A Lame Dog's Diary Part 6

Mrs. Fielden admitted that they had not. "But," she said, "I don't really think that that is important. The men whom one knows are always nice to one, and I don't think it matters much what the others are."

"Rank individualism," said Eliza. And she said it without a moment's hesitation, which gave us a very high opinion indeed of her powers of speech. "It is the fashion to say that each woman has only one man to manage, and she must be a very stupid woman if she cannot manage him; but there are thousands of women who, being weaker morally and physically than their particular man, can do nothing with him, and it is not fair to leave their wrongs unredressed because you are comfortable and happy."

"Still, you know," said Mrs. Fielden thoughtfully, "one cannot help wishing that they could get what they want without involving us in the question. You see, if they got their rights we should probably get ours too, and then I'm afraid we should lose our privileges."

"You are like the man," said I, "who could do quite well without the necessaries of life, but he could not do without its luxuries."

"What a nice man it must have been who said that!" exclaimed Mrs.

Fielden. "It would be quite easy to do without meat on one's table, but it would be impossible to dine without flowers and dessert."

It must be admitted that Eliza had the last word in the argument after all.

"Just so," she said; "and all life shows just this--that a woman has, with her usual perverseness, chosen a diet of flowers and dessert with intervals of starvation, instead of wholesome meat and pudding."

CHAPTER VI.

"We shall have to ask the engaged couple to dinner," I said to Palestrina one morning a few days later. "And I suppose one or two more of the rest of The Family would like to be asked at the same time."

"I never know in what quant.i.ties one ought to ask the Jamiesons," said my sister, "nor how to make a proper selection. It seems invidious to suggest that Kate and Eliza and Margaret should come, and not Maud and Gracie; and yet what is one to do? The last time that you were away from home I wrote and said, 'Will a few of you come?' And Mrs.

Jamieson, the Pirate Boy, and four sisters came."

"One feels sure," I replied, "that the Jamiesons thought that was quite a modest number to take advantage of your invitation. One knows that had they been inviting some girls from a boarding-school they would have included the entire number of pupils."

Palestrina protested that as the meal to which our friends were to come was dinner, it would be only reasonable to invite the same number of ladies and gentlemen; and to this I a.s.sented. She suggested asking the Darcey-Jacobs, whom we had not seen for a long time.

Mrs. Darcey-Jacobs is a woman who always affords one considerable inward amus.e.m.e.nt, being herself, I believe, more conspicuously devoid of humour than any one else I have ever met. Mrs. Darcey-Jacobs has never been known to see a joke. That she herself should appear to any one in a humorous light would, I know, appear an inconceivable contingency to her. She has a high Roman nose, and rather faded yellow hair, which was her princ.i.p.al claim to beauty when a girl. It is even now thick and long, and is always worn in a sort of majestic coronet on the top of her head. Her manner is somewhat formidable and emphatic, and the alarm which this engenders in timid or diffident persons is increased by the habit she has of accentuating many of her remarks by a playful but really somewhat severe rap over the knuckles of the person she is addressing, with her fan or lorgnettes. She dresses handsomely in expensive materials somewhat gaudy in colour, and she has an erect carriage, of which she is very proud. Mrs. Darcey-Jacobs has a good deal to say on the subject of the feeble-mindedness of the male s.e.x, and when something has been proved impossible of attainment by them she always says, "A woman could have done it in five minutes."

At the time of her marriage, Mrs. Darcey-Jacobs (Miss Foljambe she was then) was a dowerless girl with two admirers, Major Jacobs and Mr.

Morgan. Not being, it would seem, a young lady of very deep affections, her choice of a husband was decided entirely by the extent of the worldly prospects he could offer, and the Major, being the better match of the two, was accepted. But how cruel are the tricks that fate will sometimes play! Not long after her marriage Mr. Morgan not only inherited a large fortune, but shortly afterwards left this world for a better, and Mrs. Darcey-Jacobs is in the habit of remarking, with a good deal of feeling, "If I had only chosen the other I might have been a happy widow now!"

Mrs. Darcey-Jacobs lives in our quiet country neighbourhood during the greater part of the year, on the distinct understanding that she loathes every hour of it. When she goes abroad or to London she talks quite cheerfully of having had one breath of life. So fraught with happy successes are these pilgrimages in her brocaded satin gowns into the outer world that she often says that were she but free she might have the world at her feet to-morrow. And she has been known to refer to the Major, still in the tone of cheerful resignation and with her emphasizing tap of the fan, as "a dead weight round her neck."

