Saccharissa and the Candlesticks

by E. Nesbit

Saccharissa and the Candlesticks

By E. NESBIT.

SACCHARISSA collects candlesticks. Most of us collect something or other—postage stamps, or butterflies, or botanical specimens, or hearts, or memories. Even in our village there are collectors. Captain Smeeth collects old maps; Miss Eversleigh old music. Saccharissa collects candlesticks. I believe she has eighty-seven, and she makes it a point of honour never to spend more than five shillings on a pair. The number of candlesticks added to her collection is strictly regulated by her income, and that, in turn, is regulated by the number of the fortunes made in trade. Her own trade is literature, or, as she calls it, "writing"; her special branch, the department dealing with deportment, with what is and is not done, with the inner mysteries of that rigid rule of conduct prevailing in ducal circles. When trade is good, there is a brisk market for "dainty manuals" of manners, from which the nouveaux riches can study the fluctuating status of fish-knives, the correct weapon with which to attack hors d'œuvres; can learn that you must say London and not town, luncheon and not lunch, as well as how to address a letter to an archbishop and what not to do with your table-napkins—serviettes, the N.R. call them.

An influx of newly married actresses, anxious not to disgrace the peerage, was responsible for that increase in Saccharissa's income which led her, timid and reluctant at first, but presently enthusiastic, from brass to Sheffield plate. The first lapse was my fault. On the anniversary of her wedding-day I gave her, not without malice, I admit, a pair of stately candlesticks, Sheffield plate—the best period. The poison worked.

She thanked me prettily—she does everything as prettily as anything can be done—but I could see that her mind was not at ease.

"We have no candles big enough for them," she said presently. "Twelves are all right for the brass candlesticks, but these ought to wear eights. If you come with me, we could run up to Bates and get the candles, and be back in heaps of time for dinner."

We were then at tea. I have formed the habit of dropping in at Saccharissa's at or after tea-time about four days a week. I adore Saccharissa—so does everybody. I also adore Mabel, to whom I happen to be engaged. This gives me the right to adore Saccharissa as much as I like, which is a good deal.

So she put on her fur cloak and the little velvet hood that the wild winds of our village in winter require, and we went to get the candles. But on the way we had to pass Ilford's. If you happen to like the kind of things that Saccharissa likes, it is safer to pass the den of a lion whose front door has been carelessly left open than to pass Ilford's. Ilford has in his window the most seductive things in the world. Salt-cellars and snuffer trays, old china, old paintings on glass, enamelled snuff-boxes that have belonged to people's grand-uncles, and tortoiseshell tea-caddies that have belonged to people's grandmothers. I had bought those candlesticks there. And there was another pair—branching out like forest trees, three lights to each. With one accord we stopped outside Ilford's and flattened our noses on his plate-glass.

"I'll just ask——" she said, and we went in.

Ilford was there. He knows his business. As we came out, having bought nothing, Saccharissa turned and said over her shoulder, just as though it didn't really much matter either way—

"I'll have those three-branched candlesticks. You might send them down."

We went on up the street—I intentionally mute, she silent with the agony of remorse.

"It's your fault," she said presently. "They go so perfectly with the others you gave me. But I don't know what Henry will say."

Henry said nothing. He is married to Saccharissa, and has the sense to know when he is well off. I dined there that night, and when she said timidly: "You haven't admired the new candlesticks, Henry; Edward gave me two of them," he said—

"That was very charming of Edward, but I am sorry for the old ones. Their poor brass noses seem a little out of joint, don't they?"

So then she set up candles in the fifteen brass candlesticks that stand on the high dark mantelpiece, and lighted them all.

"Poor dears," she said, "I love them as much as ever, only I love the others more."

"That," said Henry, "is one of the tragedies of life to which the victims can never accustom themselves."

Henry goes to sleep after dinner. When he leaves London, he leaves his brains behind him, and becomes for the time as like one of our landed gentry as an Egyptologist of modest means can hope to be. He is out all day tramping wet fields with dog and gun. So that after dinner Saccharissa and I are practically tête-à-tête over the coffee cups.

