Whittaker

“ I have worked long enough; I think I want to be a little more in my own home—I’m not so young as I was.”
“You’re worn-out, that’s about the English of it,” said Alfred Whittaker, putting his knife and fork on his plate and sitting back. “As long as it amused you it was all right; it was as good as spending your life in running from one hot, stuffy party to another. Cut it, my dear, cut it. There’s one axiom in business that never fails, ‘cut your loss’—at least, I have never known it fail yet. By-the-bye,” he said, “I have brought you a little present.”
Regina almost screamed aloud. ”

“ They are The Chase. Give me one of your cocktails, Whittaker. No—give me two."
With two thin glasses of Whittaker's latest concoction he walked over to old Mrs. Ambrose, watching him from her distant corner and wishing she was less old and less deaf, so that she could command the attentions of pleasant and distinguished young men. When he came to her she glowed with contentment like the harvest moon emerging from a mist, and to her own intense astonishment and the horror of her daughter was prevailed upon by Stephen to accept and actually consume the cocktail he had brought her. ”

“ So presently Regina found herself sitting in a hansom with Julia beside her.
“I say, mother,” said Julia, as the cab started from the doorway, “that was a little awkward, wasn’t it? And how silly of Maudie! I really thought she had more sense.”
“Not one word of this to your father,” said Mrs. Whittaker in the same tone of fierce repression. “You children are quite mistaken, I understand it perfectly. You will not speak to your father of our having seen him? He would not be able to explain the circumstances to you.”
“Oh, certainly, not if you don’t wish it, darling. ”

“ Whittaker was as poor as anything when he started out.
It always amused Paul to hear more about Mr. Whittaker; he took up the subject.
Did he fight hard, Vera?
Did he? She served herself to a bountiful helping of a particularly fattening variety of pudding. Did he? Well, he just fought until he conquered down among the bears and oxen. It was wheat that made his fortune, she mused. Ceres, the great nature goddess, did that for us. I always told Bristol that we should worship nature! Now if I had been a Roman. . . . ! ”

“ Alfred Whittaker rejoined; “there’s nothing in that, my dear girl, provided he makes his sausages good and wholesome and enough of ’em. But I was afraid it would be a bit of a blow to you.”
“My daughter—my daughter married to a sausage-maker!” Regina repeated.
“Now, come, come, Queenie, you mustn’t—you mustn’t—hang it all, I don’t know what you mustn’t do! The girl fancies the boy, and he has plenty of money. He’s a nice, gentlemanly chap, and she’ll live in style. He’s going to have a motor car; she’ll live in far better style than we’ve ever done.” ”

“ And out of this conversation there arose in Regina Whittaker’s mind an idea that, after all, another decade had gone by, and she was still wasting her life.
“I asked myself a question at twenty,” her thoughts ran. “I asked it again at thirty, and now I have touched my fortieth birthday, here I am asking it yet once more. I have fulfilled the functions of wife and mother, and nothing else. Yet I am an extraordinary woman, far out of the common in intelligence, brain power, logic, and in all mental attributes. It only shows me that the time is not yet ripe for woman to become the equal of man. ”

“ Whittaker would be making his fortune.
"All the more chance of it, Mrs. Prendergast," said Whittaker with his smoothest smile, "that Wilmot will be out of my way; he's a wonderfully clever fellow, wonderfully; and I can't imagine a more popular physician. I assure you he reminds me, in his way of dealing with a case, of Carlyle's description of Frederick the Great's eyes, 'rapidity resting upon depth.' Quite Wilmot--quite Wilmot, I assure you." And Dr. Whittaker, considering that he had made a remarkably good hit, took himself off, leaving Henrietta with new matter for her thoughts. ”

“ So have it entirely done, Alfie—ceiling, walls, paint—then give them a sum of money, just enough for them to exercise their ingenuity in making it go the very furthest.”
“I’ll give you thirty pounds,” said Alfred Whittaker, slapping his pocket and thrusting his hand into it with an air of firm determination. “Thirty pounds after I have done the decoration, and no more. If you can’t make a room look smart with thirty pounds, you don’t deserve to have a room of your own.”
“All right, daddy. Thank you very much,” said Julia.
“Yes, daddy dear, we’ll make it do very nicely,” said Maudie. ”

