Part 4

“It shows great poverty of mind to speak merely of people. There are so many other subjects.”

Marlow is abashed.

He knows that his mind is not rich according to her ideas of intellectual wealth.

“At all events,” he says, rather crossly and hotly, “one may be allowed to envy such a prig such good luck as to have Miss Seymour for a champion.”

“Jane,” says Cicely, turning to her friend, “here come your children. How well that mite Dolly rides!”

“He _is_ a prig, you know, my dear,” murmurs Lady Jane, “and I am sorry it makes you angry when we say so.”

“I dislike all injustice,” says Cicely, coldly, “and I do not consider that Mr. Bertram is in the least done justice to by his friends and relations. How badly every one treated him yesterday in return for a most learned and interesting lecture!”

While she is thus defending himself and his doctrines in his absence, Bertram, still seated under the trees, sees in the distance a girl’s figure; she wears a black straw hat, a black jacket, and a grey stuff skirt; she has thread gloves and leather highlows, the highlows are white with dust; she has two deep baskets filled with primroses and covered by red cotton handkerchiefs; she carries one on each arm. She has a round, fair, freckled face, a sweet and cheerful expression, and a fringe of naturally curling brown hair.

She approaches Bertram smiling: “Oh, gracious, sir! Don’t get up for the likes of me. Mother told me as how you were under this tree; I just met her by the Gate, so I thought I’d come and have a peep at you.”

“Thanks,” replies Bertram, distantly. “Don’t say ‘as how,’ Annie. You are heavily laden this morning.”

“Oh, no, sir. Primroses have no roots; they make a fine show, but they don’t weigh naught.”

“Like the party of which they are the emblem.”

Annie smiles, in entire ignorance of his meaning, and sits down by him, planting her baskets on the ground.

“These aren’t very good flowers,” she says, regretfully, “the rain’s spiled ’em. They’ll do to put at the horses’ ears. Why do they put ’em at the horses’ ears, sir? I asked a groom onst, and he says, says he, it means that when our party come back to office we’ll take the tax off horses. Is that so, sir?”

“They are not only at the horses’ ears, but at the asses’ button-holes!” says Bertram. “As for taxation, it is the arc of Toryism.”

“Dear me!” he thinks, “why will she sit down by me? With all the will in the world one cannot but fret occasionally at their manners, though of course manner is only the shell, and ought not to weigh with one!”

Annie is meanwhile making some primroses up into a bunch. “What had you said to mother?” she asks. “Her back was quite set up, like.”

“Your mother,” replies Bertram, “is the most estimable and indefatigable of persons, but she has the taint of painfully narrowed and archaic views: she persists in considering herself of an inferior class; she persists in speaking of ‘quality,’ by which she means the patrician order, as something superhuman and alien to herself. It distresses me.”

“Oh, yes! Mother’s always going on about our engagement. She says as how----”

“‘As how,’ again, Annie!”

“Well, sir, that’s just what mother means. You speak in one way and I in another. And your friends will laugh at my way of speaking, sir; they certainly will.”

“Let them laugh! Besides, we shall not see them, Annie; we shall live wholly apart from them, in some remote spot of our own.”

“Out o’ London, sir?”

“Out of London beyond a doubt. Is that any subject of regret?”

“Well--I should miss the streets, sir.”

“Miss the streets! Merciful heavens! To what a pass has the baneful disease of town life brought a pure and unsophisticated soul! But you have been in the country this morning early--the hem of the country at any rate. Did the freshness, the silence, the fragrance around you say nothing to your heart?”

“Well, no, sir. Where the growers are you don’t smell much else than manure; and there’s a steam pump always going fit to deafen you.”

“Well, well! But you must have seen the real country. I have taken you myself to Bushey and Thames Ditton. Surely you must see that the streets are the quintessence of vulgarity, of artificiality, of hideousness, of ludicrous effort?”

“If they’re as bad as that, sir, why do all the great ladies stay all the summer in ’em, when they might be in the country? Our little street ain’t much, for sure, but there’s a deal o’ neighbourliness in it; and I’m so used to listening for Sam’s growler rattlin’ home I don’t think sleep ’ud come to me without it.”

“We really cannot take Sam and his cab into our wedded life,” remarks Bertram, with irritation; “and why will you say ‘sir,’ and not Wilfrid?”

