Patricia

Contents

CHAPTER PAGE

I. — A House of Mourning . . . i

II. — The Rectory 25

Chapter I

“Luncheon is served, Miss,” declared the butler in those solemn and impressive tones in which such announcements are usually made.

“Oh, Fitz! doesn’t it seem awful, somehow?” And the girl looked up from the fire, over which she had been crouching to get some warmth into her nerve-cold hands.

“What does? ” asked her brother, throwing away a barely touched cigarette.

“That luncheon should be served, as Watson puts it, when Father has only just died ! Not even one hour ago yet!”

“Well, what would you have had him say?”

“I don’t know,” and she gave a nervous little laugh, “only ‘luncheon’ sounds so heartless and horrid.”

“If sandwiches and weak sherry and water on

i a tray would jar less upon your frame of mind, old girl, by all means have them, but I am going down to lunch.”

“ Of course! So am I, ” and she jumped up and linked her arm through that of the young man. “I am so glad you are ordinary, Fitz. I feel as if I wanted ordinariness more than anything else just now. Oh! I do hope there will be a leg of mutton for lunch, or something there is no mystery about. Do you remember Aunt Lucy always says that she thinks it so dreadful when people are going to be hanged to put in the papers that they ate a good breakfast — she should have only dry toast and tea if she were going to be hanged. But do you know I don’t agree with her. I should have bacon — just dull, homelike, ordinary, cheerful bacon.”

“I should have curry or devilled kidneys.”

“Oh, Fitz! Don’t make me laugh. Watson would think it so awful if we laughed at lunch.”

“I have wired to Uncle George. I expect they will come to-morrow. Tell them to have all the spare rooms ready,” he added to the butler, “and for heaven’s sake, pull up that blind.”

“Yes, sir, very good, sir.” And Watson’s face expressed stem disapproval.

“You keep in these back rooms overlooking the gardens, old girl, where you can see the sky and trees. I suppose for convention’s sake we must darken the front rooms — heathenish custom though it is!”

“Isn’t Mr. Whately coming this afternoon? It will be horrid. I hate lawyers.”

“Don’t bother about them. Order some new clothes. That will cheer you up.”

A little smile crept back over the girl’s white face.

“Clothes are a comfort! And a legitimate comfort, too, as one must get mourning. I’ll telephone to Jay’s. But, Fitz, ” and her smiling lips quivered a little, “I do wish things like this wouldn’t happen.”

“Don’t think about it, for heaven’s sake,” and the young man looked anxiously at her. “You simply mustn’t get upset, and you know you will be if you think about things. Talk about clothes, or motor cars, or rice pudding, or suffragettes, or anything, but do be ordinary.”

“ Like the roast mutton and the bacon. Yes, we must be very ordinary, Fitz, and not a bit affectionate or anything upsetting. Don’t kiss me for the world.”

“Nothing was farther from my thoughts. There’s the telephone again. I think you’ll look rather well in black — pitch black, I mean, only soft and thin and transparent.”

“Not all of it, Fitz? There is a piercing east wind, and March is still playing the lion. And even when it is preparing for its lamb-like exit there are still decencies to be considered.”

“Are there?” replied her brother, drily; “you surprise me!”

Fitzpatrick Vaughan and his sister Patricia were the children of a brilliant and distinguished man of letters.

Possessing all the charm and sparkle of Irish descent on his mother’s side and some other qualities also for which that race is proverbial, Edward Vaughan won for himself not only a place in the journalistic and literary inner circle, and in the appreciation of the most carping of critics, but also in the affections of his public. His touch was so human, his wit so understanding, his humour so delightful and reviving, that his readers felt for him that bond of brotherhood which springs from sympathy; and it was with a sense of personal loss that most reading men laid down the paper which announced the death that thirteenth day of March of Edward Vaughan.

