A Perfect Fool: A Novel

CHAPTER I.

THE GREAT MAN OF A LITTLE TOWN.

“My dear, the girl’s a perfect fool. What her poor mother is going to do with her I don’t know. As for teaching, I don’t believe she knows anything herself. And as for getting married, why, I’m perfectly certain she doesn’t know beef from mutton, and couldn’t tell the difference between a cabbage and a cauliflower. I should be very sorry for the man who took Chris Abercarne for a wife!”

So spoke one of Chris Abercarne’s mother’s friends to another old lady, who was of exactly the same way of thinking, as a pretty girl, with dark-brown hair and merry dark blue eyes, passed the window of a dull house in a dull road in that part of Hammersmith which calls itself West Kensington.

Indeed, matters had come to a serious point with Chris and her mother. The widow of an officer in the army, Mrs. Abercarne, having only the one child, had got on very comfortably for some years, until one of those periodical upheavals of “things in the city” had caused a sudden diminution of her small income, and brought the two ladies face to face with actual instead of conventional, poverty. Poor Mrs. Abercarne felt utterly helpless; and Chris, merry Chris

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 who hitherto had had nothing to do but to laugh and keep her mother and her friends in good spirits, found with surprising suddenness that some aspects of life are no laughing matter.

At first there had been a vague tendency on the ladies’ part to trust to the help of their rich and well-born relations. But this tendency was checked very early by the uncompromising tone of their relations’ letters. It was clear that to get out of their difficulties they had no one but themselves to rely upon. Mrs. Abercarne was a hopeful woman, however, with an enormous belief in her own untried powers. She had an unacknowledged belief that nothing very dreadful ever did, or ever could, happen to the widow of a Colonel, who was also the granddaughter of an Admiral, and first cousin to the son of a Marquis. She would manage, so she said a hundred times, to pull herself and her “little daughter” through their difficulties.

Chris she had always treated as a baby, a very sweet and charming child, but a creature to be tenderly cared for and played with, not to be trusted or confided in. Mrs. Abercarne had old-fashioned notions about the bringing-up of girls, and she would have been reduced to her last crust before consenting to allow her daughter to leave her, except as a wife.

Now Chris, without daring openly to combat her mother’s opinion that she was a mere baby, unfit by reason of her tender years to have a voice in any serious discussion, had her own views as to the wisdom of her adored mother’s behaviour, over which she brooded in secret. She could not help feeling that she was by no means the helpless creature her mother and her mother’s friends imagined, and she set

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 about devising plans whereby she might bring such wits as she possessed to their common aid.

To this end she used to buy The Times, and the other daily papers, and search their columns with a view to finding a rapid and easy way of making a fortune.

According to these same papers, nothing in the world was so simple. You had only to send fourteen stamps to somebody with an address in an obscure street, to learn the golden secret of “realising a competence without hindrance to present employment.”

“As our present employment consists generally in sitting looking at the fire, with our hands clasped, wondering where the next quarter’s rent is to come from,” she remarked to her mother, who looked upon these exercises as trivial, “it wouldn’t matter if we were hindered in it!”

Although Mrs. Abercarne felt convinced that the brilliant prospect was illusory, and the work offered would be something inconsistent with the dignity of a gentlewoman, she was always ready to supply the necessary fourteen stamps, and she waited with quite as much anxiety as her daughter for the answers they received to their applications. These answers were, unfortunately, nearly all of the same kind. The applicant for the fortune was to sell small and, for the most part, useless articles on commission among his or her friends.

“And you know, mamma,” commented Chris, sorrowfully, as she looked at a pair of aluminium studs which had been sent in return for the latest fourteen stamps, “as our commission is only threepence on each pair, if we had forty thousand friends and each friend bought a pair of studs from us, that

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 would be only four hundred and ninety-eight pounds ten shillings! I’ve worked it out, and that isn’t what I should call a fortune, after all!”

Her mother sighed, and then said, rather petulantly, that she had known those advertisements were only nonsense, and she hoped she would not want to waste any more money in that way.

“No, mother,” said Chris gently.

And then the blood rushed up into her face, as her eye caught sight in the columns of the newspaper before her, of an advertisement of a different kind.

“If I only dared!” she thought as she threw a sly glance at her mother’s worried face. But she did not dare, until presently she saw a tear drop suddenly on to her mother’s dark dress.

In a moment Chris was on her knees. Her pretty, round young face was full of eagerness, as well as of sympathy, and in the touch of her arms, as they closed round her mother’s neck, there was the clinging caress of one who entreats.

