Under love's rule

Contents

CHAPTER

I. The Children's Hour

II. How THE Rich Live

CHAPTER I. THE children's HOUR

It was teatime all over London ; and it was the children's hour at No. icx), Palatine Square.

The children's hour. The words used to sound very pretty from the rosy lips of Mrs. Lerwick, the children's mother.

" Five o'clock is the children's hour," she would say. "They always have tea with me — when I am at home,"

"The worst of it is that there are so few *whens,'" Eustace, the eldest of the three boys, would complain sometimes.

For once in a way mother was at home. It was

B early in the season, and the room seemed full of a pale yellowness — the yellow of Lent lilies, the pale, faint gold of an April sun. It was mother's morning room — on the second floor in Palatine Square; and the flowers, the tables loaded with silver toys, the Indian draperies, and tall painted leather screen — on which Court beauties and Court fops, after Watteau, danced a formal dance in a formal garden — made up a prettier picture than the spacious drawing-rooms below, with their six lofty windows, and blue satin curtains, and immaculate chintz chair*covers, and general air of being meant for company. Here the chair-covers were always tumbled, the draperies were tossed about anyhow, and there were generally dogs on the sofas.

Eustace, Paul, and Fritz loved the room ; for it was the only room in Palatine Square in which they ever felt that their mother really belonged to them and they to her. In the country they saw her nearly every day. They ran behind her cart when she drove her Norwegian ponies, dined now and then at her luncheon-table, rode their shelties to the meet with her when she made believe to follow the hounds ; but in London mother was busy, with an air of incessant occupation which the Prime Minister himself could not have exceeded. This afternoon, even, though the teatables had been set out ten minutes ago, mother's work was not quite finished.

She was sitting close to the fender, with a blotting-pad on her knee, filling in cards for her first musical evening, as fast as her active little hand could scribble the names. She had been paying visits in the afternoon, and had not long exchanged the triple armour of her fashionable visiting-gown for a picturesque arrangement of soft Indian silk, in which she could loll at ease in a chair that was as near the ground as a chair could be. Mother loved low seats; and Fritz loved to crawl over the back of mother's chair, and descend, an avalanche of boy, flaxen head downwards, into mother's lap.

Fritz was the baby — not quite six years old — and allowed to do what he liked in mother's room and in mother^s presence. In mother's absence he

4 Under Lovers Rule*

dropped from pet and plaything into the position of a troublesome little boy, who was openly spoken of by the household as a " young Turk, and spoilt by his mar till he was beyond bearing."

Stacie— the eldest— was at Elstree, and reported very highly of himself in the cricket-field ; but in the matter of lessons, as compared with certain saps and smugs among his schoolfellows, he owned to being "thick." He had visions of growing up to be a famous cricketer, invited all over England for the sake of his prowess in the field. Nor did he think ill of himself at the rougher sport of "footer," which occupied most of his thoughts in the winter terms.

Paul was educated at home by a morning governess, whom he hated ; not because she was unkind to him, but because it was a low thing for a boy to be taught by an old woman. Fritz had not yet achieved so much as a spelling acquaintance with the alphabet, in spite of all mechanical aid in the shape of ivory letters, picture-books, bricks, puzzles, and instructive games, and in defiance of the patient drudgery of a pale young person in the upper story, who was called a nursery governess, and treated like a nursemaid.

Of course the boys had nicknames. Eustace was Stacie. Paul was Poppy with his family, but with no one else ; for he was one of those boys who are always more grown up than the grown-up people about them, and with whom the use of a pet name would seem an unwarrantable liberty. Fritz was Fluff — so named on account of curly hair which was in colour and texture like silkworm's silk, but which had been cut as short as Samson's before his fourth birthday.

" More 'vitations, mammy ? " asked Fluff, sprawling on his stomach at his mother's feet while she wrote.

"Yes, darling."

" What a lot of parties you do give ! "

" People are obliged to entertain, pet, if they go

out as much as I do."

"To enter what?" inquired. Fluff, lifting up

wondering blue eyes to the busy writer.

