The Helpmate Part 23

"I wonder, Nancy," he once said to her, "if you know how divinely sweet your voice is?"

"I shall begin to think it is, if you think so," said she.

"And would you think yourself beautiful, if I thought so?"

"Very beautiful. At any rate, as beautiful as I want to be."

He could not control the demonstration provoked by that admission, and she asked him if he were coming to church with her to-morrow.

His Nancy chose her moments strangely.

But not for worlds would he have admitted that she was deficient in a sense of humour. She had her small hilarities that pa.s.sed for it.

Keenness in that direction would have done violence to the repose and sweetness of her blessed presence. The peace of it remained with him during his hours of business.

Anne did not like his business. But, in spite of it, she was proud of him, of his appearance, his charm, his distinction, his entire superiority to even the aristocracy of Scale.

She no longer resented his indifference to her friends in Thurston Square, since it meant that he desired to have her to himself. Of his own friends he had seen little, and she nothing. If she had not pressed f.a.n.n.y Eliott on him, he had spared her Mrs. Lawson Hannay and Mrs. d.i.c.k Ransome. She had been fortunate enough to find both these ladies out when she returned their calls. And Majendie had spoken of his most intimate friend, Charlie Gorst, as absent on a holiday in Norway.

It was, therefore, in a mood of more than usual concession that she proposed to return, now in October, the second advance made to her by Mrs. Hannay in July.

Majendie was relieved to think that he would no longer be compelled to perjure himself on Anne's account. The Hannays had frequently reproached him with his wife's unreadiness in response, and (as he had told her) he had exhausted all acceptable explanations of her conduct. He had "worked"

her headaches "for all they were worth" with Hannay; for weeks he had kept Hannay's wife from calling, by the fiction, discreetly presented, of a severe facial neuralgia; and his last shameless intimation, that Anne was "rather shy, you know," had been received with a respectful incredulity that left him with nothing more to say.

Mrs. Hannay was not at home when Anne called, for Anne had deliberately avoided her "day." But Mrs. Hannay was irrepressibly forgiving, and Anne found herself invited to dine at the Hannays' with her husband early in the following week. It was hardly an hour since she had left Mrs.

Hannay's doorstep when the pressing, the almost alarmingly affectionate little note came hurrying after her.

"I'll go, dear, if you really want me to," said she.

"Well--I think, if you don't mind. The Hannays have been awfully good to me."

So they went.

"Don't snub the poor little woman too unmercifully," was Edith's parting charge.

"I promise you I'll not snub her at all," said Anne.

"You can't," said Majendie. "She's like a soft sofa cushion with lots of frills on. You can sit on her, as you sit on a sofa cushion, and she's as plump, and soft, and accommodating as ever the next day."

The Hannays lived in the Park.

Majendie talked a great deal on the way there. His supporting and attentive manner was not quite the stimulant he had meant it to be. Anne gathered that the ordeal would be trying; he was so eager to make it appear otherwise.

"Once you're there, it won't be bad, you know, at all. The Hannays are really all right. They'll ask the very nicest people they know to meet you. They think you're doing them a tremendous honour, you know, and they'll rise to it. You'll see how they'll rise."

Mrs. Hannay had every appearance of having risen to it. Anne's entrance (she was impressive in her entrances) set the standard high; yet Mrs.

Hannay rose. When agreeably excited Mrs. Hannay was accustomed to move from one end of her drawing-room to the other with the pleasing and impalpable velocity of all soft round bodies inspired by gaiety. So exuberant was the softness of the little lady and so voluminous her flying frills, that at these moments her descent upon her guests appeared positively winged like the descent of cherubim. To-night she advanced slowly from her hearth-rug with no more than the very slightest swaying and rolling of all her softness, the very faintest tremor of her downy wings. Mrs. Hannay's face was the round face of innocence, the face of a cherub with blown cheeks and lips shaped for the trumpet.

"My dear Mrs. Majendie--at last." She retained Mrs. Majendie's hand for the moment of presenting her to her husband. By this gesture she appropriated Mrs. Majendie, taking her under her small cherubic wing.

"Wallie, how d'you do?" Her left hand furtively appropriated Mrs.

Majendie's husband. Anne marked the familiarity with dismay. It was evident that at the Hannays' Walter was in the warm lap of intimacy.

It was evident, too, that Mr. Hannay had married considerably beneath him. Anne owned that he had a certain dignity, and that there was something rather pleasing in his loose, clean-shaven face. The sharp slenderness of youth was now vanishing in a rosy corpulence, corpulence to which Mr. Hannay resigned himself without a struggle. But above it the delicate arch of his nose attested the original refinement of his type.

His mouth was not without sweetness, Mr. Hannay being as indulgent to other people as he was to himself.

