If Only etc. by Francis Clement Philips and Augustus Harris

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IF ONLY

ETC.

BY

F.C. PHILIPS

AUTHOR OF "AS IN A LOOKING GLASS," ETC. ETC.

LEIPZIG

BERNHARD TAUCHNITZ

1904.

TO

MY OLD FRIEND AND COLLABORATOR,

SYDNEY GRUNDY,

I DEDICATE THESE PAGES.

F.C. PHILIPS.

CONTENTS.

IF ONLY

ONE CAN'T ALWAYS TELL

SONGS. AFTER VICTOR HUGO, ARMAND SILVESTRE,
CHARLES ROUSSEAU AND THE VICOMTE DE BORELLI

LOVE WENT OUT WHEN MONEY WAS INVENTED

A PUZZLED PAINTER. (WRITTEN IN COLLABORATION
WITH THE LATE SIR AUGUSTUS HARRIS)

* * * * *

IF ONLY.

CHAPTER I.

There is a vast deal talked in the present day about Freewill. We
like to feel that we are independent agents and are ready to overlook
the fact that our surroundings and circumstances and the hundred and
one subtle and mysterious workings of the fate we can none of us
escape, control our actions and are responsible for our movements,
and make us to a great extent what we are.

A man is not even a free agent when he takes the most important step
of his whole life, and marries a wife. He is impelled to it by
considerations outside of himself; it affects not only his own
present and future, but that of others, very often, and he must be
guided accordingly.

Emerson says; "The soul has inalienable rights, and the first of
these is love," but he does not say marriage. Love is the business of
the idle and the idleness of the busy, but marriage is quite another
affair--a grave matter, and not to be undertaken lightly, since it is
the one step that can never be retraced, save through the unsavoury
channels of shame and notoriety, or death itself.

But perhaps Jack Chetwynd was hampered with fewer restraining
influences than most men, for he was alone in the world, without kith
or kin, and might be fairly allowed to please himself, and pleasing
himself in this case meant leading to the altar, or rather to the
Registry Office, Miss Bella Blackall, music-hall singer and step
dancer.

It was unquestionably a case of love at first sight. The girl was
barely seventeen, and her girlishness attracted him quite as much as
her beauty, which was exceptional. There was nothing meretricious
about it, for as yet she owed nothing to art--brown hair, warm lips,
soft blue eyes, and a complexion like the leaf of a white rose--a
woman blossom. Then, too, she was a happy creature, full of life and
happiness and bubbling over with childish merriment--no one could
help liking her, he told himself, but it was something warmer than
that. What makes the difference between liking and love? It is so
little and yet so much. There was an air of refinement about her,
too, which to his fancy seemed to protest against the vulgarities of
her surroundings. He thought he could discern the stuff that meant an
actress in her, and prophesied that she would before long be playing
Juliet at the Haymarket. He was still at the age when the habit is to
discover geniuses in unlikely places, especially when the women are
pretty. He raved about her when he adjourned with his companions to
the bar, and they chaffed him a good deal to his face and sneered at
him behind his back. He was there the next night, and the night,
after and by-and-by he managed to get introduced to her.

She was prettier off the stage than on, and her manner was charming,
and her voice delicious with its racy accent.

She was an American, and had been in London only a few months; and he
was duly taken to a second-rate lodging in a side street near the
Waterloo Road, and presented to "Ma,"--a black satined and beaded
type of the race. There was also a sister, whom, truth to tell, he
objected to more than her maternal relative, for she was distinctly
professional, not to say loud, and the little mannerisms which were
so taking in his inamorata were very much the reverse in Miss Saidie
Blackall.

Still, he told himself, he was not going to marry the whole family;
which might be true in a sense and yet might not mean the entire
independence it implied. Bella's relations must, if he made her his
wife, mean more or less to him.

However, youth is sanguine, and Jack Chetwynd did not look too
closely at the thorns which hedged his dainty rose-bud round. She at
least was all he could wish her to be--unsophisticated as a child,
and pure and good at heart.

After a month's acquaintance it began to be understood that he was
engaged to her. "Ma" wept copious tears, and reckoned her Bella was a
lucky girl to get such an "elegant" husband; and Saidie wished him
happiness in a voice like a corn-crake, and declared that her sister
was "just the sweetest and best girl out of N'York," which she was;
"and born to lead a private life," which she wasn't.

