THE WHITE RIBAND

*       *       *       *       *

F. TENNYSON JESSE





_By the Same Author_

*       *       *       *       *

THE MILKY WAY
BEGGARS ON HORSEBACK
SECRET BREAD
THE SWORD OF DEBORAH
THE HAPPY BRIDE

*       *       *       *       *

NEW YORK: GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY




[Illustration]




THE WHITE RIBAND

OR

A YOUNG FEMALE'S FOLLY


BY

F. TENNYSON JESSE


NEW YORK
GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY
1921



*       *       *       *       *

TO STELLA,

A YOUNG FEMALE,

I DEDICATE THIS TALE,

In the hope that it will encourage her to persevere in that indifference
to personal adornment for which she is conspicuous at present

SHOULD IT FAIL IN THIS HIGH ENDEAVOUR,
NEVERTHELESS
THIS BOOK IS HERS IN ALL SISTERLY LOVE

*       *       *       *       *




CONTENTS



PROLOGUE

CHAPTER

I IN WHICH THE READER IS TAKEN BACK A FEW WEEKS IN POINT
OF TIME, AND DOWN SEVERAL STEPS IN THE SOCIAL SCALE

II IN WHICH THE ONION-SELLER'S DAUGHTER FOR THE FIRST TIME
FEELS AS A WOMAN

III IN WHICH SHE FOR THE FIRST TIME FEELS AS A GIRL

IV IN WHICH THE ONION-SELLER'S DAUGHTER FEELS HERSELF A GODDESS

V IN WHICH LOVEDAY ESSAYS THE WHITE GOWN

VI IN WHICH LOVEDAY ESSAYS TO OBTAIN THE WHITE SATIN RIBAND

VII IN WHICH LOVEDAY STILL ESSAYS TO OBTAIN THE WHITE SATIN RIBAND

VIII IN WHICH LOVEDAY CONTINUES HER QUEST AND ACHIEVES TENPENCE

IX IN WHICH LOVEDAY SETS ONE MAGPIE

X IN WHICH LOVEDAY DOES NOT ATTEND A FUNERAL

XI IN WHICH LOVEDAY ATTENDS THE FLORA

XII IN WHICH LOVEDAY DANCES

EPILOGUE

*       *       *       *       *




PROLOGUE




*       *       *       *       *




THE WHITE RIBAND

OR

A YOUNG FEMALE'S FOLLY


Prologue


That was how they spoke of her story in the duchy's drawing-rooms;
for what had Loveday been, at the most charitable count, but a young
female--less humanly speaking, even a young person? And what was the
spring of her mad crimes but folly, mere weak, feminine folly? Even
an improper motive--one of those over-powering passions one reads
about rather surreptitiously in the delightful works of that dear,
naughty, departed Lord Byron--would have been somehow more ...
more ... satisfactory. One could only whisper such a sentiment, but
it stirred in many a feminine breast when Loveday's story set the
ripples of reprobation circling some twenty miles, till the incomparably
bigger pebble of the Prince of Wales' nuptials made correspondingly
greater waves, even though they took a month or so to spread all its
fascinating details so far from the Metropolis. What, after all, as a
topic of conversation, was Loveday's ill-gotten gaud compared with the
thrill of the new Alexandra jacket with its pegtop sleeves? One should
hold a right proportion in all things.

Thus the duchy's drawing-rooms. In the back parlours of the little
country-town shops, where an aristocracy as rigid in its own
respectable--and respectful--way, held its courts of justice, Loveday's
story was referred to with a slight difference. She had become a "young
besom," and her crime was what you might have expected from the bye-blow
of an ear-ringed foreigner, who bowed down to idols instead of the laws
of God and the British Constitution.

In her own little seaport and the farms of the countryside, Loveday
descended lower still--she became a "faggot." Thus from one born to
wield a broom we see how she descended, with the declination in scale of
the chatterboxes, to the broom itself, and from that to the rough
material for it. Which things are a parable, could one but fit the moral
to them as neatly as did everyone who discussed Loveday, in whatever
terms, fit the due warning on to her tale.

And this moral, for all who ran, but more particularly for those who
danced, to read, was as follows:--

It all came of wanting things above your station.

