, and if you bought it for twelve thousand you’d be getting a bargain.”
Jill was too astonished to speak. Plainly Uncle Chris had made no mention of the change in her fortunes, and this man looked on her as a girl of wealth. She could only think how typical this was of Uncle Chris. There was a sort of boyish impishness about him. She could see him at the telephone, suave and important. He would have hung up the receiver with a complacent smirk, thoroughly satisfied that he had done her an excellent turn.
“I put all my money into real estate when I came to live here,” went on Mr. Mariner. “I believe in the place. It’s growing all the time.”
They had come to the outskirts of a straggling village. The lights in the windows gave a welcome suggestion of warmth, for darkness had fallen swiftly during their walk, and the chill of the wind had become more biting. There was a smell of salt in the air now, and once or twice Jill had caught the low booming of waves on some distant beach. This was the Atlantic pounding the sandy shore of Fire Island. Brookport itself lay inside, on the lagoon called the Great South Bay.
“This is Brookport,” said Mr. Mariner. “That’s Haydock’s grocery store there by the post-office. He charges sixty cents a pound for bacon, and I can get the same bacon by walking into Patchogue for fifty-seven!”
“How far is Patchogue?” asked Jill, feeling that some comment was required of her.
“Four miles,” said Mr. Mariner.
They passed through the village, bearing to the right, and found themselves in a road bordered by large gardens in which stood big, dark houses. The spectacle of these stimulated Mr. Mariner to something approaching eloquence. He quoted the price paid for each, the price asked, the price offered, the price that had been paid five years ago. The recital carried them on for another mile, in the course of which the houses became smaller and more scattered, and finally, when the country had become bare and desolate again, they turned down a narrow lane and came to a tall, gaunt house standing by itself in a field.
“This is Sandringham,” said Mr. Mariner.
“What!” said Jill. “What did you say?”
“Sandringham. Where we live. I got the name from your father. I remember him telling me there was a place called that in England.”
“There is.” Jill’s voice bubbled. “The King lives there.”
“Is that so?” said Mr. Mariner. “Well, I’ll bet he doesn’t have the trouble with help that we have here. I have to pay our girl fifty dollars a month, and another twenty for the man who looks after the furnace and chops wood. They’re all robbers. And if you kick they quit on you!”
CHAPTER XIX.
THE POOR RELATION
Jill endured Sandringham for ten days: and, looking back on that period of her life later, she wondered how she did it. The sense of desolation which had gripped her on the station platform increased rather than diminished as she grew accustomed to her surroundings. The east wind died away, and the sun shone fitfully with a suggestion of warmth, but her uncle’s bleakness appeared to be a static quality, independent of weather conditions. Her aunt, a faded woman with a perpetual cold in the head, did nothing to promote cheerfulness. The rest of the household consisted of a gloomy child, “Tibby,” aged eight, a spaniel, probably a few years older, and an intermittent cat, who, when he did put in an appearance, was the life and soul of the party, but whose visits to his home were all too infrequent for Jill. Thomas was a genial animal, whose colour-scheme, like a Whistler picture, was an arrangement in black and white. He had green eyes and a purr like a racing automobile. But his social engagements in the neighbourhood kept him away much of the time. He was the popular and energetic secretary of the local cats’ debating society. One could hear him at night sometimes reading the minutes in a loud, clear voice: after which the debate was considered formally open.
Each day was the same as the last, almost to the final detail. Sometimes Tibby would be naughty at breakfast, sometimes at lunch: while Rover, the spaniel, who was a great devotee of the garbage-can, would occasionally be sick at mid-day instead of after the evening meal. But, with these exceptions, there was a uniformity about the course of life in the Mariner household which began to prey on Jill’s nerves.
The picture which Mr. Mariner had formed in his mind of Jill, as a wealthy young lady with a taste for house property, continued as vivid as ever. It was his practice each morning to conduct her about the neighbourhood, introducing her to the various houses in which he had sunk most of the money he had made in business. Most of these houses were converted farm-houses, and, as one unfortunate purchaser had remarked, not so darned converted at that. The days she spent at Brookport remained in Jill’s memory as a smell of dampness and chill and closeness.
