Lovers' Vows

The highest tribute ever paid Miss McCormack’s appearance was that she was not a bad-looking girl. Even the most well-wishing of her friends never so stretched credulity as to imply she was a beauty. Oh, not ugly! No indeed. No squint, no butter tooth or platter face marred her plainness. Her hair was brown, hair-coloured hair that did not hold a curl nor even a hairpin very well, with the result that there was often a wisp of a tail hanging down her back.

Her eyes were hazel, neither beautifully large and lustrous nor heavily fringed with lashes nor even, truth to tell, so very effective as organs of vision. In the privacy of her room, she occasionally resorted to a pair of spectacles to read her Bible, whose print was extremely fine. Her teeth, while regular and in good repair, had never been likened to pearls. Her figure, too, was average, neither gracefully willowy nor pleasingly plump. It was compact, on the thin side. All in all, she was not a bad-looking girl.

In the opinion of her Aunt Elsa, under whose roof Holly McCormack had found a home upon the death of her widowed father a few years before, this lack of physical distinction was a desirable attribute. Holly had slid into their lives like a minnow into a pond, without causing a ripple of trouble. In a short space of time, she had become indispensable, rather like a comfortable grey gown in which one always appears respectable and can wear anywhere.

She was not noisily distracting; neither was she so shy as to cause pity. She was just there, speaking when spoken to and occasionally making a sensible comment on her own. She could be put forward without shame for her appearance and manners, but certainly she was no threat to her cousin Jane. Her age, too, was a convenient thing, somewhere in the mid-twenties. Old enough to preclude having to have a husband found for her, and old enough to act as a chaperone for Jane, but not so ancient as to require any special care for her health. She was fully young enough to run an errand upstairs or into the village, but old enough not to require a footman on the latter.

It was really very strange, had anyone thought to consider it, how Miss McCormack was exactly the right age for everything but marriage. When the nursemaid contracted the measles, Miss McCormack’s youth made her the one to enjoy a romp in the nursery with the youngsters, yet in a week she had so far matured as to be a respectable chaperone for Jane at the Assembly Room. By the time she returned from there, she had become forty or so, and enjoyed an hour-long coze with her aunt on the trials and tribulations of raising a family. She arose the next morning rejuvenated to her twenties, and just the proper age to hem up Jane’s suit for church on Sunday.

Holly was engaged in this chore when her Aunt Elsa (Papa’s sister) entered the morning room, wearing her habitual air of distraction. Elsa Proctor was a faded beauty of another decade. She felt in some vague and undefined way that life had been hard on her to have given her a doting husband, a ravishing daughter and two rowdy sons, a fine country mansion, and good health.

Life had recently rectified its error, however, and bestowed on her spouse an increase in fortune upon the death of a relative, and a knighthood upon the judicious spending of a small portion of the increase. Lady Proctor felt the full weight of her new dignity, and meant for the village to feel it as well. To this end, her natural bent for elegance of toilette had recently increased, as had her aspirations in the sphere of a husband for Jane.

“Holly, my dear,” she said, pausing at the doorway with a lace wisp of handkerchief held aloft to add refinement to her new status, “perhaps you should just put Jane’s skirt away for the moment. Lady Dewar is coming by for a visit. You will stay to meet her, of course. It would not do for her to catch us at work.”

Lady Dewar was not likely to catch the speaker at work unless she arrived at the door of her bedchamber, to find her occupied with her rouge pot and powder box. “She will be coming to congratulate us on Bertie’s being knighted. Dear me, what does one say to a countess? I wish Bertie were here, but there, he never is when one needs him.”

“Uncle has gone into the village. He won’t be home to luncheon,” Holly informed her aunt. She was the main medium of communication between them from eight in the morning till six in the evening, when Sir Egbert arrived at the table for his dinner, which he insisted on calling his mutton, as though he were still a mere country squire. His lady thought it would not hurt him to call it dinner now that he was a knight. Sir Egbert was an early riser and a hard worker about his estate, where he raised excellent hogs. His wife never came downstairs before ten. Lately, eleven was deemed a more dignified hour.

