Read Ebook: The Osbornes by Benson E F Edward Frederic

Font size: 10 px 15 px 20 px 25 px 30 px 35 px

Background color: BlackWhiteGrayLight GrayDark GrayDim Gray

Text color: BlackWhiteGrayLight GrayDark GrayDim Gray

Apply/Save settings

Ebook has 1357 lines and 102873 words, and 28 pages

"Well, not often. Anyhow, she enjoyed herself tremendously and was perfectly natural."

Dora shook her head.

"Oh well," said May in deprecation of this rather lengthy harangue, "I didn't mean to rouse you, Dora."

"I daresay not, and in that case you have done so without meaning. But really, when you say that Mrs. Osborne is natural I am bound to protest. You might as well say that your mother is."

"Oh no, I mightn't," said May quite calmly. "It would be simply silly to call mother natural. She only does things because they are 'the thing.' She spends her whole life in doing 'the thing.' And yet I don't know--oh, Dora, what very odd people women are when they grow up! Shall you and I be as odd, do you think? I love mother, and so do you, and we both of us love yours, don't we? but they are very, very odd people."

Dora gave a little shriek of laughter.

"Oh don't," she said. "I want to talk about snobs a little more."

"Well, I'm sure you've often told me that mother was one," remarked May.

"Oh, no, is there heraldic glass on the stairs?" asked May, in a slightly awe-struck tone. "I never saw it."

Dora, as her friend often declared, really did not always play fair. There had quite distinctly been the satirical note in her own allusion to the heraldic glass, but as soon as May reflected that in the appreciative reverence of her reply, Dora was down upon her at once.

"And why shouldn't they have heraldic glass as much as your people or mine?" she asked smartly. "They've got exactly as many grandfathers and grandmothers as we have, and there's not the slightest reason to doubt that Mrs. Osborne was a Miss Parkins, and Mr. Parkins's heir, who, I expect, was far more respectable than my mother's father, who drank himself to death, though mother always calls it cerebral haemorrhage. Oh, May, we are all snobs, and I'm not sure the worst snobbishness of all isn't shown by those who say they came over with William the Conqueror or were descended from Edward the Fourth. Probably the Osbornes didn't come over with William the Conqueror but were here long before, only they don't happen to know who they were."

"I know, that is just it," said May, calmly. "They don't know who they were, and yet they put up their coats of arms."

Dora looked at her friend in contempt.

"I suppose you think you have scored over that," she said.

"Not in the least. I am only pointing out perfectly obvious things."

"Then why do it?" said Dora. "What I am pointing out are not perfectly obvious things. At least they appear not to be to you. The whole affair is a game, stars and garters and ancestors, and coats of arms is all a game. Oh, I don't say that it isn't great fun. But it is absurd to take it seriously. What can it matter to you or me whether great-grandpapa was a peer or a bootblack? It only amuses us to think that he was a peer. And if it amuses Mrs. Osborne to think that Mr. Parkins had a coat of arms at all, why shouldn't she put it up in the hall window? And since, as I said, she was the only child, of course she quarters with the Osborne arms. It's one of the rules. I believe you are jealous of them, because they are richer than your horrid family."

Nothing ever roused May except a practical assault upon her personal comfort, and Dora seldom attempted to rouse her. It was invariably hopeless and the present attempt only added another to the list of her failures.

"I think that is partly true," said May. "I don't see why common people should have the best of everything. They only have to invent a button or a razor, and all that life offers is theirs. I think it's deplorable, but it doesn't make me angry any more than a wet day makes me angry, unless I am absolutely caught in the rain with a new hat. As to coats of arms and things, I think it is rather pleasant to know that one's grandfather was a gentleman."

Dora waved her arms wildly.

"He wouldn't have had the chance," remarked May. "And also Mrs. Osborne herself would cut nobody, who would--would lend lustre to her house. Oh, Dora, let's stop. It isn't any good. You are a democrat, and a radical and a socialist, and really it doesn't matter. Besides I haven't seen you for--oh, well, nearly twenty-four hours. What has happened?"

