The Osbornes E-Book

E.F. Benson

• Herausgeber: Publisher s11838
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019

Beschreibung

The Osbornes written by E. F. Benson who was an English novelist, biographer, memoirist, archaeologist and short story writer. This book was published in 1910. And now republish in ebook format. We believe this work is culturally important in its original archival form. While we strive to adequately clean and digitally enhance the original work, there are occasionally instances where imperfections such as missing pages, poor pictures or errant marks may have been introduced due to either the quality of the original work. Despite these occasional imperfections, we have brought it back into print as part of our ongoing global book preservation commitment, providing customers with access to the best possible historical reprints. We appreciate your understanding of these occasional imperfections, and sincerely hope you enjoy reading this book.

Leseprobe

The Osbornes

By

E. F. Benson

Table of Contents

CHAPTER I

CHAPTER II.

CHAPTER III.

CHAPTER IV.

CHAPTER V.

CHAPTER VI.

CHAPTER VII.

CHAPTER VIII.

CHAPTER IX.

CHAPTER X.

CHAPTER XI.

CHAPTER XII.

CHAPTER I

FOR the last five hours all the windows along the front of the newest and whitest and most pretentious and preposterous house in Park Lane had been blazing with lights, which were kindled while the last flames of the long July day had scarcely died down into the ash-coloured night, and were still shining when morning began to tinge the velvet gray of the sky with colour and extinguish the stars. The lights, however, in No. 92 seemed to be of more durable quality than the heavenly constellations and long after morning had come and the early traffic begun to boom on the roadway, they still burned with undiminished splendour. It was literally true, also, that all the windows in the long Gothic facade which seemed to have strayed from Nuremberg into the West End of London, had been ablaze; not only was the ground floor lit, and the first floor, where was the ballroom, out of which, all night, had floated endless webs of perpetual melody, but the bedrooms above, though sleep then would have been impossible, and, as a matter of fact, they were yet untenanted, had been equally luminous, while from behind the flamboyant balustrade the top of the house, smaller windows, which might be conjectured to belong to servants’ rooms, had joined in the general illumination. This was strictly in accordance with Mrs. Osborne’s orders, as given to that staid and remarkable person called by her (when she forgot) Willum and (when she remembered) Thoresby, and (also when she remembered) alluded to as “my major domo.” “Willum” he had been in earlier and far less happy years, first as boot boy, then when the family blossomed into footmen, as third, second, and finally first of his order. Afterward came things more glorious yet and Thoresby was major domo. At the present time Mrs. Osborne had probably forgotten that there existed such officers as boot boys, and Willum probably had forgotten too. The rise of the family had been remarkably rapid, but he had kept pace with it, and to-night he felt, as did Mrs. Osborne, that the eminence attained by them all was of a very exalted order.

Mrs. Osborne had ordered that every window in the front of the house was to be lit, and this sumptuous edict not without purpose. She said it looked more joyful and what was a little electric light, and as the evening had been devoted to joy, it was right that the house should reflect this quality. For herself, she felt very joyful indeed; the last month or two had, it is true, been arduous, and in all London it is probable that there had been nobody, man or woman, more incessantly occupied. But had there been an eight hours bill introduced and passed, which should limit the hours of energy for hostesses, she would have scorned to take advantage of so pusillanimous a measure. Besides,the nature of her work necessitated continuous effort, for her work was to effect the siege and secure the capitulation of London. That, with her great natural shrewdness, she realized had to be done quickly, or it would never be done at all. London had, not to be starved, but to be stuffed into surrender. She had to feed it and dance it and ply it with concerts and plays and entertainments till its power of resistance was sapped. Long quiet sieges, conducted with regularity, however untiring, were, she knew well, perfectly incapable of accomplishing its fall. The enemy—at times, though she loved it so well, she almost considered London to be her enemy—must be given no quarter and no time to consider its plans. The assault had to be violent as well as untiring; the dear foe must be battered into submission. To “arrive” at all, you had to gallop. And she had galloped, with such success that on this night in July, or rather on this cool dewy morning in July, she felt that the capitulation was signed and handed her. But she felt no chill of reaction, as is so often the case even in the very moment of victory, when energies not only can be relaxed, but must be relaxed since there is nothing for them to brace themselves over any more. Her victory was of different sort: she knew quite well that she would have to go on being extremely energetic, else the capitulated garrison would by degrees rally again. But since the exercise of these energies was delightful to her, she was merely charmed that there would be a continual call for them.