" To entertain — to give parties — you intelligent

duck ! " leaning down to kiss the top of his flaxen head and spilling some ink on her gown. " There, now see what you've made me do ! "

" Oh, mammy, I didn't make you kiss me — you did it off your own bat."

The tea-things had been in the room a quarter of an hour. Stacie and Paul had been talking in a distant window, but a tempting odour of toasted bun having crept through the room, juvenile appetites were stimulated, and the two elder boys began to think it was time something should be done to draw mother's attention to their wants.

" Stacie," Paul began, " which do you like best, tea or ginger beer ? "

" Ginger beer is the best after cricket ; but I've heard that some people like tea at five o'clock in the afternoon," Stacie replied, rather loudly and distinctly.

After this audacity both the boys became explosive with smothered laughter ; but Mrs. Lerwick went on scribbling, her pretty, fair head bending low over her blotting-pad, unconscious of this pointed dialogue.

" Well, there's one advantage about ginger beer,"

argued Stacie, a little louder than before. "A boy can run to the refreshment-tent and buy it for himself; but you can't run out into Palatine Square and buy a cup of tea."

"Oh, you impatient creatures, in a hurry for your tea ! "

" Not in a hurry, mums, but we like our tea best when it ain't quite cold."

" I haven't half finished my cards. You are such impatient children! Here is this darling Fluff as quiet as a lamb ! "

She rose hastily, scattering a shower of cards and envelopes, and exposing the patient Fluff, who was lying on her silken train luxuriously devouring a large slice of pound cake.

" A perfect lamb ! " exclaimed Stacie, pointing the finger of scorn. "That's the second piece. Pop and I have been watching him."

"And the only tea-gown I care for is all over crumbs and candied peel," protested Mrs. Lerwick.

"Fluff was so hungry," pleaded the youngest^ his mouth stuffed with cake..

*' My poor darling ! Did his cruel mother keep him waiting ? Come, boys. I am nearly fainting for want of my tea. But those cards have to be ready for the eight o'clock post."

The four sat crowding round the tea-table. Mother's low chair was particularly inconvenient for pouring out tea, but the boys helped her, and though there was a good deal of milk spilt in the tea-tray, they got on capitally. Cake, buns, bread-and-butter disappeared with astounding rapidity. Stacie and Pop told anecdotes — the elder of his masters at Elstree, the younger of base tricks played on his erudite and elderly governess.

Mother turned a smiling face to each, and tried to look as if she were listening intently; and, as she was expected only to listen, she was not found out.

Presently the boys began to ask questions.

''Where's father to-day ? "

" Out of town,'^ mother answered carelessly.

"But where?"

** Somewhere where there's racing. I think he .had to go by the Great I^orth^qrn,"

The Children's Hour. g

"Newmarket, of course," said Stacie. "The Craven Meeting. Is he going to pull ofif anything this time ? "

Mr. Lerwick was distinctly of the turf, turfy ; and his eldest son might have heard more turf talk than is altogether good for a schoolboy.

" Oh ! I've no idea," replied mother, absolutely indifferent " His two-year-olds generally seem to lose."

"And so do his three-year-olds," said Stacie. " I'm ashamed of my name at Elstree when I find how little confidence any one has in my father's stable. Ward major groaned when he drew Madame Angot in our Leger sweep, for he knew the mare belonged to father."

" Oh, but he can't be always unlucky. I hope he will win the Derby this year."

"With Gasometer? " asked Paul.

"Or with Badmash. Badmash is the horse he believes in."

"Why, there's 25 to i offered against both of them," cried Eustace, contemptuously.

^r. Lerwick's experiences oi;i the ,turf herejtofQ;r^ lo Under Love's Rule.

had not been cheerful. He had backed his own horses with gentlemanlike confidence in his own judgment and his own stable; and people knew that whatever Mr. Lerwick's horses were not, they were always " meant." His colours implied good faith, and a kind of careless honesty as of a man who could afford to lose.

