The Disentanglers

This kind of thing went on; when Matilda was visiting her cottagers it was the Vidame and Mrs. Brown-Smith whom visitors flushed in window seats. They wondered that Mrs. Malory had asked so dangerous a woman to the house: they marvelled that she seemed quite radiant and devoted to her lively visitor. There was a school feast: it was the Vidame who arranged hurdle-races for children of both sexes (so improper!), and who started the competitors.

Meanwhile Mrs. Malory, so unusually genial in public, held frequent conventicles with Matilda in private. But Matilda declined to be jealous; they were only old friends, she said, these flagitious two; Dear Anne (that was the Vidame’s Christian name) was all that she could wish.

‘You know the place is so dull, mother,’ the brave girl said. ‘Even grandmamma, who was a saint, says so in her Domestic Outpourings’ (religious memoirs privately printed in 1838). ‘We cannot amuse Mrs. Brown-Smith, and it is so kind and chivalrous of Anne.’

‘To neglect you?’

‘No, to do duty for Tom and Dick,’ who were her brothers, and who would not greatly have entertained the fair visitor had they been present.

Matilda was the kind of woman whom we all adore as represented in the characters of Fielding’s Amelia and Sophia. Such she was, so gracious and yielding, in her overt demeanour, but, alas, poor Matilda’s pillow was often wet with her tears. She was loyal; she would not believe evil: she crushed her natural jealousy ‘as a vice of blood, upon the threshold of the mind.’

Mrs. Brown-Smith was nearly as unhappy as the girl. The more she hated the Vidame – and she detested him more deeply every day – the more her heart bled for Matilda. Mrs. Brown-Smith also had her secret conferences with Mrs. Malory.

‘Nothing will shake her belief in that man,’ said Mrs. Malory.

‘Your daughter is the best girl I ever met,’ said Mrs. Brown-Smith. ‘The best tempered, the least suspicious, the most loyal. And I am doing my worst to make her hate me. Oh, I can’t go on!’ Here Mrs. Brown-Smith very greatly surprised her hostess by bursting into tears.

‘You must not desert us now,’ said the elder lady. ‘The better you think of poor Matilda – and she is a good girl – the more you ought to help her.’

It was the 8th of August, no other visitors were at the house, a shooting party was expected to arrive on the 11th. Mrs. Brown-Smith dried her tears. ‘It must be done,’ she said, ‘though it makes me sick to think of it.’

Next day she met the Vidame in the park, and afterwards held a long conversation with Mrs. Malory. As for the Vidame, he was in feverish high spirits, he devoted himself to Matilda, in fact Mrs. Brown-Smith had insisted on such dissimulation, as absolutely necessary at this juncture of affairs. So Matilda bloomed again, like a rose that had been ‘washed, just washed, in a shower.’ The Vidame went about humming the airs of the country which he had honoured by adopting it as the cradle of his ancestry.

On the morning of the following day, while the Vidame strayed with Matilda in the park, Mrs. Brown-Smith was closeted with Mrs. Malory in her boudoir.

‘Everything is arranged,’ said Mrs. Brown-Smith. ‘I, guilty and reckless that I am, have only to sacrifice my character, and all my things. But I am to retain Methven, my maid. That concession I have won from his chivalry.’

‘How do you mean?’ asked Mrs. Malory.

‘At seven he will get a telegram summoning him to Paris on urgent business. He will leave in your station brougham in time to catch the 9.50 up train at Wilkington. Or, rather, so impatient is he, he will leave half an hour too early, for fear of accidental delays. I and my maid will accompany him. I have thought honesty the best policy, and told the truth, like Bismarck, “and the same,”’ said Mrs. Brown-Smith hysterically, ‘“with intent to deceive.” I have pointed out to him that my best plan is to pretend to you that I am going to meet my husband, who really arrives at Wilkington from Liverpool by the 9.17, though the Vidame thinks that is an invention of mine. So, you see, I leave without any secrecy, or fuss, or luggage, and, when my husband comes here, he will find me flown, and will have to console himself with my luggage and jewels. He – this Frenchified beast, I mean – has written a note for your daughter, which he will give to her maid, and, of course, the maid will hand it to you. So he will have burned his boats. And then you can show it to Matilda, and so,’ said Mrs. Brown-Smith, ‘the miracle of opening her eyes will be worked. Johnnie, my husband, and I will be hungry when we return about half-past ten. And I think you had better telegraph that there is whooping cough, or bubonic plague, or something in the house, and put off your shooting party.’

‘But that would be an untruth,’ said Mrs. Malory.

