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 Another Random Document on
Scribd Without Any Related Topics
 A gulp was the only reply, for a second or two. It meant that Mr.
Andrews was done with “dumb yearnin’.” (The dress was,
unquestionably, blue.)
“Mrs. Mearely! I beg you to listen to what I am about to say.”
The words tumbled out pell-mell, now that he knew blue for what it
was; in Mrs. Bunny’s phrase, they “bust out.” “I will take any
message of yours, every message, wherever and whither you may
send it. I shall be honoured—nay, more, pleased.”
Surely she could not mistake such ardour! he had declared
himself, and as a man of honour, would stand by this avowal. He
waited breathlessly for her answer.
“Splendid!” She clapped her hands. “Then you shall ask the
Wellses and the Judge and Wilton to come for cards this evening.
Mrs. Witherby and her daughter and niece are coming; and Mrs.
Lee, who has some news for us all. You will come, of course, won’t
you? I am relying on you.”
(She was relying on him—in blue!)
“Mrs. Mearely!”
“Well, then, say that you will,” she prompted, inwardly provoked
by what she regarded as a stupid man’s more than usually dense
mood, and remembering that it would be wise to peep into the oven
to see how Dom Paradis’s “goodlie hearte’s” cake was behaving in a
modern cook stove.
He removed his hat again. He spoke solemnly.
“I will,” he said—even as he had said it, thirteen years ago, at St.
Jephtha’s altar.
“Thank you ever so much, Mr. Andrews. Now I must run along
in....”
“Mrs. Mearely!”
“Yes? Were you about to say something?”
 (Was he about to say something? She was leading him on—in
blue!)
“Mrs. Mearely! I have said it. Mrs. Mearely, did you understand
the purport of what I said to you just now?”
“What did you say to me just now, Mr. Andrews?”
Such smiles leaning to him over the low wall; such large blue
eyes, flecked and changing from grave to gay; and behind and about
this entrancing jewel of a woman her opulent setting of the Villa
Rose estate! He grew dizzy. Her dress was blue; and she was eager
to hear him repeat the declaration he had already made to her! This
could mean only one thing, he was convinced. She had observed his
devotion and secretly coveted him. She had noticed that he hovered
and had approved his brooding flutter. In short, she had donned that
blue satin to allure him; and had hung her charms upon the wall,
that morning, because she well knew he must pass by.
Mr. Albert Andrews was the average, simple, masculine creature,
making up for other deficiencies by an excellent conceit of himself.
The tradition of his sex—that woman is the pursuer, because she
recognizes the superiority of the male and wishes to entrap a
specimen of the wonderful species for her glory—comprised the
major part of Mr. Andrews’s knowledge of the feminine. He had not
learned more during his marriage, because his satisfied opacity was
proof against all attempts to instruct.
It was to him wholly natural that Rosamond Mearely—being, for
all her beauty and wealth, only a woman after all and therefore an
inferior—should have decided to entrain him; because, forsooth, he
was a man. He did not see how she could have chosen better in all
Roseborough.
Literally he rose to do that which was demanded of him; for he
stood up in his cart and laid hold of the wall with both hands. By
standing on tiptoe he could just reach the ledge near where her two
finely turned arms rested.
 “Goodness me!” she exclaimed with a trace of the Poplars Farm
in her accents. “Suppose your horse walks off and leaves you
hanging to my wall like—like a tom-cod in a fish market?”
He interrupted her.
“Mrs. Mearely! I said just now that I would carry any message of
yours wherever and whither you desire. I said even more. I said that
I would be pleased to do so. I meant it. I mean it still. Mrs. Mearely!
Can I tell you—may I tell you....” He gulped. “Mrs. Mearely I have
long—Mrs. Mearely! I have often thought over the little sentiments I
might one day express to you. That is to say, when I should see you
again as I see you now, that is to say, without the black-edged
habiliments of woe....”
“Oh, my frock? I see. You are going to pay me compliments.”
(She was asking him to pay her compliments! She was making it
easy for him!)
He beamed at her—the eager, engaging young creature, so
artful, yet artless, too—the pursuing feminine.
“I have considered, in a poetical way, what I would say if I saw
you first in something—er—green. Some little phrase about the grass
and verdant innocence. Or, in pink. I had that thoroughly outlined,
too; because we thought, Mrs. Bunny and I, that the likeliest hue
would be a pastel pink.”
Her fair white forehead puckered; her perfect eyebrows lifted.
“Mrs. Bunny? Pastel pink?” She sought enlightenment.