“Pity. I would have liked him to bring me some souchong tea for Lady Dewar’s visit, but men never think of anything useful.”

“Why don’t you sit down and be calm, Auntie? There is no reason to be upset only because the countess is coming to call. I’m sure Lady Dewar has been here half a dozen times the past year. You will have no trouble speaking to her.”

“Yes, I will, Holly.” The niece thought that Lady Proctor felt some superior method of speech was expected of her due to her elevation, but she was soon corrected. “It is plain as a pikestaff why she is coming.”

“You have only to say 'Thank you, it is kind of you to have come,’ or something of the sort, when she offers her congratulations.”

“Congratulations? My dear, that is only her excuse! Now that Bertie is knighted, and with all the money from his Uncle Thomas, she means to push for a match between Jane and her son.”

A trill of spontaneous laughter caused Lady Proctor to frown in displeasure. It could not have been the quality of the sound that accounted for it. Miss McCormack’s voice was the best part of her. It had a throaty, sensuous quality entirely lacking in her appearance. Heads (masculine heads) had been known to turn with interest at the sound of it, and to turn away again when they saw from whence the voice issued. In a fit of lyricism, Mr. Johnson, the local minister, once said she sounded as though she were laughing when she spoke, and as though she were singing when she laughed. Neither flight of poetry was quite accurate, but he had caught the essence of her voice.

“You worry for nothing, Aunt,” she said. “Dewar is old enough to be her father.” She was too polite to state any of the other impediments to the match. Certainly Jane was very pretty, and the best-natured child in the world, but to think she would appeal to a clever, mature, blue gentleman like Lord Dewar stretched imagination too far. Any romantic mention made of him by his mother featured ladies of exalted birth and fortune. The very diamonds of society were his female companions, and even these gems had failed to raise him to an offer of marriage.

“Dewar is not so much above thirty,” Lady Proctor countered. “And Jane, while she is only seventeen, is so pretty you know, and now with her dowry increased.... I expect my decision to present her in London next spring had something to do with it. It will be a vast bother. Bertie is already complaining of the expense of hiring a house too, but it will pay off in the long run. I’m sure the countess’s visit is to foster a match between them.”

Holly listened, and sought to deflate her aunt’s hopes painlessly. “Dewar would hardly have had time to learn of Uncle Bertie’s new great fortune, would he?” she asked. “I cannot think Lady Dewar would be suggesting a match to you without her son’s concurrence.”

“Bertie has only been a knight for two weeks to be sure, but I expect Dewar may have heard of it before we did ourselves. He would be frequently at St. James’s, you must know, where such matters are spoken of.”

“I had not thought of that,” Holly replied mildly, yet she could not feel a wealthy nobleman had been so impressed with her uncle’s knighthood that he had sat down on the spot and posted off a note to his mama. “Dewar so seldom visits his mother that I don’t suppose he realizes Jane is a young lady now. She was still in the schoolroom the last time he was home, was she not? It was two or more years ago. I know she did not go to the assembly. It was spoken of, you recall, but you felt fifteen too young.”

“I expect he knows how to count,” was the reply. “In any case, we shall see, for she will be here in five minutes, and I wish you will put that skirt away, Holly. It will look so underbred for us to be working when she is shown in. Do you think this gown good enough? I put on my new lace jabot, and this dab of a cameo pin. The fashion papers are saying gem stones are not eligible for morning calls.”

This speech was really only a bid for a compliment. Lady Proctor knew better than to take advice on sartorial matters from a girl who was herself wearing a faded bombazine gown and jean slippers. As she folded up the skirt and set it aside, Holly said, “You will look five times as fine as Lady Dewar.” To herself she added silently, ‘and so will I.’