"How simply does your sex dispose of the problems of life, ma'am,"
replied Mr. Constantine to Miss Flora Le Pettit, the heiress of Ignores
Manor, when she supplied him with this moral as an epitaph oh the
affair. Miss Le Pettit smiled on him amiably, but arched her already
springing brows as well, for though everyone knew Mr. Constantine was
reputed clever, there were the gravest doubts about his orthodoxy.

"Problems of life, Mr. Constantine?" she demanded. "Surely over-fine
words to apply to the crazy acts of a village girl deranged in her
intellects." She would have added: "And a nameless one at that," if
she had not remembered (what, in truth, she was never in danger of
forgetting) that she was a lady talking to a gentleman.

"A village girl is as capable of passion as you or I," replied he, and
had he not remembered (what he was somewhat apt to forget) that he was a
gentleman talking to a lady, he would have added: "And a great deal more
so than you." Miss Le Pettit, who considered that he _had_ forgotten
it, gave the little movement known as "bridling," which reared her
ringletted head a trifle higher on her white shoulders, then decided to
front the obnoxious word bravely as a woman of the world. She had met
with it chiefly in books where it was used solely to denote anger.
There had been, for instance, the tale of "Henry: or, the Fatal Effect
of Passion." ... Henry had slain a school-fellow in his rage, and had
been duly hanged; yet something told Miss Le Pettit that was not how
Mr. Constantine was using the word.... She rose to it splendidly.

"Passion ... and pray where do you find such a thing in this story of
the vanity of a child of fifteen?"

"In the usual place, ma'am," said Mr. Constantine (now entirely
forgetting that which Miss Le Pettit ever remembered)--"in her soul.
Did you think it merely a thing of the body? The body may be the
objective of passion, but the quality itself is what is meant by the
word. It is generated in the soul and may pour itself into strange
vessels."

"Or even shower its ardours upon a piece of white riband?" cried Miss Le
Pettit, with a titter.

"Shall we say upon Beauty itself?" corrected Mr. Constantine more
gravely than he had yet spoken. Then, with a smile, he elaborated:
"For as passion is in the soul, so is beauty in the heart, and hearts
have differing vision. That was Loveday's desire. Translate this paltry
thing into terms of other ambitions--and where is any one of us then?
Unless, indeed, we are so bloodless, so without imagination, that we
cannot but be content with our lot just as it is."

Miss Le Pettit, who had never seen reason for anything but contentment,
and looked upon it as a Christian virtue, demurred with:--

"The whole affair is so ridiculously out of proportion."

Mr. Constantine glanced, with admiration in his gallant though elderly
eye, over Miss Le Pettit's figure as she lay back in the gilt chair;
glanced from her high, polished forehead, round which the smooth
chestnut hair showed as gleaming, from her parted red lips and bare,
sloping shoulders to her tiny waist and the outward spring beneath it of
the clouded tulle that lapped in a dozen baby waves over the globe of
her swelling crinoline.

"When I was a young man," he said, "the ladies went about in little
robes, such as you would not wear nowadays as a shift. We thought them
pretty then, and thought none the worse of them because they made the
women look more or less as God saw fit to make 'em. Yet now we think you
equally lovely as you float about the world like monstrous beautiful
bubbles, so that a man must adore at a distance and only guess at
Paradise in a gust of wind.... Yet to the next generation, believe me or
not as you like, your garb will seem too preposterous to be true, and a
generation later Time will pay you the unkindest cut of all--you will be
picturesque, and your grand-daughters will revive you--for fancy dress.
Proportion, ma'am, is nothing in the world but fashion."

"Now we are talking about something I know more about than you, Mr.
Constantine," cried Miss Le Pettit archly, "and I, for one, do not
believe that the present style of dress can ever go completely out; it
is too becoming. We shall have novelties, of course, but the idea will
remain the same. And, talking of novelties, if you don't scorn such
things, I will tell you a great secret. I am the first person to procure
one of the new jackets--like the Princess of Wales wears, you know.
You must have heard about them. Alexandra jackets they're called. Isn't
that pretty? And they're just as pretty as she is. The sleeve...."

And thus the great description flowed on, with a bevy of entranced
girls, who had caught the raised tone, fluttering round in excitement
like a crowd of butterflies round a blossom of extra sweetness.

