Ann Veronica (3 page)

His sister appeared.

She was dressed in one of those complicated dresses that are all lace
and work and confused patternings of black and purple and cream about
the body, and she was in many ways a younger feminine version of the
same theme as himself. She had the same sharp nose—which, indeed, only
Ann Veronica, of all the family, had escaped. She carried herself well,
whereas her brother slouched, and there was a certain aristocratic
dignity about her that she had acquired through her long engagement to
a curate of family, a scion of the Wiltshire Edmondshaws. He had died
before they married, and when her brother became a widower she had
come to his assistance and taken over much of the care of his youngest
daughter. But from the first her rather old-fashioned conception of life
had jarred with the suburban atmosphere, the High School spirit and the
memories of the light and little Mrs. Stanley, whose family had been by
any reckoning inconsiderable—to use the kindliest term. Miss Stanley
had determined from the outset to have the warmest affection for her
youngest niece and to be a second mother in her life—a second and a
better one; but she had found much to battle with, and there was much in
herself that Ann Veronica failed to understand. She came in now with an
air of reserved solicitude.

Mr. Stanley pointed to the letter with a pipe he had drawn from his
jacket pocket. "What do you think of that?" he asked.

She took it up in her many-ringed hands and read it judicially. He
filled his pipe slowly.

"Yes," she said at last, "it is firm and affectionate."

"I could have said more."

"You seem to have said just what had to be said. It seems to me exactly
what is wanted. She really must not go to that affair."

She paused, and he waited for her to speak.

"I don't think she quite sees the harm of those people or the sort of
life to which they would draw her," she said. "They would spoil every
chance."

"She has chances?" he said, helping her out.

"She is an extremely attractive girl," she said; and added, "to some
people. Of course, one doesn't like to talk about things until there are
things to talk about."

"All the more reason why she shouldn't get herself talked about."

"That is exactly what I feel."

Mr. Stanley took the letter and stood with it in his hand thoughtfully
for a time. "I'd give anything," he remarked, "to see our little Vee
happily and comfortably married."

He gave the note to the parlormaid the next morning in an inadvertent,
casual manner just as he was leaving the house to catch his London
train. When Ann Veronica got it she had at first a wild, fantastic idea
that it contained a tip.

Ann Veronica's resolve to have things out with her father was not
accomplished without difficulty.

He was not due from the City until about six, and so she went and played
Badminton with the Widgett girls until dinner-time. The atmosphere at
dinner was not propitious. Her aunt was blandly amiable above a certain
tremulous undertow, and talked as if to a caller about the alarming
spread of marigolds that summer at the end of the garden, a sort of
Yellow Peril to all the smaller hardy annuals, while her father brought
some papers to table and presented himself as preoccupied with them. "It
really seems as if we shall have to put down marigolds altogether next
year," Aunt Molly repeated three times, "and do away with marguerites.
They seed beyond all reason." Elizabeth, the parlormaid, kept coming in
to hand vegetables whenever there seemed a chance of Ann Veronica asking
for an interview. Directly dinner was over Mr. Stanley, having pretended
to linger to smoke, fled suddenly up-stairs to petrography, and when
Veronica tapped he answered through the locked door, "Go away, Vee! I'm
busy," and made a lapidary's wheel buzz loudly.

Breakfast, too, was an impossible occasion. He read the Times with an
unusually passionate intentness, and then declared suddenly for the
earlier of the two trains he used.

"I'll come to the station," said Ann Veronica. "I may as well come up by
this train."

"I may have to run," said her father, with an appeal to his watch.

"I'll run, too," she volunteered.

Instead of which they walked sharply....

"I say, daddy," she began, and was suddenly short of breath.

"If it's about that dance project," he said, "it's no good, Veronica.
I've made up my mind."

"You'll make me look a fool before all my friends."

"You shouldn't have made an engagement until you'd consulted your aunt."

"I thought I was old enough," she gasped, between laughter and crying.

Her father's step quickened to a trot. "I won't have you quarrelling and
crying in the Avenue," he said. "Stop it!... If you've got anything
to say, you must say it to your aunt—"

"But look here, daddy!"

