The Way of a Maid With a Man

by Richard Marsh

 

THE WAY OF A MAID WITH A MAN

 

By Richard Marsh

 

(Miss Whitby writes to her mother.)

 

MY DEAREST MAMMA—You will be surprised, and I hope you will be pleased, to hear that I am engaged to be married! You are not to smile—it would be cruel—this really is serious. Charlie is all that a husband should be—you are not to laugh at that—you know exactly what I mean. I am nearly twenty, and this time I feel that my happiness really is at stake. I may not be able to keep my looks for long—some girls lose them when they are quite young—and something seems to tell me that I ought to begin to look life seriously in the face, and become responsible. I almost wish that I had taken to district visiting, like Emma Mortimer—it might have balanced me. Poor Emma! what a pity she is so plain.

Will you mind hinting to Tom Wilson that I think he might be happy with Nora Cathcart? It is true that I made him promise that he would never speak to her again, but all that is over. I hope you will not think me fickle, dear mamma. I enclose the ring Tom gave me. Will you please give it to him? And point out to him that I am now persuaded that boy and girl attachments never come to anything serious.

By the way, do not forget to tell them to send two pairs of evening shoes. Those which I have are quite worn out. Let both pairs be perfectly plain bronze. Charlie thinks that they make my feet look almost ethereal. Is he not absurd? But I hope that you will not think so when you come to know him, for he loves your child. You might also ask them to send me a dozen pairs of stockings—nice ones. All mine seem to be in holes. You know I like them as long as you can get them.

I have been here nearly a month, and I have been almost engaged to three different men. How time does seem to fly! Lily says I am a heartless little flirt. I think that perhaps I was, until he came. He has been here just a week, and I seem to have known him years.

Lily seems to be under the impression that I was engaged to Captain Pentland. She is wrong. Captain Pentland has some very noble qualities. He is destined to make some true woman profoundly happy. Of that I have no doubt whatever. But I am not that woman. No, dear mamma, I feel that now. Besides, he wears an eyeglass. As you are aware, I have always had an insuperable objection to an eyeglass. It seems to savor of affectation. And affectation I cannot stand. And then he lisps. As I told you when I wrote you last, when I sprained my ankle on Highdown Hill, he carried me in his arms for over a mile. Of course, I was grateful. And, between you and me, dear mamma, he held me so very closely to him, that, afterward, I felt as if I ought to marry him. I have explained everything to Charlie. He quite agrees with me that it is absurd for Captain Pentland to think himself ill-used.

While I think of it, when you are in town will you tell them to send me a box of assorted chocolates? You know the kind I like. There is nothing of that sort to be had here, and I do so long for some.

Charlie is Lily’s cousin. Do you think that cousins ought to kiss each other? I wish I could get the opinion of someone on whose judgment I could implicitly rely. At any rate, even supposing that they ought, I am quite sure that there should be limits. Before long I am afraid that I shall have to give Charlie a hint that I do not think, under the circumstances, that he ought to kiss Lily quite as much as he does me. She may be his cousin, but she is young, and she is pretty. And cousins are not sisters. It is nonsense for people to pretend they are.

The odd part of it is that if Charlie had not been so fond of kissing Lily I might not be going to marry him now. I knew that he was coming. And I was sitting alone in the drawing-room, in a half-light, with my back to the door, when suddenly someone, putting his arm round my waist, lifting me right off my feet, twisted me right round, and began kissing me on my eyes and lips and everywhere.

I thought it was Captain Pentland, though I was astonished at such behavior even from him, because it was only that morning we quarreled. You may judge of my astonishment when I was again able to look out of my own eyes to find myself being he!d, as if I were a baby or a doll, in the arms of a perfect giant of a man whom I had never seen before. You may imagine how shocked I felt, because, as you know well, my views on such subjects—which I owe to your dear teaching—are, if anything, too severe. I will do him the justice to admit that he seemed to be almost as much shocked as I was.

“I beg your pardon,” he said, “ten thousand times. I thought that you were Lily.”

He put me down very much as you handle your Chelsea cups, mamma—softly and delicately, as if he had been afraid of chipping pieces off me.

“I suppose you’re Charlie?”

I spoke more lightly and more cheerfully than I felt. He seemed so ashamed of himself, and so confused, that I pitied him. You know, dear mamma, that when people know and feel that they have done wrong I always pity them. I cannot help it. It is my nature. All flesh is weak. I myself am prone to err. When Lily did appear, we were talking quite as if we knew each other. And that is how it began. It is odd how these sort of things sometimes do begin. As you are aware, I speak as one who has had experience. I shall always believe that it was only the breaking of a shoelace that first brought Norman Eliot and me together.

But those chapters in my life are closed. In the days that are past I may have seemed to hesitate, to occasionally have changed my mind. But now my life is linked to Charlie’s by bonds which never shall be broken. I feel as if I were already married. The gravity of existence is commencing to weigh upon my mind. A woman when she is nearly twenty is no longer young.