“You want to buy,” said Mr. Mariner every time he shut a front-door behind them. “Not rent. Buy. Then, if you don’t want to live here, you can always rent in the summer.”
It seemed incredible to Jill that the summer would ever come. Winter held Brookport in its grip. For the first time in her life she was tasting real loneliness.
On the eighth day came a letter from Uncle Chris—a cheerful, even rollicking letter. Things were going well with Uncle Chris, it seemed. As was his habit, he did not enter into details, but he wrote in a spacious way of large things to be, of affairs that were coming out right, of prosperity in sight. As tangible evidence of success, he enclosed a present of twenty dollars for Jill to spend in the Brookport shops.
The letter arrived by the morning mail, and two hours later Mr. Mariner took Jill by one of his usual overland routes to see a house nearer the village than most of those which she had viewed. Mr. Mariner had exhausted the supply of cottages belonging to himself, and this one was the property of an acquaintance. There would be an agent’s fee for him in the deal, if it went through, and Mr. Mariner was not a man who despised money in small quantities.
There was a touch of hopefulness in his gloom this morning, like the first intimation of sunshine after a wet day. He had been thinking the thing over, and had come to the conclusion that Jill’s unresponsiveness, when confronted with the houses she had already seen, was due to the fact that she had loftier ideas than he had supposed. Something a little more magnificent than the twelve thousand dollar places he had shown her was what she desired. This house stood on a hill looking down on the bay, in several acres of ground. It had its private landing-stage and bath-house, its dairy, its sleeping-porches—everything, in fact, that a sensible girl could want.
“They’re asking a hundred and five thousand,” he said, “but I know they’d take a hundred thousand. And, if it was a question of cash down, they would go even lower. It’s a fine house. You could entertain there. Mrs. Bruggenheim rented it last summer, and wanted to buy, but she wouldn’t go above ninety thousand. If you want it you’d better make up your mind quick.”
Jill could endure it no longer.
“But you see,” she said, gently, “all I have in the world is twenty dollars!”
There was a painful pause. Mr. Mariner shot a swift glance at her in the hope of discovering that she had spoken humorously, but was compelled to decide that she had not.
He was stunned. He had supported himself up till now by the thought that, frightful as the expense of entertaining Jill as a guest might be, the outlay was a good sporting speculation if she intended buying house-property in the neighbourhood. The realisation that he was down to the extent of a week’s breakfasts, lunches, and dinners, with nothing to show for it, appalled him.
“Twenty dollars!” he exclaimed.
“Twenty dollars,” said Jill.
“But your father was a rich man.” Mr. Mariner’s voice was high and plaintive. “He made a fortune over here before he went to England.”
“It’s all gone. I got nipped,” said Jill, who was finding a certain amount of humour in the situation, “in Amalgamated Dyes.”
“Amalgamated Dyes?”
“They’re something,” explained Jill, “that people get nipped in.”
Mr. Mariner digested this.
“You speculated?” he gasped.
“Yes.”
“You shouldn’t have been allowed to do it,” said Mr. Mariner warmly. “Major Selby—your uncle ought to have known better than to allow you.”
“Yes, oughtn’t he?” said Jill demurely.
* * * *
The result of this conversation was to effect a change in the atmosphere of Sandringham. The alteration in the demeanour of people of parsimonious habit, when they discover that the guest they are entertaining is a pauper and not, as they had supposed, an heiress, is subtle but well-marked. In most cases, more well-marked than subtle.
That night, after dinner, Mrs. Mariner asked Jill to read to her.
“Print tries my eyes so, dear,” said Mrs. Mariner.
It was a small thing, but it had the significance of that little cloud that arose out of the sea like a man’s hand. Jill appreciated the portent. She was, she perceived, to make herself useful.
“Of course I will,” she said cordially. “What would you like me to read?”
She hated reading aloud. It always made her throat sore, and her eye skipped to the end of each page and took the interest out of it long before the proper time. But she proceeded bravely, for her conscience was troubling her. Her sympathy was divided equally between these unfortunate people who had been saddled with an undesired visitor and herself, who had been placed in a position at which every independent nerve in her rebelled. Even as a child she had loathed being under obligations to strangers or those whom she did not love.
