John Strange Winter

Sometimes it is a good thing to be aroused out of sleep, especially if the sleep has been a fool’s paradise.

Mrs. Whittaker crept softly out of the room, and went as softly out of the house. There was a pillar-box a little way along the road, and it was not an infrequent habit with her to carry her own letters to the post without troubling to make any sort of outdoor toilette. So on that soft summer night she gathered up her voluminous skirts, and with the letter in her hand went down the covered way to the gate and walked as far as the pillar-box.

“My dear,” said a neighbor, who had been to the club and was on his way home, as he entered the room where his wife was sitting, “I met Mrs. Whittaker just now. I never saw anything so remarkable.”

“Really! She’s always rather remarkable in her dress, but how?”

“I don’t know, but it was white; it looked like a voluminous exaggerated nightgown.”

“Mrs. Whittaker in a nightgown, Charley? She must have been out of her mind, or was she walking in her sleep, do you think?”

“Oh, no, I don’t think she was; she was evidently going to the post-box, but her gown—’Pon my word, she looked like a dressed-up figure in a carnival.”

“Oh, she is quite mad,” said the little wife; “they say she’s very nice, but quite mad.”

Meanwhile, Regina, all unconscious of the strictures which had been passed upon her appearance, had gone back into Ye Dene, and lingered in the covered way adjusting a plant here and a leaf there, as if she had no higher object in life than the arrangement of her house. It happened that Alfred woke up as his wife gently closed the door behind her.

“I thought Queenie was here. Dear me, it is quite chilly—what a fool I was to go to sleep here! I suppose it’s a sign of old age.”

Then he stretched out one arm and then the other one.

“I suppose I ought to write that letter to Jenkinson,” was his next thought. So he heaved himself up out of his comfortable chair, picked up the art magazine, and sought his own little sanctum, which was behind the dining-room. There he wrote a letter of three lines making an appointment for the next morning, and then he too set off for the pillar-box.

“Hullo! Queenie, are you here?” he exclaimed, as he saw the tall figure in the voluminous white draperies. “Walk up as far as the post with me.”

“Oh, are you going to the post?” she said. “I have just been. Yes, I will come with you, certainly.”

He opened the gate to let her pass out in front of him.

“You won’t take cold?” he said anxiously.

“Oh, no, not a night like this.”

“I don’t know,” he remarked, as they sauntered up the pathway together, “that there is much protection in a frock like this.”

“It’s not a frock, dear, it’s a tea-gown.”

“Oh, is it?”

“What the French call saute de lit.”

“It’s flimsy. I don’t know that I altogether like it,” said Alfred, slipping his hand under her arm.

“It has the advantage of being cool,” said Regina.

“Yes, I daresay it is cool, but this kind of gown makes you look—” He wobbled his hand about to express something that was not very clear to either of them.

“I know, it makes me look too fat,” said Regina in quite a crushed tone. “I am too fat.”

“Oh, I don’t know—you’re just comfortable.”

“No, Alfred, I’m too fat,” Regina reiterated with an air of firm conviction.

“Well, as to that,” said Alfred, slipping the letter into the letter-box, and wheeling round, still keeping hold of his wife’s arm, “I never did admire the ‘two-deal-board’ style of woman myself.”

Regina immediately decided in her own mind that the hussy was of the plump little partridge order.

“When I take hold of a lady’s arm,” continued Alfred, with the facetious air of a heavy father, “I like an arm that I can feel; I object to taking hold of a bone. No, no, my dear, you are not at all too fat, but I don’t think you ought to wear gowns, except purely for reasons of comfort, that tend to increase your apparent size.”

“But you don’t think it matters much?”

“I’m sure it does not matter very much.”

“Alfred, do you think that I am greatly altered?” She asked the question wistfully, as if the issue of life and death hung upon his reply.