Dora got up.

"I don't think I can stop," she said. "Because I want to know what you really think about certain things. Two heads are better than one, you know, even when mine is one of them. Oh, by the way, Austell has let Grote to the Osbornes. They have taken it for seven years from the end of July. It was mother's doing I think. I--oh, May, you may call me a radical and a socialist and anything else you choose, but I can't quite see Mrs. Osborne there. She'll fill it with plush. I know she will. After all, I expect mother is right. I suppose it is better to pay some of your debts, and have other people putting plush monkeys into your house than go on as Austell has been doing. I expect I should be just the same if he was my son instead of my brother. It doesn't seem to matter much what one's brother does, as long as he doesn't wear his hair long, or cheat at cards. But I daresay it's different if he's your son."

Dora gave a great sigh, and was silent. In spite of that series of statements which had led May Thurston, quite reasonably, to call her a radical and a socialist, there was some feeling within her, rather more intimate, rather more herself, that made her dislike the idea of the Osbornes living in Grote, which had always been her home. The Austell finances, especially for the past two or three years, had been precarious, and though her mother had a jointure that would enable her and Dora to live quite comfortably in her house in Eaton Place, and at the little bungalow at Deal, it had been necessary before now to let the house in Eaton Place during the months of the season, and live at Deal, and to let the bungalow at Deal during August and September, and encamp, so to speak, in a corner of Grote. For Jim Austell, her brother, it could not be denied, was not a person who could possibly be described as dependable. His mother had made the most prolonged attempt to describe him as such, but without success, and she had at length seen the futility of clinging to Grote, a huge Jacobean mansion with an enormous park. In the latter, being of sandy soil, a public golf links had been started, which brought in ?192 a year, while neighbouring farmers grazed their beasts on other portions. The total receipts, however, about paid for the flower beds and the trimming of the exquisite bank of rhododendrons that grew round the lake, and after a year or so of trial, the scheme had been pronounced financially unsound, and for the last six months the place had been in search of a tenant. Austell had hoped that his well-known skill at bridge and his knowledge of horses might save him from the extremity of letting it. In this he had been disappointed; they had but contributed to the speed at which it was necessary to do so.

All this, which was part of the habitual environment of Dora's mind, part of the data under which she lived, passed through it or was presented to it, like a familiar picture, in the space of the sigh that concluded her last speech. It was no longer any use thinking about these things; Grote had been let to the Osbornes, the bungalow at Deal had also been let for August, and till September she and her mother were going to "live in their boxes." After all, they had done that, as everybody else had, often before, and for much longer periods than one month, but it was the first time that they had been compelled to live in their boxes with no house to flee unto. And, at this moment the change struck Dora. For week after week before now, she had stayed with friends, knowing that all the time there was home behind it all. True, now that Grote had been let, it would have been possible to live in the bungalow at Deal, but the latter had been let while the former was still uncertain, and Dora suddenly felt a sense of homelessness that was not quite comfortable. In two weeks from now they went to the Thurstons, then there were three more visits, then, no doubt, if they chose, many more visits, but there was nothing behind; there was no home. Meantime, the Osbornes grabbed homes wherever they chose, they built a palace in Park Lane, they took Grote from her own impecunious family, and as Mrs. Osborne had told her mother last night, Mr. O. had a fancy for a bit of stalking for self and friends in the autumn, and had taken a little box up in Sutherland. She, however, was going to settle down at Grote at the end of the season, and did not intend to go North. There had been badinage over this, it appeared, between her and Mr. O.; and he threatened her with an action for divorce on the grounds of desertion. And Dora felt much less socialistic and far more inclined to agree with May on the iniquity of common people having all they wanted simply because they invented a button. If only she could invent a button.