“Thank you, dear,” said Mrs. Mariner, when Jill’s voice had roughened to a weary croak. “You read so well.” She wrestled ineffectually with her handkerchief against the cold in the head from which she always suffered. “It would be nice if you would do it every night, don’t you think? You have no idea how tired print makes my eyes.”
On the following morning after breakfast, at the hour when she had hitherto gone house-hunting with Mr. Mariner, the child Tibby, of whom up till now she had seen little except at meals, presented himself to her, coated and shod for the open, and regarding her with a dull and phlegmatic gaze.
“Ma says will you please take me for a nice walk!”
Jill’s heart sank. She loved children, but Tibby was not an ingratiating child. He was a Mr. Mariner in little.
“All right, Tibby. Where shall we go?”
“Ma says we must keep on the roads and I mustn’t slide.”
Jill was thoughtful during the walk. Tibby, who was no conversationist, gave her every opportunity for meditation. She perceived that in the space of a few hours she had sunk in the social scale. If there was any difference between her position and that of a paid nurse and companion, it lay in the fact that she was not paid.
Nearing home Tibby vouchsafed his first independent observation.
“The hired man’s quit!”
“Has he?”
“Yep. Quit this morning.”
It had begun to snow. They turned and made their way back to the house. The information she had received did not cause Jill any great apprehension. It was hardly likely that her new duties would include the stoking of the furnace. That and cooking appeared to be the only acts about the house which were outside her present sphere of usefulness.
“He killed a rat once in the wood-shed with an axe,” said Tibby chattily. “Yessir! Chopped it right in half, and it bled!”
“Look at the pretty snow falling on the trees,” said Jill faintly.
At breakfast next morning Mrs. Mariner, having sneezed, made a suggestion.
“Tibby, darling, wouldn’t it be nice if you and cousin Jill played a game of pretending you were pioneers in the Far West?”
“What’s a pioneer?” inquired Tibby, pausing in the middle of an act of violence on a plate of oatmeal.
“The pioneers were the early settlers in this country, dear. You have read about them in your history book. They endured a great many hardships, for life was very rough for them, with no railroads or anything. I think it would be a nice game to play this morning.”
Tibby looked at Jill. There was doubt in his eye. Jill returned his gaze sympathetically. One thought was in both their minds.
“There is a string to this!” said Tibby’s eye.
“Exactly what I think!” said Jill’s.
Mrs. Mariner sneezed again.
“You would have lots of fun,” she said.
“What ’ud we do?” asked Tibby, cautiously. He had been had this way before. Only last summer, on his mother’s suggestion that he should pretend he was a shipwrecked sailor on a desert island, he had perspired through a whole afternoon cutting the grass in front of the house to make a shipwrecked sailor’s simple bed.
“I know,” said Jill. “We’ll pretend we’re pioneers storm-bound in their log cabin in the woods and the wolves are howling outside, and they daren’t go out, so they make a lovely big fire and sit in front of it and read.”
“And eat candy,” suggested Tibby, warming to the idea.
“And eat candy,” agreed Jill.
Mrs. Mariner frowned.
“I was going to suggest,” she said frostily, “that you shovelled the snow away from the front steps!”
“Splendid!” said Jill. “Oh, but I forgot. I want to go to the village first.”
“There will be plenty of time to do it when you get back.”
“All right. I’ll do it when I get back.”
It was a quarter of an hour’s walk to the village. Jill stopped at the post-office.
“Could you tell me,” she asked, “when the next train is to New York?”
“There’s one at ten-ten,” said the woman behind the window. “You’ll have to hurry.”
“I’ll hurry!” said Jill.
CHAPTER XX.
DEREK AND THE MITTEN
Doctors, laying down the law in their usual confident way, tell us that the vitality of the human body is at its lowest at two o’clock in the morning: and that it is then, as a consequence, that the mind is least able to contemplate the present with equanimity, the future with fortitude, and the past without regret. Every thinking man, however, knows that this is not so. The true zero hour, desolate, gloom-ridden, and spectre-haunted, occurs immediately before dinner while we are waiting for that cocktail.