From which it will be seen that a month had already passed since Loveday
had been the excitement of society, and that this conversation between
the eccentric Mr. Constantine and the charming Miss Le Pettit was almost
the last flickering of interest in her fate. The life of one moon had
been enough to see the waxing and waning of what Mr. Constantine had
surprisingly called her passion.

Yet Miss Le Pettit, eager, nay, even anxious, as she had been to
lead the gentleman away from the topic, reverted to it as though by
a curious fascination, when he had taken his leave. To tell the truth,
her conscience had some slight cause to make her uneasy on this very
subject of the violent Loveday. The thing was ridiculous, of course ...
she, Miss Le Pettit, could not conceivably have been even remotely to
blame for such a fantastical happening, and yet that slight pricking
remained....

"An odd word to have used," she commented, in recounting the
conversation she had had with Mr. Constantine to her eager friends, "a
very odd word, indeed, for by it, apparently, he did not mean an access
of anger such as the word signifies in all the books I have read...."

"You mean in the books that you are _supposed_ to have read,
Flora," interrupted one of the young ladies, a flighty girl, whose
tongue often outran her discretion. "I have come across it meaning
something quite different in books like--well, you know the sort of
books I mean."

"I do not think, though, that even _that_ was how Mr. Constantine
used the word," replied Flora, with more of discernment than she
commonly showed, "though I will not pretend to you, Ellen, that I do not
recognise the sense in which you refer to it. To be candid, I don't
think I know what he did mean, but he seemed to me to be paying a vast
deal of attention to the matter, which surprised me in a person of his
standing."

"I have heard he is a man of much sensibility, though he is so
satirical," murmured the romantic Emilia, bending over her netting so
that her ebon curls shaded her suddenly flushing cheek.

"Perhaps he knows more about the fair Loveday than we have guessed,"
cried the careless Ellen; "perhaps he knows _too_ much, and cannot
keep away from the subject for his guilty conscience, as they say
murderers are drawn back to the spot where they have buried the body of
their victim!"

But this was too gross a departure from delicacy of thought and phrase,
and Miss Le Pettit, the prick stirring, perchance, signified as much by
the cold manner in which she brought back the conversation to the more
correct and really more enthralling subject of the Alexandra jacket.

It was generally agreed that Miss Belben, of Bugletown, could not go far
wrong with the sleeves if Flora would be so infinitely good as to lend
her jacket for a copy, and this favour she accorded graciously to her
dear friend, Emilia.

Mr. Constantine walked down the windy hill with his mind already clear
both of Loveday and the elegant company in which he had been taking tea.
He was, above all things, a philosopher, and that means that, though his
imagination was easily touched, his heart remained unstirred, He had
serious thoughts of ordering a new cabriolet, and on arriving at the
market place, he turned into the coachbuilder's to renew the discussion
as to whether red or canary yellow were the more fashionable hue for
the wheels.



CHAPTER I: IN WHICH THE READER IS TAKEN
BACK A FEW WEEKS IN POINT OF TIME, AND
DOWN SEVERAL STEPS IN THE SOCIAL SCALE




Chapter I

IN WHICH THE READER IS TAKEN BACK A FEW WEEKS IN POINT OF TIME, AND DOWN
SEVERAL STEPS IN THE SOCIAL SCALE


It was on a balmy day in early Spring that Loveday had first met Miss Le
Pettit. Loveday had gone to fetch the milk. For Loveday's aunt, Senath
Strick, with whom she lived, was a shiftless, unthrifty woman, never
able to keep prosperous enough to own a cow for as long as the beast
took between calvings, and the times when Loveday had a fragrant,
soft-eyed animal to cherish were mercifully rare. Mercifully, for
Loveday, though she appeared sullen, had ever more sensibility than was
good for one in her position, and each time Aunt Senath was forced to
sell the cow, Loveday behaved as though she had as good a right to sit
and cry herself silly as any young lady with whom nothing was more
urgent than to spoil fine cambric with salt water.

This, then, was a period of poverty with the Strick family, and Loveday
was sent to fetch the evening milk from the farm at the crest of the
hill. On the way, she came upon Cherry Cotton and Primrose Lear, seated
upon a granite stile, their heads together over something Cherry held in
her lap. Cherry heard approaching footsteps, and whipped her apron over
the object she and her friend had been so busily discussing. Loveday was
hurt rather than angered by the unkind action, for there was a reason,
connected with Primrose, why she had felt a tender curiosity as to what
the two girls were guarding so closely. Yet she was aware of bitterness
also--for it was ever so when she appeared. Maids ceased their gossip,
boys laughed and pointed after her. She was "different."

