At Home with the Jardines Part 24

Jack, our snow-white bulldog, came at a word. Bee beamed on him.

"It is the latest--the very latest fad in London to drive in a victoria with a white bulldog on the seat with you!" she said, complacently.

"And Jack will be simply perfect for the part."

"Shall I train Aubrey to run behind with his tongue hanging out, in Jack's place?" I asked.

"Now there you go--rejecting my simplest suggestion!" cried Bee. "My simplest, my smartest, and my least expensive! This won't cost you a penny, and it will attract attention at once."

I closed my eyes for a moment to contemplate just what sort of attention we would attract if the dog and I drove to the Station to meet Aubrey.

"Suppose we try it now!" suggested Bee. "Will you have Amos bring out the horses?"

Bee is always scrupulously polite about not giving orders to my servants direct, although I have begged her to consider them as her own. I always think that a hostess who neglects to make her guests feel at liberty to give an order either is not accustomed to servants or else stands in too much awe of them.

Jack, the bulldog, a.s.sisted in our preparations with much getting under our feet and many hearty tail-waggings. Little he knew what was to follow!

Bee carefully gave me my position at the right, and took her own.

"Now," she said, "there are two equally correct ways of sitting in a victoria, neither of which you are doing."

I was quite comfortable, but I immediately sat up.

"It depends upon what you have on," Bee proceeded. "If you are tailor-made and it is morning, you sit straight like this. If it is afternoon and you are all of a Parisian fluff, you recline like this and put your feet as far out on the cushion as you can. It shows off your instep."

"It comes very near showing off your garter," I said, indignantly.

"You needn't expect me to lie down like that and put my feet on the coachman's back. Aubrey would have a fit."

"You are positively low," said Bee, straightening herself. I giggled helplessly at her instructions. They were so beyond my power to carry them out properly.

"Can't I sit like this? Can't I be comfortable? What's a victoria for, anyhow?" I demanded.

"Call the dog!" was Bee's only answer.

I called him. He came to the step, his tongue hanging out, his stumpy tail wagging.

"What'll you have, girls?" he seemed to say.

"Get in here! Come up, Jack!" I coaxed, patting the seat invitingly.

Jack put one paw on the step, and wagged his tail harder. Old Amos's shoulders shook.

"Don' reckon you all will git dat dorg into de kerredge, Miss Faith,"

he said. "Look lake he smell a trick."

It certainly did look as if he smelled treachery, for nothing could persuade him to enter our chariot. Finally the stable-boy lifted him bodily. Bee seized a paw and I his two ears, and thus protesting we dragged him to a position between us. He was badly frightened by such treatment, but remembering that I had been his friend in times past, his tail fluttered amiably. I gave a hurried order to Amos to drive out quickly, but as the carriage began to move, Jack's big body trembled violently, and he lifted up his voice in a howl of protest which woke the echoes. He tried to jump out, but as both Bee and I had our arms around him, more in anxiety than affection, however, he realized that we desired his society, and forbore to escape. Jack is a good deal of a gentleman, you see, albeit primitive in his methods of showing his discomfort.

"He'll soon stop," said Bee, encouragingly. "He feels strange at first."

But he didn't stop. The more familiar his surroundings became, the more we pa.s.sed horses and dogs he knew, the keener became his humiliation at driving by in enervating luxury, where once he had trotted pantingly in the dust and heat. His howl changed to a deep bay, and the bay to a long-drawn wailing, which was so full of pain that the pa.s.sers-by made audible comments. As for me, I was afraid every moment that we would be arrested by a member of the S. P. C. A., but fortunately the populace seemed to think we were on our way to the veterinary surgeon for a dangerous operation.

"Poor fellow!" said one, "you can see he is injured by the way they are holding him!"

"Ain't them ladies kind-hearted now to take that ugly-lookin' old bulldog in that fine carriage to the doctor!" said a factory-girl.

Bee crimsoned.

"Stop laughing!" she said to me in a savage aside. "I wish I could stuff my handkerchief down his throat. Won't he ever stop?"

"It seems not!" I answered, cheerfully. "And we really can't consider that there is any more style to this manner of driving than if we belonged to the _hoi polloi_ who drive with their husbands, and let their dogs follow, can we?"

Bee gave me a look.

"I believe you are pinching him to make him howl," she said.

At that unjust accusation I took my arms away from Jack's neck, and feeling the affectionate embrace of his lawful mistress relax, he violently eluded Bee's, and with a flying leap he was out and away, safely restored to his doggish dignity.

