The Headmistress

CHAPTER I-3

“Let’s see, Lady Pomfret was a—bless my soul, what was she?” said Mr. Belton. “I know as well as I know my own name, but it is just where I can’t get at it.”

“She was Edith Thorne, Fred,” said his wife. “I didn’t know you had Thorne relations, Mr. Oriel. We must have been cousins all these years without knowing it.”

“It is hardly so near as that, I am afraid,” said Mr. Oriel smiling. “The connection is through the Greshams.”

“Wait a bit now,” said Mr. Belton, as if Mr. Oriel were trying to take an unfair advantage. “There was a bit of a scandal, wasn’t there? Something about a queer—if that bell rings again, Lucy, I’ll have Icken down to-morrow to dismantle the whole thing and have an electric one. What is it, Wheeler?”

“Mr. Carton’s called and he says if you are busy he won’t come in,” said Wheeler. “And Miss Marling brought some grapes and a brace of partridges, madam, with Mr. Marling’s love. Miss Marling was in the pony cart and said she couldn’t stop, but if you wanted a small load of manure she could tell you where to get some. Excuse me, my lady, but would his lordship and Lady Emily like to have tea with me in the pantry? We have plenty of milk.”

“I am sure they would love to,” said Lady Pomfret. “Now Ludovic, take Emily’s hand and go with Wheeler. Old Lady Lufton would insist on being a godmother,” she said apologetically as her children went away with Wheeler, “but I suppose we shall get used to it.”

Then Mr. Carton came in. And if any reader wishes to know what he was like, he was exactly like what an Oxford don nearer sixty than fifty ought to be; tall and rather untidy, with receding hair, and spectacles which he was always putting on and taking off; of precise speech, capable of vitriolic rancour in the field of scholarship, secretly very kind to his pupils, with no known ties except a mother of eighty who lived at Bognor and did a surprising amount of gardening. With Mr. Oriel he had a perpetual friendly difference of opinion about the singing in church, Mr. Carton upholding Hymns Ancient and Modern with violence, while Mr. Oriel who had High Anglican leanings rather affected a little book called Songs of Praise.

“You do know Mr. Carton, I think, Sally,” said Mrs. Belton to Lady Pomfret. “Will you have tea, Mr. Carton? You have come just at the right moment, because we can’t quite make out how Mr. Oriel and old Lady Pomfret were connected and you are so good at families.”

“My great-uncle at Greshamsbury——”

“Edith Pomfret’s mother’s cousin——”

“That girl there was a queer story about that brought all the money into the Gresham family——”

“I often heard Lady Pomfret speak of an old Dr. Thorne who married an heiress——”

Said Mr. Oriel, Mrs. Belton, Mr. Belton and young Lady Pomfret all at once.

“Stop,” said Mr. Carton. “Wait. I’ll tell you exactly how it is.”

He put his spectacles on, looked piercingly at the party over the top of them as if they were undergraduates, and putting his finger tips together, pronounced judgment.

“Your great-uncle the bishop, Oriel, married some time in the ’sixties one of Squire Gresham’s daughters whose name for the moment escapes me. His wife’s brother, Frank Gresham, the present man’s great-grandfather, married Mary Thorne who was the illegitimate niece of the Dr. Thorne who married Miss Dunstable whose money came from a patent Ointment of Lebanon. Dr. Thorne was only a distant cousin of the Ullathorne Thornes, to whom old Lady Pomfret belonged, but the connection is there all right, though I couldn’t give the precise degree.”

He then took off his spectacles, put them into their case, snapped the case shut and put it in his pocket. There was a short silence while his audience digested these facts.

“My great-uncle had fifteen children,” said Mr. Oriel thoughtfully. “His fifteen little Christians he used to call them. Dear, dear.”

There seemed to be no adequate comment on this picture of scenes from clerical life, so it was almost a relief when the bell suddenly rang again and Wheeler came in.

“It’s Dr. Perry, madam,” she announced, “and he said not to disturb you if you were engaged. And did you wish Lady Emily to have a piece of cheese with her tea, my lady? His lordship said she always did at the Towers.”

Lady Pomfret said certainly not and Ludovic was being most untruthful and would Wheeler let her know as soon as the home farm lorry came, because it was high time she took the children home, and then Dr. Perry came in, a stout jovial little man who had been the Beltons’ family physician, just as his father before him had been family doctor to the previous generation of Beltons.

“I was telling my wife, Perry, that your father always said this was the best house in the High Street,” said Mr. Belton. “You know everyone, I think.”

Mrs. Belton said she would have fresh tea in a minute but Dr. Perry refused, saying he was on his way home and had only looked in to give them his wife’s love and bring two pots of her peach jam.

“I’ve just been up at the Park,” he added. “One of the girls had a nasty boil and I had to lance it. Lots of boils going about now. We’re going to have a nasty winter among the civilian population, Mrs. Belton, mark my words. How are your young people?”