‘And what have I been acting for the last ten days?’ asked Mrs. Brown-Smith, rather tartly. ‘You must settle your excuse with your conscience.’

‘The cook’s mother really is ill,’ said Mrs. Malory, ‘and she wants dreadfully to go and see her. That would do.’

‘All things work together for good. The cook must have a telegram also,’ said Mrs. Brown-Smith.

The day, which had been extremely hot, clouded over. By five it was raining: by six there was a deluge. At seven, Matilda and the Vidame were evicted from their dusky window seat by the butler with a damp telegraph envelope. The Vidame opened it, and handed it to Matilda. His presence at Paris was instantly demanded. The Vidame was desolated, but his absence could not be for more than five days. Bradshaw was hunted for, and found: the 9.50 train was opportune. The Vidame’s man packed his clothes. Mrs. Brown-Smith was apprised of these occurrences in the drawing-room before dinner.

‘I am very sorry for dear Matilda,’ she cried. ‘But it is an ill wind that blows nobody good. I will drive over with the Vidame and astonish my Johnnie by greeting him at the station. I must run and change my dress.’

She ran, she returned in morning costume, she heard from Mrs. Malory of the summons by telegram calling the cook to her moribund mother. ‘I must send her over to the station in a dog-cart,’ said Mrs. Malory.

‘Oh no,’ cried Mrs. Brown-Smith, with impetuous kindness, ‘not on a night like this; it is a cataclysm. There will be plenty of room for the cook as well as for Methven and me, and the Vidame, in the brougham. Or he can sit on the box.’

The Vidame really behaved very well. The introduction of the cook, to quote an old novelist, ‘had formed no part of his profligate scheme of pleasure.’ To elope from a hospitable roof, with a married lady, accompanied by her maid, might be an act not without precedent. But that a cook should come to form une partie carrée, on such an occasion, that a lover should be squeezed with three women in a brougham, was a trying novelty.

The Vidame smiled, ‘An artist so excellent,’ he said, ‘deserves a far greater sacrifice.’

So it was arranged. After a tender and solitary five minutes with Matilda, the Vidame stepped, last, into the brougham. The coachman whipped up the horses, Matilda waved her kerchief from the porch, the guilty lovers drove away. Presently Mrs. Malory received, from her daughter’s maid, the letter destined by the Vidame for Matilda. Mrs. Malory locked it up in her despatch box.

The runaways, after a warm and uncomfortable drive of three-quarters of an hour, during which the cook wept bitterly and was very unwell, reached the station. Contrary to the Vidame’s wish, Mrs. Brown-Smith, in an ulster and a veil, insisted on perambulating the platform, buying the whole of Mr. Hall Caine’s works as far as they exist in sixpenny editions. Bells rang, porters stationed themselves in a line, like fielders, a train arrived, the 9.17 from Liverpool, twenty minutes late. A short stout gentleman emerged from a smoking carriage, Mrs. Brown-Smith, starting from the Vidame’s side, raised her veil, and threw her arms round the neck of the traveller.

‘You didn’t expect me to meet you on such a night, did you, Johnnie?’ she cried with a break in her voice.

‘Awfully glad to see you, Tiny,’ said the short gentleman. ‘On such a night!’

After thus unconsciously quoting the Merchant of Venice, Mr. Brown-Smith turned to his valet. ‘Don’t forget the fishing-rods,’ he said.

‘I took the opportunity of driving over with a gentleman from Upwold,’ said Mrs. Brown-Smith. ‘Let me introduce him. Methven,’ to her maid, ‘where is the Vidame de la Lain?’

‘I heard him say that he must help Mrs. Andrews, the cook, to find a seat, Ma’am,’ said the maid.

‘He really is kind,’ said Mrs. Brown-Smith, ‘but I fear we can’t wait to say good-bye to him.’

Three-quarters of an hour later, Mr. Brown-Smith and his wife were at supper at Upwold.

Next day, as the cook’s departure had postponed the shooting party, they took leave of their hostess, and returned to their moors in Perthshire.

Weeks passed, with no message from the Vidame. He did not answer a letter which Mrs. Malory allowed Matilda to write. The mother never showed to the girl the note which he had left with her maid. The absence and the silence of the lover were enough. Matilda never knew that among the four packed in the brougham on that night of rain, one had been eloping with a married lady – who returned to supper.

The papers were ‘requested to state that the marriage announced between the Vidame de la Lain and Miss Malory will not take place.’ Why it did not take place was known only to Mrs. Malory, Mrs. Brown-Smith, and Merton.