While I remember it, when you send the chocolates don’t send any walnuts. I am sick of them. Variously flavored creams are what I really like. And let two pairs of the stockings be light blue, with bronze stripes high up the leg.

I cannot truly say that Lily is behaving to me quite nicely in my relations with Charlie. I do not wish to wrong her, even in my thoughts—she is the very dearest friend I have!—but sometimes I cannot help thinking that she had an eye on Charlie for herself, because when, the other morning, I was telling her how strongly I disapproved of cousins marrying, if she had not been Lily—whose single-hearted affection I have every faith in—I should have said that she was positively rude. Charlie only proposed to me last night, yet, although she must have seen what was coming, in the afternoon she was actually talking to me of Norman Eliot—as if I had been to blame! Mr. Eliot and I never really were engaged—some people jump to conclusions without proper justification. And am I compelled to answer a person’s letters if, for reasons of my own—quite private reasons—I do not choose to?

She came to my bedroom last night, just as I was going to bed. I told her what Charlie had said, and what I had said. Of course, I expected her to congratulate me—as, in circumstances such as mine, a girl’s best friend ought to do. She heard me to an end, then she looked at me and said:

“So you’ve done it again!”

“I don’t know about again, dear Lily,” I replied. “But it would seem as if I had done it at last. I am feeling so happy that it almost makes me afraid.”

“Some girls would feel afraid if they had reason to be conscious of the fact that they had engaged themselves to marry three men at once.”

I could not help but notice that a jarring something was in her tone. But I paid no heed to it. My thoughts were otherwhere.

“How wrong it is,” I murmured, “for people to scoff at love. They cannot know what love is—as I do.”

“Perhaps not. I should think that what you don’t know about love, May, isn’t worth knowing.”

I sighed.

“I fancy, Lily dear, that I have heard stories about you.”

“I dare say; but I never snapped up your favorite cousin from under your nose. Possibly you will not mind telling me if you do mean to marry one of them, and if so which.”

“Lily! How can you ask me such a question? Have I not just been telling you that there is only one man in the world for me, henceforth and forever, and that his name is Charlie?”

“Exactly. Only last week you told me precisely the same story, and his name was Jim, while about a fortnight ago it was Norman.”

My dearest mamma, you see I am making a clean breast of everything to you. I own, quite candidly, that since I have been here I have not behaved precisely as I might have done, and, indeed, ought to have done. I do not know how it is, I meant to be good; I am sure that nothing could have been better than my resolutions. I had no idea that they could have been so easily broken. It only shows, after all, how fragile we are. I felt that, strange and sad though it seems, Lily was not wholly unjust. I got up from my chair, and I knelt at her feet, and I pillowed my head in her lap and I cried:

“Oh, Lily, I’ve been so wicked! You can’t think how sorry I am, now that it’s too late. I wish you’d help me, and tell me what I ought to do.”

“I’m a bit of a dab at a cry myself,” she said. “So, if you take my advice, to begin with you’ll literally dry up.”

Was it not unkind? And was it not vulgar? But I sometimes think that Lily’s heart is like the nether mill-stone—so hard, you know. She went on:

“If you do mean business with Charlie, and you do want my advice, you’ll just tell him everything you have been doing, and leave the solution of the situation to him.”

I made up my mind there and then that that was exactly what I would do. I resolved that I would have no secrets from my husband—particularly as he would be sure to be told them by unfriendly lips if he did not learn them from mine. Besides, in such matters a man is so much more generous and so much more sympathetic than a woman—especially the man. Nor does he value you any the less because he finds that someone else happens to value you a little, too.

So, directly Lily had gone, I let my hair down and I put on my light blue dressing-jacket and a touch of powder, and I waited. Presently I heard steps coming along the passage. I opened the door. Sure enough, it was Charlie, just going to bed. At sight of me he started. I was conscious that I was, perhaps, acting with some imprudence. But I could not help it. My entire happiness was at stake. You know, dear mamma, that I do look nice in that pretty dressing-jacket, with my hair not at all untidy, but simply let down. You yourself have told me that, in every sense of the word, I look so young. He held out his hands to me—under a misapprehension. I shrank back.

“Mr. Mason,” I began, very softly, with, in my voice, a sort of sob, “I could not rest until 1 had told you that all that has passed between us to-night must be considered as unsaid.”

He started as if I had struck him. I could see that his face went white.

“Miss Whitby! May! What do you mean?” He seemed to gasp for breath. “After all, it is only natural that you should not love a great hulking idiot such as I am.”

“You are mistaken. You are not a great hulking idiot. And I do love you. I shall never love anyone but you. It is you who will not love me when you have heard all I have to say.”

“What nonsense are you talking?”

Again he held out his arms to me, and again I shrank away.