Not in being a love-child, there were plenty of them in the village, but
their parents generally married later, and even if they did not, then
the female partner in crime would be one of the unmentionable women
about whom other people talk so much.... She would live by the harbour
plying a trade which allowed her to have a love-child or so without it
being an occasion for undue remark, or, if she did not descend to those
depths where no one expects anything better and censure consequently
ceases through ineffectiveness, then at least everyone knew the author
of her fall to be an honest, loutish Englishman, no worse than most of
his neighbours.

Loveday was without either of these two rights to existence. Her mother
had been a respectable girl till her fall, and, as far as anyone was
aware, since, for she had died of the fruit of her guilty connection,
and though her portion was doubtless hell-fire, there is nothing to
show that one cannot keep respectable even under such disquieting
circumstances. The elder Loveday had clung obstinately to her
self-respect under circumstances which her neighbours had tried to
render nearly as trying on earth. She had died, as she had lived,
impenitent and only crying for the foreigner who had seduced her,
while he was then lying, had she but known it, in the lap of his first
mistress, the sea, who, perhaps from jealousy at his straying, had taken
him forcibly into her embrace on the same night that Loveday the younger
was born.

Old Madgy, the midwife, who was also more than suspected of being
somewhat of a witch, declared that the expectant mother _did_ know
it--that she had been made aware, through a supernatural happening, of
the loss of her lover, and that that was why the babe saw the light in
such undue haste, and the mother took her departure almost as swiftly
to that place where alone she could ever hope to rejoin him. For, as
evening drew on, Madgy, having called to see how Loveday did, though
nothing was thought of yet for a clear week, found her in the dairy
(the Stricks had not yet fallen on that poverty which came to their roof
under Aunt Senath's shrewish management) standing as one wisht beside
the great red earthen pan of scalded cream.

"And 'ee can b'lieve me or no as it like 'ee, my dears," old Madgy would
say to many a breathless circle in a farm kitchen during the intervals
of her duties overstairs, "but there was the cream in the pan a-heavin'
up an' down in gurt waves, like a rough sea, and her staring at 'en like
one stricken, as she was poor sawl, sure enough. Eh, it was sent for a
sign to her, and a true sign, for that avenen' her man was drowned on
his way to her, with his fine cargo of oil and onions and all. And there
was the cream heavin' in waves for a sign of the rough seas that took
him, though wi' us the skies was fair and the water in the bay as smooth
as silk."

A story that filled simple souls in kitchens with awe, but naturally was
treated more scornfully in drawing-rooms, where it was felt that signs
and portents would hardly be sent to inform a cottage girl of the death
of an onion-seller. For, after all, that is what he amounts to, and the
horrid secret is out.... An onion-seller ... the very words stink in
the nostrils and are fatal to romance.

Fatal to romance in the minds of the fastidious, fatal to respectability
in those of the common people, for only foreigners sold onions. Strange
men with rings in their ears and long, dark curls like a woman's, and an
eye that was at once bold and soft.

Loveday the younger had that eye, save that it had never learned from
life to be bold, and her face was milken white instead of showing the
blown roses of the other girls, though the back of her slender neck was
stained a faint golden brown as by the inherited memories of sun. She
was most immodestly "different," and even the Vicar's lady, who had
charitably seen to her baptism, had difficulty in bringing herself to
believe the girl could be a Christian.

Cherry and Primrose stared up at her as she stood with the red jar in
her hand, and, seeing her look so black, so white, so thin, they leant
their yellow heads together and drew their two aprons closely over their
plump laps.

Seen thus, fronted by Loveday, they seemed amazingly alike, because of
the completeness of her differing, yet a longer look showed that, in
spite of their sleek, fair heads and rounded shoulders, there was
between them the deepest division there can be between women.

Cherry was a maid, thoughtless, blowsy, still untouched enough for
wonder; Primrose had been a wife, though only seventeen, these three
months; in another three was to be a mother. Her eyes, blue as her
friend's, showed an even greater assurance, because it was based on
positives and not on a mere negation. Dark-circled as those eyes were,
her glance, as it passed over Loveday, was the more merciless, because
it came from behind the shelter of a ring-fence.



