Dance of the Years (30 page)

“My darling, you should not talk enthusiastically about gentlemen you have never met,” said Jinny. “It's not pretty.”

Debby looked round her with a helplessness which for once was not affectation.

“Oh, Mama,” she said. “I don't want to be deceitful. I do know him.”

She enjoyed the sensation she caused and was loth to spoil it, but
James was looking more like a bull than ever in his life, and she was forced to continue.

“I saw him twice,” she said. “We did not speak. I only knew his name to-day when dear Madeleine wrote to tell me. It was so interesting him having the same name as us, you see, Papa. That was why she wrote.”

James did not see at all. He looked murderous, and Deborah, who was always a fool in the deportment class, could not remember if this was the moment to break into becoming tears, or the time to show womanly fortitude and a ladylike composure. In her confusion she became natural, and gave James a look which reminded him of his mother, and also of something else which he knew was unpleasant but could not place.

“He was at school in the town,” she said. “He saw me in church, and he blushed when I looked at him. Madeleine noticed it, because she looked round afterwards, but we were not allowed to, you know, and I didn't. But she says in her letter that he asked after me, and said that I look like a…”

“A what?” James demanded.

Deborah was sitting up in her chair, and the tight bodice of her plain gown was strained across her full bosom. Her bustle was plumped up behind her, and the curls on her forehead were tight as a lamb's. She was alarmed, but too pleased and too excited to hide a disgraceful smile. James knew now who else she had called to his mind, and why it had annoyed him. It was Jinny, of course; Jinny when she had been Lizzie Timson as he had first seen her running into the hallway, with her gown dimpled with jack-by-the-hedge.

The recollection annoyed him and he hit the table with his fist.

“Like a what, Miss?”

Deborah drew herself up, exhibiting the same spirit as his own.

“Like a wild moss rose, Papa.”

The simile was so inept that old Will Galantry, who was always bestirring himself languidly in James whenever he lost his temper, began to laugh, and a spark of amusement lit in James's hooded eyes and he showed his teeth, which were still as strong if not quite as white as they had ever been.

“Never let me hear of this young imbecile again.”

“But, Papa…”

“Never, Miss. Do you understand me?”

“Yes, Papa.”

“One more word and I write to Miss Marchbanks to complain of her negligence.”

“Papa!” The tears were genuine now, and her eyes looked like licked toffee.

“Oh, be a good girl,” said James, “and try not to be a fool.”

“Your Papa does not like to be asked about his relations,” said Jinny afterwards to her daughter. “You must not bother him.”

“But, Mama, I only asked. I only brought it up at dinner so that he could not be cross.”

Deborah was very much at home with her mother, and was inclined to bully her much as James did.

“Mama, do you think I could look like a wild moss rose?”

“No, darling,” said Jinny. “Better not try.”

“Mama, do you think I'm a—well, foolish?” (Julia had taken the whole family to task over their habit of calling each other fools, because he that calleth his brother a fool is in danger of hell-fire. Foolish was permissible though, and Debby, who was always anxious to please, had only just remembered in time.)

“I think you're a muff,” said Jinny, with that simplicity which made all her more serious pronouncements sound like the wisdom from the babes and sucklings. “I think you're a muff. You take after me in that. We are silly, not clever. There is only one thing for us to do and that is to be good. Then God takes care of us.”

“But what about Septimus Galantry, Mama?”

“Pray,” said Jinny unexpectedly, “pray.”

It began to occur to James, at first slowly and then with gathering speed, that all his children were fools, or very well might be. The two youngest were not yet old enough for him to pass judgment on them, but he feared the worst.

Tom gave him a deal of trouble and did not endear himself to William either. He had charm and great liveliness, and he looked sensationally like Blackberry Smith. There was no holding him at school, and when he went to Timson's the complaints came with the constant irritation of a dripping tap. Some of his escapades had an amoral, gypsy-like flavour which appalled James, and struck terror into the Dorothy who sat within him. (James sometimes wondered as he found himself growing more and more like her, if he had not somehow
inherited
Dorothy.)

