Читать книгу A Bachelor's Comedy - Buckrose J. E. - Страница 6

When Andy went into the garden next morning he buckled on tight the mantle of the senior curate and advanced across the grass to where Sam Petch was bending over a flower-bed with an air of decent contrition. No skulking behind bushes for him – he prodded dismally for all the world to see.

Andy, in spite of himself, felt slightly mollified, but he had made up his mind to say a certain thing, and he said it.

“This state of things cannot continue. You bring discredit on my profession, my parish, and myself.”

There – that was it – just as the senior curate would have put it; Andy took hold of his coat lapel, coughed, and waited – just as the senior curate would have done.

It is one of those facts about human nature which cannot be explained, that while Andy disliked the senior curate exceedingly, and had groaned under his oppressive rule, he strove to imitate that gentleman. Perhaps he unconsciously wanted people to be as much impressed by him as he had been by the senior curate.

Anyway, Sam Petch appeared to be greatly impressed by the dignified rebuke.

“I own I’d had a drop too much,” he said repentantly. “But Bill Shaw drank five times what I did and never turned a hair. It shows how unfair things is, sir.”

“If a little makes you drunk you must refrain from that little,” said Andy, severely.

“I know,” acknowledged Sam. “But it is hard when a man can’t take his mug o’ beer with the rest without getting what you might call jolly; isn’t it, sir?”

“After all – what is a mug of beer?” argued Andy. “I’m not a total abstainer myself, but I will become one if you will.”

Sam’s potations of the previous night still hung about him sufficiently to make him very irritable, and he suddenly lost control of his temper.

“It’s all very well talking like that,” he said. “You, who don’t care whether you ever have another drink or not – what do you know about it? Give up the thing you like best and then I’ll do the same.”

Andy looked at the man, and the mantle of the senior curate was blown away in the blast of truth that swept across him. He even forgot to notice the disrespectfulness of Sam’s manner as that wind burst open a closed chamber in his mind and he saw farther than he had ever done before.

“All right,” he said simply. “I like” – he sought for his preference – “I like butter best of anything – always did, as a little kid – I’ll give up that.”

“I’ll give up beer, then,” agreed Sam Petch; but he made certain mental reservations of which Andy, naturally, could know nothing. Every man had a right to beer on a Saturday night, of course; that was the privilege of a British working-man which was above and beyond all other agreements.

Then Andy went back into the house with a complete sense of failure dogging his footsteps. It was a ridiculous and undignified thing to do, to make a compact of that nature with a drunken gardener. He ought to have insisted in a dignified manner upon instant reform or instant dismissal.

“Mrs. Jebb,” he said, looking in at the kitchen door, “please do not send butter into the room with my meals. I shall not be taking any for some time.”

“What? No butter?” said Mrs. Jebb. “Are you bilious? Well, I know towards the last Mr. Jebb never could – ”

“And I am dining out to-night,” continued Andy, who was particularly disinclined, just then, for Mr. Jebb.

“How convenient! I mean, how strange!” said Mrs. Jebb. “I was just about to ask if you would have any objection to my going over to Millsby Hall this evening.”

“Why – are you invited too?” said Andy, very much astonished. “I mean, there’s no reason why you should not be dining with the Attertons, only I hadn’t heard – ”

“Once a lady always a lady, of course,” replied Mrs. Jebb, smoothing her lace cravat. “But the conventions of life are such that, as lady-cook-housekeeper, I neither am, nor expect to be, bidden to Mrs. Atterton’s table. I was referring to the Long Night.”

She gave to the two last words such a melancholy emphasis that Andy had a vague idea, for the moment, that she was in some new way referring to the demise of Mr. Jebb.

“The long night?” he echoed stupidly.

“I mean the final evening of the Parish Dancing Class,” said Mrs. Jebb, “which Mr. and Miss Fanny Kirke have pressed me to attend.”

“Of course,” said Andy. “I’d forgotten. It is to be held at Millsby Hall, of course, so that Mrs. Atterton may see the final practice of the country dances for the Garden Fête next week.”

“Mr. and Miss Kirke told me in confidence,” added Mrs. Jebb, with an indescribable air of being ‘in the know,’ “that Mrs. Atterton’s back would not permit of her coming to the village schoolroom.”

“Ah,” said Andy, to whom even the back of the Beloved’s mamma was sacred. “Well, go, by all means, Mrs. Jebb. I expect I shall see you dancing like a girl.”

“My girlhood’s days are over,” sighed Mrs. Jebb. “But” – she cheered up – “married ladies are very popular in ballrooms now, I understand. The gentlemen seem to like mature conversation combined with their dancing. And I do not intend to refuse. I think it neither Christian nor right, Mr. Deane, for a widow to make a suttee of herself.”

“Of course not,” agreed Andy absently. “Well – no butter – you quite understand?”

“Trust me,” said Mrs. Jebb effusively, “to understand a gentleman’s inside. For months before he died, Mr. Jebb – ”

Andy departed, and the recording angel put it down to the right side of his everlasting account that he did not say, “Damn Mr. Jebb.”

The day seemed long, and the afternoon appeared to stretch out interminably until the hour when Andy could adorn himself in a new clerical dress-suit which he now thanked the aunt and cousins in Birmingham for insisting upon; thus arrayed, he surveyed his newly plastered curls in the looking-glass, and felt that, though severely freckled and rather short than otherwise, he was the right thing.

He stepped jauntily in the cool of the evening past Brother Gulielmus asleep, and never gave him a thought, only wondering if he had buckled his braces high enough, or if his trousers were, after all, a shade too long. He paused behind the yew at the corner to adjust matters, and gazed down at his legs with a keen preoccupation that left no room for anything else.

He felt it was such an immensely important thing that Elizabeth should see him with his trousers exactly the right length, and he was very much startled to hear a voice behind him saying tentatively —

“Excuse me – as a married lady – perhaps I might oblige with a safety-pin – ”

Mrs. Jebb again! – taking the air in the congenial neighbourhood of the tombstones.

Not daring to trust himself to speech, Andy shook his head and marched out of the churchyard. He began to hate Mrs. Jebb.

But when he came in sight of Millsby Hall he forgot all about her, and approached with beating pulses the extremely ugly, modern house which sheltered the lady of his dreams. It had been built by Mr. Atterton’s father after he developed from a small county landowner into the owner of a watering-place. Marshaven, previously to 1850, had been the resort of fishermen and waterfowl only; now it was crowded from June to September with train-loads of trippers from all over the country, and Mr. Atterton found the joy and interest of his existence in supervising the erection of ever-new rows of red-brick villas, and in putting his finger into every pie which the town council of that prosperous resort made for the purpose of attracting visitors.

“I believe we’ve got that matter arranged with the Bandmaster,” he said, rubbing his hands energetically as he entered his drawing-room that evening. “I did think for a time that the situation looked serious, but I approached him informally at first, and then officially, as the Chairman of the ‘Amusements Committee,’ and I think the crisis is over.” He paused, and smiled with satisfaction at his assembled family. “I’m glad to have my mind free for the Promenade question – that will take some engineering – but of one thing I am absolutely determined,” – he hit one hand on the other – “I will not