So reflected Freddie Rooke, that priceless old bean, sitting disconsolately in an armchair at the Drones Club about two weeks after Jill’s departure from England, waiting for his friend Algy Martyn to trickle in and give him dinner.
It would have been bad enough in any case, for Algy Martyn was late as usual, and it always gave Freddie the pip to have to wait for dinner: but what made it worse was the fact that the Drones was not one of Freddie’s clubs and so, until the blighter Algy arrived, it was impossible for him to get his cocktail.
Freddie gave himself up to despondency: and, as always in these days when he was mournful, he thought of Jill. Jill’s sad case was a continual source of mental anguish to him. From the first he had blamed himself for the breaking-off of her engagement with Derek. If he had not sent the message to Derek from the police-station, the latter would never have known about their arrest, and all would have been well. And now, a few days ago, had come the news of her financial disaster, with its attendant complications.
It had descended on Freddie like a thunderbolt through the medium of Ronny Devereux.
“I say,” Ronny had said, “have you heard the latest? Your pal Underhill has broken off his engagement with Jill Mariner.”
“I know. Rather rotten, what!”
“Rotten? I should say so! It isn’t done! I mean to say, chap can’t chuck a girl just because she’s lost her money! Simply isn’t on the board, old man!”
“Lost her money? What do you mean?”
Ronny was surprised. Hadn’t Freddie heard? Yes, absolute fact. He had it from the best authority. Didn’t know how it had happened and all that, but Jill Mariner had gone completely bust: Underhill had given her the miss-in-baulk: and the poor girl had legged it, no one knew where. Oh, Freddie had met her, and she had told him she was going to America? Well, then, legged it to America. But the point was that the swine Underhill had handed her the mitten just because she was broke, and that was what Ronny thought so bally rotten. Broker a girl is, Ronny meant to say, more a fellow should stick to her.
“But”—Freddie rushed to his hero’s defence—“but it wasn’t that at all. Something quite different. I mean, Derek didn’t even know Jill had lost her money. He broke the engagement because . . .” Freddie stopped short. He didn’t want everybody to know of that rotten arrest business, as they infallibly would if he confided in Ronny Devereux. Sort of thing he would never hear the last of. “He broke it off because of something quite different.”
“Oh, yes!” said Ronny sceptically.
“Don’t you believe it, old son! Don’t you believe it! Stands to reason it must have been because the poor girl was broke. You wouldn’t have done it and I wouldn’t have done it, but Underhill did, and that’s all there is to it. I mean, a tick’s a tick, and there’s nothing more to say. Well, I know he’s been a pal of yours, Freddie, but, next time I meet him, by Jove, I’ll cut him dead. Only I don’t know him to speak to, dash it!” concluded Ronny regretfully.
Ronny’s news had upset Freddie. Derek had returned to the Albany a couple of days ago, moody and silent. They had lunched together at the Bachelors, and Freddie had been pained at the attitude of his fellow clubmen. Usually, when he lunched at the Bachelors, his table became a sort of social centre. Cheery birds would roll up to pass the time of day, and festive old eggs would toddle over to have coffee and so forth, and all that sort of thing. Jolly! On this occasion nobody had rolled, and all the eggs present had taken their coffee elsewhere. There was an uncomfortable chill in the atmosphere of which Freddie had been acutely conscious, though Derek had not appeared to notice it. The thing had only come home to Derek yesterday at the Albany, when the painful episode of Wally Mason had occurred. It was this way. . . .
“Hullo, Freddie, old top! Sorry to have kept you waiting.”
Freddie looked up from his broken meditations to find that his host had arrived.
“Hullo!”
“A quick bracer,” said Algy Martyn, “and then the jolly old foodstuffs. It’s pretty late, I see. Didn’t notice how time was slipping.”
Over the soup, Freddie was still a prey to gloom. He sipped sombrely, so sombrely as to cause comment from his host.
“Backed a loser?”
“No. . . . Worried.”
“Worried?”
“About Derek.”
“Oh?” said Algy, with sudden coolness. “What about him?”