There was the incident of the Meerschaum pipe-cleaning factory; that was very unfortunate. It was fashionable to take a great deal of trouble to get one's Meerschaum evenly coloured with tobacco smoke, and some who had made a false beginning were anxious to have theirs cleaned so that they might try again. One night James was confronted by an extremely angry man who said that he had paid Master Tom five guineas in gold for the secret and plant of a pipe-cleaning factory, and after parting with the money had been introduced to a small shed in which stood a bucket of ochre-tinted whitewash and a brush. James reimbursed the over-optimistic speculator, and afterwards had an extremely lively interview with Tom. But a few months later, on returning unexpectedly one night from Farthing Hall where he had left the rest of the family, he discovered his own parlour in a blaze of light. Round his own table was a gathering of ladies and gentlemen from the less distinguished corners of the burlesque stage, making merry with his plate, his wine, and a bird or two from his poulterer.

James recognized acquaintances in some of the roisterers, people he had entertained himself in his time, but elsewhere; he was apoplectic with rage, and Tom came in for serious trouble. James banished him, and put him in lodgings at Greenwich with a retired porter of the Timsons, who had a reputation for a strong hand. Tom had to get from Greenwich to the firm every day, and travelling was not easy.

About six weeks after this move the son of Tom's landlord, an extremely weary child, presented himself at Penton Place with a heavy rush basket out of which there protruded a goose's head and feet. He explained that it was a present from Tom to his father. James was touched in spite of himself. He knew the gift must have cost money, and he realized that a long period of saving and penitence must have passed before it could have been made. He gave the exhausted messenger a shilling and sent him down to the kitchen to be fed, while he himself carried the present in triumph to Jinny to show her that he had been right and she wrong when she had begged him in vain to keep Tom at home.

All this might have been very satisfactory, but as James set the basket down one of the big yellow feet fell out on the carpet and the fraud was discovered. The parcel contained a couple of bricks wrapped in hay, with the bird's head and feet arranged as a trimming. Worse still, after James had exhausted his rage on the messenger, it transpired that the boy had been deceived also and that he had lugged the heavy bundle on foot all the way from Greenwich in perfect innocence. He was as disappointed as James, and nearly as angry, and as Mr. Galantry listened to his bellowing, it dawned upon him
that in upbraiding the child he had probably been obliging his son, who had possibly very good private reasons for wishing his landlord's offspring a really skilled dressing down at the hands of an expert.

James consigned Tom to perdition, and for a time at least washed his hands of him.

William was even more unfortunate in his relations with the black sheep.

After the party episode, when Tom was about eighteen, William decided that here was a soul whose reclamation would benefit everybody, both celestial and terrestial. He and Julia, therefore, set to work, and Tom was attended to.

It would hardly be untrue to say that a small mission was sent to Tom, but the whole thing was a dreadful disaster. Tom was stony ground, and the story of that season's growing was distressing and ought to have been a serious lesson to William.

At first Tom was a great success with the Brotherhood, and in six months was a ‘Good Young Man' himself. And then one day he went out with others to reclaim certain ladies of whom Jinny had never heard, and Debby, the modern, only whispered. He returned after several days, apologetic but remarkably cheerful, and volunteered the frightful information that they had converted him. William felt himself disgraced, the other Good Young Men were horrified, and the Leader flung Tom into the street with his own hands, his mild eyes frozen with loathing and disgust. Even Tom was frightened of him, for it occurred to him at the time that the great man might, in that mood, have consigned him there and then to the Chapel stove without waiting for matters to take their more normal course.

James was worried about Tom. To be honest it was his foolishness rather than his wildness which upset him most. Never in all his life, he felt, had he met such a fool.