It was popularly reported of Mr. Lerwick that his income was of such an expansive figure that he did not know how rich he was. He had inherited the chief interest in a great commercial house in the iron country, which had progressed by leaps and bounds under the new order of things in which success and failure are for the most part on a Titanic scale. It was supposed that his income flowed in upon him in a golden stream, whose force increased as the years rolled on. Let him spend as lavishly as he pleased — be as unlucky with his horses as hard Fate willed — he could never come to the end of the income produced by his share in Lerwick and Co. Here was no question of a Jubilee Plunger inheriting a quarter of a million. The wealth of Lerwick and Co, was an

The Children's Hour. ii

endless web of bank paper, of which no mind could conceive the exhaustion.

In order to assist him in the business of a life of pleasure, Anthony Lerwick had married one of the prettiest debutantes of her year — and, perhaps, also, one of the silliest; a fresh young beauty from Devonshire, launched in the choicest monied circles by a wealthy widowed aunt, and enjoying her first season as a butterfly enjoys his first flight among the roses. EUinor Lerwick's admirers were all agreed that she was much too pretty to be clever, and they liked her better so, being for the most part golden youth, who had been more distinguished on the river than in the schools. She was quite intelligent enough for her husband, who would have been bored to death by a clever wife, and would have exiled himself for life in Central Africa rather than endure the companionship of a strong-minded woman. Of anything that could be called mind in a woman Tony had a dislike which was akin to absolute fear; indeed, from mind masculine as well as from mind feminine he shrank with unconcealed aversion. The society he liked best was to be found in the saddle-room, the gun-room, his trainer's cottage, or among the blue-jackets on his yacht. That a man should seek entertainment in the inside of a book seemed to him as extraordinary as that a solitary prisoner should make spiders or mice his companions. The things he liked were the things he could see, touch, and understand — horses, dogs, guns, boats. He could not appreciate a joke that was not of the practical kind. The men he liked were men of his own calibre. The only woman he liked was his wife. v;.

As a husband, Tony Lerwick stood out from the ruck — a first prize in the matrimonial lottery. He admired his wife as much fourteen years after marriage as he had admired his girlish bride blushing under a cloud of tulle. In his eyes those years had only made her lovelier. She had not disappointed him as some of his horses had done, by growing coarse instead of fine. She had " furnished *' just in the right degree ; and her figure, in acquiring a womanly plumpness, had retained all the grace of her girlhood. His Nellie could do no wrong. She was the prettiest thoroughbred in his stables. She could not be too extravagant, too frivolous, too selfish to please him. All that she did, all that she said, found favour in those indulgent eyes.

Mrs. Lerwick went back to her nest by the fire and her batch of invitation cards ever so long before the boys had finished tea. The children's hour had resolved itself — so far as maternal com* panionship goes — into the children's ten minutes» Again the pretty fair head bent itself over the blotting-pad, and the busy pen scribbled and scampered along.

The boys went on chattering in low voices. They emptied the dish of toasted buns, about which there was more coagulated butter than a careful nurse would approve ; but it was the nurse's hour as well as the children's hour, and the custodian of the little boys' health was at the bottom of the house gossiping over cups and saucers with the housekeeper and the French maid.

When the dishes and the teapot were empty, and there was a terrible mess in the tea-tray, Fluff suddenly wearied of the entertainment.

"May we go to the Surbiton and sail our boats, mummy ? " he asked ; but the pen rushed on, and he had to repeat the question several times in an ascending treble before it was answered.

The Surbiton was Fluff for Serpentine. Fluff had a prodigious command of the English tongue, but he was not particular about details, and proper names were often beyond his limits.

"No, darling, it is too late,'* came the tardy answer.

"No, it ain't too late!'*

" Yes, loveliest, it will be dark in half an hour. You know you never go out after tea at this time of the year."^

" That's Tommy rot ! '' cried Fluff.

The fair head started up with a jerk of horror, but reproof was addressed to the quarter where it is least expected.

"Eustace, this is your doing. You bring this horrid language from Elstree."