When the noble dame was shown in, Holly mentally noted that ten times as fine would have been no exaggeration. The countess, being a countess, felt it suitable to pay a morning call on her inferiors in a well-worn greatcoat which had belonged, some several years previously, to her son. About her head she had wrapped a shawl. Beneath the greatcoat she wore a gown that had known what it was to be a curtain in one of its previous incarnations. If one did not recognize in this shabby ensemble the unmistakable gaunt anatomy of Lady Dewar, one might well take the apparition for a beggar. Strands of grey hair had blown forward over the plain, lined face. A pair of brightly intelligent eyes were the lady’s only claim to physical distinction.

“Well now, Elsa, ain’t you fine!” was the jocular shout from the doorway when Her Ladyship was shown in by the butler. “Sitting idle like a lady, now that that husband of yours has set up as a knight. Good day, Holly. You’ve nothing better to do than to sit moping on a nice day like this either, eh? Sit down, gel. Don’t bother hopping up like a puppet for me. I’ll find myself a seat. I may be getting long in the tooth, but I don’t need to be helped into a chair yet.”

She dropped her body into the most comfortable chair in the room as she spoke and reached down to pull off her boots, which she then kicked aside. They looked remarkably like a pair of gentlemen’s Hessians that had been cut off with a pair of large scissors till they reached no higher than the ankle. “Corns,” she explained briefly; then, looking down at her toes, she wiggled them, with a luxurious sigh of relief.

“So kind of you to call,” Lady Proctor said, in her most elegant voice, pretending all this gross exhibition was not going forth.

“Kind? I was bored to tears and had nowhere to go, so I decided to see if Holly has that receipt for Folkstone pudding she mentioned to me. I am fagged with plain rice. Old Dr. John has got me on rice pudding, trying to cure this bellyache that keeps recurring on me. He threatens me with custard as well, the wretched man. I think myself it is no more than constipation that ails me, but he don’t believe in purges. What do you think, Elsa?”

Elsa thought it a great shame people had to have interiors at all, and certainly had no notion of discussing their functions in her best morning gown. “Dr. John is a little old-fashioned,” she decreed, and racked her brain for a more elevated topic of conversation. Knighthoods, presentations of daughters to court, eligible sons, and dowries occurred to her, but she saw no polite way of raising them.

“Try prunes, Lady Dewar,” Holly suggested. “Stewed prunes in the morning might help, or a mild aperient—Scots perhaps. Certainly you don’t want custard, if your problem is what you think.”

“Just what I said! Nothing is so binding as boiled milk, and what is custard but boiled milk and eggs and sugar?” She turned her full attention to Miss McCormack then, for she never could find two words to say to Elsa Proctor.

“You’re looking a little peaky, gel,” she announced. “Too much sitting in. I suppose Mr. Johnson has burdened you with those demmed woolen undershirts for the orphans. He gave me two dozen of ‘em to do. I passed them along to my woman. I refuse to burn my eyes out on stitching when I could be burning them out on a good spicy novel.”

“Yes, he gave us two dozen as well. We have finished one dozen.” The word ‘we’ was used in a nominal sense, for of course it was her own fingers that had wielded the needle.

“Don’t hurry or he’ll land another dozen in on you. Mrs. Wheeler won’t be able to do her share. She has sprained her wrist, did you hear?”

“Yes, I heard it in the village,” Holly answered, then looked to her aunt, for she did not wish to monopolize the guest’s attention.

Lady Dewar followed her glance, and said to Elsa, “Well, is there any other news?”

What was called ‘news’ in the village of Harknell was really no more than gossip. They discussed the latest floral miracle of the Misses Hall, keen horticulturalists who were forever cross-pollinating and grafting. There was Mrs. Raymond’s newest pelisse to be analysed. Elsa thought, though she could not be positive till she saw it closer up, that it was last year’s with a new fur collar added. Before long, Elsa was saying, “We have decided to give Jane a Season next spring.”