Bella herself had very little to say. She blushed rosily when Jack
made fervent love to her; acquiesced confusedly when he told her she
must give up the music-hall stage, and seemed to take happily to the
idea of a quiet, uneventful life as Mrs. Jack Chetwynd.

They took a small house in Camberwell New Road. Jack put up a brass
plate with his name on it, and M.D. in imposing letters, and invested
in a telephone for the accommodation of night callers; and Bella
began to busy herself about the furnishing.

That was a delightful time. The little bride elect was so excited and
eager, and showed herself wonderfully capable, and with quite a
pretty taste in draping and ornamenting; but there was a terrible
hole in Jack's purse: chairs and tables seemed to cost a mint of
money; and the young man sighed and hoped fervently that it would not
be long before patients appeared, or he would be obliged to say No to
his darling when she turned her appealing eyes upon him and begged
him to give her money for that "duck of a screen," or something else
that was from her point of view the most extraordinary bargain, but
which, Jack reflected, privately, they could very well have done
without.

He was giving up a certainty in settling in Camberwell, for as House
Surgeon at St. Mark's his income was assured; but then as a married
man he could no longer have lived at the hospital, and "one must risk
something" said Jack, hopefully.

They were married in May, just three months from that eventful night
when our hero first saw pretty Bella Blackall, on the boards at the
"Band Box," and Mrs. John Chetwynd was altogether so sweet and
winsome in her simple white gown, that Saidie was right when she
hilariously remarked that Jack might well be forgiven for falling in
love with her "all over again."

The wedding was just as quiet as it could be, for Jack did not care
to invite any of his friends. "Ma" and Saidie were altogether too
impossible; and unfortunately no one seemed to mind whether he did or
not. There was one unpleasantness connected with the day which
Chetwynd felt Bella might have had tact enough to avoid. Two or three
of Saidie's friends, in light and eminently professional attire, were
of the party, the women a good deal worse than the men; and they all
returned together to Holly Street, where a meal had been prepared in
the front parlours, the landlady having generously placed them at the
disposal of her lodgers for the occasion. There was a good deal of
banter and side jokes were bandied about from one to another; which
was galling to young Chetwynd, and made him devoutly thankful that
none of his own companions and friends were present. When at last
Bella rose from the table to change her gown for the pale grey he
himself had chosen, with the big hat and nodding plumes in which she
had looked such a dainty little mortal, he pushed his chair back with
a look of disgust on his face and left them to talk amongst
themselves.

Saidie was distributing small pieces of wedding cake, laughing and
screaming at the top of her voice.

"Saikes, man! you are not to eat it. Put it under your pillow and as
sure as I'm a Yank you'll see your intended," she cried. And then
followed an amount of vulgar chaff and coarse pleasantry which caused
the "happy man" to set his teeth hard and register a vow at the
bottom of his heart that this should be the last occasion on which
his wife should associate with her sister's friends.

And then Bella came tripping down the narrow staircase, her cheeks
warm with a pale pink colour that made her inexpressibly lovely; and
the carriage which Mrs. Blackall had insisted upon ordering to take
the young couple to the station was at the door, and in the bustle
that ensued Jack lost sight of all annoyances and remembered only
that he had married the girl he loved and that he was the happiest
fellow in the universe; and amid a shower of rice and a white satin
slipper (one of Saidie's), which fell right into Bella's lap; the
last farewell was spoken, and they drove away.

"Only to Brighton!" cried Nina Nankin, the celebrity famed for the
height to which she could raise one leg while standing upon the
other. "What a mean chap! He might have forked out enough for a trip
to Paris, I should have thought."

"It wouldn't satisfy me," returned Saidie, turning up her nose
disdainfully; "but he isn't my style, anyway."

"Bit of a prig, eh?"

Saidie nodded.

"I do detest a man who fancies himself a head and shoulders above the
rest of his kind," said that young lady vehemently; "you'll generally
find out he don't amount to a row of pins. My! ain't I glad I'm not
going to live with him. I would as lief go to Bible-class every day
of the week. I'll bet my bottom dollar Bella'll see the mistake she's
made before she's many weeks older. There's a chip of the old block
about that young woman, for all her baby ways and her innocent
know-nothing. He'll be a spry man, will Dr. Chetwynd, to come up to
her. It'll take him all he knows to get ahead, you bet".

Saidie lay back in the chair and laughed till the tears ran down her
cheeks.