" If I do, it*s useful to all of us," said Eustace, accustomed to have other people's sins laid upon his shoulders. "I heard you tell the Governor that the last novel you read was Tommy "

"No, Eustace, not Tommy," interjected Paul, who was the most serious of the three, made grave beyond his years by the overshadowing of his governess's mature intellect. "Mother only said utter rot — not Tommy."

" I'm very sorry I ever used such a disgraceful word," exclaimed mother, and then concluded with withering emphasis, " or that I should have a son rude enough to remind me that I was capable of being vulgar."

Eustace jumped up from the tea-table with a vehemence that made the cups and saucers rattle.

" That's what always happens when Fluff does anything wrong," he said, marching to the door. " I get blamed for it"

He slammed the door behind him ; and the doors in Palatine Square are solid six-panelled doors, the banging whereof resounds from basement to garret.

" What a temper ! " sighed Mrs. Lerwick, despair^ ingly. ** He is becoming positively unmanageable."

Such a little spurt of temper on Eustace's part was not an uncommon occurrence in Palatine Square; though at Elstree he was reckoned one of the best-tempered fellows in the school. Sooth to say, Mr. Lerwick's eldest son and heir did not get the best of it in the family circle. As the eldest, and as a schoolboy, he was supposed to be harder than his younger brothers, and his hardness was tested by a good many hard knocks. He had never pretended to be as clever as Paul — had always been willing to be the second, not the first — and had freely owned that at school he was called "thick," such thickness being taken to stand for intellectual inferiority. And so even Fluff learnt somehow to laugh at his eldest brother's deficiencies — or, at least, to laugh at Paul's jokes about them.

And yet what would those juniors have done without the schoolboy ? Who was it taught them

El which of all the summer*s cricket matches and all the winter's football matches were worth being excited about ? Who was it told them the relative strength of Eton and Harrow — of Blackheath and Richmond ? Why, Eustace, of course ; for even that brilliant Tandy, past master of all turf know- ^ ledge, was no authority upon cricket, and scarcely knew the difference between Rugger and Socker, and, indeed, owned that he " took no stock " of either game.

What would their vocabulary have been like without Eustace ? Mere nursery talk, the language of boys given over to the teaching of women. Without Eustace they would not have known that money was " oof," and that a boy who had half a crown a week pocket-money was an "oof-bird." Unenlightened by Eustace, they would have gone on talking about " sovereigns " instead of calling those' useful coins "quids" or "thick 'uns;" nor would they ever have acquired the manly habif of terminating every noun substantive with the syllable -er, Tandy had been useful to them ; but though Tandy was a young man of vast

C judgment, he lacked language, and expressed his deepest thoughts by a significant action of the eye and eyebrow, or a long low whistle, rather than by words.

Thus, had it not been for Eustace and those fresh breathings of boyish life that he brought from Elstree, Paul and Fluff might have talked like babies long after they were in trowsers.

Fluff had removed himself to the other end of the room, out of the path of the storm, and had taken all the silver toys off one of his mother's favourite tables, and was sitting on the floor making railway trains with them — a harpsichord, two armchairs, a bird-cage, a bedstead, a sofa — all hooked together and pushed along the velvet pile at express speed by Fluff's dexterous little hands.

"Miss Warren says you don't know how to manage any of us ; I heard her tell Perry so," said Paul, who was seated luxuriously in a large armchair, brooding.

" Then she told Perry something that's not true, and if Miss Warren indulges in insolent remarks about me she will be dismissed at the end of the quarter."

" I wish you would dismiss her, and let me go to Elstree with Eustace."

" Yes, and come home a coarse rough bear, like Eustace, thinking and talking of nothing but cricket."

'* Well, I can't go on for ever learning of an old woman," groaned Paul. " I know more Latin than Eustace, and Fm a book further on in Euclid. Why shouldn't I go to Elstree next term ? "

" Because it's quite enough to have one schoolboy in the family," protested Mrs. Lerwick, who had allowed her sons to flutter her spirits considerably, so that it was all she could do to put her cards into the right envelopes, and manipulate the goldhandled stamp-damper without messing the thick " Royal Family " paper.