There was no “casement jessamine” on the house, which could “stir to the dancers dancing in tune” but on the walls of the lowest story, growing apparently from large earthenware pots filled with mould, were enormous plants of tin ivy which swarmed up the walls of the house. But it was too strongly and solidly made to stir even to the vibration produced by the earthquaking motor-buses which bounced down Park Lane, and thus the dancers dancing in tune had no effect whatever on it. This stalwart ivy was indeed a sort of symbol of the solidity of the fortunes of the house, for it was made at the manufactories from which her husband derived his really American wealth. They covered acres of ground at Sheffield, and from their doors vomited forth all sorts of metallic hardware of the most reliable quality. The imitation ivy, of course, was but a froth, a chance flotsam on the stream of hardware, and was due to the inventive genius of Mrs. Osborne’s eldest son Percy, who had a great deal of taste. His was no abstruse taste, like an appreciation of caviare or Strauss, that required an educated—or, as others might say—a vitiated palate or a jaded ear, but it appealed strongly and almost overwhelmingly, to judge by the order book of the Art Department, to the eye of that general public which goes in for forms of decoration which are known as both chaste and “handsome,” and are catholic enough to include mirrors framed in plush on which are painted bunches of flowers and bead curtains that hang over doors. With shrewd commercial instinct Percy never attempted to educate the taste of his customers into what they ought to want, but gave them in “handsome” catalogues lists of the things they did want, and of a quality that they would be sure to find satisfactory. Though this ivy, for instance, was from the excellence of its workmanship and the elaborate nature of its colouring rather expensive, it was practically indestructible till the melting point of the best tin was reached, and it resembled ivy so closely that you might perfectly well prick your fingers on it before you found out the art that so closely imitated nature. Indeed, before now some very pretty jesting had taken place in the windows of the house with regard to it, when Percy, who liked his joke (amid the scarcely suppressed merriment of the family), asked a stranger to pick a leaf of it and examine the beauties of nature as illustrated in the manner in which the stalk of the leaf was joined to the parent stem. Also it had no inconvenient habits of growing over places on which you did not wish it to trespass (if you wanted more, you ordered more), it harboured neither slugs nor any abominable insects and afforded no resting-place for birds, while it could be washed free from London dust by the simple application of the hand-syringe.

The ivy has been insisted on at some little length because it was typical of the fortunes and family of its inventor. It was solid, indestructible and new, and in just the same way the Osbornes were very strong and well, held large quantities of gilt-edged stock, and had no family history whatever. In one point only were they unlike the ivy that clung to the limestone wall of the house in Park Lane, but that was an important one. The point of the ivy was to deceive—it was often successful in so doing—while the Osbornes never intended to deceive anybody. There was, with regard at any rate to Mrs. Osborne, her husband, and Percy, no possibility of being taken in. You could see at once what they were like; a glance would save you any subsequent disappointment or surprises. And no one, it may be added at once, ever pricked his fingers over them. They were as kind as they were new. But since many strains of blood have gone to the making of each member of the human race, one strain prospering and predominating in this specimen while in another, though of the same blood, it scarcely shows a trace of existence, the divergence of type even in one generation is often very marked indeed. Thus, though Mr. Osborne felt that he both understood and admired his eldest son, his admiration for the younger was agreeably tempered with mystification. “Old Claude’s a rum fellow,” he often said, and Mrs. Osborne agreed with him. But, as will be seen, there was still much in common between Claude and them.

The house, like the ivy, was also new and solid and in point of fact none of its inhabitants, again with the curious exception of Claude, were quite used to it yet. This they concealed as far as they were able, but the concealment really went little further than the fact that they did not openly allude to it. They all agreed that the house was very handsome, and Mr. Osborne had a secret gratification not unmingled with occasional thrills of misgiving as to whether he had wasted his money in the knowledge of the frightful costliness of it. Outside, as has been said, it was of Gothic design; but if a guest thought that he was to pass his evening or listen to music in a Gothic interior, he would have been rudely undeceived. It had been unkindly said that you went through a Gothic door to find Vandals within, and if Vandalism includes the appropriation of beautiful things, the Vandalism exhibited here was very complete. But the destructive side of Vandalism had no counterpart; Mr. Osborne was very careful of his beautiful things and very proud of them. He admired them in proportion to their expensiveness, and having an excellent head for figures could remember how much all the more important pictures, articles of furniture, and tapestries had “stood him in.” And he ran no risk of forgetting these items, for he kept them green in his memory by often speaking of them to his guests.

“Yes,” he would say, “there’s three thousand pounds worth of seating accommodation in this very drawing-room, and they tell me ’twas lucky to have got the suite at that figure. All Louis—Louis—Per, my boy, did they tell us it was Louis XV. or XVI.? Sixteenth, yes, Louis XVI. Divide it up and you’ll find that it averages two hundred pounds a chair. Seems funny to sit on two hundred pounds, hey? Mrs. Osborne, she said a bright thing about that. ‘Sit firm then,’ she said and you’ll keep it safe.’”

The furnishing and appointments of the house had in fact been entrusted to a notable firm, which though it had certainly charged Mr. Osborne a great deal of money for what it supplied, had given him very good for his cheque, and both he and his wife, after they had got over the unusual feeling of sitting on two hundred pounds, and if you chose putting your feet up on another two hundred, were quite content that both the furniture of this Louis XVI. room for instance and the cheque for it, should be what they called a “little stiff.” It was the same in the Italian room that opened out of it, and matters were no better in the dining room, which was furnished with Chippendale. Here indeed a very dreadful accident had happened on the first evening that they had got into the house, now two months ago, for Mr. Osborne, alone with Percy his wife for that night, had drawn his chair up to the fire—the night being chilly—to drink his second and third glasses of port and had rested his feet on the pierced steel fender that guarded the hearth. This led to his tilting his Chippendale chair back on to its hind legs, which, designed to bear only half the weight of its occupant, had crashed into splinters and deposited Mr. Osborne on the floor and his second glass of port on his shirt front. But he had taken the incident with great good-humour.