“ Let there be no mistake about the Whittaker girls. They were not in any way deceived or blinded by their mother’s partiality for them.
“There is one thing you and I have got to make up our minds to, Maudie,” said Julia, the day after they had had the little serious talk with their mother. “It’s one thing to climb up a wall, it’s another to topple over on the other side. If we don’t look out what we are doing, we shall topple over the other side of our wall.” ”

“ I saw Captain Whittaker knock him down, and I honored the captain for it. I only wished I were a man and could have done it myself.”
She left the room, and, a few moments later, the house. Mr. Tidditt chuckled aloud. Even Bailey dared to look pleased.
“There!” sneered the widow Tripp. “Ain't that—Perhaps you remember that Cap'n Whittaker got her the teacher's place?”
“Yes,” put in Miss Phinney, “and nobody knows WHY he got it for her. That is, nobody has known up to now. Maybe we can begin to guess a little after this.”
“She was at his house, was she?” observed Keturah. “Humph! ”

“ If you bring girls up, dear lady, to run quite wild, do you not think that you do away with their domesticity, that most precious quality of all women?”
“I am only too anxious to do away with their domesticity,” said Mrs. Whittaker, quietly but very firmly. “You see, Mrs. M’Quade, I am no ordinary woman myself. I have had the education of a man. I have a man’s brain. ”

“ He liked his rector to come to him as an open-handed, clean-living man on whom he could depend for contributions suitable to his style of living. He liked to be able to take his wife to a theatre, and to dine her beforehand, and to give her a bit of supper afterwards. He liked to go to the seaside for August, and to take a trip to Paris at Easter if he was so inclined. And, above all things, Alfred Whittaker liked a good dinner, a pretty, tasteful table, and a neat handmaiden to wait upon him. To do him justice, he never lost his early admiration for Regina. ”

“ M’Quade to the mother of the little girl who at school was called Tuppenny, “I am perfectly certain that Mrs. Whittaker has at last found her metier. Are you going to join her scheme for the regeneration of women?”
“I don’t think so,” replied the lady who lived at Highthorn. “My husband is so very sneering when anything of the kind is mentioned. I shouldn’t mind for myself; I think it would be rather fun. They are going to have tea-parties and soirées, and all sorts of amusements. ”

“ Whittaker scrupulously withdrew from the window. He had no desire to overhear their conversation. But his eyes were fierce with a sudden anger. The very attitude of the new-comer—his respectful, and yet patronizing, manner of removing his hat—clearly showed that he was a lover, perhaps a favoured one. And the American, who, with all his knowledge of the world, knew so little of women, stood in the middle of the room wrapt in thought. It seemed hardly possible that a woman of Miss Cheyne's intelligence, a woman no longer in the first flush of girlhood, should fail to perceive the obvious. ”

“ And because the old man—bless his heart, I say now—told me I shouldn't BE a Whittaker no more, nor live like a Whittaker, I simply swore up and down I would be one and come back here, when I'd made my pile, to heave anchor and stay one till I die. ”

“ Her father was rich. They went the round of Fifth Avenue, St. Augustine, the Riviera, and Canada—the Château, at Quebec.
"Of course, Miss Rand," Whittaker was aggrieved. "You know Major Fraser-Carnie, don't you? Well, when you see him, ask him about it He told me the story. And I"—he looked up hopefully—"I have arrived at an explanation."
Leaning back comfortably in the settee Whittaker contemplated Edith Rand, who, with gray eyes half closed, was staring out of the drawing-room window at the lights of the Château terrace. ”

“ Whittaker,” he said. “I must be off home, because I’ve got to be up awfully early in the morning. I made half-a-dozen business appointments for to-morrow ever so early, before I knew that Maudie and I would quite come to an understanding to-night. May I come to-morrow evening?”
“You may come whenever you like,” said Regina. “You had better begin, Harry, as you mean to go on. I have no son of my own, and the young men who take my girls away from me must not think they are going to rob me of my daughters—on the contrary, they must make me forget that I never had sons.” ”