Meanwhile Deborah took on more and more of her mother's household duties, and James, who was very much the master of his domestic affairs, found her in need of Dorothy's training. She, too, was a fool, he thought, but of an even more unusual kind. The division between the things she had been taught, and the person she was stood out like seams sewn in bright cottons. In matters in which she had been taught to be tidy, she was tidy. She folded her clothes, arranged her chest of drawers, and her stockings which sometimes showed now that skirts were becoming so tight were never undarned. But she had no notion whatever of tidying a room.

There were times when she so reminded James of Shulie that he could have boxed her ears for no other reason. In manner, it was the same. She had learned to come into a room and to sit down at a
piano, and she could do that with grace and elegance, but she was not nearly so good at sitting down at a tea-table.

Sometimes it seemed to the exasperated James that she really was Shulie; Shulie got at, and seen to, and put through the hoop. But he knew that was not true, for there was Jinny there too. Debby had Jinny's remarkable patience, and her never-failing interest in people. The servants told Debby things about themselves and their aspirations which they did not tell to other people, and she was as interested in them and expected other people to be as interested too, which annoyed James, as if they had been the troubles of their own families.

If Boxer, the housemaid, had a quarrel with her beau, Debby wept with her. If Harris, the cook, heard her brother was out of gaol again, Debby went about with a hunted look for days.

Sometimes James saw himself in Debby. She was strong as he was, and her phenomenal physical force sat very oddly with the whimsy airs, affected laughs, and coy tilts of the head, each of which she had studied so painfully under Miss Marchbanks.

She had also his obstinacy and his spirit, too, when she needed it. They made rum partners for Miss Marchbanks' bric-a-brac.

One day when she was reading to him up in his room, for nowadays he was very nearly as gouty as ever old Jed had been, he let fly at her and told her that her silliness was beyond bearing. He said she was mistaken in thinking herself a muff, for she was really an imbecile and he dreaded to think what might become of her when he died. A much more sophisticated young woman of the day might have been expected to break into tears at less violent criticism, but to his surprise Debby drew herself up and surveyed him with flashing black eyes, which delighted him. What she said, though, was devastating, and spoilt everything. “A gentleman,” said Debby, “would ne'er insult me—none other can.”

“Good God!” said James.

Debby laughed with Shulie-like pleasure at her success, and presently James laughed too, if not for the same reason, and she continued to read
The Times
newspaper aloud to him about the far-away Franco-Prussian war. She had been taught to read and could do it very well, and as her clear young voice went easily on James allowed his mind to wander from Sedan to matters more near him.

His children were fools. Tom and Debby were sensational fools. If it were not for William, who had some real brains, James would have had cause to be very worried indeed about the future of his family. It struck him with great force that he had been right; the instinct which had made him do such a very unconventional thing when Mr. Timson had approached him, had been wise. It was justified, indeed, at this distance it seemed almost providential. For a
moment he wondered if it was providential, if there was some broad outlined scheme to which a man conformed whether he would or no. It was a repellent idea, and he did not think it was true, not quite true. All the same, it certainly was a mercy that William did exist; it was a mercy in view of everything that Edwin Castor had come to visit Groats, that James had admired him, even that Jinny had been led astray.

It was all very odd, very interesting, slightly dispiriting; he wished he were a younger man, he wished …

Phœbe cut into his thoughts as she did often in these days. Her arrival in his waking mind was always curious; she came suddenly, not vaguely and sadly as do lost loves as a rule, but definitely and vividly and never with regret. There was no telling in what mood he would find her or she him. She was clear and sharp always as if he had seen her yesterday. To-day she was as he had last seen her in a yellow gown to match her hair, and he saw her walking across the room with that famous swagger of hers.

Debby's voice was swinging on, and the ponderous sentences from the leader rolled out of her mouth like platoons on the march. Above them he could hear Phœbe's voice quite distinctly. At first he could not tell what she was saying, and then when he did hear the words, they startled him.

“I could have had children, James,” said Phœbe. “I could have had children. Didn't you want my children?”