Phemie Keller

When Mrs. Montague Stondon invited her relations to dine with them in “a quiet way,” she assured Captain Stondon that she would not ask more than a couple, or so, of friends to meet them.

“It will be only a family party,” she declared, and then forthwith she wrote notes to about five-and-twenty people, of whom the one-half had pleasure in accepting.

“I could not get through the dinner with that pair alone,” she informed her husband; “and if we have one or two, we may as well have a dozen. It is no more trouble, and it is no more expense; and although Captain Stondon talks so much about not caring for society, I know he would not like to spend an evening tête-à-tête with us. That is the way with all those kind of men. They do not know what they want! If the bride acquits herself creditably he will be as proud as a peacock, and it shall not be my fault if she do not.”

“Nor mine,” added Mr. Stondon, for all which kind intentions Phemie would have been duly grateful had she only known of them.

As it was, she dreaded that visit as she had never dreaded anything before in her life, and the hints and instructions which Captain Stondon thought it necessary to give only made her original confusion worse. He told her she must not do this, and that she must do something else. He fidgeted about her dress; he would not let her maid arrange her hair, but sent for an individual with elaborate whiskers, who made her head ache, and sent her out unable to bend her neck.

“I do not think going to Court could be much worse than this!” sighed Phemie, as she fitted on her gloves; but she felt comforted when her husband surveyed her proudly, and told her she was the prettiest creature he had ever seen.

“Am I really pretty, Henry?” asked the girl, who had begun to question her own good looks, and to value her personal possessions at a much more modest rate than formerly.

“Are you really what?” he retorted, holding her at arm’s length from him, and proudly surveying her from head to foot. “Are you really what?—oh, vanity! vanity!” and then Phemie laughed and blushed to hear again and again that she was beautiful.

But no consciousness of beauty could have made that dinner-party other than a wretched ordeal to the young wife. The faces of twelve strangers whom she had never seen previously, swam before her. Thirty eyes were always, as she imagined, riveted on her. If Mr. Stondon would only have let her alone; if he had only not tried to make her talk; if the servants could only have believed that she was not famishing, and that she did not want a glass of wine every other minute; if the light had not been so strong; if the room had not been so close; if everything had been different, Phemie thought she could have managed better: as it was, she envied Mrs. Stondon, she envied the servants, she envied every person and any person who knew what was what, and she envied, beyond all other persons, a young lady who, owing to there being seven on a side, sat next to her, and whose composure filled Phemie with the most intense admiration, not to say awe.

If she had upset her wine, if she had spilled her soup, if she had taken mint sauce with duck, if she had kept the whole table waiting, if she had answered without being spoken to, if she had dropped her fork, if she had appropriated her neighbour’s bread, that wonderful woman would have shown no more sign of embarrassment than if she had done everything decently and in order.

Talking to a gentleman on her right hand, she let a morsel of chicken fall from her fork, and the misadventure made Phemie feel as though she had committed some sin herself.

“That was a great disappointment,” remarked the culprit to her, with a charming smile, and then straightway she observed to her other neighbour, “which shows people should not try to do two things at once.”

“If I could learn to be like her,” thought Phemie, jealously, “I should not mind paying a thousand pounds, supposing I had the money.”

Have patience, child, have patience—Rome was not built in a day. If the gift be so valuable, rest content, for it will come to you yet; if ease of manner and indifference to the opinions of others be possessions worth coveting, rest satisfied, for in the years now before you all diffidence will vanish and fade away, and you shall care no more for speaking to a countess than you ever did to a farmer’s wife in Tordale.

