Somehow Good by William Frend De Morgan (best short novels TXT) 📕

so much disturbance; but my meaning is plain. When I was a girl young women were different.... I dare say it is all right. I do not wish to lay myself open to ridicule for my old-fashioned opinions.... What _is_ it? I came back early, certainly, because I found the sun so tiring; but surely, my dear, you cannot have failed to see that our front window commands a full view of the bathing-machines. But I am silent.... Mrs. Iggulden does not understand making mustard. Hers runs."

Dr. Conrad was not interested in the mustard. He _was_ about the cryptic attack on Sally's swimming and diving, which he felt to have been dexterously conveyed in his parent's speech with scarcely a word really to the point. There was no lack of skill in the Goody's method. He flushed slightly, and made no immediate reply--even to a superhumanly meek, "I know I shall be told I am wrong"--until after he had complied with a requisition for a very little more--so small a quantity as to seem somehow to reduce the lady's previous total morally, though it added to it physically--and then he spoke, taking the indictment for granted:

"I can't see what you find fault with. Not Miss Sally's bathing-costume; nobody could!" Which was truth itself, for nothing more elegant could have been found in the annals of bathing. "And if she has a boat to dive off, somebody must row it. Besides, her mother would object if...." But the doctor is impatient and annoyed--a rare thing with him. He treats his beefsteak-pudding coldly, causing his mother to say: "Then you can ring the bell."

However, she did not intend her text to be spoiled by irruptions of Mrs. Iggulden, so she waited until the frequent rice-pudding had elapsed, and then resumed at an advantage:

"You were very snappish and peevish with me just now, Conrad, without waiting to hear what I had to say. But I overlook it. I am your mother. If you had waited, I should have told you that I have no fault whatever to find with Miss Nightingale's bathing-dress. It is, no doubt, strictly _en regle_. Nor can I say, in these days, what I think of girls practising exercises that in _my_ day were thought unwomanly. All is changed now, and I am old-fashioned. But this I do say, that had your father, or your great-uncle, Dr. Everett Gayler, been told forty years ago that a time would come when it would be thought no disgrace for an _English girl_ to jump off a boat with an _unmarried man_ in it.... My dear, I am sure the latter would have made one of those acrid and biting remarks for which he was celebrated in his own circle, and which have even, I believe, been repeated by Royalty. That is the only thing I have to say. I say nothing of girls learning to swim and dive. I say nothing of their bicycling. Possibly the young lady who passed the window this morning with a gentleman _on the same bicycle_ was properly engaged to him; or his sister. Even about the practice of Sandow, or Japanese wrestling, I have nothing to say. But if they are to dive off boats in the open sea, in the face of all the beach, at least let the boats be rowed by married men. That is all I ask. It is very little."

What fools mothers sometimes are about their sons! They contrive that these sons shall pass through youth to early manhood without a suspicion that even mothers have human weaknesses. Then, all in a moment, just when love has ridden triumphant into the citadel of the boys' souls, they will sacrifice all--all they have won in a lifetime--to indulge some petty spleen against the new _regime_ that threatens their dethronement. And there is no surer way of undermining a son's loyalty than to suggest a want of delicate feeling in the new Queen--nothing that can make him question the past so effectually as to force him to hold his nostrils in a smell of propriety, puffed into what seems to him a gale from heaven.

The contrast between the recent merpussy in the freshening seas, and this, as it seemed to him, perfectly gratuitous intrusion of moral carbolic acid, gave Dr. Conrad a sense of nausea, which his love for his mother enjoined ignorance of. His mind cast about, not for ways of excusing Sally--the idea!--but of whitewashing his mother, without seeming to suggest that her own mind had anything Fescennine about it. This is always the great difficulty skywardness has in dealing with the moral scavenger. Are not the motives of purity unimpeachable?

Goody Vereker, however, did not suspect herself of being a fool. On the contrary, she felt highly satisfied with her speech, and may be said to have hugged its peroration. Her son flushed slightly and bit his lip, giving the old lady time for a corollary in a subdued and chastened voice.

"Had I been asked--had you consulted me, my dear--I should certainly have advised that Mr. Fenwick should have been accompanied by another married man, certainly not by a young, single gentleman. The man himself--I am referring to the owner of the boat--would have done quite well, whether married or single. Boatmen are seldom unmarried, though frequently tattooed with ladies' names when they have been in the navy. You see something to laugh at, Conrad? In your mother! But I am used to it." The doctor's smile was in memory of two sun-browned arms that had pushed the boat off two hours ago. One had Elinor and Kate on it, the other Bessie and a Union Jack.

"Don't you think, mother dear," said the doctor at last, "that if Mrs. Fenwick, who knew all about it, had seen anything outrageous she would have spoken? She really only seemed anxious none of us should get drowned."

