_ Francesca Bassington sat in the drawing-room of her house in Blue
Street, W., regaling herself and her estimable brother Henry with
China tea and small cress sandwiches. The meal was of that elegant
proportion which, while ministering sympathetically to the desires
of the moment, is happily reminiscent of a satisfactory luncheon
and blessedly expectant of an elaborate dinner to come.
In her younger days Francesca had been known as the beautiful Miss
Greech; at forty, although much of the original beauty remained,
she was just dear Francesca Bassington. No one would have dreamed
of calling her sweet, but a good many people who scarcely knew her
were punctilious about putting in the "dear."
Her enemies, in their honester moments, would have admitted that
she was svelte and knew how to dress, but they would have agreed
with her friends in asserting that she had no soul. When one's
friends and enemies agree on any particular point they are usually
wrong. Francesca herself, if pressed in an unguarded moment to
describe her soul, would probably have described her drawing-room.
Not that she would have considered that the one had stamped the
impress of its character on the other, so that close scrutiny might
reveal its outstanding features, and even suggest its hidden
places, but because she might have dimly recognised that her
drawing-room was her soul.
Francesca was one of those women towards whom Fate appears to have
the best intentions and never to carry them into practice. With
the advantages put at her disposal she might have been expected to
command a more than average share of feminine happiness. So many
of the things that make for fretfulness, disappointment and
discouragement in a woman's life were removed from her path that
she might well have been considered the fortunate Miss Greech, or
later, lucky Francesca Bassington. And she was not of the perverse
band of those who make a rock-garden of their souls by dragging
into them all the stoney griefs and unclaimed troubles they can
find lying around them. Francesca loved the smooth ways and
pleasant places of life; she liked not merely to look on the bright
side of things but to live there and stay there. And the fact that
things had, at one time and another, gone badly with her and
cheated her of some of her early illusions made her cling the
closer to such good fortune as remained to her now that she seemed
to have reached a calmer period of her life. To undiscriminating
friends she appeared in the guise of a rather selfish woman, but it
was merely the selfishness of one who had seen the happy and
unhappy sides of life and wished to enjoy to the utmost what was
left to her of the former. The vicissitudes of fortune had not
soured her, but they had perhaps narrowed her in the sense of
making her concentrate much of her sympathies on things that
immediately pleased and amused her, or that recalled and
perpetuated the pleasing and successful incidents of other days.
And it was her drawing-room in particular that enshrined the
memorials or tokens of past and present happiness.
Into that comfortable quaint-shaped room of angles and bays and
alcoves had sailed, as into a harbour, those precious personal
possessions and trophies that had survived the buffetings and
storms of a not very tranquil married life. Wherever her eyes
might turn she saw the embodied results of her successes,
economies, good luck, good management or good taste. The battle
had more than once gone against her, but she had somehow always
contrived to save her baggage train, and her complacent gaze could
roam over object after object that represented the spoils of
victory or the salvage of honourable defeat. The delicious bronze
Fremiet on the mantelpiece had been the outcome of a Grand Prix
sweepstake of many years ago; a group of Dresden figures of some
considerable value had been bequeathed to her by a discreet
admirer, who had added death to his other kindnesses; another group
had been a self-bestowed present, purchased in blessed and unfading
memory of a wonderful nine-days' bridge winnings at a country-house
party. There were old Persian and Bokharan rugs and Worcester tea-
services of glowing colour, and little treasures of antique silver
that each enshrined a history or a memory in addition to its own
intrinsic value. It amused her at times to think of the bygone
craftsmen and artificers who had hammered and wrought and woven in
far distant countries and ages, to produce the wonderful and
beautiful things that had come, one way and another, into her
possession. Workers in the studios of medieval Italian towns and
of later Paris, in the bazaars of Baghdad and of Central Asia, in
old-time English workshops and German factories, in all manner of
queer hidden corners where craft secrets were jealously guarded,
nameless unremembered men and men whose names were world-renowned
and deathless.
And above all her other treasures, dominating in her estimation
every other object that the room contained, was the great Van der
Meulen that had come from her father's home as part of her wedding
dowry. It fitted exactly into the central wall panel above the
narrow buhl cabinet, and filled exactly its right space in the
composition and balance of the room. From wherever you sat it
seemed to confront you as the dominating feature of its
surroundings. There was a pleasing serenity about the great
pompous battle scene with its solemn courtly warriors bestriding
their heavily prancing steeds, grey or skewbald or dun, all gravely
in earnest, and yet somehow conveying the impression that their
campaigns were but vast serious picnics arranged in the grand
manner. Francesca could not imagine the drawing-room without the
crowning complement of the stately well-hung picture, just as she
could not imagine herself in any other setting than this house in
Blue Street with its crowded Pantheon of cherished household gods.
