The Enchanted April
years, and not again come across such another chance.
Directly his wife’s letter reached him he telegraphed and packed. This
was business. He was not a man to lose time when it came to business;
nor was he a man to jeopardise a chance by neglecting to be amiable. He
met his wife perfectly amiably, aware that amiability under such
circumstances was wisdom. Besides, he actually felt amiable—very. For
once, Lotty was really helping him. He kissed her affectionately on
getting out of Beppo’s fly, and was afraid she must have got up
extremely early; he made no complaints of the steepness of the walk up;
he told her pleasantly of his journey, and when called upon, obediently
admired the views. It was all neatly mapped out in his mind, what he
was going to do that first day—have a shave, have a bath, put on clean
clothes, sleep a while, and then would come lunch and the introduction
to Lady Caroline.
In the train he had selected the words of his greeting, going over them
with care—some slight expression of his gratification in meeting one of
whom he, in common with the whole world, had heard—but of course put
delicately, very delicately; some slight reference to her distinguished
parents and the part her family had played in the history of
England—made, of course, with proper tact; a sentence or two about her
eldest brother Lord Winchcombe, who had won his V.C. in the late war
under circumstances which could only cause—he might or might not add
this—every Englishman’s heart to beat higher than ever with pride, and
the first steps towards what might well be the turning-point in his
career would have been taken.
And here he was . . . no, it was too terrible, what could be more
terrible? Only a towel on, water running off his legs, and that
exclamation. He knew at once the lady was Lady Caroline—the minute the
exclamation was out he knew it. Rarely did Mr. Wilkins use that word,
and never, never in the presence of a lady or a client. While as for
the towel—why had he come? Why had he not stayed in Hampstead? It would
be impossible to live this down.
But Mr. Wilkins was reckoning without Scrap. She, indeed, screwed up
her face at the first flash of him on her astonished sight in an
enormous effort not to laugh, and having choked the laughter down and
got her face serious again, she said as composedly as if he had had all
his clothes on, “How do you do.”
What perfect tact. Mr. Wilkins could have worshipped her. This
exquisite ignoring. Blue blood, of course, coming out.
Overwhelmed with gratitude he took her offered hand and said “How do
you do,” in his turn, and merely to repeat the ordinary words seemed
magically to restore the situation to the normal. Indeed, he was so
much relieved, and it was so natural to be shaking hands, to be
conventionally greeting, that he forgot he had only a towel on and his
professional manner came back to him. He forgot what he was looking
like, but he did not forget that this was Lady Caroline Dester, the
lady he had come all the way to Italy to see, and he did not forget
that it was in her face, her lovely and important face, that he had
flung his terrible exclamation. He must at once entreat her
forgiveness. To say such a word to a lady—to any lady, but of all
ladies to just this one . . .
“I’m afraid I used unpardonable language,” began Mr. Wilkins very
earnestly, as earnestly and ceremoniously as if he had had his clothes
on.
“I thought it most appropriate,” said Scrap, who was used to damns.
Mr. Wilkins was incredibly relieved and soothed by this answer. No
offence, then, taken. Blue blood again. Only blue blood could afford
such a liberal, such an understanding attitude.
“It is Lady Caroline Dester, is it not, to whom I am speaking?” he
asked, his voice sounding even more carefully cultivated than usual,
for he had to restrain too much pleasure, too much relief, too much of
the joy of the pardoned and the shriven from getting into it.
“Yes,” said Scrap; and for the life of her she couldn’t help smiling.
She couldn’t help it. She hadn’t meant to smile at Mr. Wilkins, not
ever; but really he looked—and then his voice on the top of the rest
of him, oblivious of the towel and his legs, and talking just like a
church.
“Allow me to introduce myself,” said Mr. Wilkins, with the ceremony of
the drawing-room. “My name is Mellersh-Wilkins.”
And he instinctively held out his hand a second time at the words.
“I thought perhaps it was,” said Scrap, a second time having hers
shaken and a second time unable not to smile.
He was about to proceed to the first of the graceful tributes he had
prepared in the train, oblivious, as he could not see himself, that he
was without his clothes, when the servants came running up the stairs
and, simultaneously, Mrs. Fisher appeared in the doorway of her
sitting-room. For all this had happened very quickly, and the servants
away in the kitchen, and Mrs. Fisher pacing her battlements, had not
had time on hearing the noise to appear before the second handshake.
The servants when they heard the dreaded noise knew at once what had
happened, and rushed straight into the bathroom to try and staunch the
flood, taking no notice of the figure on the landing in the towel, but
Mrs. Fisher did not know what the noise could be, and coming out of her
room to inquire stood rooted on the door-sill.
It was enough to root anybody. Lady Caroline shaking hands with what
evidently, if he had had clothes on, would have been Mrs. Wilkins’s
husband, and both of them conversing just as if—
Then Scrap became aware of Mrs. Fisher. She turned to her at once. “Do
let me,” she said gracefully, “introduce Mr. Mellersh-Wilkins. He has
just come. This,” she added, turning to Mr. Wilkins, “is Mrs. Fisher.”