His love for Ireland and all things Irish amounted to a passion, which possessed the true childlike qualities of genius; and he thought his ideal of happiness lay in the hope of one day settling in a restored castle which was falling into ruins on the lands which bore his mother’s name, far away on the shores of an Irish lough. As a matter of fact he could not possibly have lived happily out of London, nor been content to take his finger off the bounding pulse of the heart of things; but he dreamed of the bliss of being alone with Ireland, amid the moods of her mountains and the romantic comradeship of her countryside, and these dreams breathed a rare atmosphere about him, in which his pen worked, and some of which it caught, so that Londoners could feel it, and be fascinated and refreshed even in the very hum of the metropolis.

He married early in life the typical wild Irish girl of fiction — the daughter of a penniless Irish peer, — and for a very few, brief years they honeymooned in Ireland, and played at life in London, and adored the quaint reality of a baby son, and built their castles in the air, and dwelt in them, with all the glad exuberance of youth, and Irish youth at that. And then a little daughter came, and with a tragic suddenness the light went out. The baby must be Irish bom, and the spot was romantic, and the artistic setting perfect, and such disturbing worries as good sanitation, analysed water, and competent doctors had never crossed their minds. But all the same they had to be reckoned with, and the young wife’s life was the price. In passionately-shallow grief Edward Vaughan looked his last on the beautiful face of his dead wife, and was comforted by the thought that now she would never grow old, nor lose in his admiring eyes her bewitching beauty, nor stale his love with the wear and tear of ordinary everyday life. He did not know of that love which is deeper than these superficial things, — he was not old enough to know of it. So the wound healed into a sweetly-sad memory, and his brilliant brain was rarefied by what he called experience, but what really was experimentalism. Their effect on the brain is similar ; it is the heart and character which they affect so differently.

To his children Edward Vaughan was a pleasant friend. He named them after their mother’s Irish kinsfolk Fitzpatrick and Patricia, and liked them best before they were six and after they grew up and began to do things. The midway stages rather bored him, as middle cuts of anything always did. His was the nature of beginnings and endings — the passion of welcomes, the pathos of good-byes. He had no use for what lay between. Mountain heights or deepest seas — no table-land for him.

He was glad that his boy was sea-struck — the boy with the Irish eyes and the name of his mother’s race of men. He himself felt, in sympathetic imagination, the call of the sea and the wonder of the West ; for in picturesque imagination the ships are always westward-bound, even though they have to direct their course south or east to reach most places whither our sailors go. He thrilled with delight when the lad started on his first voyage, and talked much of the unknown seas beyond which lay the treasure of far countries and the adventures of heroic lives. He never gave a thought to that unknown sea of life upon which his son was setting out to sail alone, nor gave him a word of advice concerning the temptations of every day. He would have preferred his boy to be a genius, and to be one of the world’s crea|ors, but as such come rarely along the line of generations, he accepted the inevitable, and rejoiced in the romance of a sailor’s calling.

Of his daughter Patricia he was immensely proud. Her rather weird, delicate beauty pleased his taste, and her ready tongue and quick wits were daily delights to him. She was artistic to her finger tips, and with her pen possessed the power of portraiture and discriminating criticism which heredity had bequeathed to her. Together they read, and wrote, and reviewed at home ; and together they tasted of the best of London’s literary, artistic, and political society, which in these modern days reaches from Bohemia to Mayfair, and embraces much of the intellectual life of the day.

“Don’t imagine for one moment,” he had told her on her debut , “that hospitality is a gratuity. Every meal to which you are invited you must earn, and you must share the responsibility of every party you attend. Your success in life will depend not on how much you yourself enjoy things, but on how much you can make other people enjoy them.”

This was the only piece of practical advice Patricia ever received from her father.

Edward Vaughan had very few relations of his own, and absolutely no congenial ones. He was the younger son of a very small country squire, who for his first wife married the colourless daughter of the rectory, and for his second a very clever, rather naughty Irish girl, whom he met during a surreptitious visit paid to the Dublin

Horse Show before the orthodox days of his mourning had quite run out. Neither marriage was specially happy, perhaps because neither woman was an ideal wife, still more likely because he was not to either an ideal husband, nor indeed knew the rudiments of which that ideal is composed. By each he had an only son. The first took Orders and his own way in life, the second, the latter half of that programme but not the former. The squire died, and the brothers, who each resembled his respective mother, rarely met, and never wanted to meet. The clergyman thought Edward of the world worldly, and Edward thought George of the Church churchy. Consequently they did not know how many things they might still have in common underneath the outward conventions, and their lives rarely touched, except during a few days’ strained intercourse when the George Vaughans wished to visit London and save an hotel bill.