The Major himself is a guileless person, whose very simplicity causes his wife more exquisite suffering than even a husband of keen, vindictive temper could inflict.

Does Mrs. Jacobs give a dinner-party, it is not unusual for the master of the house to remark in a congratulatory tone from his end of the table, "What has Mullens been doing to the silver, my dear? it looks unusually bright;" while his greeting to his friends as they arrive at his house, though distinctly cordial, often takes the form of a hearty "I had no idea that we were going to see you to-night." As Mrs.

Darcey-Jacobs always sends some kind message from the Major in her notes of invitation, this of course is most disconcerting, both for her and for her guests. This year when they were in Italy a friend of ours in the same hotel overheard a lady ask the Major if he were related to the Darceys of Mugthorpe. "I really can't tell you," said the Major; "the Darcey was my wife's idea."

"Four Jamiesons," I said, "and the Darcey-Jacobs, and our two selves.

Isn't it humiliating to think that we have invariably to invite the same two men to balance our numbers at a dinner-party? I can't help remarking that Anthony Crawshay and Ellicomb are present at every dinner-party in this neighbourhood, as surely as soup is on the table."

"We might ask Mrs. Fielden," said Palestrina; "she is sure to have some colonels with her. Besides, I love Mrs. Fielden, though people say she is a flirt. I think most men are in love with her; some propose to her, and some do not, but they all love her."

"Even when she refuses to marry them?"

"I have heard Mrs. Fielden say that an offer of marriage should be refused artistically," said Palestrina. "She says young girls hardly ever do it properly, and that they are brusque and brutal. I suppose she herself has some charming way of her own of refusing men which does not hurt their feelings. I believe," said Palestrina, "that she would marry Sir Anthony Crawshay if he could play Bridge."

"Anthony is an excellent fellow," I said.

Mr. Ellicomb is a young man of High Church principles and artistic tastes who has taken an old Tudor farmhouse in the neighbourhood, and has furnished it very well. He waxes eloquent on the monstrous inelegance of modern dress, and the decadence of j.a.panese art, and he says he would rather sit in the dark than burn gas in his house, and he dusts his own blue china himself. In his house it is a sign of art to divert anything from its proper use, and to use it for another purpose than that for which it was originally intended. Poor Ellicomb uses a cabbage-strainer as a fern-pot, a drain-tile for an umbrella-stand, his mother's old lace veils as antimaca.s.sars, bed-posts as palm-stands, a linen press as a book-case, and a bra.s.s spittoon for growing lilies.

It is almost like playing at guessing riddles to go over his house with him, and to try and discover for what purpose some of his things were originally created. Their conversion to another use is, I am sure, a very high form of art.

"There are the Jamiesons," said my sister, as we sat in the hall ready to receive our guests.

It does not require any occult power to sit indoors and to be able to distinguish the Jamiesons' carriage-wheels from those of the other arrivals, for the Jamiesons have, as usual, employed the "six-fifty"

bus on its return journey from the station to set them down at our gate. It is quite a subject of interest with our neighbours to find themselves fellow-pa.s.sengers with the young ladies, in their black skirts and their more dressy style of bodice concealed beneath tweed capes. And it generally gets about in Stowel circles before the evening is over, or certainly soon after the morning shopping has begun, that the Miss Jamiesons have been dining at such or such a house. Even the bus conductor has a sympathetic way of handing the young ladies into his conveyance when they are going out to dinner, and he fetches a wisp of straw and wipes down the step if the night is wet.

Mr. Ward piloted the independent Kate up the short carriage-drive with quite an affectionate air of solicitude, frequently inquiring of her if she did not feel her feet a little damp; and Kate answered cheerfully and kindly, feeling, no doubt, that this sort of fussing was one of the drawbacks of prospective matrimony, but that it was only right to accept the little attentions in the spirit in which they were made.

The Pirate Boy, who followed with his sister Maud, begged her to take his arm in a burly fashion, and fell a little distance behind. The Pirate Boy thinks that it is etiquette to place himself at a distance from any engaged couple, even during the shortest walk. He does so even when he makes the untoward third in a party. On these occasions he falls behind and puts on an air of abstraction a little overdone.

The Jacobs arrived next, and then Anthony Crawshay, who drove over in his high dog-cart, with its flashing lamps and glittering wheels--a very good light-running cart it is; Anthony and I used often to drive in it together--and Ellicomb arrived in a brougham, in which we have a shrewd suspicion that there is a foot-warmer.