“Your Christian name would sound so cheeky, sir,” replies Annie. “I couldn’t bring myself to say it. You’re so different to me, sir. That’s what mother allus says: ‘Mr. Bertram’s got queer notions,’ says she; ‘but he was born of the quality, and quality he’ll be till he die, let him fuss and fad and fettle as much as ever he likes.’”

Bertram is looking uneasily down the Mile: “Won’t your primroses wither in the sun?”

“No; there’s the shade o’ the tree.”

Bertram says to himself: “However shall I get rid of her? If Marlow should come back while she’s sitting here, or Fanshawe come out of his house!” (_Aloud._) “Dear Annie, if you won’t misunderstand me, I think we’d better not be seen sitting here together. Cæsar’s wife--no, I don’t mean that, I mean an Englishman’s betrothed--in fact, you know what I mean. It was very kind of you to send those violets yesterday, but it was a mistake--my rooms were full--people laughed.”

“Oh, Mr. Bertram, I am sorry. It was silly, of course, now I think of it,” says the girl, as she rises and takes up the baskets. “Mr. Bertram, if you don’t like to be seen with me settin’ on this bench, how ever will you stand being seen with me all your life?”

“You don’t comprehend,” replies Bertram, nervously. “That isn’t the question at all. I don’t want people to say coarse and rude things of you. Of my wife no one will ever dare to do so.”

Annie hangs her head in silence for a minute; then murmurs:

“Do you really love me, sir? Mother says as how it’s moonshine.”

“I dislike the word love. It is coarse, and implies coarse feelings. It is a degrading impulse, shared with the beasts of the fields. Poets are responsible for having covered its unloveliness with a starry garment which has disguised--fatally disguised--its nakedness. What I feel for you is respect, esteem, the sweetness of fulfilled duty, the means of proving to the world the sincerity of my sociology.”

“Yes, sir. You told me that afore.”

“Well, what better sentiment can you desire? Love fills lunatic asylums, divorce courts, cemeteries, heats charcoal braziers, fires revolvers, gives human bodies to fishes; but such a sentiment as I have for you purifies society, advances civilisation, ensures mutual respect, and eliminates passion, the tyrant of man.”

He stops abruptly, for before his memory floats the vision of Cecily Seymour, and he seems to hear her saying: “What heresy! And how untrue!”

Annie murmurs, keeping her head down, and in a disappointed voice: “Yes, sir.”

“You do not seem to understand! You are vexed?”

“I’ll try to understand, sir. I’m only a poor girl, and all that you say is very beautiful, I dessay; but--it makes me think of a novel I got onst from the library, where a poor governess, without a umberellar or a friend, stands out in the rain and looks through the winder at a cosy kitchen, where they’re a-toastin’ muffins for tea, and a cat’s a-warming hisself at the fire.”

“‘Jane Eyre.’ I fail to see the connection.”

“Well, Mr. Bertram, I say it ill; but when you talk in that kind o’ way it makes me feel out in the cold like as that poor teacher was, and I think I’d rather have the fire and the muffins and the cat.”

“I fear you are a sad Philistine, Annie.”

“I don’t know what that is, sir. I daresay as it’s only that your beautiful talk’s too fine for me. I think I’ll go now. I didn’t ought to have dawdled here.”

“You are crying, child!”

“Oh, no, sir.”

She gets up and hurries away.

“O Heavens!” Bertram says to himself. “One does not go to that sturdy class to get a sensitive plant that droops at a touch. She says _liberry_ and _umberellar_. It is absurd that such a trifle should irritate one, but it does; it is like a grain of dust in one’s eye, a crumb of bread in one’s sock. What atoms they are, yet how miserable they can make one! And then her absolute inability to understand one! Love! Good gracious! She would want to have a bride cake from Gunter’s; a temple of Hymen in spun sugar!”

The remembrance of Cicely Seymour’s fair face, with its tender, dreamy eyes and its beautiful mouth, comes over him. He shivers in the warmth of the pleasant and unusual sunshine.

Marlow, who has left the ladies after his snubbing, passes him again, puts his glass in his eye, and gazes after Annie Brown.

