"Bertha is a fat little fool," said Victor, in a voice that was as loud as his mother's and had more assurance in it.
"Victor, you are not to say such things. Bertha is not a fool, and she is not in the least fat.
You are to come in and choose a doll for her."
The couple passed into the shop, out of view and hearing of the two back-street children.
"My, he is in a wicked temper," exclaimed Emmeline, but both she and Bert were inclined to side with him against the absent Bertha, who was doubtless as fat and foolish as he had described her to be.
"I want to see some dolls," said the mother of Victor to the nearest assistant; "it's for a little girl of eleven."
"A fat little girl of eleven," added Victor by way of supplementary information.
"Victor, if you say such rude things about your cousin, you shall go to bed the moment we get home, without having any tea."
"This is one of the newest things we have in dolls," said the assistant, removing a hobble-skirted figure in peach-coloured velvet from the window; "leopard skin toque and stole, the latest fashion. You won't get anything newer than that anywhere. It's an exclusive design."
"Look!" whispered Emmeline outside; "they've bin and took Morlvera."
There was a mingling of excitement and a certain sense of bereavement in her mind; she would have liked to gaze at that embodiment of overdressed depravity for just a little longer.
"I 'spect she's going away in a kerridge to marry the rich lord," hazarded Bert.
"She's up to no good," said Emmeline vaguely.
Inside the shop the purchase of the doll had been decided on.
"It's a beautiful doll, and Bertha will be delighted with it," asserted the mother of Victor loudly.
"Oh, very well," said Victor sulkily; "you needn't have it stuck into a box and wait an hour while it's being done up into a parcel. I'll take it as it is, and we can go round to Manchester Square and give it to Bertha, and get the thing done with. That will save me the trouble of writing: 'For dear Bertha, with Victor's love,' on a bit of paper."
"Very well," said his mother, "we can go to Manchester Square on our way home. You must wish her many happy returns of to-morrow, and give her the doll."
"I won't let the little beast kiss me," stipulated Victor.
His mother said nothing; Victor had not been half as troublesome as she had anticipated.
When he chose he could really be dreadfully naughty.
Emmeline and Bert were just moving away from the window when Morlvera made her exit from the shop, very carefully in Victor's arms. A look of sinister triumph seemed to glow in her hard, inquisitorial face. As for Victor, a certain scornful serenity had replaced the earlier scowls; he had evidently accepted defeat with a contemptuous good grace.
The tall lady gave a direction to the footman and settled herself in the carriage. The little figure in the white sailor suit clambered in beside her, still carefully holding the elegantly garbed doll.
The car had to be backed a few yards in the process of turning. Very stealthily, very gently, very mercilessly Victor sent Morlvera flying over his shoulder, so that she fell into the road just behind the retrogressing wheel. With a soft, pleasant-sounding scrunch the car went over the prostrate form, then it moved forward again with another scrunch.
The carriage moved off and left Bert and Emmeline gazing in scared delight at a sorry mess of petrol-smeared velvet, sawdust, and leopard skin, which was all that remained of the hateful Morlvera. They gave a shrill cheer, and then raced away shuddering from the scene of so much rapidly enacted tragedy.
Later that afternoon, when they were engaged in the pursuit of minnows by the waterside in St. James's Park, Emmeline said in a solemn undertone to Bert -
"I've bin finking. Do you know oo 'e was? 'E was 'er little boy wot she'd sent away to live wiv poor folks. 'E come back and done that."
Shock Tatics
On a late spring afternoon Ella McCarthy sat on a green-painted chair in Kensington Gardens, staring listlessly at an uninteresting stretch of park landscape, that blossomed suddenly into tropical radiance as an expected figure appeared in the middle distance.
"Hullo, Bertie!" she exclaimed sedately, when the figure arrived at the painted chair that was the nearest neighbour to her own, and dropped into it eagerly, yet with a certain due regard for the set of its trousers; "hasn't it been a perfect spring afternoon?"
The statement was a distinct untruth as far as Ella's own feelings were concerned; until the arrival of Bertie the afternoon had been anything but perfect.
Bertie made a suitable reply, in which a questioning note seemed to hover.
"Thank you ever so much for those lovely handkerchiefs," said Ella, answering the unspoken question; "they were just what I've been wanting. There's only one thing spoilt my pleasure in your gift," she added, with a pout.
"What was that?" asked Bertie anxiously, fearful that perhaps he had chosen a size of handkerchief that was not within the correct feminine limit.
"I should have liked to have written and thanked you for them as soon as I got them,"
said Ella, and Bertie's sky clouded at once.
"You know what mother is," he protested; "she opens all my letters, and if she found I'd been giving presents to any one there'd have been something to talk about for the next fortnight."
"Surely, at the age of twenty--" began Ella.
"I'm not twenty till September," interrupted Bertie.
"At the age of nineteen years and eight months," persisted Ella, "you might be allowed to keep your correspondence private to yourself."
"I ought to be, but things aren't always what they ought to be. Mother opens every letter that comes into the house, whoever it's for. My sisters and I have made rows about it time and again, but she goes on doing it."
"I'd find some way to stop her if I were in your place," said Ella valiantly, and Bertie felt that the glamour of his anxiously deliberated present had faded away in the disagreeable restriction that hedged round its acknowledgment.
"Is anything the matter?" asked Bertie's friend Clovis when they met that evening at the swimming-bath.
"Why do you ask?" said Bertie.
"When you wear a look of tragic gloom in a swimming-bath," said Clovis, "it's especially noticeable from the fact that you're wearing very little else. Didn't she like the handkerchiefs?"
Bertie explained the situation.
"It is rather galling, you know," he added, "when a girl has a lot of things she wants to write to you and can't send a letter except by some roundabout, underhand way."
"One never realises one's blessings while one enjoys them," said Clovis; "now I have to spend a considerable amount of ingenuity inventing excuses for not having written to people."
"It's not a joking matter," said Bertie resentfully: "you wouldn't find it funny if your mother opened all your letters."
"The funny thing to me is that you should let her do it."
"I can't stop it. I've argued about it--"
"You haven't used the right kind of argument, I expect. Now, if every time one of your letters was opened you lay on your back on the dining-table during dinner and had a fit, or roused the entire family in the middle of the night to hear you recite one of Blake's
'Poems of Innocence,' you would get a far more respectful hearing for future protests.
People yield more consideration to a mutilated mealtime or a broken night's rest, than ever they would to a broken heart."
"Oh, dry up," said Bertie crossly, inconsistently splashing Clovis from head to foot as he plunged into the water.
It was a day or two after the conversation in the swimming-bath that a letter addressed to Bertie Heasant slid into the letter-box at his home, and thence into the hands of his mother. Mrs. Heasant was one of those empty-minded individuals to whom other people's affairs are perpetually interesting. The more private they are intended to be the more acute is the interest they arouse. She would have opened this particular letter in any case; the fact that it was marked "private," and diffused a delicate but penetrating aroma merely caused her to open it with headlong haste rather than matter-of- course deliberation. The harvest of sensation that rewarded her was beyond all expectations.