"Yes, I want your advice May," she repeated, "or I think I do. It's quite serious, at least it's beginning to be quite serious, and there are so many dreadfully funny things connected with it. Yes, Mr. Osborne has asked leave to call upon mother this afternoon at six, and it's half-past five now. Oh, dear, oh, dear! I suppose he found out in a book that that sort of thing was done a hundred years ago, and he wishes to be correct. The Osbornes are absolutely correct if you think of it. Every one went in to supper in the right order last night, which never happens at any other house I have ever been to, and where does he get those extraordinary good looks from? Oh, I don't mean Mr. Osborne. How can you be so silly--but him. Yes, I'm telling it all very clearly, aren't I, so I hope you understand. Perhaps Mrs. Osborne was a beauty once, you can't tell."

That May perfectly understood this extraordinary farrago of observations said less for her powers of perspicacity than might have been supposed, for Dora was not alluding to any new thing, but to a subject that had often before been mentioned between them. And Dora went on, still discursively but intelligibly.

Dora paused a moment and then took a cigarette from a box that stood on the mantelpiece, and lit it. She never smoked cigarettes; she only lit them, and the mere fact that she lit one was indicative of extreme absorption in something else.

"You're engaged, May," she said, "so you ought to know. Else what is the use of your being engaged. What do you feel when that angel Harry comes into the room?"

May could answer that quite easily.

"Oh, I feel as if it was me coming into the room," she said. "I feel as if I am not in the room, since you put it like that, unless he is."

The conversation had been flippant enough up till this moment, though, as a matter of fact, Dora, being inconsequential by nature, often gave the note of flippancy, when she was in earnest. Both of the girls, in any case, were quite serious now. And out of the depth of her twenty years' wisdom, May proceeded to draw a bucket full for Dora, who was only nineteen.

"You haven't told me about me," remarked Dora.

May Thurston shifted her position slightly. It was not done with any idea of manoeuvre. She was the least dramatic of girls, and she only shifted because she felt a little uncomfortable. It was new to her also to take the lead. Dora usually strode ahead.

"Oh, are you, darling?" murmured Dora. "Nobody would have guessed it."

"But I am over things like that, old-fashioned and romantic. I think love in a cottage would be quite ideal, not because a cottage is ideal--I would much sooner not live in one--but because love is. And, oh, Dora, I can just advise you not to marry him unless you are in love with him. I daresay heaps of girls make very nice sensible marriages, where there's lots of money, and where they each like the other, but you do miss such a lot by not falling in love. You miss--you miss it all."

Dora scrutinized her friend for a moment, her head a little on one side, with something of the manner of a bright-eyed thrush listening for the movement of the worm that it hopes to breakfast on.

"But there's something in your mind, which you are not saying, May," she remarked. "I can hear it rustling."

"Yes. There are just two little things that make me wonder whether you are in love with him. The first is you said you were sure he was good! That is no reason at all. You don't fall in love with a person because he's good. You esteem and like him--or it's possible to conceive doing so--because he's good, but you don't love him for that reason."

Dora gave a little purr of laughter.

"Oh, certainly, but nobody in love stops to think about that."

"I see. Well, what is the second thing that makes you wonder?"

May looked at her with her large, serious blue eyes.

"What you said about being brought up with a jerk in the middle of your thrill, when he spoke of a handsome lady. As if it mattered! Yet somehow it does to you, or it would not bring you up with a jerk!"

"And you think it doesn't matter?" asked Dora.

"Of course not if you love him, and if you don't, in the name of all that is sensible, don't marry him. That sort of marriage is called sensible, I know. It is really the wildest and most awful risk."

Dora stared.

"How do you know?" she asked.

"Of course I know, simply because I'm in love with Harry. Fancy being tied to a man for life without that! Gracious, it's nearly six, and he was to call for me at home at six."

"Oh, you can keep him waiting ten minutes," said Dora. "We've only just begun to talk about the great point."

May shook her head.

"I could keep him waiting," she said, "but I couldn't keep myself. I must go. Darling, I long to hear more, only you see I can't stop now. Come and see me to-morrow morning. I shall be in till lunch time."

Share on: WhatsApp @Hash Facebook Tweet