CHAPTER II

It was not long before Dr. Chetwynd's eyes were fully open to the
mistake he had made and that he realised the fact that you cannot
fashion a Dresden vase out of earthenware, and though pinchbeck may
pass muster for gold, it does not make it the real article.

At first Bella did try her "level best" as Saidie put it, to be all
that Jack required of her. She took his lecturings humbly, held her
peace when he scolded her (and I am afraid he constantly did), and
acknowledged in the depths of her shallow little mind that she fell
far short of what his wife should be. But as time went on she grew
less solicitous about pleasing him. His standard was an almost
impossible one to the very second-rate little American girl, to whom
the atmosphere of the "Halls" was far more congenial than the
humdrum, quiet life she led in the Camberwell New Road, and she
slipped back little by little into the mire out of which he had
raised her.

"I can never learn to be what he wants me to," she said a little
pathetically to Saidie--"It is like standing on tiptoe all the time
trying to reach up to his standard. I'm sick of it. If he loved me
well enough to marry me, the same love ought to be strong enough to
make him contented with me. After all, I'm the same Bella now that I
was then."

A word of advice at this juncture might have quieted the poor little
wife, and brought her back into safe paths, for she really loved Jack
in her heart; but Saidie was not the person to give it. Privately she
considered her sister a fool to have put up with this ridiculous
nonsense of her husband's as long as she had done; and the line of
argument she took was about the worst she could have adopted for the
happiness and peace of the Camberwell household.

She was a good deal older than Bella, and the girl had been wont to
rely upon her in a great measure, and to look up to her as a
practical, sensible person, which Bella was quite ready to admit she
herself was very far from being; so now, when Saidie spoke in a
resolute, determined way, she listened meekly, if she did not in so
many words acquiesce in the wisdom and justice of what she said.

"As far as I can see, you don't get a bit of fun and happiness out of
your life," remarked Saidie, critically examining her features in the
glass. "What did you marry him for, I should like to know? You might
as well be Bella Blackall, on the boards again, and free, as the wife
of a stingy fellow like that."

"Oh! Saidie, he doesn't grudge me anything." The young wife felt a
little compunction in her heart.

"Yes he does." Saidie turned round and faced her sister. "He don't
like you to enjoy yourself, not a little bit. He would keep you
wrapped up in cotton wool if he could, and if you don't make a stand
now, once and for all, and let him see you have a mind of your own
and intend to do as you like, you'll regret it to the last day of
your life. Who is he, anyway? I guess our family's as good, if we
knew anything about them, which we don't, worse luck. Just you give
him back his own sauce, Bella, and next time he finds fault with you,
laugh in his face and tell him he has got to put up with what he
finds, for it ain't likely you can alter your nature to suit his high
mightiness. Pitch on a thing or two he does which you don't like, and
give him a sermon as long as your arm. You see; he will come off his
pedestal. Sakes alive! he ought to have me to deal with; I bet I'd
teach him a thing or two."

And then Saidie whipped herself off to the "Rivolette," where she
sang a doubtful song and displayed her finely turned limbs in a style
that would have disgusted her brother-in-law, if he had been there to
see.

But music halls were not to his liking under any circumstances. He
had never really cared for them, even in his bachelor days, and now
he would have cut his right hand off rather than be seen with his
young wife beside him, at such resorts.

Then, too, Dr. Chetwynd felt that it behoved him to be circumspect in
all his actions, for his practice was steadily increasing and he was
becoming popular, and had serious thoughts of migrating westward. It
was a constant source of vexation to him that Bella was not liked as
much as her handsome, clever husband, and he began to be painfully
alive to the fact that she could not have been received in certain
houses whose doors would have been gradually opened to him. In a
social sense his wife was a failure, and with a sigh he realised that
it was almost an impossibility to show her where the fault lay; he
could not always be at her elbow to guard against little solecisms of
manner and speech which he knew must jar and grate on others even
more than on himself.

It went terribly against the grain, for he loved her none the less
that his eyes were not blinded to her shortcomings. She was still the
same winsome girl he had made his own; large-hearted, gentle and
affectionate, but--and he sighed impatiently, for that something
lacking was for ever pulling him back and standing in the way of his
own social advancement.

He became less demonstrative, less congenial, and his practice made
huge demands upon his time, and left but scant opportunity for
pleasure-seeking. Lines traced themselves upon his brow and lurked at
the corners of his mouth; he aged rapidly, and began to look like an
elderly man while Bella was still little more than a girl.