“As a matter of fact,” said Alfred Whittaker, promptly, “I think you are the least altered of any woman I ever knew in my life. I see other women going to pieces in the most extraordinary manner. Now, Mrs. Chamberlain came into the office this morning. My goodness, what a wreck! Yellow as a guinea, her face lined all over—she made me think of a mummy.”

“Yet she is younger than I am,” said Regina.

“Oh, years—they have nothing to do with the case. You have been a happy woman, a prosperous woman, a healthy woman; there has been nothing in your life to seam your face with lines and generally stamp you with all the worry that is too plainly visible on poor Mrs. Chamberlain’s features. Well, here we are, and here is Julia skipping across the road.”

As the words left his lips a slim young figure in white emerged from the rustic gate that gave entrance and egress to the house of Marksby. They stood until Julia came running across the road.

“Have you two dear things been out for an airing?” she exclaimed as she reached the foot-path.

“No, only to the post-box,” said Regina.

“Mother dear,” said Julia, “you look exactly as if you were walking about in your nightgown—a very voluminous and sublimated nightgown, but a nightgown all the same.”

For a moment Regina was too dashed to speak. The thought came fluttering through her mind, and seemed to fall to the floor of her heart with a great crash, that surely it was hopeless for her ever to try to win back Alfred from the hussy by personal means. Evidently she was hopelessly out of it as regards all questions of dress and the toilette.

“Of course,” she hastened to reply, for she did not wish Julia to think that she was annoyed by her criticism, “it really is a bedroom garment. I put it on because I was so hot to-day, and in this little country sort of place I thought going to the post in it would not matter, and—we—we did not meet anyone, did we, Alfred?”

“It would not have mattered if you had,” said Julia; “what you wear is a matter for your own consideration. But it does look like a nightgown.”

“And your mother,” said Alfred, “looks better in a sort of glorified nightgown than most women do in their best frocks. And now don’t you think we had better go off to bed? You will have the least as ever was, dear?”

Regina’s face broke into a smile. “The least as ever was,” she replied. So the two went into the dining-room, where, as usual, the refreshment tray was set out upon the table. Julia, with a laughing declaration that she did not want even the least as ever was, went gayly upstairs to her bedroom.

“I shall be very glad to get away,” said Alfred, sitting on the edge of the oaken dining-table and holding his whisky-and-soda up to the light. “I want a change badly this year. We are not as young as we were, Queenie; I’ve taken a lot out of myself lately.”

“You’ve been so busy.”

“Yes, we’ve never had such a good year in business as the last one, but there’s something wrong with Chamberlain.”

“How wrong?”

“I don’t know, I can’t make it out. Whether there’s a screw loose at home, or whether his wife’s health is worrying him, I don’t know.”

“Does she own to being ill?”

“No, never. This morning I quite offended her by telling her that she did not look very well.”

“And they are not going away till September?”

“No, she has just come back.”

“She has been to the sea?”

“Yes.”

“Then she came up specially for Maudie’s wedding?”

“I suppose so. I did not know she had been away till Chamberlain told me this morning. He seems dull and gloomy—ah, there’s a screw loose there, but I don’t know just where it is. Anyway, I know I want my holiday very badly this year and glad I shall be when we have packed up and are off for La Belle France.”

“And I,” said Regina, with a sigh which, though quickly suppressed, was full of meaning. Somehow, she could not sleep that night; during the day some of her most cherished ideals had been ruthlessly torn up by the roots. Never in all her life before had she had even so much as a suspicion of her noble Alfred’s matrimonial integrity, and she had come to see flaws in her own life and rents in her own robes. Indeed, had she not been, as it were, aroused out of sleep, the regeneration of women had been like to cost her very dear. But, God be thanked! she had been awakened in time, and in future she would leave the great question of womanhood to look after itself, and she would devote her time and thought and the use of her astute brain to regaining her husband’s love. “Think,” her thoughts ran, “think—Maudie is married, Julia is young and beautiful, and fascinating to the opposite sex, you cannot hope to keep her long in the home nest; think what your life would be living alone with a husband whose heart was wholly gone from you.”