By this time quite a little crowd had collected, and Amos's shoulders were shaking unmistakably. Both these things annoyed Bee. The crowd was pitying her. Amos was laughing at her,--two things which could not fail to vex. She can bear being envied to the verge of being wished a violent death with equanimity, but to be pitied or ridiculed? Haughty Bee! She forgot herself, and gave the order herself to drive fast, and the way we drove back to Peach Orchard gave Jack something to do to keep up with us. We may have lacked the style of our driving out, but Bee said the pace was good for the sorrels. To me it savoured of the pace of fugitives from justice.

This episode, unfortunate as it had proved, would not have dampened Bee's ardour nor discouraged her in the least, had not Jack taken matters into his own paws. He seemed to connect Bee with his day of humiliation, and not only eyed her with deep aversion, but howled painfully whenever she cornered him. And as for the victoria--to this day, whenever it is taken out, Jack with one leap is under the barn by a private entrance which he tunnelled out for himself on that never-to-be-forgotten day when we endeavoured to introduce a London fashion by means of him.

Nevertheless, her other suggestions were carried out. The lovely wild tangle of berry-bushes and long gra.s.s was subdued. Our old-fashioned garden was hidden by a row of firs, while Bee set out beds of cannas and geraniums. To me it was simply hideous, but the look of complacency which Bee habitually wore as she thus brought us within the pale of civilization more than repaid me for any artistic losses we may have sustained. Bee was my sister and our guest, and could only be made happy by feeling that her coming had effected changes for the better and by being constantly entertained. What, then, was more simple than to content her with such entertainment as she had requested before she came, and by permitting her to smarten us up? To be sure, Aubrey used to tell me every night that he was going to dig up the bed of cannas and coleus the moment her back was turned, but as I, too, was quite willing to see that done, it seemed to me that I was treading a somewhat dangerous road with great discretion and a tact I never should get the credit for. Bee, I felt sure, regarded me as a fool for not having done all this at the beginning.

At Bee's request we joined the Country Club and the Copsely Golf Club, and I bought more clothes, and the Angel and I found ourselves in a set we never had cared for before, but which was amusing enough for a few weeks or months at most.

But the episode which broke the backbone of Bee's complacency and virtually gave us back our freedom was this:

True to her word, Bee got us an English coachman and a footman, and put them into a very smart and highly expensive livery. But the coachman only lasted a week, having too eagerly imbibed of the flowing bowl and being discovered by the Angel asleep in his new livery with his head sweetly pillowed on the rec.u.mbent body of the gentlest cow. This mortified Bee, for the men were, in a sense, her property, so she dismissed him, had his livery cleaned, and resolutely set herself to the somewhat difficult task of securing a coachman to fit the livery.

I could, in this, give her no a.s.sistance, or, to speak more accurately, she would permit none, and finally she announced, with an air of triumph which plainly called for congratulations, that she had secured what she wanted.

The first time I saw my new coachman, there was something irritatingly familiar about him. He seemed to know me very well, too, and called me "Mis' Jardine" with a nod of the head as if we had formerly been pals.

But under Bee's tutelage I was on terms of distant civility with my menials instead of knowing all their joys and sorrows as in the past.

But Bee was charmed with the _tout ensemble_. She said he matched the footman better than the Englishman did, because the Englishman was Irish anyway.

So that first afternoon Bee arranged to go to the Copsely Golf Club just at the close of the tournament, and to drive up when the porches would be filled with the players and their friends having tea. Bee likes to make a dramatic entrance, and often relates in tones of positive awe how she once saw a Frenchwoman in an opera-cloak composed entirely of white tulle run the whole length of the Grand Opera House in Paris in order to make the tulle, which was cut to resemble wings, float out diaphanously behind her.

So as we bowled smartly along, the sorrels having been reduced by hard driving until they were models of symmetry, the new victoria shining, our new liveries glittering in the eyes of the populace, and we ourselves ragged out, as Aubrey said, as if our motto had been, "d.a.m.n the expense," we certainly felt complacent.

"Now watch him pull the sorrels up," whispered Bee. "I taught him myself."

With that we arrived almost at a fire-engine pace in front of the club-house steps, and the carriage stopped. But to our horror, Bee's coachman leaned so far backward to pull up that his body was perfectly horizontal, and--yes--I was sure of it, he braced his foot against the dashboard to get a leverage. I have seen grocery-boys pull up and turn sidewise on their seats in exactly the same manner.

Bee's face was purple.

The sorrels, unaccustomed to such a jerk of their bits, instantly began to back, and two men rushed down the steps to our a.s.sistance. But Jehu was equal to the occasion. He slapped the horses' backs with the reins, and joyously drove our two off wheels up on to the lowest step of the club-house porch.

In that att.i.tude we paused, and _I_ got out. Bee, after an instant's hesitation, gracefully followed suit. Nor could you tell from her placid face that this was not always the way we made our approach.