Chapter Nineteen #2
“The rest can wait,” said Frances quickly, folding it up and shoving it under her plate.
In her confusion she could hardly acknowledge Mr. Hearne when he took the seat next to her, because there in black and white her sister had written, “How I hope I might attend your play, if only to see the beauteous half-wit Mr. Hearne you all speak of.”
“But will she and Philip come?” asked Gordon.
“Yes, I think. At least, Jane will. She didn’t mention Philip.”
“Hurrah!” cheered Maria and Gordon, and their mother beamed. “Mr. Hearne, I hope I will shortly have the pleasure of introducing you and the rest of the Greenwood party to my older daughters and their husbands. There are even more of us, I’m afraid.”
“The world could not hold enough Barstows to suit me,” he replied solemnly, buttering his cut roll thickly to its edges with precise strokes. “I wish I might be one.”
“How kind of you to say. Now do satisfy our curiosity, Mr. Hearne, and tell us the thought which brought you here.”
He nodded. “Oh, yes.” But instead of continuing, he cut his slice of ham in four little squares and stacked them on his roll.
“You smell like a fish,” said Bash on his left.
“Sebastian!” Sarah gasped.
“I held a fish this morning,” answered Mr. Hearne. “But I will wipe my hands again. It was a chub, or so Jimmy told me.”
“Jimmy?” repeated Frances. “But who is Jimmy?”
“Oh, dear. He seemed to know you all. Blond hair. About so high.” He held his hand as high as his chest, as if he were still standing, thus giving Jimmy a height of two-and-a-half feet.
“Goodness. That is smaller than Bash,” said Maria.
“He can’t have been so short, unless he were an elf,” said Frances before comprehension dawned. “Ah! Could it have been Jimmy Cramthorpe?”
He turned to smile at her, and Frances felt as if a bowl of sunshine had been poured over her head.
“Yes. That’s the one,” he said happily. “He was fishing. For chub.”
“As you said,” she could not help reminding him. “Was that—what your thought was about this morning? Fishing? Jimmy Cramthorpe?”
“Jimmy Cramthorpe says he is employed by Mrs. Lamb,” he went on with the same placid earnestness.
Frances took a deep breath. This was a good reminder of how very impossible it would be ever to marry Mr. Hearne, no matter how he poured sunshine on her or how handsome he was. Because sometimes talking to him made her want to tear her hair out, clump by clump, and set it on fire.
“That’s right,” she said tightly. “He performs tasks for her like cleaning and delivering messages and such.”
“And sells fish to her.”
“And sells fish to her,” she agreed. Frances poured more milk into her tea, though it was already cooled.
Enough.
She did not care.
She would leave the questioning to Maria.
But then, miraculously, he came to the point. “Jimmy told me that Mrs. Lamb is unhappy with us at Greenwood Hall,” he sighed, “because she wants to see the play.”
Mrs. Barstow clicked her tongue, her brow knitting.
“Oh, my. That was what Mrs. Terry hinted. But I think it simply must be so. To invite…everyone of any sort of acquaintance in Iffley would make it a ‘public’ performance, and one could hardly ask the Eveleighs to participate, even if Mrs. Markham Dere approved it.”
“I had a thought,” he repeated.
“Yes?” said Mrs. Barstow, and Frances bit back a smile to hear the tiniest note of impatience in even her mother’s patient, patient voice.
“We might do one scene for the villagers. The ones who are your friends and neighbors and acquaintances.”
“But how would that be any different?” Frances asked, forgetting at once that she was not going to speak anymore.
He had taken a bite of his ham “sandwich” and chewed with deliberation. Then he washed it down with tea. The Barstows repressed fidgets.
“It could be a scene without the Eveleighs,” he resumed. “And it needn’t be performed at Greenwood Hall. Not so formal then, you know. Just a neighborly amusement. I thought of the Pyramus and Thisbe part, minus the commentary from the Athenians.”
“Oh!” exclaimed Maria, delighted. “That would be fun! And entertaining for the audience. Mrs. Terry would let us use the rectory, I’m certain. The little old schoolroom.”
“Yes!” Gordon whooped, slapping his open playbook. “That’s the best scene in the whole play, and since it’s the mechanicals, there isn’t any high-flown language. What a grand thought, Hearne!”
“I do think that might work,” Mrs. Barstow agreed. “What a very, very good idea.”
Frances alone felt a twinge of disappointment, of which she was ashamed. Because she wasn’t in the Pyramus and Thisbe scene, and they were all so eager.