CHAPTER II: IN WHICH THE ONION-SELLER'S
DAUGHTER FOR THE FIRST TIME FEELS AS
A WOMAN




Chapter II

IN WHICH THE ONION-SELLER'S DAUGHTER FOR THE FIRST TIME FEELS AS A WOMAN


For all her woodland timidity, Loveday was prone to those flashes of
temper to which the weak in defence and the strong in feeling seem
peculiarly exposed. She snatched the shielding apron back from the lap
of the buxom Cherry, stamping her foot the while. Cherry, too amazed to
protect her treasure, stared, slack-mouthed.

Primrose flew into a temper that surpassed Loveday's, already failing
her through dismay at her own action, even as the thunder, to children,
surpasses in terrifying quality the lightning.... And, had they but
known it, Primrose's sounding tantrums held as much possibility of
danger, compared with Loveday's rage, as holds the crash compared with
the flash. But they knew it not, and already Loveday stood panting a
little and spent with her own storm, while Primrose gathered herself,
undaunted, for the attack.

A hail of words would have beaten about Loveday's drooping head had not
Cherry, all unwitting, come to the rescue with a cry on the discovery
that her treasures, thus disturbed, had fallen to the ground, which was
muddy enough, owing to the habit of the cattle of trampling the soil
around the stiles.

"Oh, my fairings, my fairings!" cried Cherry, swooping at them from her
height with all the headlong thump of a gannet after its prey. Loveday's
dive was as the gull's for grace contrasted with it. Their hands met;
Loveday divined in an instant, by the tug of Cherry's, that she was
suspected of trying to snatch the fairings, instead of merely restoring
them, and she straightened herself with a return of her sick anger.
Cherry clutched the frail morsels of riband and lace in her lap, then,
seeing there was no danger, began to straighten them out, scolding the
while.

"There, see, Primrose love, that edging is all crumpled ... did you ever
see the like? Never mind, I'll press it out for 'ee, and it'll look as
good as new. And this riband, that's the one I bought off Bendigo, the
pedlar, for Flora Day--oh, my dear life, what'll I do with it now?"

"'Tis a gurt shame, that's what 'tis," said Primrose, resentful both for
her friend's riband and her own edging; "and I'd get my Willie to make
her buy new, only 'tis no good asking paupers for money, because, even
if they was to be sold up, all their sticks and cloam wouldn't fetch
enough for a yard o' this riband."

The vulgar taunt had sting enough to rouse Loveday to a wholesome
contempt that saved her. She stood staring with a genuine scorn at the
little articles of lace and artificial flowers which Cherry's beau had
given her at the last fair. Yes, even at the riband which had been
Cherry's special pride as bought by herself from the pedlar, and it was
one that had taken Loveday's eye with its delicate beauty--for it was of
palest rose, like the shells she picked up on the beach, not a crude red
or blue, such as she saw in the shops at Bugletown when she went in on
market days. Secretly, something in her marvelled that such a riband had
been Cherry's choice, and her scorning of it now was the easier because
she hated to think she and the blowsy damsel could have a taste in
common.

"You and your fal-lals!" she exclaimed; "here's a fine boutigo to make
of a parcel of ribands and laces that'll make you look like a couple of
the puppets at Corpus Fair. If you wear such as those to the Flora
you'll be mistook for a Maypole, and folk'll dance round you."

"Well, folks 'ull never dance even _round_ you, unless you're burnt
as a guy in a bonfire, let alone dancing _with_ you, Loveday
Strick," rejoined Primrose, "and so you do very well knaw, and that's
why your heart's sick against us."

A minute ago, and that had been true; it was for her isolation Loveday
had raged, but when she had seen these two draw their aprons over their
girl's treasures, she had not guessed those possessions aright. What she
had imagined in her girl's heart, knowing Primrose's condition, it is
not for us to pry at; whatever it was, it was so swift, so born of
instinct, as to be holy. But when she saw the crumpled finery, she was
suddenly too much of a child again to rate it worth envy. The things
that Primrose, all unthinking, stood for, the things of warm hearth and
hallowed bed that her house had never known, might have power to draw
the woman out in her all too soon, but the things that merely charm the
feminine still left her chill.

