Ladies-In-Waiting. Wiggin Kate Douglas Smith
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the occasion is too grand; unless they should happen to like me very much. Then I could play for myself, and sing ‘Allan Water,’ or ‘Believe Me,’ or ‘Early One Morning,’ or ‘Barbara Allen.’”
(Appleton wondered if a claque of sizable, trustworthy boys could be secured in Torquay, and under his intelligent and inspired leadership carry Miss Thomasina Tucker like a cork on the wave of success.)
“Wouldn’t it be lunch-time?” asked Miss Tucker, after a slight pause.
“It is always time for something when I’m particularly enjoying myself,” grumbled Appleton, looking at his watch. “It’s not quite one o’clock. Must we go in?”
“Oh, yes; we’ve ten minutes’ walk,”—and Tommy scrambled up and began to brush sand from her skirts.
“Couldn’t I sit at your table—under the chaperonage of the Bishop of Bath and Wells?” And Appleton got on his feet and collected Tommy’s books.
The girl’s laugh was full-hearted this time. “Certainly not,” she said. “What does Bexley Sands know of the bishop and his interest in us? But if you can find the drawing-room utterly deserted at any time, I’ll sing for you.”
“How about a tea-basket and a walk to Gray Rocks at four o’clock?” asked Appleton as they strolled toward the hotel.
“Charming! And I love singing out of doors without accompaniment. I’m determined to earn that sovereign in course of time! Are you from New England?”
“Yes; and you?”
“Oh, I’m from New York. I was born in a row of brown-stone fronts, in a numbered street, twenty-five or thirty houses to a block, all exactly alike. I wonder how I’ve outlived my start. And you?”
“In the country, bless it,—in the eastern part of Massachusetts. We had a garden and my mother and I lived in it during all the months of my life that matter. That’s where the mignonette grew.”
“‘And He planted a garden eastward in Eden,’” quoted Tommy, half to herself.
“It’s the only Eden I ever knew! Do you like it over here, Miss Tucker, or are you homesick now that your friend is in America?”
“Oh, I’m never homesick; for the reason that I have never had any home since I was ten years old, when I was left an orphan. I haven’t any deep roots in New York; it’s like the ocean, too big to love. I respect and admire the ocean, but I love a little river. You know the made-over aphorism: ‘The home is where the hat is’? For ‘hat’ read ‘trunk,’ and you have my case, precisely.”
“That’s because you are absurdly, riotously young! It won’t suit you forever.”
“Does anything suit one forever?” asked Tommy frivolously, not cynically, but making Appleton a trifle uncomfortable nevertheless. “Anything except singing, I mean? Perhaps you feel the same way about writing? You haven’t told me anything about your work, and I’ve confided my past history, present prospects, and future aspirations to you!”
“There’s not so much to say. It is good work, and it is growing better. I studied architecture at the Beaux-Arts. I do art-criticism, and I write about buildings chiefly. That would seem rather dull to a warbler like you.”
“Not a bit. Doesn’t somebody say that architecture is frozen music?”
“I don’t get as immediate response to my work as you do to yours.”
“No, but you never had sixpences and pennies put into your plate! Now give me my books, please. I’ll go in at the upper gate alone, and run upstairs to my room. You enter by the lower one and go through the lounge, where the guests chiefly congregate waiting for the opening of the dining-room. Au revoir!”
When Tommy opened her bedroom door she elevated her pretty, impertinent little nose and sniffed the air. It was laden with a delicate perfume that came from a huge bunch of mignonette on the table. It was long-stemmed, fresh, and moist, loosely bound together, and every one of its tiny brown blossoms was sending out fragrance into the room. It did not need Fergus Appleton’s card to identify the giver, but there it was.
“What a nice, kind, understanding person he is! And how cheerful it makes life to have somebody from your own country taking an interest in you, and liking your singing, and hating those beastly pennies!” And Tommy, quickly merging artist in woman, slipped on a coatee of dull-green crêpe over her old black taffeta, and taking down her hat with the garland of mignonette from the shelf in her closet, tucked some of the green sprays in her belt, and went down to luncheon. She didn’t know where Fergus Appleton’s table was, but she would make her seat face his. Then she could smile thanks at him over the mulligatawny soup, or the filet of sole, or the boiled mutton, or the apple tart. Even the Bishop of Bath and Wells couldn’t object to that!
V
Their friendship grew perceptibly during the next two days, though constantly under the espionage of the permanent guests of the Bexley Sands Inn, but on Wednesday night Miss Tucker left for Torquay, according to schedule. Fergus Appleton remained behind, partly to make up arrears in his literary work, and partly as a sop to decency and common sense. He did not deem it either proper or dignified to escort the young lady on her journey (particularly as he had not been asked to do so), so he pined in solitary confinement at Bexley until Saturday morning, when he followed her to the scene of her labors.
After due reflection he gave up the idea of the claque, and rested Tommy’s case on the knees of the gods, where it transpired that it was much safer, for Torquay liked Tommy, and the concert went off with enormous éclat. From the moment that Miss Thomasina Tucker appeared on the platform the audience looked pleased. She wore a quaint dress of white flounced chiffon, with a girdle of green, and a broad white hat with her old mignonette garland made into two little nosegays perched on either side of the transparent brim. She could not wear the mignonette that Appleton had sent to her dressing-room, because she would have been obscured by the size of the offering, but she carried as much of it as her strength permitted, and laid the fragrant bouquet on the piano as she passed it. (A poem had come with it, but Tommy did not dare read it until the ordeal was over, for no one had ever written her a poem before. It had three long verses, and was signed “F.A.”—that was all she had time to note.)
A long-haired gentleman sitting beside Appleton remarked to his neighbor: “The girl looks like a flower; it’s a pity she has such a heathenish name! Why didn’t they call her Hope, or Flora, or Egeria, or Cecilia?”
When the audience found that Miss Tucker’s singing did not belie her charming appearance, they cast discretion to the winds and loved her. Appleton himself marveled at the beauty of her performance as it budded and bloomed under the inspiration of her fellow artists and the favor of the audience, and the more he admired the more depressed he became.
“She may be on the threshold of a modest ‘career,’ of a sort, after all,” he thought, “and she will never give it up for me. Would she be willing to combine me with the career, and how would it work? I shouldn’t be churl enough to mind her singing now and then, but it seems to me I couldn’t stand ‘tours.’ Besides, hers is such a childlike, winsome, fragrant little gift it ought not to be exploited like a great, booming talent!”
The audience went wild over Donald Tovey’s songs. He played, and Tommy sang them from memory, and it seemed as if they had been written then and there, struck off at white heat; as if the composer happened to be at the piano, and the singer chanced with his help to be interpreting those particular verses for that particular moment.
His setting of “Jock o’Hazeldean” proved irresistible:
“They sought her baith by bower an ha’;
The ladie was not seen.”
And then with a swirl and a torrent of sound, a clangor of sword and a clatter of hoofs:
“She’s o’er the Border and awa’
Wi’ Jock o’ Hazeldean.”
Appleton