"Very likely, my dear; she would be. You will, I am sure, do me this justice, that I have throughout said, from the very beginning, that Mrs. Fenwick is a most excellent person, though I have sometimes found her tiring."

"I am sorry she has tired you. You must always tell her, you know, when you're tired, and then she'll come and fetch me." The doctor resisted a temptation to ask, "From the very beginning of _what_?" For the suggestion that materials for laceration were simmering was without foundation; was, in fact, only an example of the speaker's method. She followed it with another.

"It is so often the case with women who have passed a good deal of time in India."

"Are women tiring when they have passed a good deal of time in India?"

"My dear Conrad, _is it likely_ I should talk such nonsense? You know perfectly well what I mean." But the doctor merely awaited natural development, which came. "Mind, I do not say I _believe_ Mrs. Julius Bradshaw's story. But it would quite account for it--fully!"

What would account for what? Heaven only knew! However, the speaker was getting the bit in her teeth, and earth would know very soon. Dr. Conrad was conscious at this moment of the sensation which had once made Sally speak of his mamma as an Octopus. She threw out a tentacle.

"And, of course, Mrs. Julius Bradshaw's story may be nothing but idle talk. I am the last person to give credit to mere irresponsible gossip. Let us hope it is ill founded."

Whereupon her son, who knew another tentacle would come and entangle him if he slipped clear from this one, surrendered at discretion. What _was_ Mrs. Julius Bradshaw's story? A most uncandid way of putting it, for the fact was he had heard it all from Sally in the strictest confidence. So the insincerity was compulsory, in a sense.

The Octopus, who was by this time anchored in her knitting-chair and awaiting her mixture--two tablespoonfuls after every meal--closed her eyes to pursue the subject, but warmed to the chace visibly.

"Are you going to tell me, my dear Conrad, that you do _not_ know that it has been said--I vouch for nothing, remember--that Miss Nightingale's mother was divorced from her father twenty years ago in India?"

"I don't think it's any concern of yours or mine." But having said this, he would have liked to recall it and substitute something else. It was brusque, and he was not sure that it was a fair way of stating the case, especially as this matter had been freely discussed between them in the days of their first acquaintance with Sally and her mother. Dr. Conrad felt mean for renegading from his apparent admission at that time that the divorce was an affair they might properly speculate about. Mrs. Vereker knew well that her son would be hard on himself for the slightest unfairness, and forthwith climbed up to a pinnacle of flawless rectitude, for his confusion.

"My dear, it is absolutely _none_. Am I saying that it is? People's past lives are no affair of ours. Am I saying that they are?"

"Well, no!"

"Very well, then, my dear, listen to what I do say, and do not misrepresent me. What I say is this--(Are you sure Perkins has mixed this medicine the same as the last? The taste's different)--Now listen! What I say is, and I can repeat it any number of times, that it is useless to expect sensitiveness on such points under such circumstances. I am certain that your father, or your great-uncle, Dr. Everett Gayler, would not have hesitated to endorse my opinion that on the broad question of whether a girl should or should not dive off a boat rowed by an unmarried man, no one is less likely to form a correct judgment than a lady who was divorced from her husband twenty years ago in India. But I say nothing against Mrs. Fenwick. She is, so far as she is known to me, an excellent person, and a good wife and mother. Now, my dear Conrad, I must rest, for I fear I have talked too much."

Poor Prosy! All the edge of his joy of the morning was taken off. But never mind! It would very soon be Sally herself again, and his thirsty soul would be drinking deep draughts of her at the pier-end, where the appointment was to be kept with the young lady and her dolly.


CHAPTER XXXIII


OF AN INTERMITTENT CURRENT AT THE PIER-END, AND OF DOLLY'S FORTITUDE. HOW FENWICK PUT HIS HEAD IN THE JAWS OF THE FUTURE UNAWARES, AND PROSY DIDN'T COME. HOW SALLY AND HER STEP SAW PUNCH, AND OF A THIN END OF A FATAL WEDGE. BUT ROSALIND SAW NO COMING CLOUD

An iron pier, with a sense of lattice structure about it, is not to our old-fashioned minds nearly so fascinating as the wooden fabric of our early memories at more than one seaside resort of our boyhood. St. Sennan was of another school, or had become a convert or pervert, if a Saint may be judged by his pier. For this was iron or steel all through, barring the timber flooring whose planks were a quarter of an inch apart, so that you could kneel down to see the water through if you were too short to see over the advertisements a sordid spirit of commercialism had blocked the side-railings with. And if you were three or four, and there was nobody to hold you up (because they were carrying baby), you did so kneel, and as like as not got tar on your knees, and it wouldn't come off. Anyhow, Miss Gwendolen Arkwright did, on her way to the appointment, and was reproved therefore. On which she