But be not over eager, ma mignonne, for the human being has yet to be created who shall retain a child’s heart under a woman’s manner. Is it worth the price, Phemie? Is the external ease and grace and self-possession a fair exchange for the internal suffering and loss that must first be incurred? In this world do we get anything cheaply? On this side of heaven can we secure any prize without paying dearly for it? It is better to be embarrassed at a dinner-party than to sit nursing care o’nights. It is better that society should have our worst than that we should be miserable when the guests are gone and the doors closed. The day may come when you will look back to the blushing, timid, ignorant Phemie, three parts through her teens, and wish you could steal her back from the past to have and to hold for ever—wish unavailingly, for along the road you will then have travelled there is no return, and the Phemie you can dimly remember—the Phemie who was married while yet almost a child in Tordale Church, may return to you in the flesh, only when the rivers flow back to their springs, when the grain ripens in December, and the flowers and the trees bloom and look green among winter frosts and snows.

Nevertheless Phemie envied her companion, and wished with all her heart that the calumet of peace she and the Captain had come to smoke in Chapel Street had not assumed the form of a dinner-party.

How could she guess that care was sitting beside her hostess likewise?—how could she imagine, looking at the plate, the glass, the china, the servants, the wines, the fruits, that Mrs. Stondon had not found it easy to arrange her materials? that there was a terrible to-morrow, and a more terrible morrow after, coming to the smiling woman at the head of the table? How could she foresee the end which came to Montague Stondon, to his debts, to his embarrassments, to his dinners, to his hopes, to his schemes? When he took her under his especial protection later on in the evening, and began “drawing her out,” she, looking at his fine figure, at his handsome face, never realised how stiff and stark would be the one, how fixed and ghastly the other, ere she set foot in England again.

If she could have turned over a few pages and read to the point where “the end” was written across his life, she would have been tolerant and sorrowful; as it was, she saw merely his brown eyes searching her through, she heard only his soft voice asking her questions, which were full of torture to her.

“She liked flowers, he was certain;” so he took her to see the conservatory, which was always full of bloom, let who would, go without money. “You must not compare our plants with those you are accustomed to at Roundwood,” he went on; “General Keller’s gardens are famous all over Sussex, I am told.”

Phemie kept silence for a moment. She did not know whether Captain Stondon would like her to say she and the Kellers were far apart as the poles; and, on the other hand, she felt it would not be truthful for her to let Mr. Stondon think she had ever seen her father’s birthplace.

She had not lived all the most impressionable part of her life, however, with Mr. Aggland for nothing, and accordingly she answered timidly, though with the tell-tale colour that offended Mrs. Stondon flushing her face—

“I think your flowers beautiful, and I have never been at Roundwood.”

“Then you have a pleasure more to come,” replied Mr. Stondon. “I suppose it is stale news to you that your aunt is in town. I saw her in the Park yesterday.”

Phemie’s thoughts flew back to the cruel letter with which her aunt had severed all ties between them; and forgetting everything except that and the contemptuous repulse her mother had received from the Keller family, she retorted hotly—

“That she did not know anything about Miss Keller, and did not want to know. She had never seen her, and she hoped she never should see her;” after which statement, feeling she had committed herself, the girl grew scarlet, and stooping down over the flowers, commenced admiring them insanely.

“What does your mamma say to the idea of your staying away from her for so long a time?” asked Mr. Stondon, smiling. She was such a foolish little fish, and he was so skilful an angler (this was what he thought), that there was no use in wasting valuable bait upon her.

“I have not any mamma,” replied Phemie. “She has been dead ever since I can remember, I was going to say; but I can remember her, so that would not be true. She has been dead ever so many years—ever so many;” and the bride bent her head again, and Montague Stondon knew it was to hide the tears that were brimming in her eyes.

He was beginning to like her. If she had been anybody else than his relation’s wife, he would have commenced a flirtation. She had divine hair, she had sweet eyes, she had a delicious voice, with the faintest, slightest Northern accent to make it earnest and pathetic. She was soft and pulpy, as Mrs. Montague Stondon said; but then men are not usually averse to even an exaggeration of feminine perfections.

She was astonishingly pretty, and young, and impulsive. The kind of girl it was possible to fancy kissing a man out of gratitude if he had done her a great service; a charming girl, with the tenderest expression, with the whitest skin, with the frankest manner, with the most extraordinary want of self-confidence.