“There is not much money,” said Fitzpatrick with a whistle as he came into the back drawing-room late in the afternoon. Patricia had drawn the curtains to hide the shrouded windows which looked into Princes Gate. “I have asked old Whately to have some tea.”

“How tiresome! But there’s enough to live on and all that, I suppose?”

“Enough to live on — but not much for the ‘all that,’ my dear. I never thought there would be, ” he added sagely.

“I never thought about it at all,” said the girl, 4 ‘but I think it is really rather splendid of Father to have left anything — he liked spending and giving away so much, — and of course an income from writing is awfully uncertain.”

“Yes, that’s it. Whatever he made in a year, he thought he was making that much every year, and it doesn’t always quite pan out like that. However, it’ll be all right. Don’t bother.”

“There is one thing, Fitz, I do like about you — you carry things, and Father never did, he always pushed them on to me.”

“He was rather of the ‘pay, pack, and follow’ type. Geniuses often are.”

“Well, I am glad there isn’t another in the family. It sounds horrid I know, to be speaking of Father’s faults to-day, but you can’t think how it is comforting me to do so. I am raking them all up in my memory because — because — oh ! Fitz — you know!”

“Tiger!” exclaimed her brother wamingly. “Don’t you remember how when we were little we would read about tigers in the daylight, and then when we were in bed we thought of them all again, and seemed to hear them padding up the stairs, and used to shut our eyes so that we shouldn’t see them glaring through the dark? We mustn’t talk about tigers to-day, old girl.”

Patricia smiled a watery little smile.

“’Ware tiger,” she said softly.

The old lawyer was somewhat at sea. He began by speaking in what Fitz called “a poorly voice,” but then Patricia made a joke, and the atmosphere became less strained. Mr. Whately took another cup of tea and felt better.

“It makes it pleasanter on occasions of this kind when there is a large family to be summoned,” he remarked, thoughtfully regarding the two young people, — “more cheerful, you know.”

“That is a matter of taste, ” replied Fitzpatrick drily; “in my opinion the fewer the better. Of course in the case of millionaires it may be different, but, somehow, I doubt it.”

“We shall have my uncle and aunt to-morrow, ” said Patricia after the lawyer’s somewhat hushed guffaw had subsided, “but I don’t think it will be any more cheerful.”

“I remember the Rev. George well,” mused Mr. Whately. “At the time of your grandfather’s death I saw him several times. There was a little disappointment about that time.”

“There often is,” interpolated Fitz.

“The late Mr. Vaughan’s property had diminished;” and now Mr. Whately’ s voice assumed its normal tone. He was on familiar ground.

“To vanishing point?” suggested the grandson cheerfully.

“Yes, that is so. There was practically nothing left. It was more of a disappointment to Mrs. Vaughan, I fancy, than to either her husband or your late dear father.”

“So it would be,” chimed in Patricia, “she ii would know best where the shoe pinched. Uncle George was too unworldly to mind ; but a woman is never so unworldly as not to mind her husband’s losses, even though she may swallow her own.”

“Your late dear father’s income was so large just then as to avoid the possibility of disappointment.”

“It was not because his income was large, but because his heart was, that Father didn’t care,” said Patricia. “However large a man’s income is he always wants more, unless his heart and nature are large enough not to. Father’s were.”

“Quite so, quite so,” replied the lawyer dubiously.

“Oh, Fitz!” exclaimed Patricia late that evening, when the old man had at length departed, “I do wish he wouldn’t speak of Father as date and dear.’ He was never the least dear to Mr. Whately, and being late won’t make him so. I nearly screamed.”

“Personally it almost tempted me to ribaldry.”

“What a mercy it didn’t quite. But I know we shall have an awful time with uncle and aunt.”