Her drawing-room is charming, white-panelled from floor to ceiling; it holds all the things that I should buy if I were not quite certain that Mabel's drawing-room will have a Morris paper and be furnished throughout by Liberty's. There is a cabinet of buhl, a bulging marqueterie bureau, banner-screens and chair-seats in faded needlework, framed samplers and coloured prints, a work-table with faint pink silk flutings, a little piano, carved and silk fluted. It is the perfect drawing-room, and I am never otherwise than happy in it.

I could see that its mistress was not happy. There was a cloud.

"What is it?" I asked softly.

"Did you see. …" she answered dreamily, "that other pair at Ilford's? They must be fresh in to-day. I never saw them before. The weight of them! I don't mind talking about them to you—I wouldn't to everyone. But you've got too much sense to go and buy them and give them to me for a Christmas present. They're seven guineas. … Did you see them?"

"I saw them right enough," I said—"clumsy, ugly things." And I wished she had not read my thought about Christmas.

•••••

It was the day before yesterday that I dropped in, late, for tea. Saccharissa greeted me brightly, but the brightness went out like a spent firework at the pouring of my second cup, and I knew she had something on her mind. So little happens in our village that anything in anybody's mind is at once noted as a godsend. Besides.…

"Have you been to Ilford's lately?" I said, to make conversation. "He has a bureau that.…"

"Oh, I know," she said, and her tone touched the tragic, "he has a lot of new things—perfect, perfect! That man's coining money. Everyone said how silly to start a curio shop in a little village like this; but it's on the high road from Dover to Hastings, and people in motors stop and buy everything that other people want. Henry's furious," she added.

"Nothing," said I, "will induce me to believe that your husband ever wanted anything from Ilford's so much as to mind who else got it."

"I don't mean that," said Saccharissa. "You know I don't. It's about his pension."

"I didn't know he had one."

"He hasn't, of course. But his friends have been trying to get him one."

"Twenty years' devotion to early Egyptian art does deserve something of its country," said I; "it's a dull subject."

"It's very interesting, if you only knew." Saccharissa doesn't know, but she is so fond of her husband that it doesn't matter. "He is furious, first because he didn't get the pension, and then because anyone should have thought he wanted it."

"And is that what makes you sad?"

"I'm not sad," said she. "And you'd be sad if your only son didn't love you."

I laughed. The idea of anyone's not loving Saccharissa is in itself amusing, but Toto, who hangs worshipping to her adorable apron-strings!

"But he doesn't," she said. "I'm going to get rid of that Italian nurse. To-day I said to him: 'You love mother, don't you, Toto?' and the wretch said: 'You love also the papa, Toto, non e ver?' and Toto looked like an owl, and—oh, it was terrible!—he said——"

"Well?"

"He said: 'I like best eating!'"

"And that's what makes you sad?"

"I'm not sad," she insisted. "On the contrary, I've sold an article that's been refused by every magazine and newspaper in Europe. 'How Dukes Dine,' it's called—you remember it. The new Socialist weekly has given me seven guineas for it."

I could not for the moment understand why that should seem to be so faultlessly just a price.

Saccharissa enlightened me.

"It is," she said almost in a whisper, "exactly what Ilford wants for those candlesticks. Oh, you can't have forgotten the ones I said you weren't to give me for Christmas."

"It's a direct Providence," I said.

"It's a wile of the devil," said she.

"Come and buy them," said I gaily.

"What will Henry say?" she said, picked up her empty cup, put it down again, and smiled at me.

"Oh, get your coat on," I said. "You know you mean to buy them."

"Indeed I don't," said she. "I can't afford them. I won't buy them. I won't——"

"Someone in a motor," I said, contentedly stretching my feet to the fire, "will find them a bargain."

"I hate you!" she said. "Oh, shall we? Do you think we'd better? Do you think it would be wrong? You see, I never thought anybody would buy 'How Dukes Dine'; and it does seem almost as if——"

"Why quarrel with your luck?" said I. "But there—if you don't buy them, I shall."

"For Mabel?" she wavered; and I think she would have been almost glad of the chance to be self-sacrificing.

"No, for my sister Lucy."

"I will put on my hood," she said. She does not love my sister Lucy any more than I do.

