The Farringdons Part 35

"Now in church, of course, it would be just the other way," said Lady Silverhampton; "I should line my pew with the same stuff as my Sunday gown, so as to look as if I was there when I wasn't."

Lord Stonebridge began to argue. "But that wouldn't be the other way; it would be the same thing."

"How stupid and accurate you are, Stonebridge! If our pew were lined with gray chiffon like my Sunday frock, it couldn't be the same as if my Sunday frock was made of crimson carpet like our pew. How can things that are exactly opposite be the same? You can't prove that they are, except by algebra; and as n.o.body here knows any algebra, you can't prove it at all."

"Yes; I can. If I say you are like a person, it is the same thing as saying that that person is like you."

"Not at all. If you said that I was like Connie Esdaile, I should embrace you before the a.s.sembled company; and if you said she was like me, she'd never forgive you as long as she lived. It is through reasoning out things in this way that men make such idiotic mistakes."

"Isn't it funny," Elisabeth remarked, "that if you reason a thing out you're always wrong, and if you never reason about it at all you're always right?"

"Ah! but that is because you are a genius," murmured Cecil Farquhar.

Lady Silverhampton contradicted him. "Not at all; it's because she is a woman."

"Well, I'd rather be a woman than a genius any day," said Elisabeth; "it takes less keeping up."

"You are both," said Cecil.

"And I'm neither," added Lord Bobby; "so what's the state of the odds?"

"Let's invent more invisible costumes," cried Lady Silverhampton; "they interest me. Suggest another one, Elisabeth."

"I should design a special one for lovers in the country. Don't you know how you are always coming upon lovers in country lanes, and how hard they try to look as if they weren't there, and how badly they succeed? I should dress them entirely in green, faintly relieved by brown; and then they'd look as if they were only part of the hedges and stiles."

"How the lovers of the future will bless you!" exclaimed Lord Bobby. "I only regret that my love-making days are over before your patent costumes come out. I remember Sir Richard Esdaile once coming upon Violet and me when we were spooning in the shrubbery at Esdaile Court, and we tried in vain to efface ourselves and become as part of the scenery. You see, it is so difficult to look exactly like two laurel bushes, when one of you is dressed in pink muslin and the other in white flannel."

Lady Robert blushed becomingly. "Oh, Bobby, it wasn't pink muslin that day; it was blue cambric."

"That doesn't matter. There are as many laurel bushes made out of pink muslin as out of blue cambric, when you come to that. The difficulty of identifying one's self with one's environment (that's the correct expression, my dear) would be the same in either costume; but Miss Farringdon is now going, once for all, to remove that difficulty."

"I came upon two young people in a lane not long ago," said Elisabeth, "and the minute they saw me they began to walk in the ditches, one on one side of the road and one on the other. Now if only they had worn my costumes, such a damp and uncomfortable mode of going about the country would have been unnecessary; besides, it was absurd in any case. If you were walking with your mother-in-law you wouldn't walk as far apart as that; you wouldn't be able to hear a word she said."

"Ah! my dear young friend, that wouldn't matter," Lord Bobby interposed, "nor in any way interfere with the pleasure of the walk. Really nice men never make a fuss about little things like that. If only their mothers-in-law are kind enough to go out walking with them, they don't a bit mind how far off they walk. It is in questions such as this that men are really so much more unselfish than women; because the mothers-in-law do mind--they like us to be near enough to hear what they say."

"Green frocks would be very nice for the girls, especially if they were fair," said Lady Robert thoughtfully; "but I think the men would look rather queer in green, don't you? As if they were actors."

"I'm afraid they would look a bit dissipated," Elisabeth a.s.sented; "like almonds-and-raisins by daylight. By the way, I know nothing that looks more dissipated than almonds-and-raisins by daylight."

"Except, perhaps, one coffee-cup in the drawing-room the morning after a dinner party," suggested Farquhar.

Elisabeth demurred. "No; the coffee-cup is sad rather than sinful. It is as much part and parcel of a bygone time, as the Coliseum or the ruins of Pompeii; and the respectability of the survival of the fittest is its own. But almonds-and-raisins are different; to a certain cla.s.s of society they represent the embodiment of refinement and luxury and self-indulgence."

Sir Wilfred Madderley laughed softly to himself. "I know exactly what you mean."

"Well, I don't agree with Miss Farringdon," Lord Bobby argued; "to my mind almonds-and-raisins are an emblem of respectability and moral worth, like chiffonniers and family alb.u.ms and British matrons. No really bad man would feel at home with almonds-and-raisins, I'm certain; but I'd appoint as my trustee any man who could really enjoy them on a Sunday afternoon. Now take Kesterton, for instance; he's the type of man who would really appreciate them. My impression is that when his life comes to be written, it will be found that he took almonds-and-raisins in secret, as some men take absinthe and others opium."