“I do not blame him,” thought Montague Stondon; “though she may have a dozen brats, and I lose Marshlands, I do not blame him.”

“I did not mean to pain you,” he said gently. “I knew you had lost your father, but I did not think you had lost your mother too; forgive me.” And he looked so penitent that Phemie could not choose but say—

“I have nothing to forgive, only it always makes me sorry to talk about my mother. She was so pretty, and she died so young.”

Phemie was pretty too; would she die young? Mr. Stondon, looking into her face, would have helped that selfish question presenting itself if he could; but if Phemie was nice, Marshlands was nicer; and though he did not blame Captain Stondon for marrying her, it was impossible for him to avoid speculating on what might yet be if she were to die.

“It would kill him,” considered the barrister. “How mercenary poverty makes a man! how good people who have plenty of money ought to be!” And then he said out loud, with a smile, “that he felt certain she had found some one to take her mother’s place.”

“I have always found more fathers than mothers,” answered Phemie; and for all he tried hard to avoid laughing, Mr. Stondon was obliged to do so outright, while Phemie, her little hand resting on his arm, stood wondering what she could have said to amuse him, wondering if she had made any mistake—done anything wrong.

“My grandfather took care of me first,” she explained, “and then my uncle, and—don’t you think Captain Stondon may be wondering where I am, and wanting me?” added Phemie, conscious she was getting into deep water, and feebly struggling back to land.

“You mean your grandfather, Mr. Keller,” suggested Mr. Stondon, as he led her towards the drawing-room.

“No,” answered Phemie, impatiently. “If the Kellers had brought me up, I should have seen Roundwood; but I had nothing to do with them; I lived with my mother’s father, a clergyman, till he died, and after that with my uncle in Cumberland.”

“Is he a clergyman, too?” demanded her host.

“No—he is—he is—” and Phemie, knowing that Mr. Stondon’s eyes were fixed upon her, grew first hot and then cold, and then angry with herself for fearing to say out openly in that genteel London house how her honest uncle got his living honestly.

With a bitter pang of shame she remembered his kindness, and contrasted it with her cowardice. In a moment it swept through her mind that it was like disowning him not to stand up and do battle, if need were, for the man who had been as a father to her.

“He is a farmer,” she finished, with a defiant uplifting of her beautiful head. “He is a farmer;” and the evening light fell softly on her face as she spoke.

The same light was lying across Tordale then; the shadows were creeping up Helbeck; they were darkling down on the valley. Almost unconsciously Phemie, as she saw the expression which came over Mr. Stondon’s face, turned and looked back at Tordale with the eyes of her heart, and as she looked she wished she was standing beside the waterfall, or among the flowers in her uncle’s little garden, that she knew were giving out their fullest sweetness in that quiet evening hour.

“Shall we have to stay here long?” she asked her husband when she could escape from Mr. Stondon, and get over to the other side of the room. “I am so tired.”

And she looked so tired that Captain Stondon observed, pityingly, “Poor child!” before he proceeded to say that Mrs. Stondon was most anxious to hear her sing. “You must make allowances for her,” he added, turning to that lady; “she has lived all her life in the country, and been unable to receive proper instruction.”

Whereupon Mrs. Montague Stondon declared she was quite certain she should be charmed; and, indeed, to do her justice, she had made up her mind to go into ecstacies if Phemie only screamed like a ballad-singer in the street.

Had not Captain Stondon promised to take care Basil was not disappointed in his long-talked-of trip to Norway, and did not she feel certain he would give her husband a few hundreds to stay the wolves for a time, at any rate?

Altogether, Mrs. Montague Stondon had done her work better than the barrister. If she could have imagined the mess he had got into with Phemie, she would have shaken him, weak and languid though she professed to be. Had she known how thoroughly the bride disliked him, how perfectly she understood Mr. Stondon thought her a “thing in the way,” she would scarcely have addressed herself so amiably to her guest.

“What style of music do you prefer? Did you bring any of your songs with you? No! well, perhaps some of mine will suit your voice.” And Mrs. Stondon began turning over the pieces that lay on the piano.