Mrs. Belton said they had all been ringing up and she hoped to see them, but one never knew till they arrived without any rations late on Saturday.

“I like the headmistress,” said Dr. Perry. “Good-looking in her own style and a lot of character I should say. A nice lot of girls too. They were arriving when I was there and they begin lessons to-morrow. I hope they won’t get measles. There’s any amount about, chicken-pox too. We only want a typhus epidemic. You know Dr. Buck has been called up, so I’m single-handed except for Dr. Morgan and I can’t abide the woman. She does well enough for half-baked highbrows, but she will talk about psychology to the cottagers and they don’t like it. Quite enough trouble with their children and their rheumatics without all this talk. And if they want a spot of libido they’ll have it all right with all these soldiers and girls about. No need to tell them about that.”

Mr. Oriel said it was most distressing and he for one was ready to marry young couples at any moment, if only for the sake of the unborn child.

“We all know that, Oriel,” said Dr. Perry, who was fond of his pastor though with no very high opinion of his worldly wisdom. “But it’s not the unmarrieds; they usually get married all right. It’s the married women with their husbands away. Mrs. Humble down near the Three Tuns has just had her second, a fine baby too. I’d like to see Morgan talk psychology to her!”

Upon which Dr. Perry laughed rather boisterously, and though all his hearers liked him and knew how good and patient he was on his professional side, it was a distinct relief when Wheeler came in to say the lorry from the Towers was there and Cook was just washing Lady Emily’s hands and face.

“And I hope, my lady, that the Honourable Giles is keeping well,” said Wheeler to Lady Pomfret.

“Splendid, thank you, Wheeler,” said Lady Pomfret. “He cut a tooth yesterday on his sixth birthday; I mean his six months old birthday. Good-bye, Lucy. Let me know if Freddy or Charles want any shooting. Poor Jenks says it isn’t like being a head keeper with no gentlemen out with their guns. His boy in the army who was in hospital is quite fit again and engaged to a nice girl in the Land Army. Come along, children.”

When the ripples of farewell had subsided, Dr. Perry said he must be going.

“Go and see that schoolmistress, Mrs. Belton,” he said. “You’ll like her and I think she will be lonely. She’s a cut above the other mistresses. You’d like her, Oriel. A good churchwoman and all that sort of thing. You’ll have to confirm her girls—no, it’s the Bishop that does that of course, though I’d as soon be confirmed by one of the Borgias myself. You’ll have to tell them what it’s all about anyway. You’d like her too, Carton. Talk about Cicero and all that sort of thing. She’s one of that classical lot. Tell your young people to let me know when they want to go to Barchester, Mrs. Belton. I’m often at the General Hospital and I can always give them a lift. And I’d like to say,” said Dr. Perry, suddenly showing signs of embarrassment, a state most uncommon with him, “that the whole village will miss you at the Park, but it will do us all a lot of good to have you down here, among us. Jove, I’ve kept my surgery waiting twenty minutes.”

Upon this he shook hands with his host and hostess, and bolted out of the house with a red face.

“A very good man,” said Mr. Oriel slowly, “though he pretends he isn’t. But I wish this new headmistress wasn’t a good churchwoman. No, I don’t mean that, but good churchwomen are so apt to want to tell one things and I’d rather not. I suppose this is cowardly though. Are you coming my way, Carton?”

“ ‘One of that classical lot’!” Mr. Carton exploded with withering scorn. “Educated women are no treat to me. Cicero indeed! She probably says Kikero. Thank God the creatures that come to Oxford now are all doing economics; they and their subject are just about fit for each other. Pah!”

Everyone secretly admired a man who could say Pah, one of those locutions more often written than spoken.

“Well, good-bye,” said Mr. Oriel, looking very hard at the high light on the nose of Raeburn’s portrait of a former Lord Ellangowan. “You know, Perry is a very sensible man. If I’d tried all day I couldn’t have put it better. About the Park I mean. As a matter of fact,” said Mr. Oriel, shifting his gaze to the raven locks of the lovely Lady Ellangowan who was carried off in a decline at twenty-five, “we all feel that the Park is Here. Arcot House will be the Park as far as the village is concerned. God bless you both.”

He then felt he had gone too far, looked wildly at the knob on the teapot, shook hands violently with the Beltons and said, “Coming, Carton?”

Mr. Carton, who had fallen into a kind of trance or dream during Mr. Oriel’s last heartfelt words, suddenly came to and uttered violently the word, “Patience.”

“We do,” said Mrs. Belton earnestly.

“Tut-tut, I don’t mean that,” said Mr. Carton, whose hearers were again filled with admiration of his vocabulary. “And when I say Patience I am wrong. I mean Beatrice. Beatrice Gresham was the girl Oriel’s great-uncle married. I knew it would come to me. Good-bye. I cannot tell you how much I look forward to seeing more of you both, if I may. In fact I have, selfishly, only one regret at your having left the Park—the library.”