"It is scandalous to reveal the secrets of the great in this manner,"

said Elisabeth, "and to lower our ideals of them!"

"Forgive me; but still you must always have faintly suspected Kesterton of respectability, even when you admired him most. All great men have their weaknesses; mine is melancholy and Lord K.'s respectability, and Shakespeare's was something quite as bad, but I can't recall just now what it was."

"And what is Lady K.'s?" asked the hostess.

"Belief in Kesterton, of course, which she carries to the verge of credulity, not to say superst.i.tion. Would you credit it? When he was at the Exchequer she believed in his Budgets; and when he was at the War Office she believed in his Intelligence Department; and now he is in the Lords she believes in his pedigree, culled fresh from the Herald's Office. Can faith go further?"

"'A perfect woman n.o.bly planned,'" murmured Elisabeth.

"Precisely," continued Bobby,

"To rule the man who rules the land, But yet a spirit still, and damp With something from a spirit-lamp--

or however the thing goes. I don't always quote quite accurately, you will perceive! I generally improve."

"I'm not sure that Lady Kesterton does believe in the pedigree," and Elisabeth looked wise; "because she once went out of her way to a.s.sure me that she did."

Lord Bobby groaned. "I beseech you to be careful, Miss Farringdon; you'll never get that photograph if you keep forgetting yourself like this!"

Elisabeth continued--

"If I were a man I should belong to the Herald's Office. It would be such fun to be called a 'Red Bonnet' or a 'Green Griffin,' or some other nice fairy-tale-ish name; and to make it one's business to unite divided families, and to restore to deserving persons their long-lost great-great-grandparents. Think of the unselfish joy one would feel in saying to a worthy grocer, 'Here is your great-great-grandmother; take her and be happy!' Or to a successful milliner, 'I have found your mislaid grandfather; be a mother to him for the rest of your life!' It would give one the most delicious, fairy-G.o.dmotherly sort of satisfaction!"

"It would," Sir Wilfred agreed. "One would feel one's self a philanthropist of the finest water."

"Thinking about almonds-and-raisins has made me feel hungry," exclaimed Lady Silverhampton. "Let us have lunch! And while the servants are laying the table, we had better get out of the boat and have a stroll.

It would be more amusing."

So the party wandered about for a while in couples through fields bespangled with b.u.t.tercups; and it happened--not unnaturally--that Cecil and Elisabeth found themselves together.

"You are very quiet to-day," she said; "how is that? You are generally such a chatty person, but to-day you out-silence the Sphinx."

"You know the reason."

"No; I don't. To my mind there is no reason on earth strong enough to account for voluntary silence. So tell me."

"I am silent because I want to talk to you; and if I can't do that, I don't want to talk at all. But among all these grand people you seem so far away from me. Yesterday we were such close friends; but to-day I stretch out groping hands, and try in vain to touch you. Do you never dream that you seek for people for a long time and find them at last; and then, when you find them, you can not get near to them? Well, I feel just like that to-day with you."

Elisabeth was silent for a moment; her thoughts were far away from Cecil. "Yes, I know that dream well," she said slowly, "I have often had it; but I never knew that anybody had ever had it except me." And suddenly there came over her the memory of how, long years ago, she used to dream that dream nearly every night. It was at the time when she was first estranged from Christopher, and when the wound of his apparent indifference to her was still fresh. Over and over again she used to dream that she and Christopher were once more the friends that they had been, but with an added tenderness that their actual intercourse had never known. Which of us has not experienced that strange dream-tenderness--often for the most unlikely people--which hangs about us for days after the dream has vanished, and invests the objects of it with an interest which their living presence never aroused? In that old dream of Elisabeth's her affection for Christopher was so great that when he went away she followed after him, and sought him for a long time in vain; and when at last she found him he was no longer the same Christopher that he used to be, but there was an impa.s.sable barrier between them which she fruitlessly struggled to break through. The agony of the fruitless struggle always awakened her, so that she never knew what the end of the dream was going to be.

It was years since Elisabeth had dreamed this dream--years since she had even remembered it--but Cecil's remark brought it all back to her, as the scent of certain flowers brings back the memory of half-forgotten summer days; and once again she felt herself drawn to him by that bond of similarity which was so strong between them, and which is the most powerfully attractive force in the world--except, perhaps, the attractive force of contrast. It is the people who are the most like, and the most unlike, ourselves, that we love the best; to the others we are more or less indifferent.

"I think you are the most sympathetic person I ever met," she added.

"You have what the Psalmist would call 'an understanding heart.'"

"I think it is only you whom I understand, Miss Farringdon; and that only because you and I are so much alike."

"I should have thought you would have understood everybody, you have such quick perceptions and such keen sympathies." Elisabeth, for all her cleverness, had yet to learn to differentiate between the understanding heart and the understanding head. There is but little real similarity between the physician who makes an accurate diagnosis of one's condition, and the friend who suffers from the identical disease.