“Yes, they will be both late and dear. I know them. Poor Patricia ! ’ ’

“It is just as bad for you, old man.” And she rubbed her pale cheek against his coat sleeve.

“Oh no! it isn’t. I am a man, and can stand things. And besides, it won’t last long for me, and — and — it will for you.”

“What do you mean?” asked the girl quickly.

“Well, you know, it’s no use blinking facts. I hate it all as much as you will, — but weVe got to stand up to things, haven’t we?”

“Of course,” echoed Patricia drearily.

“We can’t live on here. We couldn’t afford it. As a matter of fact Father couldn’t the last year or two; and besides, if we could, you couldn’t live alone. You’ll have to go to Uncle George’s when I rejoin my ship. I do hope you won’t hate it, Pat? ”

“How much money have we?” the girl asked in a far-away voice.

“About £300 a year each, when all is clear. And you couldn’t live on that alone. But I know uncle and aunt will be thankful to have you for £100 a year, and then you can dress on the other. You can get lots of smart frocks for that, you know.” ..

Patricia smiled.

“You dear!” she said. “It will be all right, Fitz. Don’t worry. I like Aunt Lucy in a funny, Sunday-aftemoon sort of way, and the daughters may be nice, though I have never seen them, except that once when they all came to lunch. Do you remember?”

“Rather! And Uncle George was bowed down with carrying their three large waterproofs. I shall never forget seeing him panting up the front door-steps half hidden in rainproof drapery.”

“The last place in the world you want a waterproof is London,” mused Patricia. “You can always take a taxi if it rains.”

“They were prepared for all emergencies. A taxi-strike or a flood.”

“But Uncle George would know there wouldn’t be a flood, because of Noah and the rainbow, and all that.”

“Ah! my dear, he followed the example of us all; we believe with our hearts — at least some of us do — but we think it as well to be prepared for any little hitch in Providential machinery all the same.”

His sister laughed.

“When things are real,” she said, “aren’t they different from what we felt they would be? At least, aren’t we different in the middle of them? If any one had told me that in one day I should be orphaned and homeless and poverty-stricken, with nothing to look forward to but life in a country rectory with impossible relations, and nothing to look back upon that wasn’t all saddened and aching because of Father’s going — and that I should have the heart to laugh at one of your jokes, Fitz, I should have said they were simply mad. Yet here am I, and my eyes feel as dry as March roads, and nothing seems to matter. It is almost a relief when the worst has happened.”

“I know.”

“I have been struggling and striving so hard to keep Father from dying all these last dreadful weeks. I sent for specialists, and other opinions, and Christian Scientists, and Faith Healers, and I prayed myself dry ; and now he is dead — my brain

H keeps saying over and over again, ‘Father is dead/ just to make me believe the impossible — I feel I have time to rest. There is nothing more to be done, and I have used up all my caring. Oh, Fitz! I know just how David felt when they told him the child was dead. He couldn’t go on weeping and fasting any longer.”

“ Go to bed, old girl. You are fagged out. And think about any nice things you can.”

“My new hat and the ostrich feather boa?” she suggested smiling.

“By all means, and all the blouses in creation.”

“Even David changed his apparel, and he was a King of Israel while I am ”

“Go to bed,” commanded her brother, “and never mind what you are.”

But his bright face clouded over as the door shut.

“Poor Patricia!” he muttered sadly.

On the following day the George Vaughans arrived — two large, ungainly, good-hearted people, who felt as strange in London as they looked. They brought with them countless parcels, and a large tight bunch of daffodils, because they felt it would comfort Patricia to have some flowers fresh from the country. That she would have huge quantities fresh from the greenhouse, had not occurred to them; and the sight of the Princes Gate drawing-room filled with a flood of colour, both in pots and vases, almost took Mrs. Vaughan’s breath away. Actually lilies of the valley shedding their sweet fragrance, and glowing azaleas, and waxen hyacinths, and great golden Lent lilies till the very room seemed like a conservatory. Mrs. Vaughan felt it would not be nice to wear colours on that sad journey, so she had extracted a costume of scratch mourning out of her resourceful storeroom, to which the parish was wont to look with so much confidence for the supply of most of its needs from a Confirmation cap to a steam kettle. It was a little old and patchy, she knew, but dear Patricia would be too sorrowful to notice anything of the kind.