“A _protégée_? Younger than your disciples usually are,” he remarks. “Ah, to be sure--that must be the Annie of the violets? My dear Bertram, surely chivalry should suggest that we should carry her baskets for her? If you will take the one, I will take the other.”

Bertram deigns no answer. He feels considerably annoyed, and gazes at the cupola of the hotel in front of him.

Marlow digs holes in the gravel with his cane.

“What an opportunity lost of practical illustration of your doctrines, and--she’s got a smart pair of ankles; rather thick, but still----”

Bertram continues to gaze abstractedly at the hotel roof.

“But why, oh why, let her wear highlows?” continues Marlow. “They would deform a goddess.”

Suddenly, with the sense of taking a plunge into water of unknown depth, the man whom he torments faces what he considers an imperative obligation.

“The young person in the highlows is my future wife,” he says between his teeth. “You will be so good as to make your jokes about some other matter than her ankles.”

Marlow stares, utterly incredulous and stupefied.

“Good Lord! you can’t mean it! Your wife? Why, she is--she is--she is a very decent sort of girl no doubt; I should be sorry to imply the contrary, but----”

“Be so good as to understand that I am not in jest. That is the--the--the daughter of the people who I am about to marry.”

“Oh, Lord!”

Marlow drops into a chair, so astonished that he could not recover his speech. Annie is too far off to hear, and there is no one else within earshot except a groom on the other side of the rails; the policeman has gone on down the road.

“I was much to blame,” says Bertram, in his chilliest manner, “not to make the announcement yesterday when you asked who were the Brown family. My reticence was a weakness of which I am sincerely ashamed.”

He has done what he believes that courage, truth, and loyalty to this poor little girl with the primrose skips demanded, but doing our duty, unhappily, is apt to leave a shivery and prickly sensation behind it, and his reasons do not, even to himself, appear so logical, admirable, and clear as they had done three months ago.

And why will she say “_liberry_” and “_umberellar_”? and her ankles certainly are thick! He tries to remember Sybil in Disraeli’s romance of that name, but he cannot conceal from his mind that Annie is not in the very least like Sybil, if he himself somewhat resembles Egremont.

“And may I tell people?” asks Marlow, with his eyes staring wide open.

“You may tell every one. The office of bellman to society is, I believe, very congenial to you.”

“Eh? Lord, how they will laugh! They’ll die of laughin’.”

Bertram reddens angrily.

“No doubt they will laugh. Such laughter is still as like the crackling of thorns under a pot as it was in the days of Solomon.”

Marlow continues to stare stupidly.

“Are you sure you aren’t jokin’? chaffin’? humbuggin’?” he asks.

“I do not joke,” replies Bertram, with chill dignity. “And certainly I should not use banter on so delicate and solemn a subject. If you think the actions of my insignificant personality will amuse people, you are at liberty to amuse them.”

With that he nods slightly, and walks towards the French Embassy, leaving Marlow rooted to his chair, still staring with a blank expression of incredulity and amaze.

“And that prig, that dolt, that triple idiot might marry Cicely Seymour if he chose!” mutters the young man with the gold crook of his cane between his teeth.

Marlow cannot believe his own senses. It is eleven o’clock in the morning, and he has taken nothing but some black coffee and a devilled kidney, or he really would think he had been drinking, and forgotten the debauch.

He feels that it would be very agreeable to his feelings to return to barbarian methods and pound into a jelly the highly cultured brains of the author of the _Age to Come_.

“But what do you marry her for?” he shouts after Bertram’s retreating figure. He receives no answer, and Bertram passes away under the budding April boughs. To explain his reasons to Marlow would be indeed to throw pearls before swine.

As he walks backward in the direction of Hyde Park Corner he sees the figure of Annie Brown going down the almost-deserted roadway of the drive.

“Her ankles _are_ thick,” he thinks painfully; “and why will she use such very odd words as ‘_liberry_’? Why? I believe philologists consider that the vernacular of the illiterate is the purest Saxon English spoken; but it grates unpleasantly on one’s ears. Is that you, Fanshawe, at last?”

Fanshawe, who has come out of his house, which is near to the French Embassy, fixes his eyeglass on the retreating figure of the unconscious Annie. He is of a supernatural quickness of observation.