“It is not nonsense. I wish it were. So far is it from being nonsense that I felt I could not be at peace until my conscience was unburdened.” I paused. I felt the crucial moment was arriving. My voice sank lower. “Someone else was staying here before you came.”

“Yes, I know; Lily told me—a man named Pentland.”

“Oh, Lily told you so much, did she? Did Lily also tell you that the man named Pentland had bad taste enough to fancy that he had fallen in love with me?”

“Bad taste, you call it. I know nothing about the man, but there evidently can be no sort of doubt about his perfect taste.”

“But, Charlie—I mean Mr. Mason——”

“You don’t—you mean Charlie.”

Dear mamma, once more I sighed. I perceived that it would have to be. Some men are so dictatorial.

“The worst of it is that he worried and worried me so—I was staying in the same house, and couldn’t get away from him, you see—that he made me almost think I cared for him. But now you have come, and made me see what a mistake it was.”

“My little love.”

For the third time he held out his arms to me. And this time he took me in them. I could not find it in my heart to resist him any longer; it might be the last time he would ever hold me there. I continued my remarks with my head not very far away from his waistcoat. He smoothed my hair, very softly, with his great right hand.

“Unfortunately, I am not at all sure that Captain Pentland does not think that, in a sort of way, I am engaged to him. Oh, Charlie, whatever shall I do?”

“Tell him the truth. Say that you’re sorry for him, poor chap, but even the best regulated girls will make mistakes. I’m the mistake you’ve made.”

I was silent. Then I whispered:

“Will you forgive me?”

“It strikes me that it is I who ought to ask you to forgive me for not having been the first to come upon the scene.”

This was throwing a new light upon the subject. It had not occurred to me to look at it from that point of view before. But I had not come to the end of my confessions. Dear mamma, how careful we women ought to be! It is these crises in our lives which make us feel what short-sighted mortals we actually are.

“Before Captain Pentland came—” I was pulling at one of the buttons on his waistcoat as I spoke, and I realized what a big heart Charlie’s must be, if it was at all in proportion to his chest—“another friend of Lily’s was stopping in the house.”

“Ye-es.”

I could not help but be conscious of a certain hesitation in his pronunciation of the word.

“His name was Eliot.”

“Well?”

There had been a moment’s silence before he spoke. And when he had spoken there ensued a portentous pause. I hid my face still more from his examining gaze. My voice seemed almost to die away.

“He, also, professed to bestow on me the gift of his affection.”

“The devil he did!”

Yes, mamma, that was precisely what he said. It made me shiver. But he was sorry as soon as the words had passed his lips.

“Forgive me! I didn’t mean it! After all, it is only to be expected that every man who sees you will fall in love with you at sight.”

I wondered if he would talk to me like that in years to come. Do husbands of ten years’ standing say such things unto their wives? Oh, how ashamed of myself I felt as I thought of what I still had to admit! Dear mamma, I will try hard never again to do what my conscience tells me is not right. If only we would always listen to the still small voice which seeks to guide us!

“Charlie, you have no notion how foolish I’ve been! Until you came I had no proper conception of the actualities of existence. Mr. Eliot caused me to confuse the issues, just as Captain Pentland did.”

He held me out a little way in front of him, trying to look into my face. I was careful not to let him see too much of it. I hung down my head with what, I do hope, mamma, was proper penitence.

“Let me know clearly where we are, little girl. Am I to understand you to say that both these men asked you to marry them?”

“I am afraid, Charlie, that you are to understand something of the kind.”

“And that you gave both of them encouragement?”

I looked up at him—such a look, mamma! My eyes were swimming in tears. I knew he would not tell me to “dry up.” My heart seemed to be rising to my lips.

“Not real encouragement. I never gave anyone real encouragement, Charlie, till I knew you. Even in your case I fear I ought to have been more reticent. But you cannot have the least idea of what a wide world of love you seem to have opened out to me. Won’t you forgive me for encouraging you?”

Dear mamma, he collapsed. Of what took place during the moments which immediately followed, I can give you no definite description. I know I began to think that the end of the world had come. When he had quite finished, he said:

“Look here, young lady, what is past is past. We will make no further allusions to what took place before the war. But in the future, perhaps you will kindly manage not, as you put it, to confuse the issues, but will continue to confine yourself to encouraging me.”

Was it not noble of him? And so sweet! I am persuaded that his character is one of singular beauty.

Dear mamma, the passages which ensued were too sacred even for your dear eyes. When he left me I feel certain it was to dream of me. I know that all night long I dreamt of him. And on my knees beside my bed I registered a vow that in the time to come I will be as good as I possibly can.

Do not forget the shoes, and the stockings, and the chocolates! And do give Tom his ring! I am registering this letter, so you are sure to get it safe.

I will bring, or send, Charlie to you, on approval, whenever you please.

I am, my dearest mamma,

Your ever loving daughter,

May.