He flapped the Times at her with an imperious gesture.

"It's settled. You're not to go. You're NOT to go."

"But it's about other things."

"I don't care. This isn't the place."

"Then may I come to the study to-night—after dinner?"

"I'm—BUSY!"

"It's important. If I can't talk anywhere else—I DO want an
understanding."

Ahead of them walked a gentleman whom it was evident they must at their
present pace very speedily overtake. It was Ramage, the occupant of the
big house at the end of the Avenue. He had recently made Mr. Stanley's
acquaintance in the train and shown him one or two trifling civilities.
He was an outside broker and the proprietor of a financial newspaper; he
had come up very rapidly in the last few years, and Mr. Stanley admired
and detested him in almost equal measure. It was intolerable to think
that he might overhear words and phrases. Mr. Stanley's pace slackened.

"You've no right to badger me like this, Veronica," he said. "I can't
see what possible benefit can come of discussing things that are
settled. If you want advice, your aunt is the person. However, if you
must air your opinions—"

"To-night, then, daddy!"

He made an angry but conceivably an assenting noise, and then Ramage
glanced back and stopped, saluted elaborately, and waited for them to
come up. He was a square-faced man of nearly fifty, with iron-gray hair
a mobile, clean-shaven mouth and rather protuberant black eyes that now
scrutinized Ann Veronica. He dressed rather after the fashion of the
West End than the City, and affected a cultured urbanity that somehow
disconcerted and always annoyed Ann Veronica's father extremely. He
did not play golf, but took his exercise on horseback, which was also
unsympathetic.

"Stuffy these trees make the Avenue," said Mr. Stanley as they drew
alongside, to account for his own ruffled and heated expression. "They
ought to have been lopped in the spring."

"There's plenty of time," said Ramage. "Is Miss Stanley coming up with
us?"

"I go second," she said, "and change at Wimbledon."

"We'll all go second," said Ramage, "if we may?"

Mr. Stanley wanted to object strongly, but as he could not immediately
think how to put it, he contented himself with a grunt, and the motion
was carried. "How's Mrs. Ramage?" he asked.

"Very much as usual," said Ramage. "She finds lying up so much very
irksome. But, you see, she HAS to lie up."

The topic of his invalid wife bored him, and he turned at once to Ann
Veronica. "And where are YOU going?" he said. "Are you going on again
this winter with that scientific work of yours? It's an instance of
heredity, I suppose." For a moment Mr. Stanley almost liked Ramage.
"You're a biologist, aren't you?"

He began to talk of his own impressions of biology as a commonplace
magazine reader who had to get what he could from the monthly reviews,
and was glad to meet with any information from nearer the fountainhead.
In a little while he and she were talking quite easily and agreeably.
They went on talking in the train—it seemed to her father a slight want
of deference to him—and he listened and pretended to read the Times. He
was struck disagreeably by Ramage's air of gallant consideration and Ann
Veronica's self-possessed answers. These things did not harmonize with
his conception of the forthcoming (if unavoidable) interview. After
all, it came to him suddenly as a harsh discovery that she might be in
a sense regarded as grownup. He was a man who in all things classified
without nuance, and for him there were in the matter of age just two
feminine classes and no more—girls and women. The distinction lay
chiefly in the right to pat their heads. But here was a girl—she must
be a girl, since she was his daughter and pat-able—imitating the
woman quite remarkably and cleverly. He resumed his listening. She was
discussing one of those modern advanced plays with a remarkable, with an
extraordinary, confidence.

"His love-making," she remarked, "struck me as unconvincing. He seemed
too noisy."

The full significance of her words did not instantly appear to him. Then
it dawned. Good heavens! She was discussing love-making. For a time he
heard no more, and stared with stony eyes at a Book-War proclamation in
leaded type that filled half a column of the Times that day. Could she
understand what she was talking about? Luckily it was a second-class
carriage and the ordinary fellow-travellers were not there. Everybody,
he felt, must be listening behind their papers.