Matilda thought that her lover had been kidnapped and arrested, by the Secret Police of France, for his part in a scheme to restore the Royal House, the White Flag, the Lilies, the children of St. Louis. At Mrs. Brown-Smith’s place in Perthshire, in the following autumn, Matilda met Sir Aylmer Jardine. Then she knew that what she had taken for love (in the previous year) had been,

‘Not love, but love’s first flush in youth.’

They always do make that discovery, bless them! Lady Jardine is now wrapped up in her baby boy. The mother of the cook recovered her health.

IX. ADVENTURE OF THE LADY NOVELIST AND THE VACCINATIONIST

‘Mr. Frederick Warren’ – so Merton read the card presented to him on a salver of Limoges enamel by the office-boy.

‘Show the gentleman in.’

Mr. Warren entered. He was a tall and portly person, with a red face, red whiskers, and a tightly buttoned frock-coat, which more expressed than hid his goodly and prominent proportions. He bowed, and Merton invited him to be seated. It struck Merton as a singular circumstance that his visitor wore on each arm the crimson badge of the newly vaccinated.

Mr. Warren sat down, and, taking a red silk handkerchief out of the crown of his hat, he wiped his countenance. The day was torrid, and Mr. Merton hospitably offered an effervescent draught.

‘Without the whisky, if you please, sir,’ said Mr. Warren, in a provincial accent. He pointed to a blue ribbon in the buttonhole of his coat, indicating that he was conscientiously opposed to the use of alcoholic refreshment in all its forms.

‘Two glasses of Apollinaris water,’ said Merton to the office-boy; and the innocent fluid was brought, while Merton silently admired his client’s arrangement in blue and crimson. When the thirst of that gentleman had been assuaged, he entered upon business thus:

‘Sir, I am a man of principle!’

Merton congratulated him; the age was lax, he said, and principle was needed. He wondered internally what he was going to be asked to subscribe to, or whether his vote only was required.

‘Sir, have you been vaccinated?’ asked the client earnestly.

‘Really,’ said Merton, ‘I do not quite understand your interest in a matter so purely personal.’

‘Personal, sir? Not at all. It is the first of public duties – the debt that every man, woman, and child owes to his or her country. Have you been vaccinated, sir?’

‘Why, if you insist on knowing,’ said Merton, ‘I have, though I do not see – ’

‘Recently?’ asked the visitor.

‘Yes, last month; but I cannot conjecture why – ’

‘Enough, sir,’ said Mr. Warren. ‘I am a man of principle. Had you not done your duty in this matter by your country, I should have been compelled to seek some other practitioner in your line.’

‘I was not aware that my firm had any competitors in our line of business,’ said Merton. ‘But perhaps you have come here under some misapprehension. There is a firm of family solicitors on the floor above, and next them are the offices of a company interested in a patent explosive. If your affairs, or your political ideas, demand a legal opinion, or an outlet in an explosive which is widely recommended by the Continental Press – ’

‘For what do you take me, sir?’ asked Mr. Warren.

‘For a Temperance Anarchist,’ Merton would have liked to reply, ‘judging by your colours’; but he repressed this retort, and mildly answered, ‘Perhaps it would be as much to the purpose to ask, for what do you take me?’

‘For the representative of Messrs. Gray & Graham, the specialists in matrimonial affairs,’ answered the client; and Merton said that he would be happy if Mr. Warren would enter into the details of his business.

‘I am the ex-Mayor of Bulcester,’ said Mr. Warren, ‘and, as I told you, a man of principle. My attachment to the Temperance cause’ – and he fingered his blue ribbon – ‘procured for me the honour of a defeat at the last general election, but endeared me to the consciences of the Nonconformist element in the constituency. Yet, sir, I am at this moment the most unpopular man in Bulcester; but I shall fight it out – I shall fight it to my latest breath.’

‘Is Bulcester, then, such an intemperate constituency? I had understood that the Nonconformist interest was strong there,’ said Merton.

‘So it is, sir, so it is; but the interest is now bound to the chariot wheels of the truckling Toryism of our time – to the sycophants who basely made vaccination permissive, and paltered with the Conscientious Objector. These badges, sir’ – the client pointed to his own crimson decorations – ‘proclaim that I have been vaccinated on both arms, as a testimony to the immortal though, in Bulcester, maligned discovery of the great Jenner. Sir, I am hooted in the public streets of my native town, where Anti-vaccinationism is a frenzy. Mr. Rider Haggard, the author of Dr. Therne, has been burned in effigy for his thrilling and manly protest to which I owe my own conversion.’