She laughed, all the sting gone, when she saw what a milliner's paradise
it was from which she was kept out, and put her foot on the first step
of the stile.

"By your lave, Cherry Cotton!" she said, and swung lightly over,
balancing her jar, while they still stared at the change in her.



CHAPTER III: IN WHICH SHE FOR THE FIRST
TIME FEELS AS A GIRL




Chapter III

IN WHICH SHE FOR THE FIRST TIME FEELS AS A GIRL


Primrose Lear was wife to the son of old Farmer Lear, of Upper Farm,
whither Loveday was bound. Willie Lear, the young man, was gay and
handsome, and generally off on any and every job that took him abroad,
from buying a pig to selling his own senses for a few mugs of cider.
Farmer Lear was usually out in the fields, and Mrs. Lear, wrinkled like
a winter apple and tuneful as a winter robin, was as a rule alone in the
big kitchen or cool dairy, for small help did her daughter-in-law give
her about the house.

To-day, however, Mrs. Lear was in the parlour, and no less a personage
than Miss Le Pettit of Ignores was seated on the best horsehair
armchair, her bonneted head, with its drooping feather, leaning
gracefully against the lace antimacassar, and her small prunella boots
elegantly crossed on the smiling cheeks of the beadwork cherub that
adorned the footstool, and that seemed to be puffing the harder, as
though to try and puff those little feet up to the heaven where he
belonged, trusting to his wings (of the best pearl beads) to bear him
after her.

Loveday paused, stricken, not with embarrassment, but with awe, upon the
threshold.

Sight of Cherry and Primrose had deepened her sense of her own isolation
and her pain. Sight of Miss Le Pettit made her forget all save what she
saw.

Blow, little cherub, puff your cherubic hardest, never can you waft
Flora Le Pettit higher than she now is, at least in the sight of one
pair of black eyes, higher, perhaps, than she will ever be again, even
in that of her own not uncomplacent orbs.

Blow, little cherub, but even if you burst the roseate beads from off
your cheeks in your ardour, leaving forlornly drooping the grey threads
that would show you as, after all, of mere mortal manufacture, you could
not cast a doubt as big as the tiniest bead upon the heavenly origin of
Miss Le Pettit--not, at least, in the heart of the devout worshipper
born in that instant upon the black woollen doormat.

The angelic visitant put up a tortoise-shell lorgnon and examined the
newcomer with a flicker of condescending interest. For Flora was a young
lady of great sensibility, and though, of course, all females are filled
by nature with that interesting and appealing quality, the finer amongst
them educate and make an art of it. Miss Le Pettit, then, encouraged her
sensibility, nursed it, nourished it, on the most exquisite of novels
and the rarest of romances, and these had taught her to show even more
sensibility than usual at sight of a barefoot girl with black hair and
eyes and an arresting, though wholly unconscious air that could but be
described by Miss Le Pettit, to herself and afterwards to her friends,
as Italianate.

"What an interesting face and figure!" she now exclaimed, at gaze
through the lorgnon, as though it were a celestial aid to vision needful
for such a long range, as it must be even for angelic eyes looking from
the skiey ramparts to a world where bare feet press the earth, to say
nothing of woollen doormats.

Loveday blenched before that searching gaze, the rare red burned in her
cheek and her own eyes sank abashed. She rubbed the flexible sole of one
foot in a stiffened curve of shyness against the slim ankle of the
other. Mrs. Lear exclaimed aloud in her horror.

"Loveday Strick, where are your manners to, that you come into the
parlour without a curtsey?" said she. "And indeed, I must ask you to
excuse her, ma'am, for she's but a nobody's girl from the village, and
doesn't know how to behave before gentry."

Mrs. Lear was a good soul, and had ever been kind to Loveday, but she
too had her sensibilities, and they were outraged by this untimely
intrusion of one world into another which was doubtless unaware even of
its existence. But Miss Le Pettit put up a delicate gloved hand in
protest.

"Nay, you frighten the child, Mrs. Lear," she said kindly, "I am sure
she means no disrespect. Did you ... what is your name, girl?'

"Loveday, ma'am."

"What a strange, old-fashioned name, to be sure," commented the taffetas