“One moment. I would then have likened you to a rose and a
sea-shell, both chaste similes and very pretty conceits. But now I
can say to you, that you are most fair in this colour since it is the
colour of the sky, therefore—may we not say?—(I think we may) the
colour of heaven—and of my birthstone, the aquamarine, and, ah!—
the colour of your eyes.”
“What?” She was startled.
 “Blue sky—that is to say, blue heavens—blue birthstone, blue
dress, blue eyes; gown and eyes a perfect match....”
“Mercy! I hope not,” she burst out laughing, “Whatever makes
you think this frock is blue? Or do my eyes look like lavender to
you?”
Mr. Andrews’s rather loose under jaw slipped down, the smiles of
rapt satisfaction faded. Slowly he turned a purplish red that passed
off in a chill.
“Mrs. Mearely,” he asked hoarsely. “Did you say that gown is l—
lavender?”
She shrieked joyously. Then, taking pity on his plainly revealed
agony of mind, tried to control her laughter.
“Yes. At least, it is lilac; but they are much alike. Lavender,
lilac....”
“Stop!” he gasped.
“Mauve, heliotrope,” she tipped them off merrily on her digits.
“Amethyst.” She crooked her little finger.
“Don’t,” he groaned.
“Wood-violet.” She waggled the thumb of her other hand.
“Lavender!” He sank back into the seat of the cart like a stone
into the sea.
“Or lilac. But it doesn’t match my eyes, Mr. Andrews; no, really, I
haven’t lavender eyes.”
She found his error too entertaining and, ceasing her kind
attempt at gravity, she bubbled gaily.
“Lavender,” he muttered. He thought with gruelling shame of
how he had “bust out,” and added: “I have been indelicate.”
“Oh, why take it so seriously?” she giggled. “I’m not offended.
I’m—I’m—laughing.”
 He could hear that she was!—but the ripples of her mirth fell
balmless upon his wound. His sober, orderly, plodding mind was in a
perilous whirl. She had not lured him; she had not been waiting for
him, as the desirous feminine awaiteth the superior being. Tradition
itself, the perfect tradition of the sexes, was exploding like
firecrackers in the little hisses and snickers that went off just above
his humbled head. He doubted that he would be able even to
“hover” in silence—with his wonted dignity and optimism—for some
time to come.
“Lavender,” he repeated. He gathered up the reins, hardly
knowing that he did so, and motioned the stocky pony away from
the vine-clad walls of Mockery’s citadel.
“Don’t forget to give my messages,” she called after him. “Cards
at Villa Rose this evening. Don’t be later than seven.”
He might still be muttering “Lavender” as he went on his way;
but there was just one colour, at that moment, of which Mr. Albert
Andrews was positive, and that colour was gray. All the world was
gray, drab-gray.
Rosamond ran into the house to examine Dom Paradis’s cake,
but, while she poked a sprig from the broom into its dough, she was
still pondering Mr. Andrews’s odd behaviour.
“Good gracious!” she exclaimed as she found to be satisfactory
what the end of the bent straw revealed. “Rosamond, dear, do you
suppose that dubby thing was making love to you? Is that what will
happen to you, Rosamond, now that you have put off the last black
ribbon? Haven’t you seen it coming? Proposals from the stupid men
and gossip from the catty women, till they make you marry
somebody—somebody old! Rosamond, dear, you simply must go in
search of that irredeemably bourgeois lover this afternoon. And you
have no time to lose.”
However, she refused to be downcast. There would still be six
hours of sun in this day—even if His Friggets came back to-morrow.
 She was so busy in the kitchen and pantry that she did not hear
one o’clock ring from the tower bell at twenty minutes past the hour.
The toll-man, being full of years and midday dinner, had fallen
asleep immediately after tucking away his meal. On awaking he
decided, very sensibly, to ignore the occurrence, and to ring the hour
as usual, no matter what the time might be.
 CHAPTER IX

D
om Paradis’s cake, as modified by Rosamond of Roseborough
and twentieth century dietetic caution, came from the oven
a golden brown and snowy white success. Its odour was
unique and delectable. Its weight was light as a puff. Rosamond
surveyed it with a pride almost equal to that which must have
extended the cheeks and bosom of its sybaritic inventor, Lallia y
Poptu de Sillihofo Sanza, Countess of Mountjoye, when she first saw
the glory she had evolved to deck the inner circles of her beloved.
She sniffed it in long-drawn delight.

“Mum-mum—ooh-h! No wonder he ate himself to death for love

of you, Contessa! I wonder if Dom Jack, the Prince of Roseborough,
is fat?”