“Mother—mother!” whispered she breathlessly, “don’t be angry—you mustn’t. Only—only I have something to say—something you must see. Look here!” and she thrust the newspaper into Mrs. Abercarne’s hands, and placed the lady’s white fingers on a certain paragraph. “Read that!”

Drying her eyes hastily, ashamed to have been detected, Mrs. Abercarne did as she was asked to do. But the words she read conveyed no meaning to her, or, at least, she pretended they did not. But a slight tone of acerbity was noticeable in her voice as she answered; and Chris knew that her mother understood.

“Well, my dear,” said the Colonel’s widow, with

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 bland dignity, which she meant to denote unconsciousness, “I see nothing that can possibly interest you or me in the lines you have pointed out. Your finger must have slipped, I think.”

“Read the lines aloud, mother dear,” whispered Chris, caressing her mother’s hand.

Still with the same imperfect assumption of extreme innocence, Mrs. Abercarne read by the light of the fire the following advertisement:

“Wanted, a thoroughly reliable and trustworthy woman, with daughter preferred, as house-keeper in a large establishment, where the owner is often away. Apply by letter only in the first instance, to J. B., Wyngham House, Wyngham-on-Sea.”

“Well, my dear child,” said Mrs. Abercarne, superbly, as she laid down the paper, “surely that is not what you wanted me to read?”

But Chris buried her head in her mother’s shoulder.

“Yes, but it is, though,” she whispered.

Of course, the elder lady had expected this; equally, of course, she had to affect the utmost amazement.

“And is it possible, my dear Christina,” she murmured, gently, “that you can consider the words, ‘a reliable and trustworthy woman,’ applicable to me?”

But here, luckily for the girl, her sense of fun carried her away, and she laughed until she cried. Her tears, however, were not all of merriment.

“Why, certainly, mother,” said she merrily. “I should be very indignant with any person who said they were not! Look here,” she went on with sudden gravity, “what’s the use of pretending any longer

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 that we can live on in the old way, when you know we can’t? What’s the use of keeping up this house, and having servants, whom we don’t see how we shall be able to pay, when we dread every knock of the postman, because it may be more bills? Mother—mother, do let us give it up. Don’t let us play any longer at being anything but dreadfully poor. Let us face it, and make the best of it.”

“What!” exclaimed the poor lady, whose pitiful pride, to do her justice, was much more concerned with her beautiful young daughter’s position than with her own; “and be a housekeeper! Just an upper servant; and, perhaps, have this horrid man asking you to mend the tablecloths and count the clothes for the wash!”

“Well, mother, I shouldn’t mind,” said Chris laughing; “and it’s too bad to call him a horrid man, when the worst thing the poor fellow has been guilty of, so far, is to advertise for a housekeeper for his ‘large establishment.’ Oh! mother, wouldn’t you like to be at the head of a large establishment again, even if it were somebody else’s!”

But Mrs. Abercarne shook her head. Her daughter’s persuasions—perhaps the very novelty of her child’s trying to persuade seriously at all—were taking their effect upon her; but it was an effect which produced in the poor gentlewoman the most acute shame and misery.

“What would Lord Llanfyllin say?” murmured she.

“What could he say except that it was a good deal better to keep somebody else’s house, than to starve in one’s own?” retorted Chris, brightly. “And as he’s never seen me, or taken the slightest notice of you

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 since poor papa died, we really needn’t trouble ourselves about him at all.”

This was self-evident, but Mrs. Abercarne did not like to be reminded of the fact. Her cousin, by a remote cousinship, Lord Llanfyllin, had forgotten her very existence years ago; but in the most sacred recesses of her heart he still sat enthroned, symbol of all that was greatest and noblest in the land and of her connection with it. She liked to think that her actions mattered to him; and to be reminded of the fact that they did not, was eminently distasteful to her.

The postman, soon after this, came to the aid of Chris and her arguments by bringing the usual batch of worrying letters with bills and threats. With a burst of tears Mrs. Abercarne gave way, and with her daughter’s soothing arms around her neck answered the loathsome advertisement with an eager hope in her heart that her letter would remain unnoticed by the advertiser.

Poor lady! she was disappointed. Two days later she received an answer to her letter, written in the neat hand of a man of business, in the following words:

“Dear Madam,—Please state terms and approximate age of self and daughter; also date when able to come.

“Yours faithfully, 

“John Bradfield.”