And herein sprouted one of the thorns that obtruded through the
rose-leaf damask of what might otherwise have been Francesca's
peace of mind. One's happiness always lies in the future rather
than in the past. With due deference to an esteemed lyrical
authority one may safely say that a sorrow's crown of sorrow is
anticipating unhappier things. The house in Blue Street had been
left to her by her old friend Sophie Chetrof, but only until such
time as her niece Emmeline Chetrof should marry, when it was to
pass to her as a wedding present. Emmeline was now seventeen and
passably good-looking, and four or five years were all that could
be safely allotted to the span of her continued spinsterhood.
Beyond that period lay chaos, the wrenching asunder of Francesca
from the sheltering habitation that had grown to be her soul. It
is true that in imagination she had built herself a bridge across
the chasm, a bridge of a single span. The bridge in question was
her schoolboy son Comus, now being educated somewhere in the
southern counties, or rather one should say the bridge consisted of
the possibility of his eventual marriage with Emmeline, in which
case Francesca saw herself still reigning, a trifle squeezed and
incommoded perhaps, but still reigning in the house in Blue Street.
The Van der Meulen would still catch its requisite afternoon light
in its place of honour, the Fremiet and the Dresden and Old
Worcester would continue undisturbed in their accustomed niches.
Emmeline could have the Japanese snuggery, where Francesca
sometimes drank her after-dinner coffee, as a separate drawing-
room, where she could put her own things. The details of the
bridge structure had all been carefully thought out. Only--it was
an unfortunate circumstance that Comus should have been the span on
which everything balanced.
Francesca's husband had insisted on giving the boy that strange
Pagan name, and had not lived long enough to judge as to the
appropriateness, or otherwise, of its significance. In seventeen
years and some odd months Francesca had had ample opportunity for
forming an opinion concerning her son's characteristics. The
spirit of mirthfulness which one associates with the name certainly
ran riot in the boy, but it was a twisted wayward sort of mirth of
which Francesca herself could seldom see the humorous side. In her
brother Henry, who sat eating small cress sandwiches as solemnly as
though they had been ordained in some immemorial Book of
Observances, fate had been undisguisedly kind to her. He might so
easily have married some pretty helpless little woman, and lived at
Notting Hill Gate, and been the father of a long string of pale,
clever useless children, who would have had birthdays and the sort
of illnesses that one is expected to send grapes to, and who would
have painted fatuous objects in a South Kensington manner as
Christmas offerings to an aunt whose cubic space for lumber was
limited. Instead of committing these unbrotherly actions, which
are so frequent in family life that they might almost be called
brotherly, Henry had married a woman who had both money and a sense
of repose, and their one child had the brilliant virtue of never
saying anything which even its parents could consider worth
repeating. Then he had gone into Parliament, possibly with the
idea of making his home life seem less dull; at any rate it
redeemed his career from insignificance, for no man whose death can
produce the item "another by-election" on the news posters can be
wholly a nonentity. Henry, in short, who might have been an
embarrassment and a handicap, had chosen rather to be a friend and
counsellor, at times even an emergency bank balance; Francesca on
her part, with the partiality which a clever and lazily-inclined
woman often feels for a reliable fool, not only sought his counsel
but frequently followed it. When convenient, moreover, she repaid
his loans.
Against this good service on the part of Fate in providing her with
Henry for a brother, Francesca could well set the plaguy malice of
the destiny that had given her Comus for a son. The boy was one of
those untameable young lords of misrule that frolic and chafe
themselves through nursery and preparatory and public-school days
with the utmost allowance of storm and dust and dislocation and the
least possible amount of collar-work, and come somehow with a laugh
through a series of catastrophes that has reduced everyone else
concerned to tears or Cassandra-like forebodings. Sometimes they
sober down in after-life and become uninteresting, forgetting that
they were ever lords of anything; sometimes Fate plays royally into
their hands, and they do great things in a spacious manner, and are
thanked by Parliaments and the Press and acclaimed by gala-day
crowds. But in most cases their tragedy begins when they leave
school and turn themselves loose in a world that has grown too
civilised and too crowded and too empty to have any place for them.
And they are very many.
Henry Greech had made an end of biting small sandwiches, and
settled down like a dust-storm refreshed, to discuss one of the
fashionably prevalent topics of the moment, the prevention of
destitution.
"It is a question that is only being nibbled at, smelt at, one
might say, at the present moment," he observed, "but it is one that
will have to engage our serious attention and consideration before
long. The first thing that we shall have to do is to get out of
the dilettante and academic way of approaching it. We must collect
and assimilate hard facts. It is a subject that ought to appeal to
all thinking minds, and yet, you know, I find it surprisingly
difficult to interest people in it."
Francesca made some monosyllabic response, a sort of sympathetic
grunt which was meant to indicate that she was, to a certain
extent, listening and appreciating. In reality she was reflecting
that Henry possibly found it difficult to interest people in any
topic that he enlarged on. His talents lay so thoroughly in the
direction of being uninteresting, that even as an eye-witness of
the massacre of St. Bartholomew he would probably have infused a
flavour of boredom into his descriptions of the event.
