“And I see that afternoon tea, with you young ladies, is a somewhat serious function,” said Vansittart, with a glance across the well-spread table to the pile of toast which Sophy was buttering.
The younger girls had come back, one with a china teapot, the other with a cup and saucer, and Eve was busy with her second brew.
“Please don’t laugh at us. We are a very irregular family in the matter of luncheon, and this is our hungriest meal.”
The youngest girl, who had resumed her seat on the hearthrug, was at this juncture seized with a giggling fit, which she vainly endeavoured to suppress, and which speedily communicated itself to the youngest but one, also seated on the rug.
“Those children are too absurd,” exclaimed Sophy, after trying to frown them into propriety. “They are always laughing at nothing.”
“Happy age,” said Vansittart; “the time so soon comes when we can’t laugh at anything.”
“She said it was our hungriest meal!” gasped Hetty, of the yellow pinafore, in convulsions of undisguised laughter; “I should rather think it was.”
“I suppose these young ladies are not yet promoted to late dinners?” hazarded Vansittart, wondering a little why this question of afternoon tea could afford such scope for mirth.
“No, we don’t dine late,” protested Hetty, more and more hilarious. “We don’t, do we, Peggy?”
Peggy, the white-pinafored youngest, was speechless with laughter.
Vansittart began to divine the mystery. In this household of narrow means there was no late dinner for the ladies of the family. There was doubtless a dinner for the Colonel. Man cannot long support life without the regulation evening meal; but for this household of girls bread and jam and plum-loaves were an all-sufficient repast. Was low living—this diet of innocent bread and butter—one of the causes of Eve’s peerless complexion, he wondered? All the girls were more or less pretty. It might be that this Arcadian fare had something to do with their prettiness.
Never had he enjoyed a meal so much as that afternoon tea in the Marchants’ parlour. As he sat looking at the room in the lamplight he began to think he had never seen a prettier room for a family to live in. The fireplace was wide and spacious, an open hearth, with a high projecting mantelpiece, and narrow shelves over that, slanting upward to the ceiling, and dotted about with trumpery blue teacups, and yellow and red vases from the Riviera. The Colonel had begun with the intention of making an ingle nook, but being told, in the rustic builder’s phraseology, that an ingle nook would run into money, he had contented himself with a wide fireplace and a projecting chimney. There was only black and white on the walls, a few etchings, and a good many photographs of pictures, against a dark red paper. There was a cottage piano in a corner, draped with a Bellagio rug of vivid amber, and there were other Bellagio rugs on the sofa, and on the Colonel’s armchair. For the rest the furniture was of the shabbiest; clumsy substantial old chairs and tables that suggested the hindermost dens of the secondhand furniture dealer, those yards and back premises in which he keeps his least attractive goods. The room was uncarpeted, but crudely coloured Indian rugs of the cheaper kind brightened the oak-stained floor here and there, and gave a suggestion of luxury. The lamp in the middle of the round table was subdued by a large shade of art muslin, daintily frilled and ribboned, evidently a home production; the German tablecloth was of white and red damask, the crockery was white, cheap but pretty, and there were a few winter flowers and bright berries in brown glass vases. Altogether that tea-table had a delightful aspect to John Vansittart. The room, the firelight, the fresh young faces, with that one fairest face shining like a star among the others, the hoydens upon the hearthrug giggling at the idea of a dinnerless household, made up a scene of homely enchantment. Even a white fox-terrier which had begun by snapping at him, and which was now at his knee begging for toast, seemed part and parcel of the pleasant homeliness. It was teatime in a domestic fairyland; a fairyland where people eat slices of buttered plum-loaf and hot frizzling toast; a fairyland odorous of strawberry jam; a land where young women put their elbows on the table, and had no need of a chaperon to keep them in countenance during the visit of a young man; in a word, the fairyland of Bohemia. To Vansittart, who in England had known only the respectabilities, the everlasting laws and conventionalities of smart people, differing in detail with the fashion of the hour, but fundamentally the same—to Vansittart, the young man of property and position, this glimpse of an unconventional household was as novel as it was fascinating. Pretty as Eve Marchant was, he would not have admired her half so much at a ball in Grosvenor Square. It was the touch of pathos, the touch of comedy in the girl’s history and surroundings which interested him.
He sat long at the tea-table, and eat more buttered toast than he had eaten at a sitting since he was an undergraduate. He forgot even to ask if Colonel Marchant were at home, and had almost forgotten the existence of that gentleman when Hetty, the youngest but one, on being reproved for noisy utterance, replied, “It don’t matter, father can’t hear me at the Rag.”
“Colonel Marchant is in town, I conclude,” said Vansittart.
“He went up by the afternoon train,” Eve answered with a stately air. “He is dining with some old chums tonight, and I don’t think he’ll be home before Saturday.”
“I have not been fortunate enough to meet him yet.”
“I’m afraid