Bertram, to his vexation, feels extreme embarrassment. He knows he ought to repeat to Fanshawe the confession just made to Marlow, but he cannot; it sticks in his throat like a fish bone. The eyes of the potent editor are malicious and inexorable.

“I saw you from my bedroom window sitting with that young daughter of the sovereign people,” remarks Fanshawe. “I wished for a Kodak. The _Torch_ should have had an illustrated Easter number.”

“You are fifty minutes late,” says Bertram, irritably.

“My dressing-gown and chocolate pot are dear to me.”

“You always turn night into day.”

“Night is day in London, as coal and electricity are its summer. Well, sha’n’t we take a hansom to Folliott’s?”

“Wait a moment, Fanshawe. Sit down here.”

Fanshawe complies reluctantly. “Why waste time? Let’s go and settle your inheritance.”

“Please go instead of me and say that I refuse. It is very simple.”

“It is simple indeed! So was the remark of ‘Tom’s a’ cold’; and just about as reasonable. My dear Bertram! _La nuit porte conseil_, and yet you still wish to refuse?”

“Yes, I refuse; and----”

He pauses, then swallows the fish bone desperately.

“And--I am going to marry yonder daughter of the people!”

“Ah! Rumour for once is correct, then?” says the gentleman, to whom the amplification and publication of Rumour brings in £40,000 per annum.

“Yes, I marry the young woman you saw when you wished for a Kodak.”

For once Fanshawe has not a syllable to say: he is dumb.

“You look astonished,” remarks Bertram. “Yet with your principles----”

“Principles be damned!” says Fanshawe. “They must go to the wall when they trample on common sense.”

“But surely for you no class divisions exist?” says Bertram, with some maliciousness. “Therefore of course you will congratulate me as warmly as if my future wife were that abominable thing a duke’s daughter.”

“There ought to be no race-horses, but while there are we put our money on them,” replied Fanshawe. “We must take the world as it is, or cut our throats in it. You are cutting yours with a bowie knife. I will return to my chocolate pot.”

At that instant Mrs. Brown comes down the road out of breath. Annie is out of sight.

“I am come after my daughter, Mr. Bertram, if you please. Soon as I told her ye was here I was that mad with myself, for it flashed across me she’d come and----”

“And why not, madam?” says Fanshawe. “It is, it seems, all _en tout bien, tout honneur_.”

“I don’t understand gibberish, sir, but girls should be circumspec.”

Fanshawe gazes at her through his eyeglass.

“Your mother-in-law to be?” he murmurs.

Mrs. Brown, not hearing, goes on in a rather shrill tone: “I don’t mean my daughter to walk along with you, sir, till she’s a right to take your arm afore everybody.”

Bertram shudders.

Fanshawe lifts his hat to Mrs. Brown approvingly.

“These sentiments, madam, do you the highest honour. The quality, as you would call them, are not so severe. Their young ladies sit out on the staircases, and flirt in corners with their young men, and meet them in these sylvan groves with a groom as chaperon, without any certainty that matrimony will ever follow. But then the _demi-vierge_ is probably confined to the Upper Ten.”

“I don’t know about the ways o’ the gentry, sir,” says Mrs. Brown; “in our street we’re respectable though we _are_ back o’ Portman Square.”

“Madam! Juvenal himself never implied anything so crushing! Bertram, I ask again, is this good lady about to be your mother-in-law?”

“Don’t be a fool.”

“Well, dear madam, it is but right that, standing in this future relation to my friend, you should know this fact: Mr. Bertram has had a very large property left him.”

“Lawk a mussy, sir!”

“But he is inclined to refuse it on account of his social principles, with which, no doubt, you are acquainted. Now, dear madam, tell us freely your opinion as a person of sound common sense, and one who is about to be closely allied to him. Should he refuse it, or should he accept it?”

“Dearie, dearie, sir! How can anybody hev left good money to such a gawk!”

Fanshawe laughs aloud: “When Truth comes out of her well she is seldom polite! Never mind, Mrs. Brown, you can make your peace with your son-in-law some other time. Only tell us now, for we are going to the lawyers on this momentous errand. Ought he to accept or to refuse?”

Annie’s mother is flattered at the deference to her opinion.