"I was speaking down in Leicestershire the other day on this
subject," continued Henry, "and I pointed out at some length a
thing that few people ever stop to consider--"
Francesca went over immediately but decorously to the majority that
will not stop to consider.
"Did you come across any of the Barnets when you were down there?"
she interrupted; "Eliza Barnet is rather taken up with all those
subjects."
In the propagandist movements of Sociology, as in other arenas of
life and struggle, the fiercest competition and rivalry is
frequently to be found between closely allied types and species.
Eliza Barnet shared many of Henry Greech's political and social
views, but she also shared his fondness for pointing things out at
some length; there had been occasions when she had extensively
occupied the strictly limited span allotted to the platform oratory
of a group of speakers of whom Henry Greech had been an impatient
unit. He might see eye to eye with her on the leading questions of
the day, but he persistently wore mental blinkers as far as her
estimable qualities were concerned, and the mention of her name was
a skilful lure drawn across the trail of his discourse; if
Francesca had to listen to his eloquence on any subject she much
preferred that it should be a disparagement of Eliza Barnet rather
than the prevention of destitution.
"I've no doubt she means well," said Henry, "but it would be a good
thing if she could be induced to keep her own personality a little
more in the background, and not to imagine that she is the
necessary mouthpiece of all the progressive thought in the
countryside. I fancy Canon Besomley must have had her in his mind
when he said that some people came into the world to shake empires
and others to move amendments."
Francesca laughed with genuine amusement.
"I suppose she is really wonderfully well up in all the subjects
she talks about," was her provocative comment.
Henry grew possibly conscious of the fact that he was being drawn
out on the subject of Eliza Barnet, and he presently turned on to a
more personal topic.
"From the general air of tranquillity about the house I presume
Comus has gone back to Thaleby," he observed.
"Yes," said Francesca, "he went back yesterday. Of course, I'm
very fond of him, but I bear the separation well. When he's here
it's rather like having a live volcano in the house, a volcano that
in its quietest moments asks incessant questions and uses strong
scent."
"It is only a temporary respite," said Henry; "in a year or two he
will be leaving school, and then what?"
Francesca closed her eyes with the air of one who seeks to shut out
a distressing vision. She was not fond of looking intimately at
the future in the presence of another person, especially when the
future was draped in doubtfully auspicious colours.
"And then what?" persisted Henry.
"Then I suppose he will be upon my hands."
"Exactly."
"Don't sit there looking judicial. I'm quite ready to listen to
suggestions if you've any to make."
"In the case of any ordinary boy," said Henry, "I might make lots
of suggestions as to the finding of suitable employment. From what
we know of Comus it would be rather a waste of time for either of
us to look for jobs which he wouldn't look at when we'd got them
for him."
"He must do something," said Francesca.
"I know he must; but he never will. At least, he'll never stick to
anything. The most hopeful thing to do with him will be to marry
him to an heiress. That would solve the financial side of his
problem. If he had unlimited money at his disposal, he might go
into the wilds somewhere and shoot big game. I never know what the
big game have done to deserve it, but they do help to deflect the
destructive energies of some of our social misfits."
Henry, who never killed anything larger or fiercer than a trout,
was scornfully superior on the subject of big game shooting.
Francesca brightened at the matrimonial suggestion. "I don't know
about an heiress," she said reflectively. "There's Emmeline
Chetrof of course. One could hardly call her an heiress, but she's
got a comfortable little income of her own and I suppose something
more will come to her from her grandmother. Then, of course, you
know this house goes to her when she marries."
"That would be very convenient," said Henry, probably following a
line of thought that his sister had trodden many hundreds of times
before him. "Do she and Comus hit it off at all well together?"
"Oh, well enough in boy and girl fashion," said Francesca. "I must
arrange for them to see more of each other in future. By the way,
that little brother of hers that she dotes on, Lancelot, goes to
Thaleby this term. I'll write and tell Comus to be specially kind
to him; that will be a sure way to Emmeline's heart. Comus has
been made a prefect, you know. Heaven knows why."
"It can only be for prominence in games," sniffed Henry; "I think
we may safely leave work and conduct out of the question."
Comus was not a favourite with his uncle.
Francesca had turned to her writing cabinet and was hastily
scribbling a letter to her son in which the delicate health, timid
disposition and other inevitable attributes of the new boy were
brought to his notice, and commanded to his care. When she had
sealed and stamped the envelope Henry uttered a belated caution.
"Perhaps on the whole it would be wiser to say nothing about the
boy to Comus. He doesn't always respond to directions you know."
Francesca did know, and already was more than half of her brother's
opinion; but the woman who can sacrifice a clean unspoiled penny
stamp is probably yet unborn. _