Freddie was too absorbed in his subject to notice the change in his friend’s tone.
“A dashed unpleasant thing,” he said, “happened yesterday morning at my place. I was just thinking about going out to lunch when the door-bell rang, and Parker said a chappie of the name of Mason would like to see me. I didn’t remember any Mason, but Parker said the chappie said he knew me when I was a kid. So he loosed him into the room, and it turned out to be a fellow I used to know years ago down in Worcestershire. Wally Mason his name was.
“Well, anyhow, now that he had turned up again and told me who he was, I began to remember. We had been kids together, don’t you know. (What’s this? Salmon? Oh, right-O.) So I buzzed about and did the jovial host, you know; gave him a drink and a toofer, and all that sort of thing; and talked about the dear old days and what not. And so forth, if you follow me. Then he brought the conversation round to Jill. Of course he knew Jill at the same time when he knew me, down in Worcestershire, you see. We were all pretty pally in those days, if you see what I mean. Well, this man Mason, it seems, had heard somewhere about Jill losing her money, and he wanted to know if it was true. I said, ‘Absolutely, and she’s gone to America, you know.’ ‘I didn’t know,’ he said. ‘I understood she was going to be married quite soon.’ Well, of course, I told him that that was off. He didn’t say anything for a bit, then he said ‘Off?’ I said ‘Off!’ ‘Did she break it off?’ asked the chappie. ‘Well, no,’ I said. ‘As a matter of fact Derek broke it off.’ He said ‘Oh, did he?’ Now, before this, I ought to tell you, this chappie Mason had asked me to come out and have a bit of lunch. I had told him I was lunching with Derek, and he said ‘Right O,’ or words to that effect, ‘Bring him along.’ Derek had been out for a stroll, you see, and we were waiting for him to come in. Well, just at this point in he came, and I said ‘Oh, what ho!’ and I introduced Wally Mason. And then . . .”
“Then what?” inquired Algy Martyn.
“Well, it was pretty rotten. Derek held out his hand, as a chappie naturally would, being introduced to a strange chappie, and Wally Mason, giving it an absolute miss, said: ‘I’m sorry, Freddie, but I find I’ve an engagement for lunch. So long,’ and biffed out without apparently knowing that Derek was on the earth.”
“Chappie was perfectly right!”
“No, but I mean . . .”
“Absolutely correct-o,” insisted Algy sternly. “Underhill can’t dash about all over the place giving the girl he’s engaged to the mitten because she’s broke, and expect no notice to be taken of it. If you want to know what I think, old man, your pal Underhill—the blighter—would be well advised either to leg it after Jill and get her to marry him, or else lie low for a goodish while till people have forgotten the thing. I tell you, Freddie, London’s going to get pretty hot for him if he doesn’t do something dashed quick, and with great rapidity!”
“But you haven’t got the story right, old thing!”
“How not?”
“Well, I mean you think, and Ronny thinks, and all the rest of you think that Derek broke off the engagement because of the money. It wasn’t that at all.”
“What was it, then?”
“Well. . . . Well, look here, it makes me seem a fearful ass and all that, but I’d better tell you.”
Algy Martyn listened to the story of the parrot with growing amazement.
“He broke it off because of that?”
“Yes.”
“What’s the use, Freddie, between old pals?” said Algy protestingly. “You know perfectly well that Underhill’s a cootie of the most pronounced order, and that, when he found out that Jill hadn’t any money, he chucked her.”
“But why should Derek care whether Jill was well off or not? He’s got enough money of his own.”
“Nobody,” said Algy judicially, “has got enough money of his own. Underhill thought he was marrying a girl with a sizeable chunk of the ready, and, when the fuse blew out, he decided it wasn’t good enough. For Heaven’s sake don’t let’s talk any more about the blighter. London’s finished with him, anyway.”
And Algy Martyn, suppressing every effort which Freddie made to re-open the subject, turned the conversation to more general matters.
Notes:
Compare this with the American serialization in Collier’s Weekly.
Note that the chapter divisions and their titles and numbering are different in this edition than in other versions of the novel. A table of correspondences (opens in a new browser window or tab) is on this site.