Maud began to flirt with Mr. Ellicomb directly. I have never known her to be for long in the society of a gentleman without doing so, and her sisters are wont to say of Maud that she certainly has her opportunities, while the criticism of an unprejudiced observer might be that she certainly makes them. Mr. Ellicomb, it is believed, has written an article in one of the magazines on the reformation of men's clothing, and it is hoped he will become a member of the Reading Society. He ate very little at dinner, and talked in a low, cultured voice about Church matters the whole of the evening, and uttered some very decided views upon the subject of the celibacy of the clergy.

"I must say," said Major Jacobs, "that I also approve of celibacy in the Church, and I may say in the army and in the navy. If I had my life to live over again----"

"William!" said Mrs. Darcey-Jacobs in an awful voice.

William was about to retreat precipitately from his position, but catching sight perhaps of a sympathetic eye turned upon him from that good comrade of his, Anthony Crawshay, he blundered on,--

"If Confession, now, became more general in the English Church," he said, "secrets confided to the clergy could hardly be kept inviolate.

A clergyman's wife might almost--well, not to put too fine a point on it--wring from him by force the secret that had been committed to him."

"I hope so, indeed," said Mrs. Darcey-Jacobs.

"The Anglican Church," said Mr. Ellicomb, "recognizes that difficulty, and has met it in the persons of the Fathers of the Church."

Maud Jamieson raised soft eyes to his, and said that a woman might be a help and a comfort to a man.

Mr. Ellicomb seemed disposed to admit that it might be so. "I have been in retreat at Cowley for some weeks," he said, "and the cooking was certainly monstrous, and, would you believe it, they did not allow one to bring one's own servant with one." There is nothing monkish about Ellicomb, nor is his asceticism overdone.

"I have been reading a book on sects and heresies," said Mrs. Fielden, "and I find I belong to them all."

Mr. Ellicomb interposed eagerly by saying, "If I had to state my own convictions exactly, I should certainly say that I was a Manichaean, with just a touch of Sabellianism."

"I think," said Mrs. Fielden gravely, "that I am a Rosicrucian heretic."

Mr. Ellicomb was interested and delighted. "I know," he said, "that many people would think that I had not exactly stated my position. For instance, a lady to whom I described my symptoms the other day, told me at once that I was a Buddhist by nature and an Antinomian by education, and I felt that in part she was right."

Mrs. Darcey-Jacobs here interposed, and gave it as her opinion emphatically that man was a contemptible creature whatever his beliefs might be, and that he required a woman to look after him. "To look after him," she repeated, in a tone that said as plainly as possible, "to keep him in order," and she tapped Mr. Ellicomb sharply on the knuckles.

The Pirate Boy had some brave notions about what he called The s.e.x, and here plunged into a long description of how he had rescued a fair creature out of the hands of cut-throats out there, and he ill.u.s.trated his action of saving the fair one by holding an imaginary six-shooter to Palestrina's head in a very alarming way. He talked of man as The Protector, and thrust his hand into his c.u.mmerbund--the action, I suppose, being intended to show that the six-shooter had been replaced--and glanced round the table with an air of defiance. "There is not a man," he remarked, "I don't care who he is, if he fail in respect to a woman when I am present, that shall not get a decanter hurled straight at his head--straight at his head. I have said it!"

He laid his hand impetuously upon one of two heavy cut-gla.s.s bottles that had been placed in front of me, and one trembled for the safety of one's guests. "I remember," he said, "in one of those gambling-h.e.l.ls in the Far West, where there was about as unruly a set of fellows and cut-throats as ever I came across----" The rest of the story was so evidently culled from the last number of the _Strand Magazine_ that it hardly seemed rude of Palestrina to interrupt it by bowing to Mrs.

Fielden, and suggesting that they should adjourn. Maud Jamieson drew my sister aside as they stood grouped round the fire-place in the hall drinking their coffee, and thanked her for introducing Mr. Ellicomb to her. "He is perfectly charming," she said. But Maud's sisters have confided to us that this is her invariable conclusion about the last man she has met, and it is intended as a sort of previndication of herself. Maud, it seems, intends to flirt with every one she sees, but if she pretends that her affections are really touched there can be no upbraidings on the part of The Family.

Kate Jamieson sat on the sofa, and twisted her engagement ring complacently round her finger. She thought that Mr. Ward had carried himself very well this evening. His quietness throughout the dinner compared favourably with the conversation of other guests. Kate said once to Palestrina: "He is a man that I shall feel the utmost confidence in taking about with me everywhere." And the remark conveyed the suggestion that Mr. Ward would always be an appendage to Kate Jamieson.