She dropped herself into Amanda’s apron again and set about
preparing the icing. Countess Lallia had called it:

A stylle and stykkie sauce of the smoothe colour of a

pearle but lyke to a paste wych dydde covere my cake about
lyke a napkyn, as it were a mysterie.

“I think my icing will be nicer than yours, Contessa—without all

that oriental sweetmeat chopped fine and beaten into it. There will
be less anticipatory excitement about my cake and more of the calm
satisfaction one feels when one knows what is coming next. You had
so many mixed spices and sweets and flavours in your cake that
Dom Paradis could not possibly tell from one bite what the next
would taste like. There is a modern slang term that describes the
culinary tactics you employed on the prince’s appetite—you ‘kept him
guessing.’”
At first the whole conceit of the Countess of Mountjoye’s cake
—“devysed and styrred first in the yeare 1715,” and now reproduced
in almost identical mixture from the old recipe—had seemed to her
deliciously humorous. She had chuckled and chattered over it to
herself and extracted from it a larger degree of the essence of mirth
than had come to her palate and nostrils in many weeks; for it
cannot be denied that life at Villa Rose lacked brightness. A mansion
full of antiques, with no human associates but servants of the same
vintage, did not provide the kind of environment which
spontaneously generates happiness in the heart of youth. Hibbert
Mearely’s widow had been a prisoner in her own grandeur, daily
acquainted with that state which, to the young, is worse than sharp
grief, namely, boredom.
To-day, with the departure of His Friggets, and the new meeting
with her young heart—which had taken place when she regarded
herself in the Orleans mirror—a joy had awakened within her like the
return of her girlhood. So vivid a joy it was, so brave and confident,
that it had sent her forth singing salutations to herself, as if she
believed the whole sun-filled, rose-scented earth were calling to her
in that syren phrase, “Good-morning, Rosamond!”
How swiftly joy had unfolded hope! And how naturally,
inevitably, both had promised love! Permeated with them, she had
defied Villa Rose and its antiquities to hold her spirit twenty-four
hours longer. Lo, a day was given her—a Wonderful Day. In it she
might recapture her lost heritage—romance.
Now, while she beat white of egg and powdered sugar together
to make the fundamental paste of the icing for the Paradis cake, an
indefinable sense of sorrow descended upon her. Thought lost its
elasticity of hope—it lagged and drooped. A lassitude crept over her
whole person. Her eyelids felt hot and heavy. There was a pressure
on her head that kept it from tossing in the air after its wonted
fashion like a proud hollyhock.
 “Everything is going wrong,” she whispered. “I have a
presentiment of it—just as if some dreadfully unhappy thing had
taken place and I was about to hear of it.” A tear fell, hit the rim of
the soup plate in which she was beating the icing, and, luckily, rolled
off instead of in. Both eyes filled again. She wiped them on the back
of her arm, and, by this mournful gesture, sent a trail of icing across
the wall from the fork in her hand.
“I never felt so sad in all my life,” was her inward admission, as
she set about filling the cake with the cooked concoction of chopped
figs, nuts, raisins, and candied fruit that made two inches of
lusciousness between the layers. This fruity mixture, further
complicated with the oriental “sweets and spyces” of her period,
Countess Lallia had poured into the centre of the original cake and
baked the whole together. In Rosamond’s day, fortunately for the
more nervous digestive apparatus of current humanity, wisdom has
reduced weightiness in cookery—hence the layer cake.
She proceeded to encase the whole—a large, imposing square of
three layers—in the “stylle and stykkie sauce of the smoothe colour
of a pearle.”
She went about it slowly and with downcast mien—sighing and
sniffing—tears welling over her lids. When she had put the perfected
achievement away in the pantry to await its modern Dom Paradis,
she sank down in the kitchen rocker and let woe take its way with
her. She thought of her high hopes of the morning and marvelled at
the malevolent power of fate, which could change those hopes, at
the noon hour, into vague, insidious griefs. Her body seemed to have
lost its substance, to be let out into space. She felt vacant and
psychic.
“Something dreadful is going to happen,” she whimpered. “I feel
my heart sinking right out of me.”
She wished that she were not alone. The big house, so silent
and aloof, was oppressive. She questioned if it were safe for her to
remain there, solitary, and decided that she would have Blake sleep
in the house that night.
“I’d give anything right now to have His Friggets walk in and say
‘It’s a quarter to one, Mrs. Mearely. I persoom you’ll like your lunch.’
That reminds me,” she added, “I suppose it must be almost that
time now.”
Unable to see the clock from where she sat she rose listlessly.
“Ten minutes past one? Why—no! It is the long hand that is at
one. Surely it can’t be five minutes past two!”