“What, none of them?” exclaimed the barrister’s wife in despair. “What, none of them? Can you not recollect anything? Not one tiny ballad?” and Mrs. Montague Stondon grew quite pathetic about the matter.

“The difficulty is that Phemie does not accompany herself,” said Captain Stondon at this juncture.

“Perhaps,” suggested the lady who had excited Phemie’s envy at dinner, “perhaps I can smooth away that difficulty, if Mrs. Stondon will only tell me what she would like best to sing;” and she pulled off her gloves, and spread out her skirts, and sat down to the piano, and ran over the notes, triumphantly glancing up at poor, fluttering, confused Phemie the while, with a look which said—“Why are you not as I am? There is nothing to frighten you.”

“What shall it be?” she asked, playing with chords and scales and chromatic passages carelessly as she spoke. “Some one mentioned ballads. Was it Scotch ballads—‘Jock o’ Hazel-dean,’ for instance?” and she just swept Phemie’s face with her dark eyes ere she bent them on some music Captain Stondon placed before her.

“I know that,” the bride remarked in a low voice.

“‘You’ll remember me,’” answered the lady. “Sing it then by all means.” And thus commanded, Phemie began.

But she never ended. She broke down hopelessly, ignominiously. She got frightened; she got confused. The strange room, the strange faces, the unaccustomed accompaniment, the novelty of her position, the very sound of her own voice alarmed her. She did her best; she fought against her embarrassment; she struggled on; she sang a false note; she made a desperate effort to recover herself; then she wavered and went wrong past redemption.

“It was all my fault,” remarked her accompanist, cheerfully; “try the last verse.”

“I cannot, I cannot, indeed,” said Phemie, almost crying, not daring to look round, mortified, angry, and ashamed. “I shall never try to sing again. I cannot sing before any one. I shall never try.”

“Oh yes, you will,” laughed her new friend. “You will go abroad; you will have lessons; you will gain courage; you will cease to be diffident; you will learn to be confident; and finally, you will return to England, and sing ‘Then you’ll remember’ to me as often as I like to ask you. Seriously, you have a splendid voice, and if it were not breaking a commandment I should covet it.”

Looking at the speaker, Phemie straightway did break the commandment, and envied her: envied her beauty, her figure, her ease, and grace.

What curls she had!—what a magnificent neck!—what a lovely dress!—what a way of putting things!

She was like a picture out of one of Heath’s “Books of Beauty.” She was like a heroine of romance—with her long lashes—with her round arms—with her flowing hair—with her smile half gay, half pensive. Everything Phemie had ever dreamed of as most lovely in her sex was there for her to fall down before and worship, if she would; but instead of worshipping she envied—silly child—a woman who was not half so charming as herself. Is not auburn hair as beautiful as raven curls?—have not men sighed for a glance from blue eyes as well as from black?—has not seventeen its attractions—its young spring freshness—its soft loveliness—though it cannot possess the easy grace, the finished manner of five-and-twenty? And did not five-and-twenty, with all her social advantages, look with a kind of speculative interest—with a vague regret at seventeen, who thought breaking down in a song the most terrible misfortune that could happen to her, and who wanted to get away and cry over her mishap.

If she could only ever hope to acquire a tenth portion of Miss Derno’s self-possession she would be satisfied. If she could only talk as she talked—answer questions without a change of colour—play whatever she was requested to play—Phemie thought she should have nothing more to ask from heaven. And she sat and considered these things in the corner of a distant sofa where Mrs. Montague Stondon had placed her, while that lady looked her new relative over as she might have done a piece of handsome silk in a draper’s shop.

All at once Phemie came back from her musings, or, rather, having followed them out to a definite point, she looked up abruptly, and said,

“Can you tell me how old Miss Derno is?”

Now there was a question to be put suddenly to a well-bred hostess!—and by a girl, too, whom she had decided did not possess a second idea.

“Why do you ask?” inquired Mrs. Montague Stondon, with one of her sweetest smiles.

