A Lame Dog's Diary Part 10

"I think I shall call on Mr. Ellicomb," said Mrs. Fielden. "I believe he has excellent afternoon teas, and he is making me an enamel box which I should like to see."

Ellicomb said once or twice, as we sat in his picturesque house with its blue china and old bra.s.s work, that he only wished we had given him warning that we were coming. We found him with an ap.r.o.n on, working at his enamels; and when he had displayed this work to us, he showed us his bookbinding, and his fretwork-carving, and his type-writing machine. Afterwards we had tea, which Ellicomb poured very deftly into his blue cups, having first warmed the teapot and the cups, and flicked away one or two imaginary specks of dirt from the plates with what appeared to be a small lace-trimmed dinner-napkin.

Mrs. Fielden began to admire his majolica ware, of which she knows nothing whatever, and Ellicomb took her for a tour round his rooms, and asked her to guess the original uses of his drain-tiles and spittoons and copper ham-pots. Afterwards we were taken into a very small conservatory adjoining his house, where every plant was displayed to us in turn; and we were subsequently shown his coal-cellar and his larder and his ash-pit before we were allowed to return to the house.

Ellicomb smiles more often than any other man I know, and he had only one epithet to apply to his house. "It's so cosy," he said. "Isn't it cosy?" "I do think it's a cosy little place."

Mrs. Fielden was charmed with everything, and deprecated the idea that she might consider the little house very small after Stanby.

"I always think," she said, "that I should much prefer to live in a place like this, and then the people who come to see one really would pay one a little attention, instead of talking of nothing but the house."

The Colonel laughed and apologized.

"Oh, I know I'm not half good enough for Stanby," said Mrs. Fielden, smiling. "But I really can't help it! I was brought up in a house with hot and cold water upstairs, and white paint, and I suppose I never can really appreciate anything else."

The dignity of Mrs. Fielden's surroundings has never affected her in the very smallest degree, and I do not believe that the traditions of the house interest her in the very least. I am quite aware that she asked me to write out the history of Lady Hylda, for instance, simply because it is part of her charm always to ask one to do something for her. It is the fashion to wait upon Mrs. Fielden's behests, and it would appear almost an unkindness to her many men friends if she did not give them some commission to do when they go up to town. Her manner of thanking one for a service is almost as pretty as her manner of asking for it, and I am really not surprised that she is the most popular woman in the country-side.

Mr. Ellicomb said ecstatically that the dim twilight at Stanby was one of the most impressive things he knew; and he added, with a shudder, that he always expected to see ghosts there.

Mrs. Fielden does not believe in ghosts except on those occasions when she has some one very charming to defend her, and she spends her evenings in a cheerful white boudoir in the modern part of the house.

Having admired all the majolica plates in the house, and having completely bewildered her host by showing an interest in him and his possessions one minute, and complete indifference the next, Mrs.

Fielden fell into one of those little silences which are so characteristic of her. Her silence is one of the most provoking things about her. She has been witty and amusing the moment before, and then relapses into silence in the most natural manner possible, and her face takes a certain wistful look, and a man wonders how he can comfort her or whether he has offended her.

"I think we ought to go now," she said, coming out of this wistful reverie like a child awaking from sleep. "Is every one ready?"

We got into the motor car again, and sped onwards along the smooth white road. Every turn made a picture which I suppose an artist would love to paint. There were red-roofed cottages smothered in orchards of plum blossom, and simple palings set across gaps in the hedges, with gardens beyond filled with spring flowers. Now a labourer, gray-coated and bent with age, pa.s.sed by like a flash, as he tramped slowly homewards from his work; and some school children, loitering to pick primroses under a hedge, dropped their slates and satchels in the ditch, and called to each other to take care, while they clung together and shouted "Hurrah!" as we pa.s.sed.

The park gates of Stanby are lion guarded and of stone, and then a long carriage-drive takes one up to the house. The park round the old gray pile was starred with primroses, and ghost-like little lambs were capering noiselessly in the fields. The scent of wallflowers was blown to us from a great brown ribbon of them round the walls of the lodgekeeper's house as we swung through the gates. The sheep in the park, bleating to their young, drew away from the palings where they had been rubbing their woolly sides, and made off to the farther corner of the field, and Mrs. Fielden's gray pony in the paddock tossed his heels in a vindictive fashion at us from a distance of fifty yards or more. And the motor car drew up with a jerk at the great doors of the house.

Stanby is not quite so large now as it originally was, immense though the house undoubtedly is, and only some ruins on the north side show where the chapel used to stand. A mound within the ruin's walls marks the resting-place of Hylda--Hylda, whose history I wrote out at the request of Mrs. Fielden, and sent to her; but I don't suppose she has ever read it.