On the night of Mrs. Chetwynd's return from the maternal roof (for
Mrs. Blackall still lived near the Waterloo Road, and her elder
daughter continued to make her home with her), she found her husband,
a good deal to her surprise, seated in the drawing-room, gay with
flowers and crowded with knick-nacks of every description. He had in
his hand a book which he flung down with an annoyed gesture as his
wife opened the door.

It was perhaps no worse than others of its type, but it had not an
honest moral tone and was not therefore, John Chetwynd considered, a
desirable work for his young wife's perusal.

"Have you read this?" he asked.

"No; it is one of Saidie's. Is it interesting?"

John Chetwynd's answer was to hurl the volume under the grate with an
angry word.

Bella flushed.

"Why did you do that? I want to read it."

"I will not allow you to sully your mind with such filth. It only
goes to prove what I have so often told you, that your sister is not
a proper associate for any young woman. A book of that
description--faugh!"

Bella picked up the offending volume and looked ruefully at its
battered condition. "I should have supposed that as a married woman I
might read anything," she said with an assumption of dignity.

"Why should you be less pure because you have a husband, my child?
Don't run away with any such notion."

"Well, I will read it and give you my opinion of it."

"You will do no such thing. I forbid it, Bella."

"In a matter like this I shall judge for myself." Her cheeks were
scarlet, and she kept her eyes downbent.

"I will not--"

"Bella!"

It was the first time in their married life that she had defied him,
and he looked at her in utter astonishment.

"Yes," she cried, turning on him like a small fury, with the book
tightly held in both hands; "I'm not a child to be dictated to and
ordered to do this and that. I'm perfectly well able to act for
myself and I intend to do so now and always. I'm sick of your eternal
fault-finding, and the sooner you know it the better. If it's not one
thing it's another. Nothing I do is right and I'm about tired of it."

John Chetwynd sat perfectly silent under this tirade. He was a shrewd
man, and he knew that Bella had been spending the evening with her
own people, and jumped at once to the conclusion that in defying him
she was acting by their advice, and his brow grew black and lowering.

Then he looked up at Bella, who, a little ashamed of her vehemence,
was slowly unbuttoning her gloves, having laid aside the unlucky
cause of the battle royal.

"My wife," he said kindly, "if you will not act on my advice, let me
beg of you to think twice before accepting that of others, since I at
least may be credited with having your real good at heart."

"And you think that--you mean to imply that--"

"That your sister has her own ends to serve? Undoubtedly I do."

"You are all wrong--all wrong." But the tell-tale blushes on Bella's
face showed him plainly enough that he had been right in his
conjecture, and had to thank his wife's relatives for her rebellion
and newly developed obstinacy and resentment.

"Now, Bella, from to-night I cannot allow you to go to Holly Street:
stay," as Bella would have spoken, "you may see your mother here when
you please, but you must let your sister fully understand that she
will not be welcome. Something surely is due to me as your husband,
and that there is no great amount of sympathy between you and Saidie
you have said repeatedly; therefore I am asking no great sacrifice of
you. Do you hear me, Bella?"

"Yes, I hear."

"And you will respect my wishes in the matter?"

"I don't know," she spoke uncertainly.

She was not fond of her sister, as he had said; certainly not
sufficiently fond of her to allow her to come between herself and
Jack; and yet she felt that it would be unwise and undignified if she
were to give in and refuse Saidie admission to their house. She had
just declared that she would stand no coercion; and after all, what
had poor Saidie done?

"I don't think you have any right to keep my people away," she said
at last, sullenly. "This is my house as well as yours, remember."

"I am not going to argue over it, my dear girl." Dr. Chetwynd rose
determinedly from his chair with an expression on his face which his
wife had learned to know and dread. "I forbid you to ask your sister
here again. I am sorry to have to speak so decidedly; but your
conduct leaves me no alternative."

And he walked quickly across the floor and the next moment the door
closed upon him.

"I don't care what he says. I won't be ordered about," flashed out
Bella, all that was worst in her nature roused by Jack's resolution.
"Saidie is quite right; if I don't put my foot down I shall soon be
nothing better than a white slave."

"Putting her foot down," certainly had one effect, namely, that of
making life anything but a bed of roses for the unfortunate doctor.

