The long, low drawing room of the Manor at Stoke Revel was the warmest and most genial room in the old Georgian house. It was four-windowed and faced south, and even on this morning of a chilly and backward spring, the tentative sunshine of April had contrived to put out the fire in the steel grate. One of the windows opened wide to the garden, and let in a scent which was less of flowers than of the promise of flowers--a scent of earth and green leaves, of the leafless daphne still a-bloom in the shrubbery, of hyacinths and daffodils and tulips and primroses still sheathed in their buds and awaiting a warmer air.
But this promise of spring borne into the room by the wandering breeze from the river, was nipped, as it were, by the frigid spirit of age and formalism in its living occupants. Mrs. de Tracy, a lady of seventy-five, sat at her writing-table. Her companion, Miss Smeardon, a person of indeterminate age, nursed the lap-dog Rupert during such time as her employer was too deeply engaged to fulfil that agreeable duty. Mrs. de Tracy, as she wrote, was surrounded by countless photographs of her family and her wide connection, most prominent among them two--that of her husband, Admiral de Tracy, who had died many years ago, and that of her grandson, his successor, whose guardian she was, and whose minority she directed. Her eldest son, the father of this boy, who had died on his ship off the coast of Africa; his wife, dead too these many years; her other sons as well (she had borne four); their wives and children--grown men, fashionable women, beautiful children, fat babies: the likenesses of them all were around her, standing amid china and flowers and bric-a-brac on the crowded tables and what-nots of the not inharmonious and yet shabby Victorian room. Mrs. de Tracy, it might at a glance be seen, was no innovator, either in furniture, in dress, or probably in ideas. As she was dressed now, in the severely simple black of a widow, so she had been dressed when she first mourned Admiral de Tracy. The muslin ends of her widow's cap fell upon her shoulders, and its border rested on the hard lines of iron-grey hair which framed a face small, pale, aquiline in character and decidedly austere in expression.
She took one from a docketed pile of letters and held it up under her glasses, the sun suddenly striking a dazzle of blue and green from the diamond rings on her small, withered hands. Then she read it aloud to her companion in an even and chilly voice. She had read it before, in the same way, at the same hour, several times. The letter, couched in an epistolary style largely dependent upon underlining, appeared to contain, nevertheless, some matter of moment. It was dated from Eaton Square, in London, some weeks before, and signed Maria Spalding. ("Her mother was a Gallup," Mrs. de Tracy would say, if any one asked who Maria Spalding was; and this was considered sufficient, for Mrs. de Tracy's maiden name had been Gallup,--not euphonious but nevertheless aristocratic.)
* * * * *
MY DEAR AUGUSTA (Maria Spalding wrote): I am going to ask you to help me out of a _difficulty_. There is no _use_ beating about the bush. You know that Cynthia's daughter Robinetta (Loring is her _married_ name) has been with me for a month. _American_ or no _American_, I meant to have had her for a part of the season, and to _present_ her, if possible (so _good_ for these Americans to learn what royalty _is_ and to breathe the atmosphere which doth hedge a _King_ as Shakespeare says, and which they can never _have_, of course, in a country like theirs). I know you can't _approve_, dear Augusta, and you will blame me for sentimentality--but I never _can_ forget what a _sweet_ creature Cynthia was before she ran away with that odious American--and my _greatest_ friend in girlhood, too, you must remember. So Robinette, as she is generally called, has come to my house as a _home_, but a most _unlucky_ thing has happened. I have had influenza so badly that it has affected my _heart_ (an old trouble), I am ordered to Nauheim, and Robinette is _stranded_, poor dear. She has few friends in London and certainly none who can put her up. Tho' she _is_ a widow, she is only twenty-two (just _imagine_!), very pretty, and really, tho' you won't believe it, _quite_ nice. I am _desperate_, and just wondering if you would let by-gones be by-gones, and receive her at Stoke Revel. She has set her heart upon seeing the place, and some _picture_ she was called after (I can't remember it, so it can't be one of the _famous_ Stoke Revel group--a _copy_, I fancy), and on paying a visit to Lizzie Prettyman, her mother's old nurse at Wittisham over the river. She _promised_ her mother she would do this--and such a promise is _sacred_, don't you think? It's such an _old_ story now, Cynthia's American marriage, and no fault of _Robinette's_, poor dear child. Her wish is almost a _pious_ one, don't you agree, to pay respect to her mother's memory and the family, and is _much_ to be encouraged in these days of radicalism, when every natural tie is loosened and people pay no more _respect_ to their parents than if they hadn't any, but had made themselves and brought themselves up from the beginning. So don't you think it's a _good_ thing to encourage the _right_ kind of feeling in Robinette, especially as she is an _American_, you know....