She was still denying this when the bell rang from the tower by
the river.
“Two o’clock! Two—and I haven’t had my lunch. Why, I—I’m
starving!”
Discovery of the true cause of her sudden malady went far
toward curing it. She ran to the larder, to see what cold fare she
could find there, all ready to be devoured without delay in
preparation. She thought, with compunction, of the faithful Friggets,
always as punctual as time itself, who would never have let her fall
into this pathos of the interior vacuum, had a greater grief not called
them from her service.
She found so many dishes, that she might have wondered if His
Friggets had not been secretly preparing for a party, except that she
knew well their one extravagance. They would cook, when the spirit
moved them. They were proud of their cooking; and they argued
that what was uneaten could always be given to the clergyman,
whose stipend was meagre, and what he did not devour he could
pass on to the thirteen McGuires, who embodied Roseborough’s
poor. It must be confessed not only that the vicar was tempted from
spiritual yearnings, by the tasty abundance of His Friggets’ art, but
that the thirteen McGuires were fattening like pigs. Their sleek looks
mocked at sweet charity’s very name. Mrs. McGuire, herself, had
given up her random profession of charwoman, because, as she
said: “Sure an’ I’ve got too heavy to be bendin’ me waist, and up
and down on me knees, and the loike.”
It occurred to Rosamond that His Friggets’ extravagance in this
one direction was fortunate for her, to-day, since it not only provided
her with lunch but with refreshments for her guests of the evening.
There were two large trembling jellies, bowls of cream, a junket, a
whole roasted chicken and a whole boiled one—[“I’ll turn the boiled
one into a salad for to-night,” she thought]—cold ham, which had
been boiled in a pot of Amanda’s own brew of currant wine, and half
a dozen quart bottles of the parsnip wine, considered by Amanda,
metaphorically speaking, as the diamond in her crown. All
Roseborough admitted that Amanda Frigget’s parsnip wine was so
good, so golden, and so lively, that it both looked and tasted
“exactly like champagne, except that, instead of the regular
champagne taste, it had the taste of parsnips.”
Rosamond appropriated the roast chicken and found bread and
butter also for her needs. To these she added a tall glass of foamy
milk. A crock filled with cookies was another pleasant discovery.
She pictured to herself, amid giggles, the expressions that would
adorn the faces of Amanda and Jemima and all Roseborough if they
could see the distinguished Hibbert Mearely’s widow perched on the
end of the kitchen table eating with her fingers.
“I suppose, if I were a born lady, I’d starve because there’s no
one here to set my lunch before me properly,” she thought, “well,
there are advantages in having a pedigree of butter pats.”
As one second joint, followed by the other, was nipped all
around neatly to the bone, and the milk followed the chicken
fragments, Rosamond’s indefinable sorrow vanished. She hung
Amanda’s apron on its hook, and ran upstairs to wash her face and
hands and catch up a loosened curl or two.
She had decided to spend the afternoon hours in a nook she
knew by the river, not a stone’s throw from the bell tower. It was the
loveliest spot in the valley and, unseen, one might watch the three
roads that crossed one another at the tower. She needed a parasol,
and ignoring the four black ones—one with lavender flowers—and
the two black and white ones—the latest with a white chiffon frill—
which, in their appointed order, had screened her grieved
countenance during the last four years—she selected a shot silk of a
grass green, its brightness tempered with silver gray. As she set out
from the house now, with its silken shade arched over her bright hair
and bringing out every bit of life there was in her skin and her gown,
even Mr. Albert Andrews could not have doubted that the young
widow’s mourning days were over.
With her hand on the latch of her gate, she paused. Far down
the road, just on the near side of the bridge, she perceived Blake
returning with the obstreperous mare. Even while she looked, she
saw Florence rear and dart off down the road to Poplars. There was
a trotting on the gravel road immediately round the curve of Villa
Rose’s line. In a moment the rider had reined in at the gate and
uncovered in salute to her.
“I hope he doesn’t think he has come to make a special call—he
looks all dressed up—because I’m not going indoors again,” was her
mental greeting. Aloud, she said, cordially, “Good afternoon, Judge
Giffen.”
 CHAPTER X

I
n Roseborough, as has been remarked, Judge Giffen was
universally listed by the adjective “imposing.” Those spinsters
with clinging natures preferred to describe him as
“authoritative.” Miss Palametta Watts, who was suspected (to put it
mildly) of special leanings—not to say intentions—in his direction,
called him “masterful.” Quite recently Miss Palametta had boldly
charged him with this trait; and, with the daring of desperate thirty-
seven, had asked him if she were not correct in deducing from his
stern mien that his wife, when he selected one, would be
constrained to obey him; for her own part she knew she would.