“Live and learn,” he had said, “live and learn. Got to sit up and behave now, Maria. Per, my boy, don’t you finish all the port while your dad changes his shirt. Drink fair, for fair play’s a jewel, and fill your mother’s glass.”

Mr. Osborne would never have attained to the eminence he occupied as a manufacturer of hardware, had he not been a man of intelligence, and instead of upbraiding the furnishing firm for charging so high a price for a “four legs of carved dry rot” which a momentary irritation carefully kept to himself might have led him to do, drew the lesson that it was unwise to tilt chairs unless they were clearly tiltable. But this accident had caused him to insist on his own room, which he called his snuggery, being furnished as he chose and not as anybody else chose, and here he rejoiced in chairs of the pattern known as Chesterfield, a solid mahogany table, on which stood a telephone, and a broad firm mantel-shelf where he could put a box of cigars without fear of its overbalancing. On this point also, his wife had adopted a similar attitude and her own sitting room opening out of the white-furnished bedroom where she was afraid to touch anything for fear of “soiling” it, was thoroughly to her taste. As in her husband’s snuggery she had matters arranged for her own comfort and not for other people’s admiration. Percy had “done” the room for her, and sometimes when she came up here to look at her letters before going to bed, and drink the glass of hot water which was so excellent a digestive after the dinner that was still a little curious to her, she wondered whether Percy did not understand house furnishing better than the great French firm, the name of which she was always rather shy of pronouncing. She had asked him to choose all the furniture himself, remarking only that she was a little rheumatic, and found it difficult to get out of very low chairs. And he had succeeded to admiration, not only had he consulted her comfort, but he had divined and satisfied her taste. The paper of the walls was a pattern of ferns with iridescent lilies of the valley neatly disposed among them, so that it was almost a shame to hang pictures thereon; indeed it would have been quite a shame had not those pictures been so well selected. For Mrs. Osborne cared far more about the subject of a picture than the manner in which it was presented, and all the subjects were admirably chosen. There was a beautiful “view” of the church that Edward had built at Sheffield, a print of the Duke of Wellington in a garter and of Queen Victoria in a bonnet and a couple of large oil-paintings, one of the Land’s End and the other of Koynance Cove, both of which were intimately associated in her affectionate heart with her honeymoon. Edward and she had spent a month in Cornwall, staying at little inns and walking as much as possible to save expense, and though all that was thirty years ago, she never entered this room now without remembering how they had sat just on that very bluff above the emerald sea, and read the “Idylls of the King” together, and he had promised her, when they were rich enough, to give her an emerald necklace to remind her of the colour of the sea. It is true that those emeralds (which were remarkably fine) were not exactly of the tint that either nature had given to the sea, or the very vivid artist had reproduced in the painting that hung on the walls, but they still reminded both her and Edward of those enchanted weeks in Cornwall, and it was but seldom, when she wore her emeralds, that he did not say “Mrs. O. has got the Land’s End emeralds on to-night.”

Then, more often than not would follow the explanation of this cryptic remark, and the whispered information of how much the emeralds had cost. Mrs. Osborne, as a matter of fact, had overheard, again and again, what the figure was, but she was still officially ignorant of it, and generally closed the subject by saying, “Mr. Osborne won’t never tell me what he paid for them. I believe he got them cheap, and that’s why.”

But she secretly rejoiced to know that this was not the reason. The reason was just the opposite; they had been so enormously expensive. That expense would not be unreasonable now, but at the time, for she had worn the Land’s End necklace for twenty years, it had been preposterous. They had had no holiday one year in consequence, but had grilled in Sheffield throughout August and September. But during those months she had worn the emeralds every evening, and it had been a sort of renewal of the honeymoon. Though they had not been able to go away themselves, they had managed to send Percy and Claude to the seaside, and the two months in Sheffield, when every night she wore the emeralds which had been the cause of their remaining there, was still one of Mrs. Osborne’s most delightful memories, as a sort of renewed honeymoon. Since then times had considerably changed, and though to many the change from simplicity of life and not uncomfortable narrowness of means to the wider horizons which the rapid accumulation of an enormous fortune brings within the view, implies a loss of happiness rather than an extension of it, neither Edward nor she were of that Arcadian build. They both immensely enjoyed the wider horizon; the humble establishment with parlour maids had been all very well, but how much more enjoyable was the brownstone house on the outskirts of Sheffield with footmen and a carriage. For Mrs. Osborne did not find it in the least interfered with her happiness to have men to manage or “richer” things to eat. As a matter of fact she liked managing, and rejoiced in the building of a new wing to the brown stone house, in the acquisition of motor cars and in the drain on their time and resources by Edward being made Mayor of Sheffield. Neither of them ever thought that they had been happier when their means were more straitened and their establishment humbler. Both of them, in spite of an essential and innate simplicity of nature rejoiced in these establishments, and were always ready to enlarge and embellish and rejoice. They had always made the most of their current resources—though in a merely financial sense they had always saved—and it was as great a pleasure to Mrs. Osborne to see her table plentifully loaded with the most expensive food that money could provide, and press second helpings on her guests, as it had been to have a solid four courses at midday dinner on Sunday in Sheffield and tell her friends that Mr. Osborne liked nothing better than to have a good dinner on Sunday, and see a pleasant party to share it with him. She still inquired if she might not “tempt” her neighbours at table to have another quail, just as she had tried to persuade them to have a second cut of roast lamb, when in season, while from the other end of the table she would hear as a hospitable echo her husband’s voice recommending Veuve Clicquot of 1884, just as in the old days he had recommended the sound whiskey which would hurt nobody, not if you drank it all afternoon.

