A Sheaf of Corn Part 29

Those among us who know more of her dead lover than was ever told to Daphne are disposed to call them her lucky flowers still.

A LITTLE WHITE DOG

"There!" Elinor cried. "Now, how could you be so careless, Ted?"

"The blessed thing must have jumped of its own accord off the chimney-piece," Ted said. He looked down at his wife on her knees beside him, ruefully collecting the fragments of the broken vase. "I wasn't so much as looking at it, Nell."

"No! If you'd only had the sense to look at it!" Nell sighed. "But you _will_ stand with your heels on the fender, and you push those great shoulders of yours against the chimney-board, and smash go all my ornaments--and a lot you care! However, something had to break to-day, and it might have been worse."

"How do you mean 'had to'?"

"That great awkward Emily threw down a soup-plate last night; and I----"

"No, not you, surely, Nell?"

"It wasn't my fault, of course. I was lifting the hand-gla.s.s from my dressing-table as carefully as carefully, and it just dropped out of my hands! 'That is the second,' I said to myself; 'now I wonder what the third will be.'"

"And why did you say anything so silly?"

"Have you actually grown to your enormous age, and not known that when one thing is broken in a house three are broken? Well, you have had an ineffectual sort of education!"

"You don't believe such rotten rubbish?"

"Don't you? When I tell you of the soup-plate, the hand-mirror, and now this vase? You can't call it nonsense, because there it is. A proof before your very eyes. You might as well say it isn't unlucky to see a single crow----"

"I'd sooner see one of the mischievous brutes any day than fifty."

"--That you may expect things to go pleasantly on the day you put on your petticoat the wrong side out----"

"I should expect them to take a comic turn on the day I did that, certainly!"

"What a ribald boy! Now, listen, Ted; be very attentive, and I will tell you a true, true story. You mustn't laugh the tiniest t.i.tter--ah, now, Ted! you won't laugh, will you?"

They were very young married people, and were not yet disposed to sit quietly apart and talk to each other. She seized him by the lapels of his coat now, and shook him to attention, while he, looking down upon her with the hardly yet familiar pride of possession in his boyish eyes, swayed his big frame in her grasp, flatteringly yielding to her small efforts.

"Are you going to attend, sir? Well, then--There was once a young man----"

"Who met a small vixen called Nell, and she fell in love with him and made him marry her."

"Ah, now, Ted, do listen!--A young man, and his mother told him never to walk under a ladder."

"And he did, naughty youth, and a bricklayer fell on him, and he died?"

She pleaded with him. "Seriously, Ted; no nonsense!" So he grasped her by the elbows and looked gravely in her face.

"It was mother's cousin Harold--really and truly--not a make-up."

"Hurry up, darling. I'm swallowing every word, and it's most awfully interesting."

"And he didn't believe that kind of thing--just like you, you know--ladders, and crows, and petticoats, and things. And he was going out to the West Indies to an awfully good appointment--hundreds a year!

And his mother went for a walk with him on the last day. And they were building a row of houses----"

"Cousin Harold and his mother?"

"No. _You_ know. And his mother said, 'Don't go under the ladder, dear'--and he did."

"Naughty boy! Naughty Cousin Harold!"

"You're laughing! Very well, just wait. To tease her, he would. 'Now, look here,' he said, 'every ladder I come to I mean to go under _twice_.' And he did. And his mother couldn't stop him, and she cried.

And--that's all----"

"All? But where's the point?"

"I didn't say there was a point. You know about mother's Cousin Harold."

"I'm hanged if I do."

"He never, never came back."

"Goodness!"

"He never even got there."

"Break it gently, Nell."

"The s.h.i.+p he went in sank, and no one escaped to tell the dreadful tale."

"And supposing he hadn't walked under ladders, but was alive in the West Indies, what relation would he be to you and to me?"

She was proceeding to tell him in all good faith, but he stopped her.

"And now," he said, "I will tell you a tale. But first, as my feelings have been considerably hara.s.sed, I will solace myself with a pipe."

She was being taught to fill his pipe, and to light it, and on this occasion was made to take a couple of draws to prove to herself that she had not properly cleaned it with the hairpin, according to instructions given last night. So that the story was long delayed, and when at length it came it did not amount to much.

"There was once an old man who gave a dinner-party."

"That was daddy," Elinor said, from the arm of the chair where she was now sitting with her shoulder against his.

"It was on the occasion of the marriage of his only daughter to a handsome and agreeable young man, the most eligible parti of the neighbourhood."

"That was you and me," Nell explained, contentedly. "Well, you are a vain old boy!"

"No interruptions, please," Ted went on, pulling at his pipe. "Although the occasion was one of rejoicing, there was a melancholy circ.u.mstance connected with it which cast a shadow over the otherwise suns.h.i.+ny--'m--suns.h.i.+ne of the scene."

"You're as bad as a newspaper. Go on softly, or you'll never keep it up. I can't think what's coming."