‘Then the conversion is relatively recent?’ asked Merton.

‘It dates since my reading of that powerful argument, sir; that appeal to reason which overcame my prejudice, for I was a prominent A. V.’

‘Ave?’ asked Merton.

‘A. V., sir – Anti-Vaccinationist. A. C. D. A. too, and always,’ he added proudly; but Merton did not think it prudent to ask for further explanations.

‘An A. V. I was, an A. V. I am no longer; and I defy popular clamour, accompanied by brickbats, to shake my principles.’

‘Justum et tinacem propositi virum,’ murmured Merton, adding, ‘All that is very interesting, but, my dear sir, while I admire the tenacity of your principles, will you permit me to ask, what has vaccination to do with the special business of our firm?’

‘Why, sir, I have a family, and my eldest son – ’

‘Does he decline to be vaccinated?’ asked Merton, in a sympathetic voice.

‘No, sir, or he would never darken my doorway,’ exclaimed this more than Roman father. ‘But he is engaged, and I can never give my consent; and if he marries that girl, the firm ceases to be “Warren & Son, wax-cloth manufacturers.” That’s all, sir – that’s all.’

Mr. Warren again applied his red handkerchief to his glowing features.

‘And what, may I ask, are the grounds of your objection to this engagement? Social inequality?’ asked Merton.

‘No, the young lady is the daughter of one of our leading ministers, Mr. Truman – author of The Bishops to the Block– but principles are concerned.’

‘You cannot mean that the young lady is excessively addicted to the – wine cup?’ asked Merton gravely. ‘In melancholy cases of that kind Mr. Hall Caine, in a romance, has recommended hypnotic treatment, but we do not venture to interfere.’

‘You misunderstand me, sir,’ replied Mr. Warren, frowning. ‘The young woman, on principle, as they call it, has never been vaccinated. Like most of our prominent citizens, her father (otherwise an excellent man) objects to what he calls “The Worship of the Calf” on grounds of conscience.’

‘Conscience! It is a hard thing to constrain the conscience,’ murmured Merton, quoting a remark of Queen Mary to John Knox.

‘What is conscience without knowledge, sir?’ asked the client, using – without knowing it – the very argument of Mr. Knox to the Queen.

‘You have no other objections to the alliance?’ asked Merton.

‘None whatever, sir. She is a good and good-looking girl. On most important points we are thoroughly agreed. She won a prize essay on Bacon’s authorship of Shakespeare’s plays. Of course Shakespeare could not have written them – a thoroughly uneducated man, who never could have passed the fourth standard. But look at the plays! There are things in them that, with all our modern advantages, are beyond me. I admit they are beyond me. “To be, and to do, and to suffer,”’ declaimed Mr. Warren, apparently under the impression that this is part of Hamlet’s soliloquy – ‘Shakespeare could never have written that. Where did he learn grammar?’

‘Where, indeed?’ replied Merton. ‘But as the lady is in all other respects so suitable a match, cannot this one difficulty be got over?’

‘Impossible, sir; my son could not slice the sleeve in her dress and inflict this priceless boon on her with affectionate violence. Even the hero of Dr. Therne failed there – ’

‘And rather irritated his pretty Jane,’ added Merton, who remembered this heroic adventure. ‘It is a very hard case,’ he went on, ‘but I fear that our methods are powerless. The only chance would be to divert young Mr. Warren’s affections into some other more enlightened channel. That expedient has often been found efficacious. Is he very deeply enamoured? Would not the society of another pretty and intelligent girl perhaps work wonders?’

‘Perhaps it might, sir, but I don’t know where to find any one that would attract my James. Except for political meetings, and a literary lecture or two, with a magic-lantern and a piano, we have not much social relaxation at Bulcester. We object to promiscuous dancing, on grounds of conscience. Also, of course, to the stage.’

‘Ah, so you do allow for the claims of conscience, do you?’

‘For what do you take me, sir? Only, of course the conscience must be enlightened,’ said Mr. Warren, as other earnest people usually do.

‘Certainly, certainly,’ said Merton; ‘nothing so dangerous as the unenlightened conscience. Why, in this very matter of marriage the conscience of the Mormons leads them to singular aberrations, while that of the Arunta tribe – but I should only pain you if I pursued the subject. You said that your Society indulged in literary lectures: is your programme for the season filled up?’