Never had Bella shown herself so unamiable and unloveable as during
the next two days. She hardly addressed her husband and she flounced
about the room and tossed her head and hummed music-hall ditties
(which she had caught from Saidie) under her breath, and altogether
comported herself in the most exasperating fashion.

John Chetwynd hardly knew how to act towards her. If he pretended to
be unconscious of anything unusual, it would probably provoke her to
stronger measures, and yet he was very loth to stir up strife between
them, and leant towards the hope that this spirit of fractiousness
would die out in time and that Bella would become her loving,
tractable self again. But he reckoned without his host.

Saidie, who was duly apprised of the condition of things, urged upon
her sister to stick to her guns and on no account to yield an inch,
and although desperately miserable, Bella took her advice.

Returning from seeing a patient a day or two later, Dr. Chetwynd ran
into the arms of an old friend, a man he had not seen since his
marriage.

"Why, Meynell, old chap, where have you dropped from?" he exclaimed,
grasping the outstretched hand.

"Where have _you_ hidden yourself? is more to the purpose. No one
ever sees you nowadays."

Dr. Chetwynd smiled.

"Perhaps you do not know I am a married man," he said. "Which
accounts for a good deal of my time, and as a matter of fact I have
but little leisure, for my practice keeps me always at the
grindstone."

"Doing pretty well?"

"Yes, I think I may say I am. Uphill work, of course, but still--"

"And where are you living?"

Chetwynd hesitated.

"Close by here," he replied the next moment. "Come home with me now,
if you have nothing better to do, and allow me to present my wife to
you."

And they walked on side by side.

"You have dined? I am afraid--"

"My dear fellow, I have this moment left the club."

Dr. Chetwynd put his latch-key into the lock and ushered his friend
upstairs to his wife's pretty drawing-room.

But Bella was not there; and finding that she was not in her bedroom,
or in fact in the house at all, he rang the bell and questioned the
maid as to when her mistress had gone out and if she knew when she
would be likely to return.

"No, sir, that I'm sure I don't. My mistress never said anything to
me."

"Well, she is not likely to be away long," remarked the doctor
philosophically. "Have a cigar, Meynell."

"Thanks, no. Your wife spoils you, Jack, if she allows you to smoke
in her pretty little room."

"Oh, she will not mind; but we will go down to my den shortly. You
see, Meynell, I'm a bit of a Bohemian, although I like to preserve
the customs of the civilised world all the same, to a certain extent.
But my little wife--well--she--she--I daresay you may have heard she
was on the stage before I married her."

"No, indeed I hadn't." Gus Meynell looked a good deal surprised.

"Well, I mention it because perhaps she is not quite like the
ordinary run of women."

Meynell could no longer be blind to the want of ease in his host's
manner, and in his turn became proportionately uncomfortable.

"Hang it all! A man marries to please himself," he said awkwardly.

"She is just the dearest girl in the world," continued Jack Chetwynd,
with warmth. "I'm not only fond of her, but proud of her too, but you
know--"

"I perfectly understand what you mean. To my idea unconventionality
is the most charming thing a woman can have. I hate the bride
manufactured out of the schoolgirl. The oppressive resemblance
between most of our friends' wives is one of the safe-guards of
society."

"What is that?" Chetwynd broke in upon his friend's speech with a
nervous start and exclamation. The hall door opened with a loud bang
and a woman's noisy laugh could be heard as a pelter of high-heeled
shoes came along the tesselated hall and then the vision of a pretty
girl at the doorway, accompanied by a man and two women.

"Hallo, Jack! You are home before me, then."

"Bella, my dear, I must introduce you to an old friend of mine:
Meynell, my wife."

Bella bowed a little coldly.

"My sister, Mr. Meynell," she said, seeing that the doctor was
looking straight over Saidie's head. "My sister, Miss Saidie
Blackall; daresay you have seen her from the front before." Then,
looking towards the open door, "Come in, come in. Jack, I think you
have already met Mr. and Mrs. Doss."

Chetwynd looked terribly annoyed; but there was no choice left for
him but to extend his hand and mutter something to the effect that he
had not had the pleasure of making the acquaintance of his wife's
friends before.

"Glad to know you, sir--not one of us--not in the profession, I
think?"

"No--er--no," responded Chetwynd feebly.

"And the 'appier you, take my tip for it. The wear and tear of the
'alls, sir, no one but a pro can estimate."

Here his wife, an over-dressed, showy individual a shade more of a
cockney than himself, interposed with a coarse laugh.

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