“Such is the scriptural injunction,” he pronounced after weighing

the matter; but, to her disappointment, pursued the subject no
further. To be sure, not having his glasses on at the time, he may
not have seen her inviting looks.
Mrs. Witherby’s dicta were taken as final in Roseborough, for it
was conceded that she had “a wonderful way of expressing herself,”
and Mrs. Witherby had a vast admiration for Judge Giffen and
frequently summed him up thus:
“Well, it may be true that the Judge has had more decisions
reversed than any other judge in the land, and that but for Hibbert
Mearely’s influence he would never have been a judge at all; but
what I always say is, ‘Where in all Roseborough (or elsewhere,
either, for the matter of that) will you find a man who has such an
air about him?’ Judge Giffen is a gentleman who understands his
own worth. One can see that at a glance.”
 One could see it at a glance this afternoon as he rode forward. It
was emphatically a man with a fine understanding of his own worth
whom the large, flea-bitten white horse brought to pause at Villa
Rose’s gate. Though above medium stature, he was still not so tall
as he appeared, from the height of his collar and the lofty manner of
carrying his head. It was this last habit in particular, no doubt, which
gave him the “air” so much admired.
His hair was graying with an even pepper-and-salt sprinkling. He
allowed it to grow long in front, that his small, square forehead
might be ornamented with a “statesman’s lock.” His eyes were small
and brown and of no marked luminosity or keenness; his pepper-
and-salt eyebrows were short and highly peaked at the outer corners
—a sign, phrenologists declare, of latent ferocity. Doubtless the
eyebrows assisted Miss Palametta Watts to her definition of
“masterful.” He wore a short-cropped moustache naturally, and
affected an imperial and goatee. His morals, of course, like all
Roseborough morals, were above reproach. His hobbies were chess
and the Weekly Digest, which gave him the news of the world in
twelve pages of small paragraphs with inserts of verse, fiction,
humour, publisher’s advertisements, and editorials on all world-wide
topics, from single tax to the Oriental problem and back by way of
the clam middens of British Columbia to the Greek schism and free
verse. By lingering and studious perusal, he managed to make each
week’s Digest last until the post brought the next.
For the rest, he dwelt in apartments in the house of a Mrs. Taite,
a gentlewoman fallen into adverse circumstances, who was willing to
take in and care for a paying guest in order to eke out. He lived in
an economical and dignified style, and kept two horses, on the
means which could very much better have been applied to the
purchase of a neat cottage to shelter a wife. At least such was the
opinion of Roseborough’s spinsters.
Perhaps the Judge did not treat the Roseborough spinsters quite
fairly. The legal mind, by reason of its professional habits, becomes
versed in subtleties, evasions, and the like—“technicalities” as they
are called. The judge’s apartments were sincerely and solidly
furnished by Mrs. Taite; but they were decorated with technicalities
and evasions. In this wise: on the slippery horsehair sofa (supplied
by Mrs. Taite) there was a row of cushions contributed by hungry
hearts. They were stuffed with rags, excelsior, goose feathers, or
ducks’ down, according to the financial rating of Miss Hopeful; and
covered with crochet, tatting, crazy-quilt patches, sampler, or crewel
work, according to her taste and her proficiency with the embroidery
needle, the bobbin, or the small steel hook. One sampler-topped
pillow bore the legend, tidily cross-stitched in a circle: “When here
you rest your weary head, dream of the Giver.” The Judge had
accepted the cushion and highly complimented the workmanship,
vaguely maundered on the sweet thoughts that natively abide in
woman’s breast, and set the pillow at the foot of the sofa. As his
stockinged or slippered pedal extremities were not dreamers, he
could use the gift without troubling his weary head about the giver.
Thus, it will be seen, that the learned jurist could appropriate the
soft advantages of a tentative contract, and escape the expected
payment on a technicality, as well as any man he ever solemnly
upbraided in court for the same act.
“I know what I should like to do with these rooms,” Miss Hopeful
would say, with arch looks.
The Judge would answer promptly:
“What, for instance?”
He was, in his way, a shrewd man as a man who knows a trifle
about horses is apt to be. He asked purposely, because, since the
spinsters of Roseborough were each and all “homey” women,
domestic by training, he had found that their suggestions, when
followed out, added to the comfort of his bachelor life.