The evening of our arrival at Stanby it pleased Mrs. Fielden to put on an old-fashioned dress of stiffest brocade, which she had found in some old chest in the house. She wore a high comb of pearls in her dark hair, and she looked a very regal and beautiful figure in the great dining-hall and drawing-rooms of her house. She did not play Bridge, as the others did, but sat on a carved high-backed chair near my sofa, and told me many of the old stories of the house, and asked me to write down some of them for her.

"I sent you the story of Hylda more than a week ago," I said, "and I don't suppose you ever read it."

"I did read it," said Mrs. Fielden gently, "and I liked it very much."

She had put on an unapproachable mood with her beautiful stiff brocade gown, and the gentleness of her voice seemed to heighten rather than to lessen her royalty. The radiance and the holiday air, which are Mrs.

Fielden's by divine right, were not dimmed to-night so much as transformed. There was a subtle aromatic scent of dried rose-leaves clinging to the old brocade dress, and about herself a sort of fragrance of old-world dignity and beauty. The pearl comb in her hair made her look taller than usual.

A deerhound got up from his place by the fire and came and laid his head on her lap, and some footmen in old-fashioned bright blue liveries came in to arrange the card-tables and hand round coffee. Everything was stately and magnificent in the house.

"And you pretend," I said, "that you do nothing; yet probably the whole ordering of this house devolves upon you."

"I am quite a domestic person sometimes," said Mrs. Fielden.

"It is rather bewildering," I said, "to find that you are everything in turn."

And the next morning she wore a short blue skirt, with a silver belt round her waist, and spent the morning punting on the lake with Anthony Crawshay.

"I hope I look after you all properly," she said at lunch-time, in a certain charming deprecating way she has of speaking sometimes. "There really are punts, and horses, and motor cars, and things, if you want them. Will you all order what you like?"

Each man at the table then offered to take Mrs. Fielden for a ride, or a drive, or a row, and not one of them could be quite sure that she had refused to go with him.

"I want to go for a turn in the garden and talk about books," she said to me as we left the dining-room. And then I found that I was sitting in her boudoir having coffee with her, and that every one else was excluded from the room--how it was done I have not the slightest idea--and that by-and-by we left it by the open French windows, and were strolling in the garden in the spring sunshine. The garden, with its high walls, is sheltered from every wind that blows, and there are wide garden-seats in it painted white, and every border was bright with early spring flowers.

"I call this my Grove of Academe," said Mrs. Fielden.

"Why?"

"Because I think it has a nice cla.s.sical sound; and it is here I come with my friends and discuss metaphysics."

"It seems to me you have a great many friends," I said.

"I was thinking," said Mrs. Fielden thoughtfully, "of adding another to their number."

"I have a const.i.tutional dislike to worshipping in crowded temples," I said.

Mrs. Fielden became silent.

It would be forging a sword against themselves did men allow women to know what a powerful weapon silence is. A soft answer turneth away wrath, but a woman's silence makes a man's heart cry out: "My dear, did I hurt you? Forgive me!"

At the end of five minutes or so of silence Mrs. Fielden turned towards me and smiled, and the garden seemed to be filled with her. There was no room for anything else but herself and that bewildering smile she gave me.

"How is the diary getting on?" she said.

"The diary," I answered, "continues to record our G.o.dly, righteous, and sober life----"

"Oh," said Mrs. Fielden quickly, "don't you think it is possible to be too good sometimes? That is really what I wanted to say to you--I brought you into the garden to ask you that."

"It is an interesting suggestion," I remarked, "and I think we ought to give it to Eliza Jamieson for one of her discussions."

"I do not wish to discuss it with Eliza Jamieson," said Mrs. Fielden, "but with you. You know there really is a great danger in becoming too good; for although I do not think that you would grow wings, or hear pa.s.sing bells, or anything of that sort, still you might become a little dull, might you not?"

"I don't think it would be possible to become duller than I am," I replied. "You have more than once told me that I am not amusing. So long as my sister is not aware of the fact, I do not in the least mind admitting that I find every day most horribly tedious. I suppose I shall get accustomed to it in time, but I don't enjoy being an invalid."

"You have watched the Jamiesons making flannel petticoats for the poor," went on Mrs. Fielden, "and you have had the Curate to tea, and you have been to the Taylors' party, and if it does not kill you, I am sure you will become like people in those books which one gives as prizes to choir-boys."

"One so often mistakes monotony for virtue," I said. "I believe I was beginning to think that there was almost a merit in getting accustomed to a sofa and a crutch."

"Oh, but it is a sin!" exclaimed Mrs. Fielden. "It is a sin to get accustomed to anything that is disagreeable. But that is what comes of studying philosophy!"

"I suppose reasoning is always bad," I said humbly.

"Yes," said Mrs. Fielden; "and it is so unnatural, too."

"I heard a man say the other day," I said, "that solitude is always sententious. And he pointed out that foreigners, who are never alone, base their ethics upon conduct; but that English people, who simply do not understand the life of the boulevards and cafes and family affection, sit apart in the solitude of their garrets or studies, and decide that the right or the wrong of a thing consists in what they think about it."