"I'm sure I sometimes wish you could have always remained babies," she murmured presently, when the last envelope was sealed.

" Perhaps you would have liked us never to be born," said Paul. "That would have been still more convenient."

Tears sprang to the pretty blue eyes — those blue eyes which Fluff's so exactly matched — and Mrs. Lerwick started up in a little burst of wounded feeling.

"You are a heartless boy," she exclaimed. "Ever so much worse than your brother. He only slams doors ; you try to hurt one's feelings.'*

" Oh, dear ! " groaned Paul. " I only answered your own remark. Look at Fluff. He's playing old gooseberry with your silver."

There was an exclamation, and a rustle of silken skirts across the floor. The toys were rescued, Fluff was slapped — a very small slap, which produced a very big squall. Electric bells were rung — bells that rang downstairs — bells that rang upstairs. Nursery governess and footman rushed to the rescue, and Fluff went off like Eugene Aram, between two sturdy custodians. Paul picked himself listlessly out of a nest of satin pillows and Japanese antimacassars, and moved slowly towards the door.

*' When is the little Auntie coming again ? " he asked.

" Not till we go back to Heatherside."

"And when will that be ?"

" Why, not till the end of the season, child. We have only just come to town."

" Only just ! It seems ages since we came ! I hate London."

And thus without a word of farewell the last of the three departed to his own kingdom in the attics. Two had left in wrath and one in silence, and so ended the children's hour.

Pretty Mrs. Lerwick sat down on the carpet and picked up the silver toys one by one with a rueful visage. Delicate little corners were bent, the threads of the 'cello were broken, a leg of the harpsichord was doubled up, the airy, fairy roof of the bird-cage was squashed in on the tiny macaw that should swing below it.

" They are quite spoilt," sighed EUinor Lerwick, *' and I shall never get such pretty ones again until we go back to Genoa."

CHAPTER 11.

HOW THE RICH LIVE.

Eustace went back to Elstree next day. He had come to Palatine Square for a day and a night, being wanted in Burlington Street by a gentleman whom he looked upon as one of the enemies of the human race — a very scientific and superior person, who did all sorts of disagreeable things to Eustace's mouth and teeth, ruthlessly extracting any tooth whose position offended his hypercritical eye. Bad as the extraction was, Eustace could bear that like a hero ; but worse remained behind, in the shape of what the dentist called "taking an impression," in which process hot red wax was crammed into his mouth and kept there till it cooled, at the risk of suffocation — the result of which ordeal by hot wax was a silver, or gold, or vulcanite plate, which made life more or less of a burden; while it was accounted basest villainy on the part of Eustace if he wore this modern instrument of torture in his pocket instead of on his jaws.

All the morning of his brief holiday had been devoted to this dreary business of having his teeth pulled out and his mouth modelled for another new plate — a plate which was to exercise the severest pressure upon two obstinate little tusks which the dentist talked of learnedly as canines. Nobody asked Eustace whether he thought the game was worth the candle, or whether he would not just as soon keep the canines as nature made them. He complained that he was handed over to Mr. Waytwright as if he had been a black slave.

" Has a fellow to wait till he is twenty-one before he has any property in his own mouth ? '' Eustace asked at the breakfast-table in the schoolroom ; but there was nobody present of sufficient learning to answer the question. "Can his parents have a sixth-form boy strapped into a chair and tortured ? "

" Oh, Stacie, you have never been strapped ! " cried Fluff.

" No, but I expect it would come to that if I didn't give in," said Eustace, darkly.

"Becos if you was strapped," said Fluff, musingly, " I should like to be there to see."

Eustace had been huffed yesterday at tea, but the sun never went down on his wrath. His temper was quick, but his affections were warm and strong. He adored the pretty fair-haired mother; and as he had to leave home early, he pleaded for an interview in mother's bedroom.