“ This lady is going down to choose a toque.”
Two minutes later Regina found herself following Madame Florence down the stairs leading to the first floor.
“Good afternoon, Madame Clementine,” said Madame Florence, cheerfully, “I have brought you a new client. This is Mrs. Alfred Whittaker—so well known—all women know the name of Mrs. Alfred Whittaker. I have been arranging her hair, and I want you to crown my efforts with the prettiest toque you have in your show-rooms.”
[Pg 208]
CHAPTER XXIV RUMOR
Have you ever noticed how a lie spreads and grows as it flies along? ”

“ CHAPTER IX THE GIRLS’ DOMAIN We learn most through our mistakes.
You know what the British workman is. Believe me, that the particular specimen of the British workman who haunts Northampton Park has no fewer sins than his fellow who inhabits the heart of London. The days dragged on, dragged on, dragged on. Oh, that lovely sitting-room of Maudie and Julia Whittaker’s imagination, day by day it seemed as if it was receding further and further into the Never-Never-Land. ”

“ Here, drink this down; it will pull you together better than anything else.”
He was an old-fashioned man, who believed in a glass of port, and Regina, with unwonted meekness and the same happy feeling of being ministered to that she had felt in the pastry-cook’s shop, obediently swallowed the pleasant potion.
“I shall be very glad,” Alfred Whittaker continued, “when we are off on our holiday, for I never felt the need of one so badly as I do this year. I suppose it is the excitement of Maudie’s wedding, but I can’t bear to see you looking as you do now.” ”

“ There was a little waiting-room hard by the ticket office and Regina turned sharply round and took refuge in this dingy little retreat.
[Pg 269]
“My dear!” said the lady who had been listening to the one who had mentioned Mr. Whittaker’s name, “you have done the most awful thing you ever did in your life. Mrs. Whittaker was standing just behind you, and she heard every word you said.”
“Poor woman! Did she, really? I am sorry! Well, I never believe in making mischief between husband and wife, but it’s a shame, and I do think that a man who is carrying on a double game ought to be found out.” ”

“ As most of us retire by half-past eight, the glow along the main road is not dazzling, to say the very least.
Miss Dawes was not afraid of the dark. She had been her own escort for a good many years. She walked briskly on, heard the laughter and loud voices in the barber shop die away behind her, passed the schoolhouse pond, now bleak and chill with the raw November wind blowing across it, and began to climb the slope of Whittaker's Hill. ”

“ I would rather have been the mother of boys, but as I have proved to be only the mother of girls, I will try to make those girls what I have missed being myself. They shall be out of the common; they shall belong to the New Womanhood; they shall be brought up at least to be the equals of men.”
Now by this time the “something in the city” on which Regina and Alfred had started housekeeping had resolved itself into a very solid and prosperous position, though Alfred Whittaker—make no mistake about it—was not, and was never likely to be, a millionaire, or even a very wealthy man. ”

“ Before bedtime it was known, from the last house in Woodchuck Lane to the fish shanties at West Bayport, that “young Cy” Whittaker had come back; that he had come back “for good”; that he was staying temporarily at the perfect boarding house; that he was “awful well off”—having made lots of money down in South America; that he intended to “fix over” the Whittaker place, and that it was to be fixed over, not in a modern manner, with plush parlor sets—a la Sylvanus Cahoon—nor with onyx tables and blue and gold chairs like those adorning the Atkins mansion. ”

“ Albert Whittaker toiling and fagging and slaving for other people’s glorification. [Pg 71] I don’t see the force of it. It seems to us,” she went on, with a certain air of severity which ought to have amused Regina, but did nothing of the kind, “it seems to us that you get the worst of it in every way. We think, mother, that you ought to be very glad that we have come home to take care of you.”
“Oh! Then you,” said Regina, with a tinge of sarcasm in her tones, “you and Maudie are to have all the independence, and I am to be taken care of? That is very kind of you. ”