Mary Austin - The Lovely Lady

"Quite right, quite right." Mr. Dassonville had lost his place in the book and laid it on his knee. "Private business? My dear, perhaps–"

"Oh, no—no," protested Peter handsomely. "I'd rather she stayed. It isn't. At least … I don't know if you will consider it private or not."

"Go on," urged Mr. Dassonville.

"I just came to ask you," Peter explained, "if you don't mind telling me, how you got rich?"

"But bless you, young man," exclaimed Mr. Dassonville, "I'm not rich."

This for a beginning, was, on the face of it, disconcerting. Peter looked about at the rows of books, at the thick, soft carpet and the leather-covered furniture, and at the rings on Mrs. Dassonville's hand. If Mr. Dassonville were not rich, how then—unless–

"I beg your pardon, sir, but I thought—that is, everybody says you are the richest man in these parts."

"As to that, well, perhaps, I have a little more money than my neighbours."

Peter breathed relief. The beautiful Mrs. Dassonville's rings were paid for, then.

"But as to being rich , why, when you come to a really rich man all I've got wouldn't be a pinch to him." Mr. Dassonville illustrated with his own thumb and fingers how little that would be. "We don't have really rich men in a place like Harmony," he concluded. "You have to go to the city for that."

"You've got everything you want, haven't you?"

Mr. Dassonville looked over at his wife, and the smile bloomed again; he smiled quietly to himself as he admitted it. "Yes, I've got everything I want."

They were quiet, all of them, for a little while, with Peter turning his hat over in his hands and Mr. Dassonville laying the tips of his fingers together before him, resting his elbows on the arms of the chair.

"I wish," said Peter at last, "you would tell me how you did it."

"How I got more money than my neighbours? Well, I wasn't born with it."

This was distinctly encouraging. Neither was Peter.

"No two men, I suppose, make money in the same way," went on the man who had, "but there are three or four things to be observed by all of them. In the first place one must be very hard-working."

"Yes," said Peter.

"And one must never lose sight of the object worked for. Not"—as if he had followed the boy's inward drop of dismay—"that a man should think of nothing but getting money. On the contrary, I consider it very essential for a man to have some escape from his business, some change of pasture to run his mind in. He comes fresher to his work so. What I mean is that when he works he must make every stroke count toward the end he has in view. Do you understand?"

"I think so." The House and the Shining Walls were safe, at any rate.

"And then," Mr. Dassonville checked off the points on his fingers, "he must always save something from his income, no matter how small it is."

"I try to do that," confessed Peter, "but what with Ellen's back being bad, and the interest on the mortgage, it's not so easy."

"Is there a mortgage? I am sorry for that, for the next thing I was going to say is that he must never go into debt, never on any account."

"My father was sick; it was an accident," Peter protested loyally.

"So! I think I remember. Well, it is unfortunate, but where there is a debt the only thing is to reduce it as steadily as possible, and if this mortgage teaches you the trick of saving it may not be such a bad thing for you. But when a man works and saves for a long time without getting any sensible benefit, he sometimes thinks that saving and working are not worth while. You must never make that mistake."

"Oh, no," said Peter. It seemed to him that they were getting on very well indeed.

"There is another thing I should like to say," Mr. Dassonville went on, "but I am not sure I can put it plainly. It is that you must not try to be too wise." He smiled a little to Peter's blankness. "I believe in Harmony it is called looking on all sides of a thing, but there is always one side of everything like the moon which is turned from us. You must just start from where you are and keep moving."

"I see," said Peter, looking thoughtfully into the fire, in imitation of Mr. Dassonville. And there being no more advice forthcoming he began to wonder if he ought to sit a while from politeness, as people did in Bloombury, or go at once. Mrs. Dassonville got up and came behind her husband's chair.

"Don't you think you ought to tell him, David, that there are other things worth having besides money; better worth?"

"You, perhaps." Mr. Dassonville took the hand of his wife laid on his shoulder and held it against his cheek; it brought out for Peter suddenly, how many years younger she was, and what he had heard of Mr. Dassonville having married her from among the summer folk who came to Harmony for the pine woods and the sea air. "Ah, but I'm not sure I'd have you without a great deal of it. It takes money to raise rare plants like you. But I ought to say," still holding his wife's hand to his cheek and watching Peter across it, "that I think it is a very good sign that you are willing to ask. The most of poor men will sit about and rail and envy the rich, but hardly one would think to ask how it is done, or believe if he were told. They've a notion it's all gouging and luck, and you couldn't beat that out of them if you tried. Very few of them understand how simple success is; it isn't easy often, but it is always simple."

Peter supposed that he really ought to go after that, though he did not know how to manage it until Mrs. Dassonville smiled at him over her husband's shoulder and asked him what sort of work he did. "Oh, if you know about gardens," she interrupted him, "you can help a little. There are such a lot of things coming up in mine that I don't know the names of."

It flashed out to Peter long afterward that she had simply provided an easy way for him to get out of the house now that his visit was terminated. She held the white fold of her shawl over her head with one hand and gathered the trailing skirts with the other. They rustled as she moved like the leaves of the elms at night above the roof, as she led him along the walk where little straight spears of green and blunt flower crowns faintly tinged with colour came up thickly in the borders. So by degrees she got him down past the hyacinth beds and the nodding buds of the daffodils to the gate and on the road again, walking home in the chill early twilight with the pricking of a pleasant excitement in his veins.

It was that, perhaps, and the sense of having got so much more out of it than any account of his visit would justify, that kept Peter from saying much to his mother that night about his talk with the rich man; he asked her instead if she had ever seen Mrs. Dassonville.

"Yes," she assured him. "Mr. Dassonville drove her over to Mrs. Tillinghurst's funeral in October. They had only been married a little while then; she is the second Mrs. Dassonville, you know; the first died years ago. I thought her a very lovely lady."

"A lovely lady," Peter said the phrase under his breath. The sound of it was like the soft drawing of silken skirts.

His mother looked at him across the supper table and was pleased to see the renewal of cheerfulness, and then, motherlike, sighed to think that Peter was getting so old now that if he didn't choose to tell her things she had no right to ask him. "Your walk has done you good," was all she said, and it must have been the case, for that very night as soon as his head had touched the pillow he was off again, as he hadn't been since Ellen fell ill, to the House of the Shining Walls. It rose stately against a blur of leafless woods and crocus-coloured sky. The garden before it was all full of spring bulbs and the scent of daffodils. The Princess came walking in it as before, but she was no Princess now, merely a woman with her dark hair brushed up in a half moon from her brow and her skirts drawing after her with a silken rustle; her face was dim and sweet, with only a faint, a very faint, reminder of Ada, and her name was the Lovely Lady.