He received Anne with a benign air; he a.s.sured her of his delight in making her acquaintance; and he refrained from any allusions to the long delay of his delight.

Little Mrs. Hannay was rolling softly in another direction.

"Canon Wharton, let me present you to Mrs. Walter Majendie."

She had risen to Canon Wharton. For she had said to her husband: "You must get the Canon. She can't think us such a shocking bad lot if we have him." Her face expressed triumph in the capture of Canon Wharton, triumph in the capture of Mrs. Walter Majendie, triumph in the introduction.

Owing to the Hannays' determination to rise to it, the dinner-party, in being rigidly select, was of necessity extremely small.

"Miss Mildred Wharton--Sir Rigley Barker--Mr. Gorst. Now you all know each other."

The last person introduced had lingered with a certain charming diffidence at Mrs. Majendie's side. He was a man of about her husband's age, or a little younger, fair and slender, with a restless, flushed face and brilliant eyes.

"I can't tell you what a pleasure this is, Mrs. Majendie."

He had an engaging voice and a still more engaging smile.

"You may have heard about me from your husband. I was awfully sorry to miss you when I called before I went to Norway. I only came back this morning, but I _made_ Hannay invite me."

Anne murmured some suitable politeness. She said afterwards that her instinct had warned her against Mr. Gorst, with his restlessness and brilliance; but, as a matter of fact, her instinct had done nothing of the sort, and his manners had prejudiced her in his favour. f.a.n.n.y Eliott had told her that he belonged to a very old Lincolnshire family. There was a distinction about him. And he really had a particularly engaging smile.

So she received him amiably; so amiably that Majendie, who had been observing their encounter with an intent and rather anxious interest, appeared finally rea.s.sured. He joined them, releasing himself adroitly from Sir Rigley Barker.

"How's Edith?" said Mr. Gorst.

His use of the name and something in his intonation made Anne attentive.

"She's better," said Majendie. "Come and see her soon."

"Oh, rather. I'll come round to-morrow. If," he added, "Mrs. Majendie will permit me."

"Mrs. Majendie," said her husband, "will be delighted."

Anne smiled a.s.sent. Her amiability extended even to Mrs. Hannay, who had risen to it, so far, well.

During dinner Anne gave her attention to her right-hand neighbour, Canon Wharton; and Mrs. Hannay, looking down from her end of the table, saw her selection justified. In rising to the Canon she had risen her highest; for the ex-member hardly counted; he was a fallen star. But Canon Wharton, the Vicar of All Souls, stood on an eminence, social and spiritual, in Scale. He had built himself a church in the new quarter of the town, and had filled it to overflowing by the power of his eloquence.

Lawson Hannay, in a moment of unkind insight, had described the Canon as "a speculative builder"; but he lent him money for his building, and liked him none the less.

Out of the pulpit the Vicar of All Souls was all things to all men. In the pulpit he was nothing but the Vicar of All Souls. He stood there for a great light in Scale, "holding," as he said, "the light, carrying the light, battling for light in the darkness of that capital of commerce, that stronghold of materialism, founded on money, built up in money, cemented with money!" He snarled out the word "money," and flung it in the face of his fashionable congregation; he gnashed his teeth over it; he shook his fist at them; and they rose to his mood, delighting in little Tommy Wharton's pluck in "giving it them hot." He was always giving it them hot, warming himself at his own fire. And then little Tommy Wharton slipped out of his little surplice and his little ca.s.sock, and into the Hannays' house for whiskey and soda. He could drink peg for peg with Lawson Hannay, without turning a hair, while poor Lawson turned many hairs, till his little wife ran in and hid the whiskey and shook her handkerchief at the little Canon, and "shooed" him merrily away. And Lawson, big, good-natured Lawson, would lend him more "money" to build his church with.

So the Vicar of All Souls, who aspired to be all things to all men, was hand in glove with the Lawson Hannays. He had occasionally been known to provide for the tables of the poor, but he dearly loved to sit at the tables of the rich; and he justified his predilection by the highest example.

Anne, who knew the Canon by his spiritual reputation only, turned to him with interest. Her eye, keen to discern these differences, saw at once that he was a man of the people. He had the unfinished features, the stunted form of an artisan; his body sacrificed, his admirers said, to the energies of his mighty brain. His face was a heavy, powerful oval, bilious-coloured, scarred with deep lines, and cleft by the wide mouth of an orator, a mouth that had acquired the appearance of strength through the Canon's habit of bringing his lips together with a snap at the close of his periods. His eyes were a strange, opaque grey, but the clever Canon made them seem almost uncomfortably penetrating by simply knitting his eyebrows in a savage pent-house over them. They now looked forth at Anne as if the Canon knew very well that her soul had a secret, and that it would not long be hidden from him.