From all parts of the room there was much ‘allowing’ that Mr Secretary had shewn his customary skill in handling an awkward situation. But for the rest he was quieter than usual. He seemed absent from them, and the youngsters among them told each other that he was getting old. Had rumour of such talk reached Mr Bailey’s own ears, he would have smiled at it with a certain degree of self-satisfaction. For indeed, though he had entered his seventies, it was not age that made him pensive today. The truth is he was listening: listening to a strange and charming tale that his heart was busy telling him: a tale that had all the summer in it except summer’s wild lustihood, all the warmth and colour, the green and gold, trees rustling like the sea on shingle, and those mellow evenings of amber and musk that seem to hold eternity itself in their stillness. And the subject of this tale, the beginning and end of it, was Elizabeth Lavender, the comely and comfortable widow who, with the help of a middle-aged daughter, kept the one small shop in the Fee. Mr Bailey smiled benignly on his company, responded to their jocularities and applauded their songs. And when he caught his attention straying, he half-blushed for his thoughts. What nonsense, and at my age! But his heart answered quietly that the only nonsense in the affair was to pretend that age was so important; and with this encouragement he began thinking how he could contrive to slip away for an hour or so and go adventuring.
Mrs Lavender would never, as they say, see fifty again, nor yet fifty-five. But she did not let the fact distress her. She had the incomparable gift of taking life easily, and, fortune having been kind to her, but for that curmudgeonly snatching away of a husband of whom she had been very fond, she had roses as well as wrinkles in her face, had lost nothing of her original plumpness, and was not unaware that her white hair suited her. She confessed to being elderly, but she had never played into the enemy’s hands by thinking herself an old lady, although it sometimes pleased her whim to pretend that she did. Her chief disappointment was that her only daughter, Patience, was forty and still unmarried; she could not help thinking that it must be largely the girl’s own fault. But now she had hopes even of Patience, for it was something new for that sober drudging woman to go gallivanting out with a neighbour, as she had done this afternoon, to watch the ladies play stool-ball in the Vicarage paddock. She had urged her mother to come too, but Mrs Lavender, besides thinking that Patience could do with a holiday from daughterliness, had reasons of her own for wishing to stay at home this Midsummer Day, She sat in her parlour placidly crocheting, glancing now and again through the window at the sunlit and empty High Street, and telling herself from time to time that if he didn’t come it made no matter: twas all one to Lizzie, birthday or no birthday. She glanced now at the clock, which told her that it was two minutes to four. Last time she had looked, it had been five minutes to four.
As the hour struck, her quick ear caught the sound of footsteps coming up the street. At once she became very intent on her crochet-work. The steps came nearer, nearer, and stopped. Someone tapped on the window-pane. Now whoever could that be? And what’s the world coming to that they can’t knock at a body’s front door like Christian people!
‘Mrs Lavender!’ said the expected voice.
She got out of her chair and moved to the window. ‘Why, tis Mr Bailey. How come you to be paying visits on Club Day, Mr Bailey?’
‘I’ve come to see you, Mrs Lavender,’ said Mr Bailey. He was rosy with a sense of the occasion. ‘I’ve come to wish you many happy returns of the day, ma’am.’
‘Well, that’s kind in ye, Mr Bailey, to remember an old woman on her birthday. I’m all alone, today.’
‘So much the better,’ said he boldly. Then, as if abashed, he added: ‘Not that twouldn’t be a pleasure and privilege to say how-d’ye-do to your amiable daughter, Mrs Lavender. But it happens I want a word with yourself.’
‘Then you’d haply best come in and say ut.’
She eyed him with humorous severity, and the same mischievous gleam shone in her blue eyes when, a moment later, she opened the door to him. He took her hand and bowed over it with much ceremony. Then, with a somewhat schoolboyish air of casualness, he fished a bottle from his pocket, placed it on the table, and contrived to look as though he didn’t know it was there.
‘And what be this?’ asked Mrs Lavender.
‘Oh that?’ said Mr Bailey, glancing at the bottle first in surprise, as though he were seeing it for the first time, and then with a certain careless disdain. ‘That’s nothing. Nothing at all. In point of fact I believe it’s a bottle of sherry-wine.’
Mrs Lavender crinkled up her face with pride and pleasure. ‘It’s . . . it’s never for me, surely?’
Indeed it is,’ said Mr Bailey smiling. ‘For your birthday, dear Mrs Lavender, with my best respects and humble duty. Ah, but I’ve something else here. A copy of verses specially written in your honour.’