“Well, sir, it ain’t for the like o’ me to judge for the likes o’ you. But, if ye want my plain opinion, it is this ’un: if he take the proputty he’ll _look_ silly. But if he don’t take it he’ll _be_ silly; and he’ll be sorry all his life.”

“Mrs. Brown,” says Bertram, “your daughter would not say so.”

“Likely not, sir. She’s a slim snippet of a girl as haven’t felt any o’ the weight o’ livin’ yet. When she hev she’ll know a full money-box is the softest pillar one can lay a tired head on any night.”

“Mrs. Brown, the classic form of Socrates dwindles before yours! I place you immediately upon the staff of the _Torch_.”

Mrs. Brown is puzzled. “I don’t hold with torches, sir. Sam’s link-boy, last week in the great fog, flourishing one about like a fool, set fire to all the straw--such a piece o’ work--and Sam warn’t hinsured.”

“I wince under the moral lesson which you convey by your apologue to my journal, but----”

“How much longer are you going to waste in chaffing this woman?” says Bertram, very angrily. “There’s an empty hansom passing. Take it.”

“Take it yourself. Mrs. Brown, your lips drop pearls of wisdom. Yet you are servile, Mrs. Brown. Are we not all equal before the great Bona Dea of Nature?”

“Equal, sir?” repeats Mrs. Brown, with fine scorn. “That’s _his_ rot; yet when he come to our place one day, and we was eatin’ good Dutch cheese and ’errings, he well-nigh fainted at the stink on ’em!”

Fanshawe laughs delightedly.

“He live on peaches and pinehapples, he do,” she continued, with a snort; “and he’s spoilt a good seasonable chance o’ settlin’ herself as my daughter had with the young man round the corner----”

“Shut up that jaw, Fanshawe!” cries Bertram, falling into low language in his wrath.

“Will you go to Folliott and Hake’s or not?” asks his friend.

“I will go to Satan’s self to stop you chaffing this woman. Look how those people are laughing.”

Bertram calls the passing hansom and gets into it; Fanshawe follows him, and waves his hand to Mrs. Brown.

“You must come and dine with me at Richmond, Mrs. Socrates!”

Cicely and her cousin are sitting under a tree near the end of the Ladies’ Mile with some men standing before them and talking to them, when Marlow again approaches, diffident, but in ill-concealed triumph.

“Oh, Lady Jane,” he says eagerly, not venturing to address Cicely directly, “I’ve come back ’cos I’ve such a bit of news; am authorised to tell it; may put it in the _Morning Post_ to-morrow. I’ve seen ‘the penny bunch of violets,’ and by all that’s awful, she’s a washerwoman’s daughter, and Bertram’s going to marry her. It’s Annieism you see, not Altruism.”

Much pleased with his own wit and humour he laughs gleefully, whilst his eyes are trying to read Cicely’s face; it gives no sign of any feeling or of having even heard what he has said.

“What nonsense you talk, Lord Marlow!” says Lady Jane. “Bertram may be silly, but he is not so utterly out of his mind as that.”

“Isn’t he? Why, he’s just told me the news himself! The young woman was with him down yonder. She sells flowers, and had got two skips full of primroses; and she’s not a good feature in her face. I’ll offer to be best man; shall I send ’em a set of saucepans or a sewing-machine?”

Cicely casts a look of supreme contempt upon him.

“The perfection to which you bring your jokes must have cost you a long apprenticeship on Bank Holidays, Lord Marlow.”

Marlow’s mirth is a little subdued.

“You can’t be speaking seriously,” says one of the men present. “Bertram is not quite such an ass as that.”

“I am, though,” replies Marlow, sulkily. “I’ve seen the girl, and Bertram’s just told me to tell everybody.”

“What is her name?”

“She’s Annie Brown; we heard that yesterday. Mother takes in washing. Oh, Lord, it’ll kill me, the fun of it.”

Doubled up with silent laughter he leans upon his cane and furtively watches Cicely’s face.

“Why should you be surprised that Mr. Bertram puts his theories into practice?” she says, coldly. “It is only like Count Tolstoi’s ploughing.”

“Goodness, Cicely!” says Lady Jane, with much irritation. “You surely can’t defend such an insanity as this? It is very much worse than any plough. I thought his manner very odd yesterday about those violets; for he is not, you know, a man _à bonnes fortunes_.”

“You would approve him more if he were!”