The year of the mayoralty of Sheffield had been succeeded by seven years fatter than even Joseph had dreamed of. Edward was as sound in his business as he was in the whiskey he so hospitably pressed on his guests, and by dint of always supplying goods of the best possible workmanship and material at prices that gave him no more than a respectable profit, the profits had annually increased till in the opinion of those who did not adopt so unspeculative a quality of goods, they had almost ceased to be respectable, and became colossal instead. Then, at the end of seven fat years, Edward had realized that he was sixty, though he neither looked nor felt more than an adolescent fifty, had turned the hardware business into a company, and as vendor had received ordinary shares to an extent that would insure him an income no less than that of the fat years. He had already put by a capital that produced some ten thousand pounds a year, and he was thus not disadvantageously situated. Percy, however, still held the Art Department in his own hands. The plant and profits of that had not been offered to the public, but had been presented to Percy by his father on the occasion of his marriage, an event now six years old. For the whole idea of ornamental tin ivy and the host of collateral ideas that emanated therefrom had been Percy’s and it was now a joke between his father and him that Mrs. P. would soon have an emerald necklace that would take the shine out of the Land’s End. “Land’s End will be Mrs. P.’s beginning,” said his father. “And the Sea is Britannia’s realm,” he added by a happy afterthought. “I’ll call her Mrs. C. instead of Mrs. P. Hey, Per?”

Badinage had ensued. She was called Mrs. C. instantly and there were numerous conjectures as to who C. was. Mr. Osborne said that it was curious that C. was the first letter of Co-respondent; but that joke, though Edward was usually very successful in such facetiæ, was not very well received. The momentary Mrs. C. ate her grapes with a studied air, and Mrs. Osborne from the other end of the table—this was still in Sheffield—said, “You don’t think, Eddie; you let your tongue run away with you.”

On reflection Eddie agreed with her, and there was no more heard about Mrs. C. But he always thought that his badinage had been taken a little too seriously. “A joke’s a joke,” he said to himself as he shaved his chin next morning, leaving side-whiskers. “But if they don’t like one joke, we’ll try another. Lots of jokes still left.”

So without sense of injury or of being misunderstood he tried plenty of others, which were as successful as humour should have any expectation of being. Humour comes from a well that is rarely found, but when found proves always to be inexhaustible. The numerical value, therefore, of Edward’s jokes had not been diminished and Percy inherited his father’s sense of fun.

Still in Sheffield, Mr. Osborne had, after the formation of the company, seen an extraordinary increase in business, with the result that his income, already scarcely respectable, mounted and mounted. Years ago he had built a chapel of corrugated iron outside and pitch-pine inside in the middle of that district of the town which had become his and was enstreeted with the houses of his workmen, and now he turned the corrugated building into a reading room, as soon as ever the tall Gothic church with which he had superseded it was ready for use. A princess had come to the opening of it, and had declared the discarded church to be a reading room, and there was really nothing more to do in Sheffield, except to say that he did not wish to become a knight. Mr. Osborne had no opinion of knights: knighthood in his mind was the bottom shelf of a structure, where, if he took a place, it might easily become a permanent one. But he had no idea of accepting a bottom place on the shelves. With his natural shrewdness he said that he had done nothing to deserve it. But he winked in a manner that anticipated familiarity toward shelves that were higher. He had not done with the question of shelves yet, though he had nothing to say to the lowest one.

It must not be supposed that because he had retired from active connection with the hardware business, his mind slackened. The exact contrary was the case. There was no longer any need for him to exercise that shrewd member on hardware, and it only followed that the thought he had previously given to hardware was directed into other channels. He thought things over very carefully as was his habit, before taking any step, summed up his work in Sheffield, settled that a knighthood was not adequate to reward him for what he had already done, but concluded that he had nothing more to do in Sheffield, just for the moment. And having come to that conclusion he had a long talk with Mrs. O. in her boudoir, where she always went after breakfast to see cook and write her letters. But that morning cook waited downstairs in her clean apron long after Mrs. Osborne had gone to her boudoir, expecting every moment to hear her bell, and no bell sounded. For more weighty matters were being debated than the question of dinner, and at first when Mr. Osborne broached the subject his wife felt struck of a heap.

“Well, Mrs. O., it’s for you to settle,” he said, “and if you’re satisfied to remain in Sheffield, why in Sheffield we remain, old lady, and that’s the last word you shall hear from me on the subject. But there’s a deal to be considered and I’ll just put the points before you again. There’s yourself to lead off with. You like seeing your friends at dinner and giving them of the best and so do I. Well, for all I can learn there’s a deal more of that going on in London where you can have your twenty people to dinner every night if you have a mind, and a hundred to dance to your fiddles afterward. And I’m much mistaken, should we agree to leave Sheffield and set up in town, if Mrs. O.’s parties don’t make some handsome paragraphs in the Morning Post before long.”

