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any more, and you're never going to be again—or—is the haddock really like she said?” Chloe asked, making horseshoes in her pretty forehead, as she always does when life presents to her any problem not immediately soluble in a laugh or a joke. “Is it another bill? Never mind! I'll ask them to wait. You'll get the check for that detective story on Monday, if the editor has a thread of conscience left, and I'll go up to town to-morrow and draw the money from old Moses for those last drawings of ‘The Holy Life.’ ”
“It's not a bill, madam,” I said, “and Moses can send his money by post. To-morrow we have another errand. To-day, alas! I must finish my article for the Weekly Wilderness.”
“Do you want to drive me to suicide?” she asked. “Give me the letter!”
“Allow me,” I said, “the melancholy pleasure of communicating its contents. If you have quite finished your eggs and things you may come and sit on my knee.”
She came and perched there.
“Don't be a pig, Len,” she said. “I'm not a baby, to have bad news broken to me.”
Then I put my arm round her and spoke out roundly.
“My dear,” I said, “we are ruined.”
“Oh, Len, are we really?” said Chloe, much interested.
“Yes,” I said, firmly. “Hitherto we've worked for our living and earned it. Now we are degraded from the ranks of the noble army of workers. My uncle James has died, and he has left us a hundred a year and a house. Our independence gone—it's a cruel blow! We'll ride over and see it to-morrow as ever is.”
I am not sure that Chloe did not weep for joy. Though as a rule, one knows, that sort of weeping is only done in books. You see, we really had worked so very, very hard. However much in love one may be, one does not like to work ten hours a day. Though two may not grudge it as the price of life together. I wrote, Chloe illustrated—we worked hard—hard—hard, and earned enough to keep body and soul and the two of us together in our microscopic house.
“The Bandbox” we called it, but on its gatepost it called itself Ross Villa. And now—a hundred a year, and a house—such a house. It came back to me out of my youth, a monument of comfortable affluence, with vineries and pineries, and pits and frames, clean-shaved lawns and trim orchards, yew avenues, box edgings, stabling and coach-houses and pigsties and henneries. Chloe and I clung together in an ecstasy, till “the girl” came in to clear away breakfast. I never saw anything more dramatic than the way in which she indicated, as she bore out the empty dish, that her opinion of the haddock was not only entirely unaltered, but indeed confirmed, by our having eaten it.
My article for the Weekly Wilderness got itself written somehow, but with difficulty, for Chloe, demoralized by our good fortune, interrupted me at every sentence—a thing we have carefully trained each other not to do.
“Has it a garden?” she asked, suddenly, stopping in front of me with a compelling wave of her wand, or feather brush. “Are you sure it has a garden?”
“More or less,” I said. “Don't chatter, there's an angel.”
“And out-houses?” after a pause and an interval of fluffy energy.
“Of sorts,” I said; “but don't talk, my dearest child. You lost me an epigram then.”
“I am so sorry—but—since you are interrupted—dear, dearer, dearest Len, tell me in six words, what is the Red House like?”
“It's not red at all—at least only one wing of it. It's a big yellow house—stands all alone in fields. Has a great alarm-bell and, I believe, a ghost. Now be quiet or I shall slap you. To-morrow we'll see it.”
But the interruption ruined a delightful sentence, conceived in a spirit of the most delicate irony, and dealing with the late deplorable action of the London water companies—and again I experienced that premonition of unrest. Never again, I felt certain, should I be able to be sure of a clear morning's work. I made allowances for my wife. I was not, I feel certain, unjust or unreasonable, but I saw that while the house and the money were new topics, she could not be expected to preserve on them the hours of silence which my writing exacted. And by the time the topics were stale, the beautiful habit of letting each other alone during working-hours would have been broken forever. I laid down my fountain-pen to make these reflections. I heard Chloe pulling out drawers and opening cupboards in our room overhead. Yet before I could snatch up my pen she had whirled in and caught me idle.
“Oh, you're not doing anything. Then I sha'n't interrupt you if I just ask whether there's a hen-house.”
“I don't know,” I said, beginning to write very fast, and not sufficiently grateful, I fear, for her indifference to the money as compared with the house. “Why don't you settle down to your work? This is the beginning of the ruin I foresaw.”
“I—I don't think I'll work to-day,” she said, guiltily. “I'm looking over some things. But I won't bother.”
But she was back again in less than half an hour with a question about larders burning on her lips, and my article degenerated from the clear, sustained logical argument which it meant to be, to a piece of patch-work—of patch-work ill fitted. I became desperate, and avenged my poor broken article by telling Chloe anything rather than the truth about my uncle's old house. In the end this disingenuousness was paid for to the uttermost. If I had prepared her, if I had had the intelligence to overpaint, even, the charms of that old house—but I was firm, firm to the point of spitefulness. “A yellow brick house, as ugly as a lunatic asylum, standing alone in the fields, bearing an alarm-bell and a ghostly reputation.” This was the most she got out of me.
My piece of patch-work got its last stitches put in sooner than I expected. I put it in its envelope, addressed it, and went up to our room.
All the wardrobe drawers were pulled out. Chloe was sitting on the floor amid a heap of stuffs—a roll of chintz which her mother had given her for covers to our drawing-room furniture, if ever we had any; some bits of velvet, soft reds and greens, that we had bought together at Liberty's sale; and she was snipping and tearing at a muslin and lace gown—a gown I had always admired. I remember she wore it to breakfast the day after our wedding. I felt as though my tenderest memories were being unpicked, stitch by stitch.
“What on earth—” I said. She looked up with a flush of excitement on her little face.
“Oh, Len, look here. Don't you think these velvets would cover some cushions very nicely? And the chintz would make lovely long curtains, and I thought I could get at least four short blinds out of this muslin for the new house.”
My blood actually ran cold. I sat down suddenly on the clothes-basket. Chloe was not too preoccupied to tell me not to, for perhaps the twentieth time.
“You know it won't bear your weight,” she said. “Look here. I shall put the lace like that, and like that, and tie it back with yellow ribbon. I've got a soft sash here.”
She got up, scattering muslin and velvet, and began to turn over a corner drawer. I found a trembling tongue.
“But, my dear child, we can't live in the house.”
She dropped a lace scarf and her best ivory prayer-book to look at me.
“But why?”
“It's too big. We can't afford it.”
“But we pay rent for this—and we shouldn't for that.”
“It's impossible. Why, of course we must let it. It ought to bring us in a couple of hundred a year.”
Chloe's eyes actually filled with tears.
“My dear, my dear,” I said, “this is very terrible. Is it possible that after so short a time I find you longing to leave the Bandbox—our own little Bandbox—the pride and joy of our hearts?”
She came to me then and asked me not to be so horrid.
“Don't