No.
The question still was, Who, this side of London, could be trusted to make our frocks? The seriousness of the consideration brought the cheque dance to an end. We sat and thought.
The precise date of this visit was not yet fixed. Aunt Josephine had asked what time would suit us best.
With one voice, Betty and I cried, "_June!_"
But we were promptly told (and we agreed) that to suggest June would be too grasping. Aunt Josephine would have other, more important, guests eager to come to her for the Coronation month. So we answered: Any time convenient to her.
Then that admirable Aunt wrote back: "Would next month do?" And would we stay for the Coronation?
In spite of the breathless shortness of the time of preparation, Bettina composed Coronation dances and practised curtseying to the Queen, though she knew quite well that she would only see Her Majesty at a distance driving by in her golden coach.
The one consideration that sobered Bettina was who, _who_--on this short notice, with all the feminine world crying passionately for frocks--who could be found to make ours? The more plain and simple, the more important was style and cut. Nobody in the country-side was competent for such an undertaking.
Brighton? Very dear, and not first-rate.
Suddenly Bettina clapped her hands.
"The little French dressmaker Hermione told us about."
The very person! Only, wouldn't she be up to the eyes in work? We remembered, too, she was said to be "not strong." She didn't care, as a rule, to work out of London. But she had come to sew for those horrid people Lord Helmstone let the Pond House to the year before. The people turned out to be badly off, and, after doing some damage, they had gone away without paying their rent. A law-suit was pending between them and Lord Helmstone. We had never known them, but we could not help noticing their clothes. They were beautiful. Even my mother said so.
Hermione had played golf once or twice with the boy and girl. One day she had admired openly something the girl was wearing.
"Yes, looks quite Bond Street, doesn't it?" the girl said. "And all done at home by a little dressmaker at four-and-six a day."
Hermione had got the woman's address, specially for us, she said--meaning for Bettina. Hermione was always advising Bettina about her clothes and making the child discontented with what she had.
We had not wanted any "little tame dressmaker" at the time, but we were enchanted now, when Bettina turned up the card inscribed:
"MADAME AURORE, "87, CRUTCHLEY STREET, "LEICESTER SQUARE."
"Madame Aurore!" my mother echoed. "No doubt a cockney of the cockneys!"
She was not a cockney. And she was a great surprise.
CHAPTER XXII
PLANTING THYME
The morning she came was the morning Eric said good-bye "just for a few days," he dreaming, as little as we, of what those few days were to bring.
And so, ignorant of what I was facing, I was almost happy in spite of the parting, because of what Eric said to me that last Monday morning.
The cart had been ordered to go for Madame Aurore at 9:42. Directly after breakfast my mother and Bettina set about trimming hats--a business in which they scorned my help. I had something particular to finish in the garden. I went on digging up the bare patches on the south bank, sharing the delight of all things growing and blowing and flying under the glorious cloud-piled sky of May. I listened intently, as I worked, to that orchestra of tiny sound underneath the loud birds'
singing. The spring, unlike last year's, had been cold and late; many days like this--with crisp air and fitful sunshine. Only here, in the sheltered south-west corner, were the bees in any number tuning up their fiddles.
I looked up from my work and saw--at that most unusual hour--Eric Annan at the gate! I saw, too, that he looked odd--excited. I dropped the garden-fork. "What is the matter?" I said.
"Matter? What should be the matter?"
I only smiled. It was so like Eric not to be pleased at hearing he had betrayed himself.
"I thought you looked as if--as if something had happened," I said. What I meant was, as if something were about to happen. Only one thing, I thought, could make Eric look like that; make him interrupt his precious morning; one thing, alone, could have grown so great overnight that the heart of man could not conceal it, or contain it, for another hour.
But, even if my hopes were not misleading me, I felt that Eric would not like my having guessed so much. To hide my eyes from him I bent down over my basket. I lifted out tufts of aromatic green, and set them firmly in the loosened soil. I pressed the earth down tight about their roots.
"What are you planting there?" he asked.
"Re-planting the wild thyme," I said. Something had killed it last year.
"Where do you find wild thyme?" he asked.
I told him how far I had to go for it. And when? Before breakfast! He looked astonished.
I did not like to explain that I had got into the habit of waking early to study. And, now that studying was no use, I spent the time in taking delicious walks in the early morning, before other people were awake. I confessed the walks.
"You ought not to have told me," he said.
"Why?"
"Because, for these next days, I can't come too."
I went on planting thyme.
"Promise me, for these next days _you_ won't go either."
"Why?" I asked again.
"Because my thoughts might go wandering."
I nudged the wild thyme, and we both smiled secretly.
"I can't afford, just at this moment, to have anything distracting me."
He said this in an anxious, almost appealing, way.
"Very well," I answered. "I won't go early walks for the next--how many days am I to be cooped up when the morning is at its best?"
"Oh, not long." Then with that impatience of his, if you were doing other things while he was there: "How much more of that stuff are you going to put in?"
"All there is," I said provokingly. And I did not hurry.