“Lor’, to think of that,” said Mrs. Osborne reflectively. She did not generally employ that interjection, which she thought rather common, and even now, though she was so absorbed, she corrected herself and said “There, to think of that.”

“But mind you, my dear,” continued Mr. Osborne, “if we go to town, and have a big house in the country, as per the scheme I’ve been putting before you, we don’t do it to take our ease, and just sit in a barouche and drive round the Park to fill up the time to luncheon. I shall have my work to do, and it’s you who must be helping me to get on, as you’ve always done, God bless you Maria, and fine and busy it will make you. There’s a county council in London as well as in Sheffield, and there’s a House of Parliament in London which there isn’t here. No, my dear, if we go to London it won’t be for a life of ease, for I expect work suits us both better, and there’s plenty of work left in us both yet. Give us ten years more work, and then if you like we’ll get into our Bath chairs, and comb out the fleece of the poodle, and think what a busy couple we are.”

Mr. Osborne got up and shuffled to the window in his carpet slippers. They had been worked and presented to him by his wife on his last birthday and this had been a great surprise, as she had told him throughout that they were destined for Percy. At this moment they suggested something to him.

“Look at me already, my dear!” he said. “What should I have thought ten years ago if I had seen myself here in your boudoir at eleven of the morning in carpet slippers instead of being at work in my shirt sleeves this last three hours. ‘Eddie,’ I should have said to myself, ‘you’re getting a fat, lazy old man with years of work in you yet.’ And, by Gad, Mrs. O., I should have been right. Give me a good dinner, but let me get an appetite for it, though, thank God, my appetite’s good enough yet.’ But let me feel I earn it.”

Mrs. Osborne got up from her davenport and came and stood by her husband in the window. In front of her stretched the broad immaculate gravel walk bordered by a long riband bed of lobelias, calceolarias and geraniums. Beyond that was the weedless tennis lawn, with its brand new net, where one of the very numerous gardeners was even now marking out the court with the machine that Mr. Osborne had invented and patented the year before he retired from entire control of his business, and which sold in ever increasing quantities. Below, the ground fell rapidly away and not half a mile off the long straggling rows of workmen’s houses between which ran cobbled roads and frequent electric trams, stretched unbroken into the town. Of late years it had grown very rapidly in the direction of this brown stone house, and with its growth the fogs and smoky vapours had increased so that it was seldom, as on this morning, that they could see from the windows the tall and very solid tower of the Gothic church that had supplanted the one of corrugated iron. He looked out over this with his wife’s hand in his for a moment in silence.

“I don’t know how it is with you, my dear,” he said, “but every now and then a feeling comes over me which I can’t account for or resist. And the feeling that’s been coming over me this last month agone, is that me and Sheffield’s done all the work we’re going to do together. But there are plenty of days of work for us both yet, but not together. Look at that there quarter, my dear, right from where the New Lane houses begin to where’s the big chimney of the works behind the church. I made that, as well you know, and it’s paid me well to do it, and it’s paid Sheffield to have me to do it. Not an ounce of bad material, to my knowledge, has gone into the factory gates, and not an ounce of bad workmanship has come out of them. I’ve paid high for first-class materials, and I seen that I got them. I’ve turned out none but honest goods what’ll do the work I guarantee them for, and last you ten times as long as inferior stuff, as you and cook know, since there’s not a pot or a pan in your kitchen, my dear, but what came from the shops. And I’ve made my fortune over it, and that’s over, so I take it, and what’s the sense of my sitting on top of a hill, just to look at my calceolarias and get an appetite for dinner by running about that court there? But if you’ve got a fancy for staying in Sheffield, as I say, this is the last word I speak on the subject.”

Mrs. Osborne nodded at him and pressed his arm, as he poured out these gratifying recollections in his rather hoarse voice.

“There’s more on your mind yet, Eddie, my dear,” she said. “Do you think I’ve lived with you these years and seen you off your victuals by day and heard you tossing and turning in your bed at night without getting to know when you’ve told me all, or when you’ve got something further unbeknown to me yet? It’s not me only you’re thinking of.”

Mr. Osborne beamed on his wife.

“Well, if you aren’t right every time,” he said. “You’ve guessed it all I reckon. Yes, it’s Claude. I doubt whether I didn’t make a mistake about Claude at the beginning, and whether we shouldn’t have done better to put him into the business like Percy, and let Alfred leave him his money or not just as he liked. But there, if we made a mistake, it’s our business to make the best we can of it now. But whenever I see the boy I think we did the right thing by him, and we’ve got to go on doing the right thing. And if a young fellow has been to Eton and Cambridge, and is going to be as rich a man and richer nor his father was, without having to do a stroke of work for it, I ask you, Mrs. O., what’s he to do with himself in Sheffield? Of course, he could go to London and work at the law or go into the Army or adopt any other of the ways of wasting time and doing nothing, without having it cast up at you, but think of the chance he gets, if you and I settle in London and have a country house as well, so that he can ask his friends down for a bit of shooting or whatever’s on, and bring them home to dine, and stop for his mother’s dance or concert, or whatever you have named for such a day.”

He paused a moment.