But it was Sarah who spoke up. “I’m sorry to be a spoil-sport, but I see two problems. Peter Dere plays Quince, and Mrs. Dere may not like him participating.”
“Then you must persuade her, Frances!” begged Maria at once. “Tell her it doesn’t matter because Peter will already know everybody there, and he’s a boy!”
“I don’t suppose it would be any different from when he and Gordon and George were being taught by Mr. Terry and spoke at church in a recital,” Frances mused. “And those recitals were always before anybody in the parish who pleased to listen. I don’t think Mrs. Dere would object.”
“And if she did, Denver could read for Peter,” Gordon suggested. “Mrs. Dere couldn’t say he couldn’t.”
Sarah bit her lip. “That’s true. Good, then. Still—the other difficulty with the Pyramus and Thisbe scene is that—isn’t Miss Jarvis in it? She’s Thisbe, if I’m not mistaken.”
A chorus of groans from Maria and Gordon acknowledged this unpleasant fact, but Mr. Hearne was undismayed.
“She is,” Mr. Hearne conceded, “but perhaps…Miss Barstow might be persuaded to read her speeches?”
The table turned as one to regard her, Maria and Gordon’s features screwed up pleadingly, but they need not have been anxious. Almost too quickly Frances said, “Certainly I could. We would need some practice, though, because everyone has learned his cues off of the Athenian interruptions.”
“It wouldn’t take long,” declared Maria. “The rest of us know it already, and if you and possibly George are simply to read from the playbooks…”
“But when would this scene be performed?” Mrs. Barstow asked. “If Friday is the actual play?”
“Why not Saturday or the week following?” proposed Mr. Hearne. “There is always a sensation of anticlimax after a play ends. This little encore might alleviate that.”
“And our speeches would still be fresh in our memories,” Gordon said.
“Not to mention, it will take a little time to get everyone’s permission and the rectory secured,” added Sarah sensibly.
“In fact, it might be best not to mention it to the general community until we are certain. If Mrs. Lamb is already resentful, she would be doubly so to have a treat dangled before her and then possibly removed.”
“Still, there is nothing to stop us from practicing right now!” urged Maria. “We have a little time before we must go to Greenwood for rehearsal.”
Which is how Frances soon found herself yet again declaring her love for Mr. Hearne, this time as the Thisbe to his Pyramus in the parlor of Iffley Cottage.
On this occasion, however, surrounded by her family, she was aware of joy far more than embarrassment.
Because it was too funny how Bash dashed around in delight to be included, which set Poppet to chasing him and leaping at Mr. Hearne’s knees, which led to workbaskets being overturned and the sleeping cat upset, so that they all were in high spirits before they even begun.
Daily repetition of the play within a play had enured them to its farcical nature, but when Frances drolly read Quince’s part introducing the players, Bash’s sincere delight in watching them brought the scene back to life, and they could not resist clowning.
Never had Gordon’s Wall been so mock stern.
Never had Maria’s Lion capered and snarled so.
Never had Sarah’s Moonshine been more thick-headed.
(Frances was reminded inescapably of Mr. Hearne and wondered if her sister-in-law had patterned herself upon him.)
Thus when Gordon’s Wall separated the lovers, and he held up his fingers in a circle as the “chink,” Frances did not hesitate to flutter her own fingers along her brother’s arm in a playful caress as she reproached him for dividing her from her Pyramus.
Her voice brought Mr. Hearne eagerly to the other side, “‘To spy an I can hear my Thisby’s face,’” and Frances giggled to see his dark eye outlined by Gordon’s fingers.
There was no wolf about him now, only humor, and with book in hand as a shield she wasn’t afraid to draw nearer or to vow her devotion.
“‘My love! Thou art my love, I think.’”
Even the kiss both she and Mr. Hearne lavished on either side of poor Gordon’s hand only made everyone laugh the harder.
It was all over too soon, and Frances was not the only one to be sorry for it.
If only Mr. Hearne always had a script to read from, she thought when he was gone. She sat with the playbook open in her lap, ostensibly to learn Thisbe’s speeches, though her mind was far away.
For he comes alive when he acts! Yes, he’s a different person altogether, which is, I suppose, the entire purpose of acting. She sighed to herself. Yes, if Mr. Hearne only had a part written for him every day of his life—one in which he was not only amusing, but also wise and thoughtful…
Impatiently, she shook her head.
Because it was nonsense, wasn’t it?
But nonsense or not, Frances Barstow could not help suspecting that if Providence had indeed written him such a role, she might fall head over ears in love with him.