A Valiant Ignorance (Vol. 1-3). Victorian Romance
requirements, into regions into which Mrs. Romayne had hardly ever penetrated before; regions which rather amused her to-day in their squalor. When Julian had done his commission in plenty of time to undo it and do it again before the bazaar came off, as he remarked with a laugh, they turned back again and went to Bond Street.
“I have a little private matter to attend to here,” said Julian, as he followed his mother into the jeweller’s shop. “You just have the kindness to stop at your end of the shop, will you, please, and leave me to mine?”
Mrs. Romayne laughed and shook her head at him. It was within a few days of her birthday, which was always demonstratively honoured by her son.
“Now, you are not to be extravagant,” she said, holding up a slender, threatening finger with mock severity. “Mind, I will not have it. I shall descend upon you unawares, and keep you in order.”
She let him leave her with another laugh, and he disappeared to the other end of the shop, while she followed a shopman to a counter near the door. Just turning away from it, she met Mrs. Pomeroy and her daughter.
“Now, this is really most delightful!” exclaimed Mrs. Pomeroy, if any speech so comfortable and so entirely unexcited may be described as an exclamation. “It is always charming to see you, dear Mrs. Romayne, of course; but it really is particularly charming this morning, isn’t it, Maud?”
“That’s very nice,” said Mrs. Romayne brightly, turning to Maud Pomeroy with a smile, and pressing the girl’s hand with an affectionate familiarity developed in her with regard to Miss Pomeroy by the last few weeks. A hardly perceptible touch of additional satisfaction had come to her face as she saw the mother and daughter. “Please tell me why?”
“Yes, of course,” said Mrs. Pomeroy placidly; she sat down as she spoke with that instinct for personal ease under all circumstances, which was her ruling characteristic. “That is just what I want to do. My dear Mrs. Romayne, it is the bazaar, of course. It really is a most awkward thing, isn’t it, Maud? It seems that we have asked twenty-one ladies—all most important—to become stall-holders, and we can’t possibly make room for more than eighteen stalls! Now, what would you—— Ah, Mr. Romayne, how do you do?”
Mrs. Pomeroy had broken off her tale of woe as placidly as she had begun it, and had greeted Julian with comfortable cordiality. He had come up hastily, not becoming aware of his mother’s companions until he was close to them.
“This is awfully lucky for me!” he exclaimed. “I want a lady desperately for half a minute, and my mother won’t do. Miss Pomeroy,” turning eagerly to the demure, correct-looking figure standing by Mrs. Pomeroy’s side, “will you come to the other end of the shop with me for half a minute? It would be awfully good of you.”
The words were spoken in a tone of fashionable good-fellowship—the pseudo good-fellowship which passes for the real thing in society—which, as addressed by Julian Romayne to Miss Pomeroy and her mother, was one of the results of his work in connection with the bazaar; and before Miss Pomeroy could answer, Mrs. Romayne interposed. Somebody very frequently did interpose when Miss Pomeroy was addressed. No one ever seemed to expect opinions or decisions from her; perhaps because she was her mother’s daughter; perhaps because of her curiously characterless exterior; while the fact that she had never been known to controvert a statement—in words—doubtless accentuated the tendency of her acquaintance to make statements for her.
“It will be awfully good of you,” Mrs. Romayne said to her now, laughing, “if you are kind enough to help this silly fellow, to insist on his remembering that his mother will be very angry indeed if he is extravagant. I shall have to give up having a birthday, I think.”
Then as Julian, with a gay gesture of repression to his mother, waited for Miss Pomeroy’s answer with another pleading, “It would be ever so good of you,” the girl, with a glance at her mother, said, with a conventional smile, “With pleasure,” and walked away by his side.
Mrs. Pomeroy looked after Julian with an approving smile. He was a favourite of hers.
“Such a nice fellow,” she murmured amiably; and Mrs. Romayne laughed her pretty, self-conscious laugh.
“So glad you find him so,” she said. “Oh, by-the-bye, dear Mrs. Pomeroy, can you tell me anything about a Mr. Marston Loring? He goes everywhere, doesn’t he? I think I have seen him at your house.”
“Oh, yes,” returned Mrs. Pomeroy, as placidly as ever, but with a decision which indicated that she was giving expression to a popular verdict, not merely to an opinion of her own. “He is quite a young man to know. Very clever, and rising. I don’t know what his people were; he has been so successful that it really doesn’t signify, you know. He lives in chambers—I don’t remember where, but it is a very good address.”
“Has he money?” asked Mrs. Romayne.
“I really don’t know,” said Mrs. Pomeroy. “He is doing extremely well at the bar. By the way, they say,” and herewith Mrs. Pomeroy lowered her voice and confided to her interlocutor two or three details in connection with Marston Loring’s private life—the life which in the world no one is supposed to recognise—which might have been considered by no means to his credit. They were not details which affected his society character in any way, however, and Mrs. Romayne only laughed with such slight affectation of reprobation as a woman of the world should show.
“Men are all alike, I suppose,” she said, with that fashionable indulgence which has probably done as much as anything else towards making men “all alike.” “By-the-bye, he was Lord Dunstan’s best man, wasn’t he?”
Mrs. Pomeroy was just confirming to Mr. Marston Loring what was evidently a certificate of social merit, when Julian and Miss Pomeroy reappeared, and Mrs. Romayne, with an exclamation at herself as a “frightful gossip,” turned to the shopman, who had been waiting her pleasure at a discreet distance, and transacted her business.
“We haven’t settled anything about this trying business of the twenty-one stall-holders,” said Mrs. Pomeroy plaintively, as she finished. “Now, I wonder—we were thinking of taking a turn in the Park, weren’t we, Maud?” Mrs. Pomeroy had a curious little habit of constantly referring to her daughter. “It would be so kind of you, dear Mrs. Romayne, if you would send your carriage home and take a turn with us, you and Mr. Romayne, and I would take you home, of course. I really am anxious to know what you advise, for there seems to be an idea that I am in some way responsible for the awkwardness. So absurd, you know. I am quite sure I have only done as I was told.”
Apparently it had not occurred to Mrs. Pomeroy that to do as you are told by four or five different people with totally different ends in view is apt to lead to confusion.
Mrs. Romayne fell in with the plan proposed, after an instant’s demur, with smiling alacrity, and the “turn in the Park” that followed was a very gay one. Miss Pomeroy and Julian laughed and talked together—that is to say, Julian laughed and talked in the best of good spirits, and Miss Pomeroy put in just the correct words and pretty smiles which were wanted to keep his conversation in full swing. Mrs. Romayne and Mrs. Pomeroy, facing them, disposed of the difficulty in connection with the bazaar, after a good deal of irrelevant discussion, by saying very often, and in a great many words, that three more stalls must be got in somewhere; a decision which seemed to Mrs. Pomeroy to make everything perfectly right, although she had had it elaborately demonstrated to her that such a course was absolutely impossible.
It was half-past one when Mrs. Romayne and Julian were put down at their own door, and the barouche drove off amid a chorus of light laughter and last words. The sunshine, the fresh air, the movement, or something less simple and less physical, seemed to have had a most exhilarating effect on Mrs. Romayne. Her face was almost as radiant in its curiously different fashion as Julian’s was radiant with the unreasoning good spirits of youth.
“Such nice people!” she said lightly. “I wonder whether lunch is ready? I’m quite starving! Oh, letters!” taking up three or four which lay on the hall-table. “Let us trust they are interesting!” She turned into the dining-room as she spoke, sorting