“He’ll be home for good now in a month’s time, and I should like to be able to say to him, ‘Claude, my boy, there’s no need for you to think how you’ll occupy yourself in Sheffield for your vacation, for we’ll soon be moving on. Mother and I’—that’s what I shall say—you understand—‘have come to an agreement, and there’ll be a house for you in Grosvenor Square, perhaps, or in Park Lane to bring your friends to, and a shooting box somewhere else, so that whether it’s Lord This or the Honourable That, you can bring them down and find a welcome, and a bird or two to shoot at, and the pick of the London girls for you to dance with.’”

“Eh, Edward, you talk as if the thing was done,” said his wife.

“Well, so it is, if you and I make up our minds to it. And you guessed right; it’s a particular feeling I’ve always had about Claude. Eton and Cambridge may have made a change in him, or it may be that he was something different all along. But to see him come into a room, into that smoking room for instance at the Club. Why, it’s as if the whole place belonged to him, it is, if only he cared to claim it. And the very waiters know the difference: and I warrant you there’s always an evening paper ready for him, whoever has to go without. But in London he’ll find friends, yes, and a girl to marry him, I wager you, whose folk came over with the Conqueror. Maria, I should like to speak of my son-in-law the Earl, or the Countess my boy’s mother-in-law. There’s a deal in a name if you can get hold of the right one.”

Mrs. Osborne gave a great sigh, and looked at her rings, and as she sighed the row of pearls that hung over her ample bosom rose and fell. There was a great deal in what Edward had said, and that which concerned Claude appealed to her most. She had felt it all again and again, and again and again she had wished, content though she was with the very comfortable circumstances of her life, that they had some other house in which to welcome him home for his vacation. She felt he was her own son at heart, but his manners were such! It was Claude all over to behave as if the whole room belonged to him, should he choose to claim it. She was devoted to Percy, but Percy, she well knew, felt as she did when he was going out to dinner, and thought about what he should say, and looked to see if his hair was tidy, and hoped he hadn’t left his handkerchief behind. But Claude seemed to know that everything was all right, with him, or if it wasn’t he didn’t care. Once on a solemn occasion, when a Royal visitor was in Sheffield, the whole family had been bidden to lunch with the mayor, and Claude had discovered in the middle of lunch that he hadn’t got a pocket-handkerchief, and the day was enough to make anybody persp——. And then in thought Mrs. Osborne checked again, and said to herself “action of the skin.” But Claude, though hot, had been as cool as a cucumber. He just stopped a waiter who was going by and said, “Please send out to the nearest shop and get me a handkerchief.” Mrs. Osborne would never have dared to do that, and if she had, she felt that the handkerchief wouldn’t have come. But in five minutes Claude had his, “and never paid for it neither,” thought Mr. Osborne to himself in a mixed outburst of pride and misgiving. Claude wanted a handkerchief and it came. He didn’t bother about it.

But the whole suggestion of giving up Sheffield where she was so friendly and pleasant with so many local magnates and their wives, and launching into the dim unplumbed sea of London was bewildering though exciting. She had no doubts about Edward; wherever Edward was he would do his part; she was only doubtful about her own. And these doubts were not of durable quality, while the reflections about Claude were durable in texture. Once a friend of Claude’s at Cambridge had come to stay at the brown stone house, and it had all been very awkward. He was an honourable, too, and his father was a lord, and though he was very quiet and polite, Mrs. Osborne had seen that something was wrong from the first. The most carefully planned dinners had been offered him, and Edward had brought out the Chateau Yquem, which was rarely touched, and this young man had eaten and drunk as if “it was nothing particular.” Mrs. Osborne had tried to console herself with the thought that he didn’t think much of his victuals, whatever they were, but it was not that he refused dishes. He just ate them all, and said no more about it. And he had been regaled with two dinner parties during the three days he was with them, to which all sorts of Aldermen and their wives and daughters had been bidden. She had not forgotten his rank either, for though there were two knights and their wives present at one of these dinners, and at the other two knights and a baronet, he had taken her in on both occasions. Nor was their conversation wholly satisfactory, for though Mrs. Osborne had the Morning Post brought up to her room with her early tea, while the young man was there, in order that she might be up to date with the movements and doings of the nobility, she had extraordinarily bad luck, since the bankruptcy case that was going on was concerned with the affairs of his sister and her husband, and the memorial service at St. James’s proved to be coincident with the obsequies of his great-uncle. Mrs. Osborne felt that these things would not happen when they were in the midst of everything in town.

So the momentous decision had been made and two strenuous years had followed, during which time Mr. Osborne had settled to adopt (as became a man of property in these Socialistic days) the Conservative cause in politics, and after one defeat to get himself returned for one of the divisions of Surrey. During that time, too, No. 92 Park Lane had been pulled down and by amalgamation with No. 93, been built up again in a style that enabled Mrs. O. to have her friends to dine, with a bit of a dance afterward or Caruso to sing, without it being necessary for late comers to huddle together on the stairs where they could not hear a note, or stand in the doorway of the ballroom without being able to get in, or to dance if they did. And though, as has been stated, the years had been strenuous and the struggle continuous, neither Mrs. Osborne nor her husband ever felt that it was a losing game that they were playing. Apart from this one defeat in the Conservative interest, and one dismal attempt at a dance in the house that they had taken before No. 92 was ready, to which eight men came (all told and counting Percy) they had swiftly and steadily mounted. For true to the principles on which her husband had amassed so large a fortune, all that Mrs. Osborne offered was of the very best, or at any rate of the sort which momentarily most attracted. The singer who was most in vogue sang at her concerts, or the heels that were most admired danced there, and beyond doubt the extreme pleasure that the excellent woman took in her own hospitality contributed largely to its success. She was no careworn anxious-eyed hostess, but bubbled with good-humour, was genuinely glad to see the world fill her rooms, and always welcomed the suggestion that any guest should bring a friend, whose name was instantly entered by her admirable secretary on her visiting list.

