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Five days before Christmas, Cheswardine came home to his wife from
a week's sojourn in London on business. Vera, in her quality of
the best-dressed woman in Bursley, met him on the doorstep (or
thereabouts) of their charming but childless home, attired in a
teagown that would have ravished a far less impressionable male
than her husband; while he, in his quality of a prosaic and
flourishing earthenware manufacturer, pretended to take the
teagown as a matter of course, and gave her the sober, solid kiss
of a man who has been married six years and is getting used to it.
Still, the teagown had pleased him, and by certain secret symptoms
Vera knew that it had pleased him. She hoped much from that
teagown. She hoped that he had come home in a more pacific temper
than he had shown when he left her, and that she would carry her
point after all.
Now, naturally, when a husband in easy circumstances, the
possessor of a pretty and pampered wife, spends a week in London
and returns five days before Christmas, certain things are rightly
and properly to be expected from him. It would need an astounding
courage, an amazing lack of a sense of the amenity of conjugal
existence in such a husband to enable him to disappoint such
reasonable expectations. And Cheswardine, though capable of
pulling the curb very tight on the caprices of his wife, was a
highly decent fellow. He had no intention to disappoint; he knew
his duty.
So that during afternoon tea with the teagown in a cosy corner of
the great Chippendale drawing-room he began to unfasten a small
wooden case which he had brought into the house in his own hand,
opened it with considerable precaution, making a fine mess of
packing-stuff on the carpet, and gradually drew to light a pair of
vases of Venetian glass. He put them on the mantlepiece.
'There!' he said, proudly, and with a virtuous air.
They were obviously costly antique vases, exquisite in form,
exquisite in the graduated tints of their pale blue and rose.
'Seventeenth century!' he said.
'They're very nice,' Vera agreed, with a show of enthusiasm. What
are they for?'
'Your Christmas present,' Cheswardine explained, and added 'my
dear!'
'Oh, Stephen!' she murmured.
A kiss on these occasions is only just, and Cheswardine had one.
'Duveens told me they were quite unique,' he said, modestly; 'and
I believe 'em.'
You might imagine that a pair of Venetian vases of the seventeenth
century, stated by Duveens to be unique, would have satisfied a
woman who had a generous dress allowance and lacked absolutely
nothing that was essential. But Vera was not satisfied. She was,
on the contrary, profoundly disappointed. For the presence of
those vases proved that she had not carried her point. They
deprived her of hope. The unpleasantness before Cheswardine went
to London had been more or less a propos of a Christmas present.
Vera had seen in Bostock's vast emporium in the neighbouring town
of Hanbridge, a music-stool in the style known as art nouveau,
which had enslaved her fancy. She had taken her husband to see it,
and it had not enslaved her husband's fancy in the slightest
degree. It was made in light woods, and the woods were curved and
twisted as though they had recently spent seven years in a
purgatory for sinful trees. Here and there in the design onyx-
stones had been set in the wood. The seat itself was beautifully
soft. What captured Vera was chiefly the fact that it did not open
at the top, as most elaborate music-stools do, but at either side.
You pressed a button (onyx) and the panel fell down displaying
your music in little compartments ready to hand; and the eastern
moiety of the music-stool was for piano pieces, and the western
moiety for songs. In short, it was the last word of music-stools;
nothing could possibly be newer.
But Cheswardine did not like it, and did not conceal his opinion.
He argued that it would not 'go' with the Chippendale furniture,
and Vera said that all beautiful things 'went' together, and
Cheswardine admitted that they did, rather dryly. You see, they
took the matter seriously because the house was their hobby; they
were always changing its interior, which was more than they could
have done for a child, even if they had had one; and Cheswardine's
finer and soberer taste was always fighting against Vera's
predilection for the novel and the bizarre. Apart from clothes,
Vera had not much more than the taste of a mouse.
They did not quarrel in Bostock's. Indeed, they did not quarrel
anywhere; but after Vera had suggested that he might at any rate
humour her by giving her the music-stool for a Christmas present
(she seemed to think this would somehow help it to 'go' with the
Chippendale), and Cheswardine had politely but firmly declined,
there had been a certain coolness and quite six tears. Vera had
caused it to be understood that even if Cheswardine was NOT
interested in music, even if he did hate music and did call the
Broadwood ebony grand ugly, that was no reason why she should be
deprived of a pretty and original music-stool that would keep her
music tidy and that would be HERS. As for it not going with the
Chippendale, that was simply an excuse ... etc.
Hence it is not surprising that the Venetian vases of the
seventeenth century left Vera cold, and that the domestic
prospects for Christmas were a little cold.
However, Vera, with wifely and submissive tact made the best of
things; and that evening she began to decorate the hall, dining-
room, and drawing-room with holly and mistletoe. Before the pair
retired to rest, the true Christmas feeling, slightly tinged with
a tender melancholy, permeated the house, and the servants were
growing excited in advance. The servants weren't going to have a
dinner-party, with crackers and port and a table-centre unmatched
in the Five Towns; the servants weren't going to invite their
friends to an evening's jollity. The servants were merely going to
work somewhat harder and have somewhat less sleep; but such is the
magical effect of holly and mistletoe twined round picture-cords
and hung under chandeliers that the excitement of the servants was
entirely pleasurable.
And as Vera shut the bedroom door, she said, with a delightful,
forgiving smile---
'I saw a lovely cigar-cabinet at Bostock's yesterday.'
'Oh!' said Cheswardine, touched. He had no cigar-cabinet, and he
wanted one, and Vera knew that he wanted one.
And Vera slept in the sweet consciousness of her thoughtful
wifeliness.
The next morning, at breakfast, Cheswardine demanded--
'Getting pretty hard up, aren't you, Maria?'
He called her Maria when he wished to be arch.
Well,' she said, 'as a matter of fact, I am. What with the--'
And he gave her a five-pound note.
It happened so every year. He provided her with the money to buy
him a Christmas present. But it is, I hope, unnecessary to say
that the connection between her present to him and the money he
furnished was never crudely mentioned.
She made an opportunity, before he left for the works, to praise
the Venetian vases, and she insisted that he should wrap up well,
because he was showing signs of one of his bad colds.
Read next: PART V - VERA'S FIRST CHRISTMAS ADVENTURE: CHAPTER II
Read previous: PART IV - THE NINETEENTH HAT: CHAPTER I
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