Of course, girls repeat phrases and opinions of which they cannot
possibly understand the meaning. But a middle-aged man like Ramage ought
to know better than to draw out a girl, the daughter of a friend and
neighbor....

Well, after all, he seemed to be turning the subject. "Broddick is a
heavy man," he was saying, "and the main interest of the play was the
embezzlement." Thank Heaven! Mr. Stanley allowed his paper to drop
a little, and scrutinized the hats and brows of their three
fellow-travellers.

They reached Wimbledon, and Ramage whipped out to hand Miss Stanley
to the platform as though she had been a duchess, and she descended as
though such attentions from middle-aged, but still gallant, merchants
were a matter of course. Then, as Ramage readjusted himself in a corner,
he remarked: "These young people shoot up, Stanley. It seems only
yesterday that she was running down the Avenue, all hair and legs."

Mr. Stanley regarded him through his glasses with something approaching
animosity.

"Now she's all hat and ideas," he said, with an air of humor.

"She seems an unusually clever girl," said Ramage.

Mr. Stanley regarded his neighbor's clean-shaven face almost warily.
"I'm not sure whether we don't rather overdo all this higher education,"
he said, with an effect of conveying profound meanings.

He became quite sure, by a sort of accumulation of reflection, as the
day wore on. He found his youngest daughter intrusive in his thoughts
all through the morning, and still more so in the afternoon. He saw her
young and graceful back as she descended from the carriage, severely
ignoring him, and recalled a glimpse he had of her face, bright and
serene, as his train ran out of Wimbledon. He recalled with exasperating
perplexity her clear, matter-of-fact tone as she talked about
love-making being unconvincing. He was really very proud of her, and
extraordinarily angry and resentful at the innocent and audacious
self-reliance that seemed to intimate her sense of absolute independence
of him, her absolute security without him. After all, she only LOOKED a
woman. She was rash and ignorant, absolutely inexperienced. Absolutely.
He began to think of speeches, very firm, explicit speeches, he would
make.

He lunched in the Legal Club in Chancery Lane, and met Ogilvy. Daughters
were in the air that day. Ogilvy was full of a client's trouble in
that matter, a grave and even tragic trouble. He told some of the
particulars.

"Curious case," said Ogilvy, buttering his bread and cutting it up in a
way he had. "Curious case—and sets one thinking."

He resumed, after a mouthful: "Here is a girl of sixteen or seventeen,
seventeen and a half to be exact, running about, as one might say, in
London. Schoolgirl. Her family are solid West End people, Kensington
people. Father—dead. She goes out and comes home. Afterward goes on to
Oxford. Twenty-one, twenty-two. Why doesn't she marry? Plenty of money
under her father's will. Charming girl."

He consumed Irish stew for some moments.

"Married already," he said, with his mouth full. "Shopman."

"Good God!" said Mr. Stanley.

"Good-looking rascal she met at Worthing. Very romantic and all that. He
fixed it."

"But—"

"He left her alone. Pure romantic nonsense on her part. Sheer
calculation on his. Went up to Somerset House to examine the will before
he did it. Yes. Nice position."

"She doesn't care for him now?"

"Not a bit. What a girl of sixteen cares for is hair and a high color
and moonlight and a tenor voice. I suppose most of our daughters would
marry organ-grinders if they had a chance—at that age. My son wanted
to marry a woman of thirty in a tobacconist's shop. Only a son's another
story. We fixed that. Well, that's the situation. My people don't know
what to do. Can't face a scandal. Can't ask the gent to go abroad and
condone a bigamy. He misstated her age and address; but you can't get
home on him for a thing like that.... There you are! Girl spoilt for
life. Makes one want to go back to the Oriental system!"

Mr. Stanley poured wine. "Damned Rascal!" he said. "Isn't there a
brother to kick him?"

"Mere satisfaction," reflected Ogilvy. "Mere sensuality. I rather think
they have kicked him, from the tone of some of the letters. Nice, of
course. But it doesn't alter the situation."

"It's these Rascals," said Mr. Stanley, and paused.

"Always has been," said Ogilvy. "Our interest lies in heading them off."