“Because I want to know,” answered Phemie, simply.

“How very singular!” exclaimed her hostess; “how very odd! How deliciously straightforward you are! Miss Derno cannot be more than five-and-twenty, though she looks nearly thirty. Now, will you tell me why you wanted to know?”

“Only that I might see how many years older she is than I,” replied Phemie.

“A great many, I imagine,” laughed Mrs. Stondon.

“She is half my lifetime older,” said the girl, earnestly.

“I dare say she is; but what then?”

“Why, only that one may do ever so much in half a lifetime.”

“I know some one who might do anything she chose,” answered Mrs. Montague Stondon, and Phemie coloured to the very roots of her hair at having her own thoughts put into such exceedingly plain English.

“Eight years!—what might she not do in eight years? That was what she began pondering and considering. She could learn—she could gain knowledge—she could work hard—she could acquire such information as might make the man who had married her, proud of her instead of ashamed.

For Phemie felt confident he must be ashamed of her. It might have been all very well at Tordale, but in London, and amongst all these grand people (as the girl in her innocence considered them), he must be ashamed of the wife he had chosen.

She felt her heart beat faster and the blood rush up into her face as she recalled a glance that she had seen exchanged between a pair of ladies when she broke down in her song so hopelessly. A raising of the eyebrows, a mere curl of the lips, the slightest shrug of the shoulders, told Phemie their thoughts as clearly as though they had spoken them outright.

And it was so hard—so hard because she knew she had a better voice than Miss Derno—and singing was her sole accomplishment, and Captain Stondon had been proud of it! He would never ask her to sing again; he would be afraid. He would——

“So you really are going to leave London in two days,” said Miss Derno at this juncture, breaking in suddenly on her reverie. “How I envy you! How I wish I was going through Switzerland, and to Rome, and to Naples, instead of down to a lonely country house on the borders of civilization, where we get letters about once a week, and see a stranger only when a vessel is wrecked on the coast!”

“I lived in a place as quiet as that,” answered Phemie, “and liked it.”

“Possibly; but you will like it no more. You could never go back and like it again. Solitude may be very charming, but society is more charming still. The world may be very hollow, but it is made up of our fellow-creatures for all that; and we cannot live without our fellow-creatures, bad as they are, for the simple reason that we are gregarious animals, and that angelic company is not obtainable on earth. Added to which,” finished Miss Derno, “I think angels would be a little dull.”

“I wish,” said Phemie, “you were going abroad too. I should like it so much.”

“So should I,” answered Miss Derno, “but duty calls me to the ends of the earth, and I obey the summons. When you are in Paris, Vienna, or in any one of the hundred towns Captain Stondon says he intends taking you to see, think of me killing time—or, rather, being killed by time—in a place fifteen miles from everything—from letters—from papers—from books—from a doctor—from a station. There is no necessary of life near us excepting the churchyard, and we have no society, unless a curate who wears thick boots and spectacles, and his lame wife and about twenty-seven children, can be called desirable neighbours.”

“What do you do all day?” asked her auditor.

“We sleep a great deal, and we eat every hour or so, and we watch the vessels passing, through a telescope; and we wonder where they are going. Then we drive; and I ride, and walk; and some one or other of the curate’s children is always getting maimed; and when the doctor has happily to be sent for, he calls at the great house, and brings us news of the outer world—of the latest suicide, of the most interesting murder. But there is my aunt preparing for departure. I must say good-bye. Au revoir.”

“I am afraid it will not be au revoir,” said Phemie. “We are to be away for so long a time that it is not likely we shall see each other again ever.”

Miss Derno laughed. “There is no ‘for ever’ in society. Everybody meets every one sooner or later; and, recollect, when we do meet you are to sing ‘You’ll remember’ without a mistake. If we were to be parted for twenty years the first thing I should say to you would be, ‘That song, Mrs. Stondon.’ So do not forget.”

And she pressed Phemie’s hand in hers, and was gone before the girl could answer.