Encouraged by his receptivity, the lady would express her idea
and even offer to come and assist “dear Mrs. Taite” in putting it into
effect. More than one damsel had spent her half hour mounted on a
kitchen stool, with her mouth full of tacks, while dear Mrs. Taite
handed the hammer back and forth and made mental note of
defects in the aspirant’s figure to retail later to the judge, who liked
what he called “a well-turned woman.” To retain her paying guest
was Mrs. Taite’s life-work.
To tell the truth, the Judge had been in no haste to woo. He was
not touched with Romeo’s fever. His temperament was judicial and
calm. He was—it may again be remarked—shrewd. He knew to a
penny exactly what his monthly income could do for him in the way
of providing a Roseborough gentleman’s requisites, and he was in
little danger of deliberately seeking to curtail his small personal
luxuries by taking a dowerless wife. So he listened the more
appreciatively to his landlady’s analyses of the dispositions and
physical characteristics of Roseborough’s spinsters.
“Knowledge is power,” he would aver with a solemn sort of
waggishness, when she had permitted him to gather, from her
discourse, that there was not an ankle among the lot which would
dare show itself in a plain white stocking; or that a certain melting-
eyed one’s shoulder blades or hip bones were “at least no sharper
than her temper.” He knew from other of Mrs. Taite’s hints—dropped
generally while stirring a hot cup of chocolate for his nightcap and
buttering a toasted scone to accompany it, that some young ladies
who owned to twenty-six would never see thirty-three again, and
that a baby-waisted white muslin frock was no longer the badge of a
guileless heart, as it had been in the days when she wore one to
induce that maiden’s shock, the first kiss.
What with Mrs. Taite’s chocolate and subtlety and the judge’s
legal technicalities, it will be seen that the Roseborough spinsters
were out-generalled. They had once been a threat; but, nowadays,
there was scarcely the aroma of danger surrounding them. Mrs.
Taite felt that the menace to her came from another quarter. It had
(as she mentally phrased it) “struck upon her bosom and fairly
winded her” one evening when Judge Giffen had remarked, between
chocolate sips, that Mrs. Mearely had received him that afternoon in
a black-and-white striped gown. Unlike Mr. Albert Andrews, the
Judge rather prided himself on having an eye for feminine apparel.
“And she looked uncommonly well in it, too,” he added. “A very
well-turned woman is Mrs. Mearely. Yes, Mrs. Taite, I believe poor
dear Mearely’s taste to have been as infallible in that case as in
every other.”
“Mr. Hibbert Mearely had the large means necessary to indulge a
woman of such extravagant fancies.” In Mrs. Taite’s voice there was
a tremolo as she shot the only dart she could find at that moment,
knowing, alas, that it was unbarbed save to her own heart.
“And now she has the means, and none to please but herself.”
The landlady attempted to retrieve her error.
“Considering her humble origin, I should hope she’d spend her
life henceforth as an offering to her distinguished husband’s
memory.” This conversation had taken place on a winter’s evening,
but that was not the reason why Mrs. Taite’s teeth chattered.
“Ah, no doubt—for a year or so. Mearely, himself, was a great
stickler for form, and he trained her in the niceties of observance.
Her origin—that is to say, the butter pats and so on—is a forgotten
myth in Roseborough now.”
“Among the men, perhaps.”
“A forgotten myth, Mrs. Taite. Mearely put the quietus on it by
his will. He left her everything. I drew it up, you know. Yes; he was
in the pink of condition at the time—the very pink. Whoever thought
he would go to his last account not three months later?” He mused
on this so long that Mrs. Taite, anxious to get to the terms of the will
and learn the worst she had to fear, put in a remark to bring him
back to the theme.
“Cholera Morpheus, was it not?”
“Morbus, Mrs. Taite, morbus—a latin word meaning—er. Yes.
Poor dear Mearely said to me: ‘I am a healthy man and the Mearelys
are a long-lived family. I except to see ninety and bury my wife a
dozen years earlier, as my grandfather did before me. However, we
are all mortal and subject to climate and accident. I may die to-
morrow and leave Mrs. Mearely a widow. I wonder, ought I make the
proviso that she must lose all my fortune, if she marries again? What
would you advise?’”
“And what did you advise, Judge Giffen?” Mrs. Taite trembled.
“Ah, a really remarkable thing! I advised against it, and he didn’t
do it.”
“What a calamity!” Mrs. Taite cried out in spite of herself, and
hastened to add: “Leaving her at the mercy of fortune hunters.”