So we went up the street, where the south-west wind blew so that we could hardly keep our feet, and had to cling to each other like shipwrecked mariners. Ilford was just shutting up his shop, but he was quite pleased to see us. We came home, each carrying a candlestick and "wishing," like Charles Lamb with the brown folios, "that they had been twice as heavy."

We spent a joyous hour polishing them, and I was asked to dinner. The candlesticks shone and gleamed.

"Aren't they heavenly?" she said. "I never saw such candlesticks! Ought we to call them candlesticks at all? Isn't it disrespectful? Aren't they candelabra when they're as big as that?"

"Candelabra!" I murmured reverently.

"I believe," she said, putting away the plate-brush and wash-leather, "that Henry will kill me."

But Henry was very sleepy. He only remarked that the new candlesticks were very large—and didn't Saccharissa think they rather overweighted everything else?

•••••

And to-night I could not resist the temptation of seeing her once more in her radiant happiness, basking in life's sunshine—or, to be more accurate, enjoying life's summer warmth under the shade of six silver branches; twelve, if you count the first ones she bought, and fourteen counting the ones I gave her for the wedding-day, which, of course, having no branches, really don't count at all. The street was cold and bleak. I saw Captain Smeeth through his uncurtained window bending over his old maps, and the sound of Miss Eversleigh's harp came to me through closed panes. Almost all the leaves were off the trees, and the wind was sweeping them into corners, trying to persuade itself and me that, after all, summer was only rubbish and had better be cleared up as soon as possible, swept away into corners and forgotten.

The little, short red curtains of Saccharissa's house glowed welcomingly. I saw already the dull pleasant pink of her Lowestoft tea-cups, the gleam of her silver tea-service, the magic of her smile, and the splendour of her candlesticks. There would be a fire, too—a wood fire—in the old, high, square grate of the panelled parlour. Muffins, perhaps. It is the baker's day for them.

The panelled parlour was there all right, but the tea was cold, there were no muffins, and the fire was out.

The candlesticks were there, it is true, and so was Saccharissa, but she was not smiling.

"Tut, tut!" I said a little petulantly, perhaps, for muffins are muffins, and I was disappointed. "You ought to radiate joy as the sun does heat. The candlesticks!"

"That's just it," she said.

"Did Henry kill you?" I asked as sympathetically as I could, for I like my tea warm, and, as I said before, muffins are muffins.

"On the contrary," she affirmed, "he said they were worth double the money."

"Toto?" I hazarded.

"The darling!" she said, with a brief flicker of enthusiasm. "He told me he didn't want to be an angel, because nurse said Protestants didn't go to Heaven. I must get rid of that woman. 'And you are a Protestant, mammy, aren't you?' he said. And he hugged me. He is sweet!"

"And the candlesticks?" said I. "You've let the fire out. Can't I get some wood, or a candle-end, or something? The candlesticks! They cheer you, don't they? So beautiful, and your very own?"

"That's just it," she said slowly. "I don't mind telling you," she was good enough to say, "because you always understand everything."

"Why, aren't they?'

"Oh, yes, they're Sheffield all right," she said. "I found the copper line at the bottom, and I've filed a bit of the silver edging, and all that. They're all right."

"Well, then?" said I, doing useless things with cinders and the poker and a wax match.

"Well—don't you see?" she said slowly. "It's all over. They're mine, I can never go and buy them again. Never again any more as long as I live."

"There are others," said I.

"Not like those. Besides, I mustn't let Sheffield plate become a habit. Habits are so difficult to break, aren't they?"

"I could break those candlesticks," I said, "the twisty part—easily."

"Ah, don't!" she said; "it's all very beautiful. They're mine, and I'm frightfully happy, really. But I can't ever again. It's the getting them that's so beautiful—and now that's over."

"It's like," said I, "it's like—it's like love and marriage."

"Oh, Henry," she said to her husband, who at that moment came in, very muddy, with four partridges, a hare, and a pheasant dead and dangling—"oh, Henry, he says our candlesticks are like love and marriage!"

"Because they light the night of life?" said Henry. "He is very polite."

I let him think so.

Copyright, 1910, by E. Nesbit Bland, in the United States of America.