And thus she rose and prospered, till on the date at which this story opens, she had crowned the work of her season by giving this immense fancy-dress ball, which, to give it its due, had whipped up again to full activity the rather moribund energies of the season. Somehow the idea had taken on at once; there had been no fancy-dress function of any importance that season, and by one of those whims that govern the flow and ebb of the social world, London had thrown itself with avidity into the notion. It was soon clear that everyone would be there, and everyone was, and at last in her own house Mrs. Osborne heard the strains of the National Anthem.

It had been of no particular period; the point was not to have a strict and classical function but any amount of jewels and fine dresses, and Queens of Sheba, Cleopatras and Marie Antoinettes joined hands in the quadrille with Napoleon, Piers Gaveston and Henry VIII. She herself had been an admirable Mistress Page, her husband a veritable merry knight. But of all the brilliant figures in that motley crowd there was none perhaps more admired than the slim dark Piers Gaveston. And that was Claude.

CHAPTER II.

DORA WEST was trimming her hat. It was a straw hat that had cost a shilling or two when it came into her deft hands, and the trimming would only prove to have cost a shilling or two when it became attached to the hat, and leaving the deft hands was put onto her extremely pretty head. But by that time the hat would certainly have become a very pretty hat. This she was explaining with great volubility to her friend.

“You are rich, darling May,” she said, “and in consequence your attitude toward hats is a little opulent and vulgar. I can put the feathers and the flags and the birds’ eggs in exactly the same place as Biondinetti, or whoever it is who sells you hats.”

“No, not exactly,” said Mary, with the quietness that real conviction brings. She was quite certain about that point, and so did not care to shout over it. It is only when people are not certain about what they say, that they drown their want of conviction in arguments. Conviction always swims.

Dora had several pins in her mouth, and so did not reply at once. In itself the pin-reason was excellent, and more excellent was the fact that she did not wish to reply, knowing the quiet truth of Mary’s conviction, especially since she could not settle the exact angle at which a very large white feather should be put. It pierced the hat, once inward once outward, that was Biondinetti all over, but where in heaven’s name ought it to start from? So she only made a little impatient noise with her lips, and even that was difficult, since there was a danger of causing a pin to be sucked into her mouth. But she made it successfully. She poised the feather a moment, focussing its appearance against the hat. The effect produced by the impatient noise was sufficient to ensure her against any immediate reply. Then suddenly the inspiration came, and with a pair of tiny scissors she cut a strand or two in the straw and stuck the quill feather through the holes.

“There,” she said, “and you pay Biondinetti two guineas for doing that. I can’t, and I wouldn’t if I could. Austell wrote to me last week and said the swans were moulting, and I telegraphed—that cost sixpence and a little thought, instead of two guineas—to tell him to send me big wing feathers. He’s a dreadful ass; we all know that, but he had the sense to see I wanted feathers, and to catch a swan and pluck——”

“What a disgusting butcher,” said May. “I don’t mean butcher, I mean vivisectionist.”

“And how do you think you get your feathers, darling?” asked Dora.

“I don’t know; I never ask. The hat comes from the shop.”

“Then don’t ask now, because I will tell you. Your horrid shop has birds killed, and then plucks them. It does; you can’t deny it. Whereas with me the swan was just moulting, and Austell assisted Nature, which we all do. He caught its head in a landing-net and it tried to peck, he says——”

Dora West stopped suddenly in the middle of these surprising remarks, and held out the hat at arm’s length in order to observe the effect of the feather. She had one of those enchanting faces that are overwhelmingly pretty for no particular reason. You could, if you chose, argue her prettiness away, by maintaining with justification that no single feature on it had warrantable claims. They were all passable, it is true, but it was not clear how it came about that the sum of them was so delicious. Her eyes were gray, and had nothing striking to recommend them, her nose turned up at the tip far too markedly to be able to claim beauty, and the mouth was quite certainly too large. Yet even allowing for the charm of her extreme youth and the vigour and vividness of her vitality, there was no accounting for the supreme prettiness that was there. So the sensible thing was to stop arguing and look at it again, and more sensible yet, to say something that should make her laugh. For her laugh was the most enchanting thing of all; then every feature laughed, there was no telling where it began or where it ended. May before now had declared that from quite a distance off, when Dora’s back was turned, she had in a ballroom seen she was amused because the back of her neck and her shoulders were laughing so much. “Oh, Nature wants a lot of assistance,” she went on. “She is perfectly hopeless if you leave her to herself. Look at the flowers even, which are quite the nicest thing she does. Roses, for instance; all she could think of in the way of roses was the ordinary wild dog rose. I don’t say it is bad, but how paltry, if you have had simply millions of years to invent roses in. Then man comes along, who is the only really unnatural being, and in quite a few years invents all the heavenly roses which we see now. Of course Nature did it, in a sense, but she did it with his assistance.”