‘I am President of the Bulcester Literary Society,’ said Mr. Warren, ‘and I ought to know. We have a vacancy for Friday week; but why do you inquire? In fact I want a lecturer on “The Use and Abuse of Novels,” now you ask. Our people, somehow, always want their literary lectures to be about novels. I try to make the lecturers take a lofty moral tone, and usually entertain them at my house, where I probe their ideas, and warn them that we must have nothing loose. Once, sir, we had a lecturer on “The Oldest Novel in the World.” He gave us a terrible shock, sir! I never saw so many red cheeks in a Bulcester audience. And the man seemed quite unaware of the effect he was producing.’

‘Short-sighted, perhaps?’ said Merton.

‘Ever since we have been very careful. But, sir, we seem to have got away from the subject.’

‘It is only seeming,’ said Merton. ‘I have an idea which may be of service to you.’

‘Thank you, most kindly,’ said Mr. Warren. ‘But as how?’

‘Does your Society ever employ lady lecturers?’

‘We prefer them; we are all for enlarging the sphere of woman’s activity – virtuous activity, I mean.’

‘That is fortunate,’ remarked Merton. ‘You said just now that to try the plan of a counter-attraction was difficult, because there was little of social relaxation in your Society, and you knew no lady who had the opportunities necessary for presenting an agreeable alternative to the charms of Miss Truman. A young man’s fancy is often caught merely by the juxtaposition of a single member of the opposite sex, with whom he contracts a custom of walking home from chapel.’

‘That’s mostly the way at Bulcester,’ said Mr. Warren.

‘Well,’ Merton went on, ‘you are in the habit of entertaining the lecturers at your house. Now, I know a young lady – one of our staff, in fact – who is very well qualified to lecture on “The Use and Abuse of Novels.” She is a novelist herself; one of the most serious and improving of our younger writers. In her works virtue (after struggles) is always rewarded, and vice (especially if gilded) is held up to execration, though never allowed to display itself in colours which would bring a blush to the cheek of – a white rabbit. Here is her portrait,’ said Merton, taking up a family periodical, The Young Girl. This blameless journal was publishing a serial story by Miss Martin, one of the ladies who had been enlisted at the dinner given by Logan and Merton when they founded their Society. A photograph of Miss Martin, in white and in a large shadowy hat, was published in The Young Girl, and certainly no one could have recognised in this conscientiously innocent and domestic portrait the fair author of romances of social adventure and unimagined crime. ‘There you see our young friend,’ said Merton; ‘and the magazine, to which she is a regular contributor, is a voucher for her character as an author.’

Mr. Warren closely scrutinised the portrait, which displayed loveliness and candour in a very agreeable way, and arranged in the extreme of modest simplicity.

‘That is a young woman who bears her testimonials in her face,’ said Mr. Warren. ‘She is one whom a father can trust – but has she been vaccinated?’

‘Early and often,’ answered Merton reassuringly. ‘Girls with faces like hers do not care to run any risks.’

‘Jane Truman does, though my son has put it to her, I know, on the ground of her looks. “Nothing,” she said, “will ever induce me to submit to that filthy, that revolting operation.”’

‘“Conscience doth make cowards of us all,” as Bacon says,’ replied Merton, ‘or at least of such of us as are unenlightened. But to come to business. What do you think of asking our young friend down to lecture – on Friday week, I think you said – on the Use and Abuse of Novels? You could easily persuade her, I dare say, to stay over Sunday – longer if necessary – and then young Mr. Warren would at least find out that there is more than one young woman in the world.’

‘I shall be delighted to see your friend,’ answered Mr. Warren. ‘At Bulcester we welcome intellect, and a real novelist of moral tendencies would make quite a sensation in our midst.’

‘They are but too scarce at present,’ Merton answered – ‘novelists of high moral tone.’

‘She is not a Christian Scientist?’ asked Mr. Warren anxiously. ‘They reject vaccination, like all other means appointed, and rely on miracles, which ceased with the Apostolic age, being no longer necessary.’

‘The lady, I can assure you, is not a Christian Scientist,’ said Merton ‘but comes of an Evangelical family. Shall I give you her address? In my opinion it would be best to write to her from Bulcester, on the official paper of the Literary Society.’ For Merton wished to acquaint Miss Martin with the nature of her mission, lecturing being an art which she had never cultivated.

‘There is just one thing,’ remarked Mr. Warren hesitatingly. ‘This young lady, if our James lets his affections loose on her – how would that be, sir?’

Merton smiled.

‘Why, no great harm would be done, Mr. Warren. You need not fear any complication: any new matrimonial difficulty. The affection would be all on one side, and that side would not be the lady lecturer’s. I happen to know that she has a prior attachment.’