John Strange Winter

Possession to some natures seems always to demand value in what is possessed; to others it has exactly the opposite effect.

Julia duly implanted in her parents’ minds the preliminary idea that a change from Ye Dene might be desirable. But the Whittakers did not leave the Park just then, for it was only a few days after the conversation between the two girls on the subject of removal, that quiet, unoriginal Maudie cast a veritable bombshell into the family circle. For Maudie got engaged to be married.

I have spoken earlier in this story of a house in the immediate neighborhood of Ye Dene which was called Ingleside, and I have just mentioned a family of the name of Marksby. The Marksbys lived at Ingleside, and Ingleside was almost exactly opposite to Ye Dene; the Marksbys, indeed, were next-door neighbors of the M’Quades. They had not very long been in possession of that desirable residence, and, mind you, Ingleside was a most desirable residence, one of the best to be found in the length and breadth of the Park. The family consisted of the father and mother, two daughters and a son. Mr. Marksby, as far as the Park was concerned, was that mysterious “something in the city” which covers such a multitude of sins, or if not sins, at least of blemishes, social and otherwise. They did themselves and their neighbors extremely well, kept good-class servants, had the smartest window curtains and flower-boxes in the Park, went to church regularly, gave largely in charity and entertained freely. What wonder that, in their case, people did not too closely inquire into the exact definition of “something in the city.”

From the very first it had been Maudie rather than Julia who had caught on with the Marksbys. The Marksby girls were quiet and singularly unassuming, and as Maudie Whittaker grew older she was attracted, perhaps because of Julia’s excessive energy, by quietness rather than the reverse, and was indeed herself a girl of singularly few words. But if the Marksby girls were quiet, then young Harry Marksby did not share their nature. He was himself the gayest of the gay, one who, a century ago, would have been called an “agreeable rattle;” indeed he was a young man who prided himself on stirring things up. He by no means approved of the fact that his father and mother had turned their backs upon convenient Bayswater in favor of the more distant Park. He was a young man who worked hard when he worked, and who abandoned himself to amusement when he was not working. But he was a sensible young man and did not see the force of burning the candle at both ends, so that he stayed a great deal more at home in the evenings than many a young man of his age and general proclivities would have done; and thus it was that he came somehow to fall in love with Regina Whittaker’s eldest girl. And, as I said, the news fell upon the Whittaker family like a bombshell.

Not that they were displeased! Mr. and Mrs. Whittaker had been too happy in their own married life to grudge either of their girls entering upon the same joys. But they had not seen it coming. Parents are often like that, and so the news came upon them with startling suddenness.

“I am not surprised, though,” said Regina to her husband and Julia when the great news had been broached and Harry Marksby had gone to seek his lady-love in the seclusion of the girls’ own sitting-room, “I am not surprised. She is very beautiful.”

“Oh, mother, how can you stuff her up like that?” cried Julia. “Nobody thinks Maudie very beautiful but yourself—not even Harry. You shouldn’t do it, dear. It gives us such a wrong idea of ourselves, or it might do if we hadn’t got the sense to see what we see in our looking-glasses.”

“Your modesty,” said Regina, “is most becoming. I honor and admire you for it—”

“I’m off to my housekeeping class,” said Julia, whisking herself out of the room.

“That is the most wonderful thing about our girls,” said Regina to Alfred, when they found themselves alone, “that is the most wonderful thing about our girls—their utter absence of self-consciousness. Beauty has never been a bane to them, because they have never had a vain thought between them. It is a beautiful and wonderful thing.”

“They’re good-looking enough,” said Alfred, “but they’ll never, either of them, be a patch upon you, dearest.”

“Upon me?” She blushed rosy red in spite of her fifty and odd years. “Why, Alfie, looks were never my strong point. They get their looks from you.”

“Nobody but yourself ever thought so, Queenie,” said Alfred Whittaker, with an indulgent glance at his wife; “and everybody may not think of our girls just as you do.”

“And as you do, Alfie?”

“And as I do. All the same, I don’t know that I should call them beautiful myself. They’re good-looking, wholesome, straight, clean, desirable girls, as good as gold and as merry as grigs. By the way,” he added, “the Marksbys must be very well off.”

“Indeed! What makes you think so?”

“From what he told me of his circumstances.”

“But what are the Marksbys?” asked Regina.

“He’s in his father’s business.”

“But what is his father’s business?”

Alfred Whittaker stretched out his hand and took hold of his wife’s. “Queenie,” he said, “we have never been very proud people, have we?”

“I hope we have always had proper pride, and no more,” said Regina.

“He is a nice young chap,” Alfred went on, as if he were following out a train of thought; “and Maudie seems to be very much taken with him—”

“Alfie,” said Regina in a tone of apprehension, “you are trying to break something to me.”

“Well, in one sense, I am,” he said, smiling; “and on the other hand I am not. Myself I believe in honest character and good solid comfort before all other considerations, and I feel that you will be sensible and do the same. Maudie has still to learn, as far as I know, the exact nature of the way in which the Marksbys’ money is made.”

“Go on,” said Regina, impatiently.

“Well, to go on,” said Mr. Whittaker, “is to let the blow fall without any further fuss.”

“Let it fall!” cried Regina in a tone of tragedy.

“Marksby,” returned Alfred, “is their private name. They trade under a different one.”

“Yes?”

