Read Ebook: Odds and ends by Croker B M Bithia Mary

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Ebook has 789 lines and 42758 words, and 16 pages

Their charming new acquaintance made no secret of the fact that for the last two years she had been a governess in Simla, and was now returning to England, before joining her only near relative, a married brother in Canada.

The Professor, although hardened by many London seasons, was immensely attracted by the young lady's bright eyes, her sympathetic manner and light-hearted gaiety. Together they played chess and bridge, and together they promenaded the decks, whilst complacent matrons looked on and approved. Julian Serle was a celebrity, a well-bred, good-looking little man, with, it was said, considerable private means.

"It would be a capital match for the girl. Much better for her to marry and settle in London than to rough it on a ranch in Canada."

Ultimately, a moonlit Mediterranean night proved to be the undoing of Julian. As he smoked, and paced the deck alone, he had been meditating on Miss Thursby. What an agreeable companion Helen would be! So intelligent, sensible, charming. He had no near relations, merely a hungry, extravagant nephew, his heir. Why not marry and make himself a home, before he fell into the sere and yellow? Miss Thursby was clever; she would be a stimulating helpmate--one who could type and copy, and was interested in Assyria. Yes! Helen would be his Egeria, and his inspiration.

That same lovely night, leaning over the bulwarks, he spoke; deplored his lonely life, his lack of belongings, and figuratively laid himself and his fortune at his lady's remarkably neat feet.

"I am not," he pleaded, "the usual style of musty fossilised old professor; we will enjoy life together, and when I am working you can still have your own friends and amusements. And I think I can promise that you shall never be bored."

His lady-love listened to him with shining eyes, and accepted his proposal with joy. Perhaps the little man beside her was not precisely her ideal. Her ideal had been someone in India, who was too poor to marry a penniless girl, and had subsequently taken a well-dowered wife. However, she had completely recovered from that heart attack, and honestly liked her present suitor.

Six weeks after the steamer had docked at Tilbury, the pair were married in London, and subsequently established themselves in a nice roomy flat in South Kensington.

All their friends crowded to call. The bride, though poor, was well connected, the bridegroom a popular celebrity, and the newly-married couple lived in a perpetual round of dinners and social entertainment. Serle had a large circle of distinguished contemporaries: philosophers, men of letters, and men of affairs.

This agreeable condition continued for months. Helen Serle was so hospitable and attractive that visitors invaded the flat from morning to night. She was invited to theatres, concerts, lectures, and dances, yet never neglected her home or husband, but wrote and typed industriously--that is to say, when Julian had a working fit--and found ample leisure for music, theatres, and other pleasures.

From Brighton he fled to the Athens of the North. Here, alas, matters were worse, for literary society fell upon the author, so to speak, as one man! Dinners, from which he could not absent himself, were given in his honour. He was invited to read papers, and to lecture on his most notable subjects--"Sardinapolis," and "Alexander the Great in Assyria."

In short, his work was absolutely at a standstill. Summer was coming, but "The Life of Semiramis," and her reign of forty-two years, was not advancing to any appreciable degree. Strong measures were his only resource. And in response to an advertisement, he secured a temporary home in a far-distant village in the south of England. It was off a main line, and buried in the country. Servants, dog, poultry, and pony were included with a most delightful furnished cottage. Helen Serle was enchanted. Edinburgh was a little bit too literary for her; she enjoyed the change from the thunder of trams in Princes Street to the cooing of pigeons in the woods, and fell in love at first sight with the cottage, the garden, and the village. Alas, in a place whose name he had never heard till he had rented "Meadow-sweet," the Professor encountered an acquaintance--Canon Simpson, an old college friend, who happened to be staying at the Rectory.

For the moment Mrs. Serle's husband felt paralysed and speechless. Like the dove from the ark, would he never find a place for the sole of his foot? When he thought of his book, his notes, his elaborate bits of description, all clamouring to be copied out, and polished up, he was struck with a brain storm. "Desperate ills require desperate remedies." If the whole country was threatening to call, and the cottage was to be overrun with visitors, there were precisely two alternatives: one to return to Meadow-sweet, and begin to pack--the other ... and the other he seized on. Clenching his hand on his stick, with his guilty eyes fastened on the ground, he jerked out:

To do his conscience justice, Julian Serle felt miserably hot and uncomfortable, as he faced towards home; he had insinuated a most terrible lie--but there was nothing else for it! He would allow the neighbours to suppose that Helen was his mistress--since no other defence would secure complete privacy and isolation. After all, what did it matter in this God-forsaken part of the world, where they did not know a soul? And it was only for three months. Then Helen could return home, meet all her old friends, and as many new ones as she liked!

At first Mrs. Serle was supremely indifferent to the lack of callers. In fact, she never gave them a thought. The pony and trap, the dog, the garden and the poultry, kept her delightfully engaged. She had a weekly box from Mudie's, some interesting embroidery, plenty of correspondence, and half a dozen new songs. After two or three weeks these pleasures began to pall, and she realised the want of a companion of her own sex, with whom to discuss new stitches, new novels, and new songs. Julian, plunged in the records of Semiramis and her times, and surrounded by stacks of musty old books, had no thought for anything but his absorbing work, and--as an occasional relaxation--a little trout-fishing.

But, once Helen had seen to the housekeeping, the flowers, and accomplished a certain amount of typing, her hours were her own, and proved both empty and solitary. As she walked out with the dog, or drove "Fat Tom," the bay pony, she noticed that the neighbourhood was well populated. Within half a mile were two large places, whose gates delivered and received motors. There were also various country houses, where she caught sight of green lawns, and gatherings of active white-clad figures, playing tennis. Helen Serle loved tennis, and was quite a notable performer.

