The Old Wives' Tale. Bennett Arnold

Table of Contents

      On the Sunday afternoon Mrs. Baines was trying to repose a little in the drawing-room, where she had caused a fire to be lighted. Constance was in the adjacent bedroom with her father. Sophia lay between blankets in the room overhead with a feverish cold. This cold and her new dress were Mrs. Baines’s sole consolation at the moment. She had prophesied a cold for Sophia, refuser of castor-oil, and it had come. Sophia had received, for standing in her nightdress at a draughty window of a May morning, what Mrs. Baines called ‘nature’s slap in the face.’ As for the dress, she had worshipped God in it, and prayed for Sophia in it, before dinner; and its four double rows of gimp on the skirt had been accounted a great success. With her lace-bordered mantle and her low, stringed bonnet she had assuredly given a unique lustre to the congregation at chapel. She was stout; but the fashions, prescribing vague outlines, broad downward slopes, and vast amplitudes, were favourable to her shape. It must not be supposed that stout women of a certain age never seek to seduce the eye and trouble the meditations of man by other than moral charms. Mrs. Baines knew that she was comely, natty, imposing, and elegant; and the knowledge gave her real pleasure. She would look over her shoulder in the glass as anxious as a girl: make no mistake.

      She did not repose; she could not. She sat thinking, in exactly the same posture as Sophia’s two afternoons previously. She would have been surprised to hear that her attitude, bearing, and expression powerfully recalled those of her reprehensible daughter. But it was so. A good angel made her restless, and she went idly to the window and glanced upon the empty, shuttered Square. She too, majestic matron, had strange, brief yearnings for an existence more romantic than this; shootings across her spirit’s firmament of tailed comets; soft, inexplicable melancholies. The good angel, withdrawing her from such a mood, directed her gaze to a particular spot at the top of the square.

      She passed at once out of the room—not precisely in a hurry, yet without wasting time. In a recess under the stairs, immediately outside the door, was a box about a foot square and eighteen inches deep covered with black American cloth. She bent down and unlocked this box, which was padded within and contained the Baines silver tea-service. She drew from the box teapot, sugar-bowl, milk-jug, sugar-tongs, hot-water jug, and cake-stand (a flattish dish with an arching semicircular handle)—chased vessels, silver without and silver-gilt within; glittering heirlooms that shone in the dark corner like the secret pride of respectable families. These she put on a tray that always stood on end in the recess. Then she looked upwards through the banisters to the second floor.

      “Maggie!” she piercingly whispered.

      “Yes, mum,” came a voice.

      “Are you dressed?”

      “Yes, mum. I’m just coming.”

      “Well, put on your muslin.” “Apron,” Mrs. Baines implied.

      Maggie understood.

      “Take these for tea,” said Mrs. Baines when Maggie descended. “Better rub them over. You know where the cake is—that new one. The best cups. And the silver spoons.”

      They both heard a knock at the side-door, far off, below.

      “There!” exclaimed Mrs. Baines. “Now take these right down into the kitchen before you open.”

      “Yes, mum,” said Maggie, departing.

      Mrs. Baines was wearing a black alpaca apron. She removed it and put on another one of black satin embroidered with yellow flowers, which, by merely inserting her arm into the chamber, she had taken from off the chest of drawers in her bedroom. Then she fixed herself in the drawing-room.

      Maggie returned, rather short of breath, convoying the visitor.

      “Ah! Miss Chetwynd,” said Mrs. Baines, rising to welcome. “I’m sure I’m delighted to see you. I saw you coming down the Square, and I said to myself, ‘Now, I do hope Miss Chetwynd isn’t going to forget us.’ ”

      Miss Chetwynd, simpering momentarily, came forward with that self-conscious, slightly histrionic air, which is one of the penalties of pedagogy. She lived under the eyes of her pupils. Her life was one ceaseless effort to avoid doing anything which might influence her charges for evil or shock the natural sensitiveness of their parents. She had to wind her earthly way through a forest of the most delicate susceptibilities—fern-fronds that stretched across the path, and that she must not even accidentally disturb with her skirt as she passed. No wonder she walked mincingly! No wonder she had a habit of keeping her elbows close to her sides, and drawing her mantle tight in the streets! Her prospectus talked about ‘a sound and religious course of training,’ 'study embracing the usual branches of English, with music by a talented master, drawing, dancing, and calisthenics.’ Also ‘needlework plain and ornamental;’ also ‘moral influence;’ and finally about terms, 'which are very moderate, and every particular, with references to parents and others, furnished on application.’ (Sometimes, too, without application.) As an illustration of the delicacy of fern-fronds, that single word ‘dancing’ had nearly lost her Constance and Sophia seven years before!

      She was a pinched virgin, aged forty, and not ‘well off;’ in her family the gift of success had been monopolized by her elder sister. For these characteristics Mrs. Baines, as a matron in easy circumstances, pitied Miss Chetwynd. On the other hand, Miss Chetwynd could choose ground from which to look down upon Mrs. Baines, who after all was in trade. Miss Chetwynd had no trace of the local accent; she spoke with a southern refinement which the Five Towns, while making fun of it, envied. All her O’s had a genteel leaning towards ‘ow,’ as ritualism leans towards Romanism. And she was the fount of etiquette, a wonder of correctness; in the eyes of her pupils’ parents not so much ‘a perfect LADY’ as ‘a PERFECT lady.’ So that it was an extremely nice question whether, upon the whole, Mrs. Baines secretly condescended to Miss Chetwynd or Miss Chetwynd to Mrs. Baines. Perhaps Mrs. Baines, by virtue of her wifehood, carried the day.

      Miss Chetwynd, carefully and precisely seated, opened the conversation by explaining that even if Mrs. Baines had not written she should have called in any case, as she made a practice of calling at the home of her pupils in vacation time: which was true. Mrs. Baines, it should be stated, had on Friday afternoon sent to Miss Chetwynd one of her most luxurious notes—lavender-coloured paper with scalloped edges, the selectest mode of the day—to announce, in her Italian hand, that Constance and Sophia would both leave school at the end of the next term, and giving reasons in regard to Sophia.

      Before the visitor had got very far, Maggie came in with a lacquered tea-caddy and the silver teapot and a silver spoon on a lacquered tray. Mrs. Baines, while continuing to talk, chose a key from her bunch, unlocked the tea-caddy, and transferred four teaspoonfuls of tea from it to the teapot and relocked the caddy.

      “Strawberry,” she mysteriously whispered to Maggie; and Maggie disappeared, bearing the tray and its contents.

      “And how is your sister? It is quite a long time since she was down here,” Mrs. Baines went on to Miss Chetwynd, after whispering “strawberry.”

      The remark was merely in the way of small-talk—for the hostess felt a certain unwilling hesitation to approach the topic of daughters—but it happened to suit the social purpose of Miss Chetwynd to a nicety. Miss Chetwynd was a vessel brimming with great tidings.

      “She is very well, thank you,” said Miss Chetwynd, and her expression grew exceedingly vivacious. Her face glowed with pride as she added, “Of course everything is changed now.”

      “Indeed?” murmured Mrs. Baines, with polite curiosity.

      “Yes,” said Miss Chetwynd. “You’ve not heard?”

      “No,” said Mrs. Baines. Miss Chetwynd knew that she had not heard.

      “About Elizabeth’s engagement? To the Reverend Archibald Jones?”

      It is the fact that Mrs. Baines was taken aback. She did nothing indiscreet; she did not give vent to her excusable amazement that the elder Miss Chetwynd