And Mr. Wilkins, nothing if not courteous, reacted at once to the
conventional formula. First he bowed to the elderly lady in the
doorway, then he crossed over to her, his wet feet leaving footprints
as he went, and having got to her he politely held out his hand.
“It is a pleasure,” said Mr. Wilkins in his carefully modulated voice,
“to meet a friend of my wife’s.”
Scrap melted away down into the garden.
Chapter 15
The strange effect of this incident was that when they met that evening
at dinner both Mrs. Fisher and Lady Caroline had a singular feeling of
secret understanding with Mr. Wilkins. He could not be to them as other
men. He could not be to them as he would have been if they had met him
in his clothes. There was a sense of broken ice; they felt at once
intimate and indulgent; almost they felt to him as nurses do—as those
feel who have assisted either patients or young children at their
baths. They were acquainted with Mr. Wilkins’s legs.
What Mrs. Fisher said to him that morning in her first shock will never
be known, but what Mr. Wilkins said to her in reply, when reminded by
what she was saying of his condition, was so handsome in its apology,
so proper in its confusion, that she had ended by being quite sorry for
him and completely placated. After all, it was an accident, and nobody
could help accidents. And when she saw him next at dinner, dressed,
polished, spotless as to linen and sleek as to hair, she felt this
singular sensation of a secret understanding with him and, added to it,
of a kind of almost personal pride in his appearance, now that he was
dressed, which presently extended in some subtle way to an almost
personal pride in everything he said.
There was no doubt whatever in Mrs. Fisher’s mind that a man was
infinitely preferable as a companion to a woman. Mr. Wilkins’s presence
and conversation at once raised the standard of the dinner-table from
that of a bear garden—yes, a bear garden—to that of a civilised social
gathering. He talked as men talk, about interesting subjects, and,
though most courteous to Lady Caroline, showed no traces of dissolving
into simpers and idiocy whenever he addressed her. He was, indeed,
precisely as courteous to Mrs. Fisher herself; and when for the first
time at that table politics were introduced, he listened to her with
the proper seriousness on her exhibiting a desire to speak, and treated
her opinions with the attention they deserved. He appeared to think
much as she did about Lloyd George, and in regard to literature he was
equally sound. In fact there was real conversation, and he liked nuts.
How he could have married Mrs. Wilkins was a mystery.
Lotty, for her part, looked on with round eyes. She had expected
Mellersh to take at least two days before he got to this stage, but the
San Salvatore spell had worked instantly. It was not only that he was
pleasant at dinner, for she had always seen him pleasant at dinners
with other people, but he had been pleasant all day privately—so
pleasant that he had complimented her on her looks while she was
brushing out her hair, and kissed her. Kissed her! And it was neither
good-morning nor good-night.
Well, this being so, she would put off telling him the truth about her
nest-egg, and about Rose not being his hostess after all, till next
day. Pity to spoil things. She had been going to blurt it out as soon
as he had had a rest, but it did seem a pity to disturb such a very
beautiful frame of mind as that of Mellersh this first day. Let him too
get more firmly fixed in heaven. Once fixed he wouldn’t mind anything.
Her face sparkled with delight at the instantaneous effect of San
Salvatore. Even the catastrophe of the bath, of which she had been told
when she came in from the garden, had not shaken him. Of course all
that he had needed was a holiday. What a brute she had been to him when
he wanted to take her himself to Italy. But this arrangement, as it
happened, was ever so much better, though not through any merit of
hers. She talked and laughed gaily, not a shred of fear of him left in
her, and even when she said, struck by his spotlessness, that he looked
so clean that one could eat one’s dinner off him, and Scrap laughed,
Mellersh laughed too. He would have minded that at home, supposing that
at home she had had the spirit to say it.
It was a successful evening. Scrap, whenever she looked at Mr. Wilkins,
saw him in his towel, dripping water, and felt indulgent. Mrs. Fisher
was delighted with him. Rose was a dignified hostess in Mr. Wilkins’s
eyes, quiet and dignified, and he admired the way she waived her right
to preside at the head of the table—as a graceful compliment, of
course, to Mrs. Fisher’s age. Mrs. Arbuthnot was, opined Mr. Wilkins,
naturally retiring. She was the most retiring of the three ladies. He
had met her before dinner alone for a moment in the drawing-room, and
had expressed in appropriate language his sense of her kindness in
wishing him to join her party, and she had been retiring. Was she shy?
Probably. She had blushed, and murmured as if in deprecation, and then
the others had come in. At dinner she talked least. He would, of
course, become better acquainted with her during the next few days, and
it would be a pleasure, he was sure.
Meanwhile Lady Caroline was all and more than all Mr. Wilkins had
imagined, and had received his speeches, worked in skilfully between
the courses, graciously; Mrs. Fisher was the exact old lady he had been
hoping to come across all his professional life; and Lotty had not only
immensely improved, but was obviously _au mieux_—Mr. Wilkins knew what
was necessary in French—with Lady Caroline. He had been much tormented
during the day by the thought of how he had stood conversing with Lady
Caroline forgetful of his not being dressed, and had at last written
her a note most deeply apologising, and beseeching her to overlook his
amazing, his incomprehensible obliviousness, to which she had replied