Читать книгу Ribbons and Laces - Ruby Mildred Ayres - Страница 5

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“Ribbons and laces for sweet pretty faces—

Oh, come to the market and buy.”

When Linda was quite a tiny child, and, as her mother, who did not understand her, or attempt to do so, would say, “a very naughty child,” the only way in which to keep her quiet and prevent her from being naughty, was to allow her to sort out her grandmother’s “ribbon box.”

Linda’s grandmother was an old-fashioned grandmother. She wore a cap of snowy lace on her grey hair, and black silk frocks that touched the ground all round, and a gold watch chain a yard and a half long which went twice round her neck and hung down to her waist, and she still put sprigs of lavender amongst her clothes instead of the new fashionable scented sachet, and she was a firm believer in a button bag and a ribbon box.

If a garment wore out, or was about to be given away to a poor relation, or someone in the village, she first looked it carefully over to see if there were any special buttons attached to it which were worth keeping in case they should come in for another frock or coat or whatever might be in the making; and if they were, snip! Grannie’s scissors cut them neatly off, and they were carefully put away in the button bag.

The same thing applied to oddments of lace and silk, and ribbons, or bits of fancy trimming, and such things; they all found their way into the ribbon box, where, be it admitted, they generally stayed indefinitely, as the occasion never seemed to arise when their usefulness could be put into practice again.

And Linda loved that button bag and that ribbon box!

To turn the buttons out on the floor and marshal them into long, varying lines, would keep her good for hours, and her idea of complete happiness for a long time after, as her mother plaintively said, “One would have expected her to have outgrown such childishness”—was to be allowed to “dress up” in the contents of the ribbon box.

Priceless odd lengths of lace, yellow with age, and as silky as a cobweb, lovely soft pieces of ribbons, each either too long or too short to be of any real use; queer-shaped oddments of silk and bright-coloured satin, and strange, old-fashioned little bunches of flowers cut from grannie’s bonnets; all these were the joy of Linda’s heart, whereas expensive toys and dolls which opened and shut their eyes, and said “Mamma,” left her cold and unresponsive.

“She inherits her father’s commercial mind,” her mother complained fretfully; she was a fretful person altogether, who never once in all the years of her married life had managed to forget that she came of an alleged blue-blooded stock, whereas plain, good-natured Thomas Dawson could only boast a line of not very respectable tradespeople as ancestors, and was proud of it.

“I’m a self-made man,” he would say, thumping himself on the chest. “I never had any education, and I’ve managed to do without it. When I die I shall be worth nearly a hundred thousand pounds.”

“Thomas is so . . . coarse!” his wife would complain to her mother. “Of course we all know that without money life would be impossible——”

(She did not think it necessary to add that it was because she had found it so impossible that she had married Thomas Dawson.) “But surely there is no need to be always talking about it?”

“Thomas talks about the only thing he understands,” her mother would answer in her sweet voice. “And, after all, think how much worse it would be if he talked about things of which he was entirely ignorant?”

She herself lived quite happily and comfortably in the house of her daughter and son-in-law, and asked no questions.

She had a small and insufficient income of her own which Thomas generously supplemented, and at the back of her tolerant, old-fashioned mind, though she would not have admitted it for the world, she considered that Thomas had behaved very foolishly in marrying her daughter at all.

Mrs. Lovelace rather despised her daughter, chiefly because of the way she incessantly complained of Thomas.

Mrs. Lovelace herself had been married to a gentlemanly blackguard, to whose glaring faults and many peccadilloes she had kept her eyes shut through fifteen years of complete unhappiness, because it was her idea of loyally keeping her marriage vows, and she had no patience with the modern wife who walked through the highways of the world screaming her misery aloud, and advertising the mistakes which she had made of her own accord.

“You have no pride, Marion,” she would say sedately to Thomas’s wife. “When I was a girl we were always taught to keep our troubles to ourselves.”

“You never had a trouble like Thomas,” Marion would answer bitterly. “And Linda is just like her father! Heaven knows what will become of her.”

“Linda is a very dear child,” Grannie would answer warmly, and look across the room to where auburn-haired Linda was sitting on the floor entirely surrounded by bright-coloured buttons, and dressed up like a May girl in odd pieces of silk and lace out of the ribbon box.

“She has her father’s temper,” Mrs. Dawson said snappily. “I suppose she inherited it with his red hair.”

“Linda’s hair is not red,” Mrs. Lovelace would object with dignity. “It is chestnut—a real, beautiful chestnut.”

Linda looked up at that moment, turning her pale, rapt face to the two women.

“Ten pink buttons, Grannie,” she said solemnly, as if the affairs of nations depended upon her calculation being correct. “And only five blue ones. I wonder where the other one is?”

Mrs. Lovelace adjusted her spectacles and looked affectionately at her granddaughter.

“Those blue buttons were on a dress I had when your mother was a little girl like you are now,” she said reminiscently. “And one of them got loose, and I meant to sew it on, but forgot, and so it was lost. That shows you, Linda, the necessity of never putting a duty off when it should be done at once. I hope you will remember that, my dear child.”

“Linda never remembers anything I tell her,” Mrs. Dawson complained. “And it’s your fault, mother; you and Thomas spoil her shockingly.”

Then she gave a final look at herself in the mirror over the mantelshelf, duly admired her feathered hat and expensive furs, and went out to where her latest extravagance, a grey-lined limousine, waited at the door.

Mrs. Lovelace rose from her chair and went to the window, watching till her daughter was out of sight; then she sighed, and came back to where Linda squatted happily on the floor, surrounded by her ribbons and laces.

The child looked up and smiled, her pretty face framed in a piece of old lace tied under the chin by a big blue bow.

“Grannie,” she said, solemnly.

“Yes, my treasure?”

Linda scrambled to her feet, looking down at the strewn floor and the dozens of buttons with awe and respect in her eyes.

“Grannie,” she said again. “When I grow up what do you think I shall do?”

“I don’t know, my darling. Wear pretty clothes like mother, I suppose, and drive about in a motor-car.”

Linda screwed up her rosebud mouth.

“Oh, no!” she said, fervently. “Nothing silly like that! I’m going to keep a shop.”