“But why do you call man unnatural?” asked May.

“Why? Because he saw at once how stupid Nature was, and had to invent all the things that make life tolerable. He lit fires, and built houses, and made laws, and motor-cars, and shops, and—and boats and button hooks. Motor-cars, too; all that Nature could think of in the way of locomotion was horses.”

The feathers were inserted in absolutely the right place, and Dora breathed a heavy sigh of satisfaction, laid the hat down on the end of the sofa, hovered over the tea table for a moment, and selected an enormous bun.

“And Nature gives us brains,” she continued, with her mouth full, “and the moment we begin to use them, as I have been doing over that hat, which is Biondinetti, she decrees that we shall be so hungry that we have to stop and eat instead. The same with talking: she gives us a tongue to talk with and after quite a few minutes, talking makes us hungry too, and we have to use our tongue to help us to swallow. Did you know you swallowed with your tongue, darling? I never did till yesterday. I thought I swallowed with my throat, but apparently the tongue helps. That’s why we can’t talk with our mouths full as I am doing.”

May Thurston looked at the hat on the end of the sofa for a while, and then transferred her gaze to her friend.

“I don’t think I agree with you,” she said. “At least I allow that many people don’t know what being natural means, but I think all the nicest people are natural. You, for instance, and me and Mrs. Osborne last night at her dance. Never before have I seen a hostess really enjoying herself at her own ball. She stood at the top of the stairs and beamed, she danced and beamed——”

“And never before have you seen a person like Mrs. Osborne dance,” remarked Dora.

“Well, not often. Anyhow, she enjoyed herself tremendously and was perfectly natural.”

Dora shook her head.

“It won’t do, darling,” she said. “I allow that Mrs. Osborne beamed all the time and enjoyed herself enormously. But why? Because everybody was there. Was she ever so much pleased at Sheffield, do you suppose, or wherever it was they came from? I am sure she was not. But last night she was pleased because every duchess and marchioness who counts at all was there, as well as heaps that don’t count at all. She’s a snob: probably the finest ever seen, and by what process of reasoning you arrive at the fact that a snob is natural is beyond me. I agree that heaps of nice people are snobs, but snobbishness is in itself the most artificial quality of an artificial age. Snobs are the crowning and passionate protest against Nature——”

“Oh well,” said May in deprecation of this rather lengthy harangue, “I didn’t mean to rouse you, Dora.”

“I daresay not, and in that case you have done so without meaning. But really, when you say that Mrs. Osborne is natural I am bound to protest. You might as well say that your mother is.”

“Oh no, I mightn’t,” said May quite calmly. “It would be simply silly to call mother natural. She only does things because they are ‘the thing.’ She spends her whole life in doing ‘the thing.’ And yet I don’t know—oh, Dora, what very odd people women are when they grow up! Shall you and I be as odd, do you think? I love mother, and so do you, and we both of us love yours, don’t we? but they are very, very odd people.”

Dora gave a little shriek of laughter.

“Oh don’t,” she said. “I want to talk about snobs a little more.”

“Well, I’m sure you’ve often told me that mother was one,” remarked May.

“Yes, the darling; she is, isn’t she? She is the most delicious sort of snob. A month ago she wouldn’t know the Osbornes, and merely said, ‘I have no doubt they are very honest people,’ with her nose at the same angle toward earth as is the Matterhorn; while a week ago she was clamouring for an invitation to the dance last night. In the interval it had become ‘the thing’ to know the Osbornes. My mother saw it was going to be ‘the thing’ to know them long ago, and called at Park Lane almost before they had washed the white blobs of paint off the windows, or hung up those shields of heraldic glass on the stairs——”

“Oh, no, is there heraldic glass on the stairs?” asked May, in a slightly awe-struck tone. “I never saw it.”

Dora, as her friend often declared, really did not always play fair. There had quite distinctly been the satirical note in her own allusion to the heraldic glass, but as soon as May reflected that in the appreciative reverence of her reply, Dora was down upon her at once.

“And why shouldn’t they have heraldic glass as much as your people or mine?” she asked smartly. “They’ve got exactly as many grandfathers and grandmothers as we have, and there’s not the slightest reason to doubt that Mrs. Osborne was a Miss Parkins, and Mr. Parkins’s heir, who, I expect, was far more respectable than my mother’s father, who drank himself to death, though mother always calls it cerebral hæmorrhage. Oh, May, we are all snobs, and I’m not sure the worst snobbishness of all isn’t shown by those who say they came over with William the Conqueror or were descended from Edward the Fourth. Probably the Osbornes didn’t come over with William the Conqueror but were here long before, only they don’t happen to know who they were.”

“I know, that is just it,” said May, calmly. “They don’t know who they were, and yet they put up their coats of arms.”

Dora looked at her friend in contempt.

“I suppose you think you have scored over that,” she said.

“Not in the least. I am only pointing out perfectly obvious things.”