“I said that, in the very unlikely event of her being left a young
widow, it would be better that she should have the responsibility of
living up to the Mearely name and estate. This duty would guide her
choice in re-marriage. Whereas, without responsibilities, she might
hark back to the farm strain and contract a union which would be a
slur on the Mearely honour. He perceived the point, and, after
providing for a few bequests to relatives, he left her everything, on
condition that she continued to live in Villa Rose. ‘For,’ said he, ‘I
won’t have her running up and down Europe, spending money to
fatten a conscienceless army of waiters, guides, and concierges. Let
her remain quietly at home and continue to carry out my artistic
scheme, as the one rustic and indigenous object of beauty in the
midst of my priceless antiques and objets d’art.’ That was his idea. A
very superior man—was my dear friend, Mearely.”
“So Mrs. Mearely has control of her fortune and is obliged to live
in Roseborough? Then she is compelled to choose a man from these
parts.”
“Yes. If she leaves Villa Rose and Roseborough, she loses
everything. Yes, it was I who drew up that will, Mrs. Taite. I relate
the facts to you now in strict confidence, relying on your discretion.
You have been my confidante for a number of years, Mrs. Taite, and
I believe there is no woman in Roseborough so discreet.”
 Whereupon, Mrs. Taite had besought him to continue this
reliance, as no word of his confidences had ever passed, or should
ever pass, her lips; but she believed that the will’s terms were not
unknown in Roseborough; she had heard rumours, indeed, though
she had not credited them. Perhaps, she thought, Mr. Howard, being
a distant cousin of Mr. Mearely’s, had felt privileged to inform
Roseborough. On the contrary, the Judge argued, Mr. Howard had
known nothing of this proviso. He was sure of that.
“Poor Howard would have been left out entirely but for me. I got
his little legacy for him. So much per year, you know—just enough to
keep him, if prices don’t soar. I pointed out to Mearely that Howard
is really an excellent chess player.”
Mrs. Taite, of course, had never heard the terms of the will as
they affected Mrs. Mearely’s re-marriage. When she said she had
heard rumours she meant that she was about to set some afloat.
She put on her bonnet and took two pennies to the Widower’s Mite
Society’s treasurer, Mr. Albert Andrews, and dropped the hint which,
in due course, matured into the aim of his life. It was she who told
the news to Wilton Howard, amid sly compliments; again sowing
seed which, though ignored at the time, was to bear fruit later.
Mrs. Taite saw that the Judge was deliberately considering the
pros and cons of a union with the young widow when all her black
should have been put by, and she intended that he should not lack
rivals. She knew that his legal mind would take its time in coming to
a decision, and that his self-sufficient nature would neither anticipate
rivals nor that the widow might say him nay. Meanwhile, there was
the one chance in a hundred that Mrs. Mearely might marry a faster
moving admirer.
She racked her brains for schemes to balk him. She even
thought wildly of sending Mrs. Mearely anonymous letters, or of
poisoning Villa Rose’s well by dropping a murdered cat into it. She
nursed her fears in secret, copiously wept, prayed nightly that a
worthy gentlewoman might not be brought to penury through the
unnecessary matrimony of a paying guest, and took to walking at
midnight, shut-eyed, in her nainsook and curl rags.
Meanwhile the judge had handed down his decision, and he
apprehended no reversal of it by the higher court, i. e., by fair
Rosamond herself. He felt that he, of all men, deserved her fortune
because it was he who had prevented a pen-stroke from depriving
her of it. Having accepted his decision, he began to formulate a plan
of procedure. He rode out to Trenton churchyard and verified the
date on the headstone. From that he computed a proper date for
proposal, which appeared to be midsummer week, a year and six
months from the day on which Mrs. Mearely had received him in
black and white. He would go to see her—say, on a Wednesday—
and inform her, in dignified yet adequate language, of the part he
had played in smoothing life for her. She would have until Sunday to
regard him as a benign fate and to become so mellowed with
gratitude that, when he returned on the Sabbath afternoon to make
formal offer of himself, she would answer with blushing enthusiasm,
“Oh, be my fate again—a second time, and forever.”
Unaware that this midsummer day was Rosamond’s “Wonderful
Day” (though, if he had known, he would have found the fact
pleasantly apropos) or that she had given up her last attenuation of
mourning only a few hours before he set out to make this
preliminary and way-paving call—resolved upon, even to the date,
eighteen months previously—Judge Giffen nosed his flea-bitten white
horse up to the gate post, removed and replaced his tall hat in high
and solemn salutation, slipped off his glove (gray, with two pearl
buttons), enclosed Rosamond’s rosy palm, and said in the tone of
one who conveys information of grave import:
“Good-afternoon, my dear Mrs. Mearely.”
Almost simultaneously he noticed the green-gray shot parasol
and the lilac-bud silk gown and was distinctly pleased by the omen.