She heard the voice in the corridor, and called out, " Stacie, Stacie darling," and he went into the bright room which opened out of mother's morning room, with three windows overlooking the branching limes and chestnuts in the square. He found her sitting up in bed in a blue silk matinie — a fair girlish face looking out of a nest of pale blue frilling and lace-trimmed pillows.

Mrs. Lerwick was sitting up to take her morning chocolate, while her French maid held a review of gowns, tippets, fichus, and other finery, discoursing vivaciously as she tossed the costly frippery about.

" But truly Madame has nothing to wear ; this blue gown is altogether impossible."

" Oh ! I am so fond of that blue surah — come and kiss me, Stacie — I must wear it again. It fits me better than anything Amelie has made for ages."

"But, Madame, have the goodness to look at the edge of the skirt — cut to pieces."

" When does your train go, love ? But you can mend that hem, Babette."

Babette shrugged her lean little shoulders and threw down the blue silk frock as if it were almost too foul a thing to hold any longer in her superfine fingers.

"But, Madame, that soft silk does not mend itself — there is not enough of substance to hold a needle."

This meant that the blue frock was cashiered. Mrs. Lerwick would see it no more ; but somebody else would go to Hampton Court in it next

Sunday afternoon, escorted by one of Mr. Hunter's under-cooks from the famous confectioner's on the other side of the square.

Stacie clambered on to a chair beside the bed, and gave his mother a vigorous hug.

** I hope you've enjoyed your holiday, dearest," she said, in the midst of a shower of kisses.

"I've enjoyed seeing you — I didn't enjoy the dentist."

"No, no, of course not. But I want all my sons to be handsome."

She looked for something on the littered table, where a fat, yellow-covered French novel, a mammoth silver eau-de-Cologne bottle, a fan, a heap of letters, three lace-edged handkerchiefs, and the chocolate service were crowded anyhow. She picked a lizard-skin purse out of the jumble, and opened it, and a shower of gold rolled over the silken coverlet.

" Oh, mummy, how rich you are ! "

She gave Eustace a couple of sovereigns, and had to submit to a second hug, while Babette picked up the rest of the gold, and placed it in a little pile on the dressing-table with ostentatious carefulness.

"Won't I have a ripping bat," exclaimed Eustace, and a voice called from without —

" Now, Master Eustace, unless you want to lose your train."

" Why, of course I want to lose my train," he said, with a last kiss from the pretty mother, " but I mustn't do it," and off he ran.

" You can put out the pink crepon for Sandown," sighed Mrs. Lerwick as she picked up the yellowbacked novel and twirled the leaves listlessly.

Palatine Square, as everybody knows, is one of the choicest positions in West End London. It is an old-world square in which there are scarcely two houses exactly alike. Some have been rebuilt and are palaces, Italian, German, or Early English, with roofs that aspire skywards, minarets and watch-towers, campaniles and clustered chimneys, loggia and oriel windows, all that is fantastical and expensive in architecture. Other houses remain just as they were under the first and second George, when Palatine Square was young ; houses so plain and homelike that one might fancy one's self in a country manorhouse. Again, there are a few much smaller houses — a cosy little bachelor house here and there, squeezed in between two colossal neighbours — houses with a rustic-looking balcony and verandah, and a delicate patrician grace in their modest stairways, and low-ceiled rooms opening one into the other, altogether suggestive of those good old times when there were meadows and rural lanes north of Palatine Square, and when the hangman's cart might be seen on the Oxford Road any morning, carrying its wretched burden to Tyburn.

Mr. Lerwick's house was one of the largest in the Square as to reception-rooms, and one of the worst as to bedrooms. It was an old house ; and though it had been gorgeously decorated and furnished at Mr. Lerwick's expense, there had been no thought of putting on a new and higher roof, and letting light, space, and air into those terrible third-floor rooms.

Fascinated with the lofty double drawing-room, the six tall windows, the Italian chimney-pieces, Mrs. Lerwick had gone up to the top floor predisposed to be delighted with all she found there.

" Oh, Tony ! " she exclaimed, as she and her husband went upstairs, " what a house for parties ! We must have it."