“And Marksby,” went on Alfred, slowly, “is the Twopenny Dinner King.”

“The Twopenny Dinner King!” cried Regina. “You mean they sell twopenny dinners?”

“Yes, Queenie—twopenny dinners. I’m told they are excellent—indeed, young Harry told me so himself just now. He has invited me to go down and have lunch with him one day, and he promises he will give me the regular twopenny fare—not by way of entertaining me, but rather in order to show me that it really could be done at such a price.”

“And—and—does Harry wear an apron—and—and serve twopenny dinners?”

“No, no! The concern’s too big for that,” Mr. Whittaker replied. “He has never done anything of that kind. It’s a regular going concern—they employ hundreds of hands, make all their own sausages, make their own beef, mutton, veal, pork and ham pies, cook their own potatoes and green vegetables. They’ve got about thirty of these shops—Bundaby’s Eating Houses they are called. They must be coining money.”

“My daughter married to a sausage-maker!” said Regina in a bewildered tone.

“There’s nothing in that,” Alfred Whittaker rejoined; “there’s nothing in that, my dear girl, provided he makes his sausages good and wholesome and enough of ’em. But I was afraid it would be a bit of a blow to you.”

“My daughter—my daughter married to a sausage-maker!” Regina repeated.

“Now, come, come, Queenie, you mustn’t—you mustn’t—hang it all, I don’t know what you mustn’t do! The girl fancies the boy, and he has plenty of money. He’s a nice, gentlemanly chap, and she’ll live in style. He’s going to have a motor car; she’ll live in far better style than we’ve ever done.”

“But you are not a sausage-maker,” said Regina. “Alfie, Alfie, I’m afraid I couldn’t have married you if you had been a sausage-maker.”

The word “sausage” seemed positively to stick in Regina’s throat.

“Queenie,” said Alfred, “you know perfectly well that what I was had nothing to do with your feelings towards me. If I had been a crossing-sweeper—”

“Alfie,” said she, interrupting him, “a duke might sweep a crossing and sweep it nobly, and remain a duke, unsullied and unsoiled; but a duke would never make sausages!”

“No, but sausages may make a duke,” said Alfred, promptly. “I know just how you feel, my dear girl—I felt a sort of a lump come in my throat myself when he told me—but he was frank and unashamed. I should hate one of my girls to marry a man who was ashamed of his calling, whatever it was.”

“My noble Alfred!” cried Regina.

“I don’t know that I’m particularly noble,” said Alfred. “I never feel it if I am. I’m afraid it’s only your eyes that see me in such a light. But I did feel a bit of a lump in my throat, a sort of extra big stone in my gizzard, don’t you know. And then it came over me that it is the girl’s own choice, and that it is not for me to damp it.”

“But Maudie doesn’t know.”

“In a way she does, and in another way she doesn’t. I asked young Harry if he had told her the exact nature of his business. He said no, he hadn’t. He had told her he was in business in the city, that they had a great many branches, but he had not told her the exact nature of it. ‘We never think about it,’ he said ‘excepting as the business; and if our friends don’t know that Bundaby’s Eating Houses belong to us, well, we don’t see why we should enlighten them.’”

“If nobody knows—” began Regina.

“Come, come, old lady, you’ll have to swallow it, and we shall have to break it to the little girl, unless young Harry does it himself.”

It was eleven o’clock before they had any opportunity of speaking on the subject to Maudie; indeed, they were still talking the affair over when they heard the pair come into the hall, and Maudie opened the door of the room in which they were sitting.

“Yes, I must go now,” said Harry Marksby. “I’ve got to be up so fearfully early in the morning. To-morrow night I shall be able to stay a bit later.”

He came in, as he said, just to say good-night, and his way of saying good-night to Maudie’s mother did a good deal to wipe the word “sausage” off the slate of Regina’s impressionability.

“I’ve only come in for a minute, Mrs. Whittaker,” he said. “I must be off home, because I’ve got to be up awfully early in the morning. I made half-a-dozen business appointments for to-morrow ever so early, before I knew that Maudie and I would quite come to an understanding to-night. May I come to-morrow evening?”

“You may come whenever you like,” said Regina. “You had better begin, Harry, as you mean to go on. I have no son of my own, and the young men who take my girls away from me must not think they are going to rob me of my daughters—on the contrary, they must make me forget that I never had sons.”

“I shall be very willing to do that,” Harry Marksby returned. “I’ve always managed to get on with my own mother all right, and I don’t see why I shouldn’t get on with my mother-in-law. It won’t be my fault if I don’t.”

“I’m sure it won’t be mine,” said Regina.

“No, I’m sure it won’t,” said he heartily. “Well, good-night, Mrs. Whittaker.” He bent down and kissed her just as frankly as if she had been his own mother, and Regina choked a little as the boy and girl went out of the room together.

In a couple of minutes or so Maudie came back, came in with quite a rush for one of her quiet nature, and flung herself down at her mother’s feet.

“I am so happy, mother dear,” she said. “You have been happy in your married life, and you can understand what I feel. To-morrow will be a great day for me. I’m going to meet Harry in Bond Street at four o’clock, and we’re going to choose our ring together; and after that I’m going right down to the city with him, and I’m going to have my tea at one of the Bundaby shops. I always did think I should like to keep a shop mother,” she went on, “you have heard me say so lots of times, but I never thought that I should one day be at the head of at least thirty!”