* * * * *
Mrs. de Tracy paused, and replaced the letter in the package from which she had withdrawn it.
"Maria Spalding's point of view," she observed, "has, I confess, helped me to overcome the extreme reluctance I felt to receive the child of that American here. Cynthia de Tracy's elopement nearly broke my dear husband's heart. She was the apple of his eye before our marriage; so much younger than himself that she was like his child rather than his sister."
"What a shock it must have been!" murmured the companion. "What ingratitude! Can you really receive her child? Of course you know best, Mrs. de Tracy; but it seems a risk."
"Hardly a risk," rejoined Mrs. de Tracy with dignity. "But it is a trial to me, and an effort that I scarcely feel called upon to make."
Miss Smeardon was so well versed in her duties that she knew she always had to urge her employer to do exactly what she most wanted to do, and the poor creature had developed a really wonderful ingenuity in divining what these wishes were. Just now, however, she was, to use a sporting phrase, "at fault" for a minute. She could not exactly tell whether Mrs. de Tracy wanted to be urged to ask her niece to Stoke Revel, or whether she wanted to be supplied with a really plausible excuse for not doing so. Those of you who have seen a hound at fault can imagine the companion at this moment: irresolute, tense, desperately anxious to find and follow up the right scent. Compromise, that useful refuge, came to her aid.
"It _is_ difficult to know," she faltered. Then Mrs. de Tracy gave her the lead.
"Maria Spalding is right when she says that my husband's niece contemplates a duty in visiting Stoke Revel," she announced. "The young woman is the lawful daughter of Cynthia de Tracy that was: our solicitors could never discover anything dubious in the marriage, though we long suspected it. Therefore, though I never could have invited her here, I admit that the Admiral's niece has a right to come, in a way."
"Though her maiden name was Bean!" ejaculated the companion, almost under her breath. "There are Pease in the North, as everyone knows; perhaps there are Beans somewhere."
"There have never been Beans," said Mrs. de Tracy solemnly and totally unconscious of a pun. "Look for yourself!"
Miss Smeardon did not need to rise from her seat and fetch Burke: it lay always close at hand. She merely lifted it on to her knee and ran her finger down the names beginning with B-e-a.
"Beaton, Beare, Beatty, Beale--" she read out, and she shook her head in dismal triumph; "but never a Bean! No! we English have no such dreadful names, thank Heavens!"
"This is the beginning of April," pursued Mrs. de Tracy, referring to a date-card. "Maria Spalding's course at Nauheim will take three weeks. We must allow her a week for going and coming. During that time Mrs. David Loring can be my guest."
"A whole month!" cried the companion, as though in ecstasy at her employer's generosity. "A whole month at Stoke Revel!"
Mrs. de Tracy took no notice. "Write in my name to Maria Spalding, please," she commanded. "Be sure that there is no mistake about dates. Mention the departure and arrival of trains, and say that Mrs. David Loring will find a fly at the station. That is all, I think."
The companion bent officiously forward. "You remember, of course, that young Mr. Lavendar comes down next week upon business?"
"Well, what if he does?" asked Mrs. de Tracy shortly.
"Mrs. David Loring is a widow," murmured the companion darkly; "a young American widow; and they are said to be so dangerous!"
Mrs. de Tracy drew herself up. "Do you insinuate that the Admiral's niece will lay herself out to attract Mr. Lavendar, a widow in the house of a widow! You go rather too far, Miss Smeardon, though you are speaking of an American. Besides, allusions of this character are extremely distasteful to me. I have been told that the minds of unmarried women are always running upon love affairs, but I should hardly have thought it of you."
"I'm sure I never imagined any about myself!" murmured Miss Smeardon with the pitiable writhe of the trodden-on worm.
"I should suppose not," rejoined Mrs. de Tracy gravely, and the companion took up her pen obediently to write to Maria Spalding.
"Shall I send your love to the Admiral's niece?" she humbly enquired, "or--or something of the kind?" There was irony in the last phrase, but it was quite unconscious.
"Not my love," replied Mrs. de Tracy, "some suitable message. Make no mistake about the dates, remember."
Thus a letter containing dates, and though not love, the substitute described by Miss Smeardon as "something of the kind" for an unwanted niece from an unknown aunt, left Stoke Revel by the afternoon post and reached Robinette Loring at breakfast next morning.
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