Strange that not a soul had come to look them up. And yet they had been at Beckwell a whole month. The villagers, too, seemed funny people. Their manners were surly, their answers brief to rudeness. And how they stared! Mrs. Serle was not unaccustomed to being looked at, nor did she disdain a certain amount of respectful admiration, but in the expression of these people's eyes lay curiosity, aversion, and contempt. The servants of the cottage--two well-trained maids and a gardener-groom--had, at first, been civil and satisfactory. Now they were off-hand and almost insolent; and yet she treated them well, and gave little trouble. Indeed, she dusted the drawing-room and did the lamps herself, partly to fill up her time. Nevertheless, the cook scowled, Annie flounced and slammed doors, and once she had been overpowered by a suspicion that the groom-gardener had winked at her! She turned and confronted him with a flaming face--and he had never repeated this enormity.

"What do you mean?" cried Helen, white with anger. "I insist on knowing!"

But Annie merely turned her back, and began to arrange the ornaments on the chimney-piece.

"Answer me, Annie."

"You cannot remain here!" said her mistress breathlessly. "You must leave at once. Go now and pack your things."

"Only too glad to be out of it," was Annie's retort, as with a toss of her head she tramped from the room.

Julian Serle was deep in meditation over the particular neat insertion of a "purple patch," when his wife burst in upon him in a condition of extraordinary excitement.

"Oh, Julian, what do you think! That girl Ann has been most outrageously insolent. I found her just now trying on my best hat; and when I remonstrated, she said the most awful things--insinuating--I can't tell you what. I think she must be crazy, for I'm sure she doesn't drink. Anyhow, she shall depart within the hour. So please give me one pound, thirteen shillings, and four pence."

"Oh, nonsense!" he exclaimed. "Why mind her, Nell? It's only her ignorance. The mental calibre of these rustics is abnormally low."

"But, my dear, how will you manage without her?"

"Oh, I'll get in the laundress's sister. I hear she's been in service. Sooner than keep Annie, I would do the work myself."

That afternoon Annie departed. As she bounced into the room to receive her wages, she said with a touch of sarcasm:

"I'll not trouble you for a character. A character from this house would be no use to me--and only stand in my way. I hear you are getting Maggie King as parlourmaid--and when she comes there will be a pair of you!"

Then, seizing the one pound, thirteen shillings, and four pence, she swept out, to where a ruddy-faced young man was waiting to carry her box. He accorded Mrs. Serle a sort of up-and-down glare, and was presumably the "Jim, who didn't half like it!"

After this little domestic storm, things subsided at the cottage. Maggie King proved humble and amenable, but her mistress noticed that she and the cook were barely on speaking terms--and that Maggie took her meals alone in the pantry.

One evening, as they sat in the garden after dinner, Helen said to her husband:

"Julian, don't you think it very odd that not a soul has called?"

"Well, no, my dear; the fact is--they know who I am, and that I'm desperately busy, and only here for absolute peace and seclusion. They understand how hard I am working."

"Um! Um!"--taking his cheroot out of his mouth and looking at it thoughtfully. "Maybe so. There may be something in what you say."

"How soon do you think the book will be finished?" She had actually come to hate the great work! Solitude, silence, and loneliness had quenched her earlier enthusiasm.

"I am just commencing the last chapter but one."

"Thank goodness!" she exclaimed with heartfelt satisfaction.

"I'm hoping that this work will definitely decide my position as an authority on Assyrian matters, and rank me with Blair, Usher, and Clinton. If so, my labours will not have been in vain"; and he smiled with easy assurance.

"But, Julian dear, do you think that it was worth it?"

"Worth what?"

"I mean sacrificing hours, days, and months, to a dusty, sandy old subject--that can only interest a comparatively small public?"

He put down his paper and stared as if he could not believe his ears.

"You miss so much," she continued boldly. "Think of the beautiful summer you have wasted, stuffing indoors, from morning till night; only creeping out now and then to do a little fishing. Think of our friends, that we have scarcely seen for six months. You are sacrificing your best hours and days to the memory of a dead woman--a woman who has been dead nearly four thousand years! Even so, I am most frightfully jealous of her!"

"But I thought you were almost at the last chapter?" she protested, with tears in her voice.

"That's true. But the complete work has to be carefully revised--rather a big job! However, when it is ready for the printers, you and I will go off, and have a couple of gay weeks in Paris."

The long, empty days lagged on. Mrs. Serle, as she walked or gardened, felt more and more solitary and depressed. Alas, for the time when she rode high on the crest of popularity! She could not have believed it possible that she would have pined so incessantly for the society of one of her own sex. Was there something strange about the house they lived in? Was there anything peculiar about herself? Why did people cross the road when they saw her? Why had she a whole pew to herself in church? The situation presented was an extraordinary puzzle! Yet she dared not seek further enlightenment from Julian, for just now he was so immersed in his book that he scarcely snatched his meals. Her enlightenment came from another quarter.

For lack of amusement, it was her custom to drive far afield, the dog seated beside her as sole companion. In a remote country road she happened upon a lady resting on a bank with a bicycle beside her. She was evidently in distress, as she looked ghastly pale, and had taken off a boot.

"Can I help you in any way?" inquired Mrs. Serle, as she pulled up.

For a moment the stranger did not reply. Her pale face became crimson. At last she said:

"I've had a tumble off my bicycle. We went over a loose stone, and I'm afraid I've sprained my ankle. If you can give me a lift back to Beckwell I shall be awfully obliged."

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