She was crying softly and smelling the flowers when the girl ran into the room.

“ Oh, Aunt Lucy ! I am so sorry I was not down to receive you,” she exclaimed, “but I was just trying on, and could not come. The woman has swallowed a mouthful of pins I feel sure, I hurried her so.”

“My love! my love!” wailed her aunt. “We do feel for you so. Don’t we, George?”

Uncle George blew his nose with such a violent trumpeting sound that Patricia uttered a little laugh.

“Hysteria,” whispered her aunt. “Grief often takes girls that way.”

“I feel Edward’s death deeply,” he remarked in lugubrious tones.

“Do you?” asked his niece, astonished. “I never knew you liked Father!”

i6

“My dear,” reproved her uncle, “we were brothers.”

“So were Cain and Abel,” said Patricia flippantly. “ Not that I mean, ” she added hurriedly, “there was any likeness to either of you in them; only it didn’t seem quite to follow that you must necessarily be friends, you know.”

“Don’t worry her, George,” Aunt Lucy broke in. “She is naturally upset. Yes, my dear, I should like to go upstairs and see my room. And I have brought you some flowers, though you seem to have so many.”

“Thank you so much,” and Patricia quickly cut the string round the daffodils which her aunt held out to her. “You have pinched their waists a little tight,” she explained “and that has made them a bit breathless and drooping.”

“These are fresh from the country,” repeated Mrs. Vaughan. “I gathered them in the walk that leads to the churchyard this morning.”

“Oh, don’t mention churchyards!” cried the girl. “Fitz and I call that sort of thing ‘tiger.’”

“A trifle unhinged!” whispered Mrs. Vaughan to her husband, as she followed Patricia out of the room — “grief often has that effect. She seems to me almost to ramble a little. Poor child!” and the good lady’s tears welled up afresh.

On the stairs she asked in a whisper :

“Which room is it, dear?”

“The spare room, aunt,” replied Patricia, wilfully misunderstanding, and speaking in the sharpened shrillness of overstrained nerves.

“I mean which room is your father in?” and Mrs. Vaughan gulped down a sob.

“Oh! Father died in his own room, of course, ” answered her niece sharply. “He has been ill you know for some weeks.”

“We will go in together, my love, this afternoon. I don’t feel quite equal to it now,” and the good lady laid her bonnet on the bed with a sigh.

“Go in!” exclaimed Patricia. “What do you mean? I wouldn’t go in for the world. I have never seen any one dead.”

“But your own father, dear. And besides you must have, when you were with him as he passed away.”

“But I wasn’t with him!” and Patricia pulled up the blind with such a sudden snap that Mrs. Vaughan nearly jumped across the room. “It is three days since I saw him. They let me come in then because he looked like himself just asleep, though he really was unconscious. I think it is dreadful to go and look at dead people,” she added hotly.

“There, there, my dear!” said her aunt in a soothing voice, which maddened Patricia. “In the parish it would be considered most unsympathetic not to see the departed. I have got into that way, I suppose.”

“Oh, Fitz!” cried the girl, rushing into his little smoke-room, which was situated on a crag-like i8 precipice of the back stairs, “they are awful! they want to go in and look at Father,” and she burst into tears.

“The fools!” muttered Fitzpatrick under his breath. “There, buck up, old girl. For heaven’s sake don’t cry, or you’ll never stop. Damn it! The flood of tears, I mean, ” and he dabbed at her cheeks with his bandanna.

“ I am sure they mean to be kind,” she whispered. “Aunt Lucy never attempted to answer back, and I was really frightfully cross. She treated me as if I were a lunatic, but quite harmless.”

“ I am sure I hope I shan’t laugh at them straight out,” continued her brother, “but if they begin the orthodox manner I know I shall, and make ribald jokes, and do everything I ought not.”