It was, indeed, as if she had expected him.
 CHAPTER XI

C
ourtesy commanded Rosamond to open the gate and invite
the Judge in. She disobeyed. She leaned over the bar, so
that he himself could not effect entrance, and said sweetly:

“How fortunate that you arrived at this moment and not later.
For I can at least exchange a word of greeting with you ere I
continue on my way.”
He pondered this unforeseen contingency. That she might not be
at home to receive him on the day set had never occurred to him.
“You are going out?”
“I am obliged to go. It is an unescapable duty that I must
perform.”
“Surely you are not going any distance on foot?”
“Oh—er—the carriage will be here in a moment,” she said
hastily. “Er—in fact—I think I hear it—I mean, see it—down the hill.
Isn’t that Blake now, driving in from the Poplars road?” She shaded
her eyes and peered, as if she were honestly trying to distinguish
the driver of a romping steed, which was just then taking the lowest
turn of the hill at a gallop. By strategy and force, Blake had
succeeded in driving the mare round the tower and back to the
Roseborough road.
“Ah, yes, Blake. You know I advised poor dear Mearely to sell
Florence; but he said she was such a beautiful creature that he
would rather risk his neck with her than sit safely behind an ugly
beast. I should advise you to use Marquis, my dear lady. That mare
is not reliable.”
“So Blake says. He threatened to take her to the farm yesterday.
But he also says he can manage her; and, as he always does
manage her I take his word for my safety and don’t worry.”
The Judge had a happy thought.
“You may regard your own safety thus lightly, fair lady. But will
you not consider the place you hold in our hearts? Can any gallant
man in Roseborough think of your unprotected loveliness in danger
and keep his pulses steady?”
Inwardly Rosamond registered another plaintive and helpless
protest against the misuse of her bright gown which circumstance
was making that day. “They’ll drive me back to crape,” she said to
herself, “in order to have my adventures free from persecution.”
Aloud she said, veiling her eyes till they were only a peep of
sparkling blue heavens through clouds:
“I have begun to feel lately that Roseborough’s gentlemen have
indeed—so to speak—a perception of my lonely state.”
“Ah. As to the others I can’t say. They would hardly have the—
ah—same interest as myself. No, hardly, I have a personal
responsibility regarding you.”
She interrupted quickly.
“Has your invitation reached you yet, for to-night?”
“Ah—yes. I thank you. I met Mrs. Witherby on the bridge. Ah—I
was about to say....”
“Can that possibly be Florence pounding up the hill? Yes, it is.
Dear me. Really, I wish she were more sedate, to-day of all days.”
Rosamond was talking against time; her words meant nothing
more than that she desired to keep the Judge at bay until the
carriage arrived, when she would pretend she had visits to make and
so dismiss him. Not understanding this, the Judge was inspired by
her last sentence to a very pretty belief; namely, that Mrs. Mearely
wished her mare to trot sedately on this day, because she was on
her way to the cemetery; a visit to the Mearely plot being her
delicate method of assuring both the departed and Roseborough
that her return to colours betokened no frivolity of spirit—that she
was still a Mearely and would maintain the Mearely dignity. This also,
he thought, was a good omen for him; since there could be no
question about his superfitness to assist her in her loyal task.
“My dear lady....” He spoke with a slow profundity which made
the blinking, sparkling eyes open wide at him. “You are on the way
to his—ah—grave. I understand. I may say I more than understand.
I will postpone until this evening—ah—the communication I came
here to make to you. Um—ah—drop a posy—ah—on the poor fellow
for me, will you not?”
Rosamond stared at him as blankly as any milkmaid.
“What?” said she, with unmodified bluntness.
Whatever might have developed, in the course of explanation,
was prevented by a rival emissary of fate, with less propriety and
more force than Judge Giffen. Florence rounded the curve. She had
the bit in her teeth and blood in her eye—and the devil himself in
her heels and her head. Blake was chiefly occupied in administering
punishment. If she would bolt, she should do it under the whip, until
discouragement set in.
Florence, being dumb, could not explain what it was about the
stolid, large, high-backed, flea-bitten white horse (and possibly his
imposing master) which irritated her beyond endurance; but she
expressed herself after her temperament. She swerved from the
road and, charging upon the unsuspecting nag—whose back was
toward her, his head sunk in the timothy along the wall—bit him
sharply on the rump. The flea-bitten white was less stolid than he
looked. He emitted a shrill snort and kicked with all his might; the
Judge lost his hat and almost lost his seat. Florence pranced in and
nipped the other side. Whereupon the flea-bitten white sounded his
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