“Just like Father would himself. Oh! can’t you imagine him, Fitz, taking them off? He always did laugh at the Georges. ”

“Yes, he would have enjoyed them now beyond words.”

“They’ll be awfully upset because there was no death -bed scene and all that ; I can see it in Aunt Lucy’s face now.”

“I don’t care how upset they are, Pat, if only you aren’t. Hold on to your sense of humour for your very life, and you’ll get through all right,” and he patted her shoulder approvingly.

“And her mourning, Fitz! She owned it was scratch. And it is!”

And Patricia’s face was quite bright again as the two went into the drawing-room.

“Did my brother say anything that indicated he was aware of his impending decease?” asked Uncle George in the early watches of that neverending afternoon.

“Yes,” replied Fitz briefly, “he knew right enough. ”

“Might I ask for a repetition of his words? Last words are valuable. ”

“Provided they’re not a woman’s,” put in Patricia smiling. Her aunt stroked her hand in the sort of way in which you pat a dangerous dog.

“He said — to be absolutely accurate — ” continued Fitz with a keen glance at Patricia, but in the most matter-of-fact tones he could command, “‘Doctor, the little girl in the house opposite is to be married on Thursday; don’t let my funeral spoil her show!’ so that is why we are waiting till Friday. By the way, Pat, there’s an enormous cardboard box for you in the hall. Something to try on, I expect. You go and look, and let me see if I like your new clothes.”

“ It is such a trial having to think about clothes at such a time as this, ” said Mrs. Vaughan.

“Oh, aunt! it is the greatest comfort, I think,” exclaimed Patricia. “Clothes are so interesting, and absorbing, and amusing, and keep one’s thoughts from dropping down into horrible real feelings. ”

“Chiffon bridges over dangerous depths,” suggested Fitz; “you go with her, aunt, and see what she’s getting.”

“A chiffon bridge is a strange metaphor,” said Uncle George as the ladies left the room, “chiffon is too frail a substance to be used in that connexion. ”

“Wherein lies the truth of the metaphor,” observed his nephew quietly. “Poor Patricia is awfully overwrought, because my father meant a lot to her — but she must be kept from breaking down at all costs.”

“Why?” and the good man looked over the top of his spectacles blandly. “ I should have thought it the best possible thing for her to have her cry out.”

Fitzpatrick shrugged his shoulders. “I happen to know it wouldn’t be, ” he said drily.

The George Vaughans’ visit was not a success. They were kind and patient and long-suffering, though they thought the young people very heartless and flippant — a sad illustration of the decadence of the rising generation. They could not understand Patricia’s dry and tearless eyes all the day of the funeral, when she ought to have been sobbing into a black-bordered pocket-handkerchief. And it really was amazingly extravagant of Fitzpatrick to light endless cigarettes and throw them away after the first few whiffs. The whole atmosphere of the house in Princes Gate had the same effect on Uncle George and Aunt Lucy as a highlyheated greenhouse would have had upon a sturdy crocus; they could hardly breathe. Everything Patricia and her brother ought to have done they did not, and they also did all the things that they most decidedly ought not to have done, in the opinion of their more conventional relations.

But all things do come to an end — even the day of a funeral; and it was with a real sigh of relief that Aunt Lucy pressed her garments back into the bulging portmanteau that night preparatory to the morrow’s joyful journey.

Fitzpatrick and his sister sat together in the smoke-room trying to hide how much they both minded the break-up of their attractive home.

“Doesn’t it smell nice?” said Patricia, blowing rings of smoke. “I feel as if I never wanted to smell a flower again. ”

“ Oh, I don’t know about that, ” and Fitz nodded wisely, — “it’s only those beastly, sickly, white things I’d avoid, if I were you. A nice red rose would be all right.”

“I’ll look forward to it as one of the delights of the country. Do you think the Georges mind my going to them?”

“ Oh no ! They’re awfully glad to get the money. Aunt said it would make a lot of difference to them, — besides the pleasure of having you yourself, my dear.”

“That is a pleasure she’s a bit afraid of, I think,” and Patricia laughed, “and I suppose I shan’t quite eat the £150 a year, but leave them a margin.”