VIII
THE SECOND FLOOR
By this time Miss Rigby might possibly have arisen and be watching the horse and its rider through her curtains. Emilie Rigby was the second of the permanent paying guests. She was tall, languid, graceful and disorderly, of uncertain age, but with a growing opacity of skin and with darkening shadows under her short-sighted eyes to tell of the ebbing life forces within: much younger in the afternoon than in the morning, and recovering her youth hour by hour as the day aged. In her rooms on the second floor she led the spoiled, sensuous life of an odalisque or a Persian cat. She breakfasted in bed, lunched in a wrapper and with her hair coiled carelessly upon her neck, had a hot bath, with elaborations, at three, and left the house an hour later, in a cab whose destinations, despite all efforts of Druce and Kendal, remain conjectural to this day. She dined from home almost nightly, but had few correspondents, and her visitors gave Mrs. Barbour no anxiety. She had a telephone installed in her room, whose sharp summons soon became one of the habitual sounds of the dark, still house. The baffled Druce, carrying up an unascetic luncheon at one, frequently found the door locked in her face and was forced to wait until a conversation, punctuated with bursts of laughter and far too disjointed to be worth listening to through the keyhole, wore itself away. Lady Anne answered for her.
"Respectable?" she exclaimed abruptly, in response to a guarded query. "Of course Jasmine Rigby's respectable. We dined at the same house last month. Only, if I were you——" she hesitated, unwilling to spoil the perfect relief in her landlady's face, "if I were you, I wouldn't have Nelly in and out there too much, once she begins to grow up. Her clothes alone are enough to unsettle the girl."
But it is hard, with four servants and three households to control, to keep an efficient eye upon inquiring youth, whose fingers are already beginning to pluck restlessly at the many hued skirt of life; and the hardship becomes greater when you are filled with pity for a loneliness that is part of your own contriving. As long as Fenella was a very little girl, beyond coaxing her in now and then to pet as one would pet a pretty kitten, Miss Rigby took scant notice of the child. But as she grew in years and stature, and a beauty that was becoming more of the earth and less of the angels was confirmed in her, I am afraid the scented, sophisticated atmosphere of the second floor began to exercise its delayed but inevitable charm. One of those foolish intimacies began which almost every pretty young girl can remember, often with shame and impatience. There was a year when the woman, nearly forty, and the girl, not yet fourteen, were "Jasmine" and "Nelly" to each other; when little cocked-hat notes (oh, how deftly folded!) were apt to lurk under the doily mats on Fenella's dressing-table, to be answered by ignorant, misspelt letters from the blindly adoring child. The jaded woman of fashion and pleasure (no; I don't know what place she filled in her world, nor is speculation worth while) took an early opportunity of showing the little parson's daughter the beauty of her arms and shoulders—talked unreservedly before her, dressed her up in her gowns andlingerie, let her lie upon the bed and prattle while she herself sat before the mirror, waging her unwearied warfare with time—refreshed herself with the girl's homage, laughed away as much as she dared of her innocence, and finally, in a last spasm of confidence, unlocked a drawer, hesitated, and put into the girl's hands a bundle of letters, bidding her, with a flushed cheek and the ghost of a giggle, to read them over and to let her know how their literary beauties affected her. "When you've read them," said she, "maybe I'll tell you who they came from."
Fenella left the room puzzled, a little frightened, but with no instinct to tell her that possibly she was holding her damnation in her hand.
What happened next? One of those happy accidents, perhaps, that good angels know how to arrange. The packet was returned, unopened, next morning, by Lady Anne, in the course of an interview which left her fellow-lodger considerable repairs to effect before she faced the world anew. An hour later the good genius, habited for her ride, knocked timidly at the door of Mrs. Barbour's sanctum in the hitherto unvisited nether regions.
Mrs. Barbour rose to her feet when she saw who her caller was, but Lady Anne signed for her to remain seated. She seemed nervous and awkward, and put her hands to her side. They say her horse kicked her there the day she broke her ankle; oh! only a touch; no notice was taken of it at the time.
"I've come to speak about our little girl," she said, sitting down and crossing her booted legs.
Mrs. Barbour bridled a little; but youthful habits are strong. She resumed her deferential manner.
"I trust she has been giving no trouble, m'lady."
"She has perhaps exposed a meddling old woman to the worst snub of her life. I'm going to be crude, Mrs. Barbour. What on earth are you going to make of that child?"
Mrs. Barbour plaited the table cover, but seemed to have no answer ready.
"She's growing lovelier every day" (the foolish mother's eyes glistened); "she dresses like a little fashion plate; she has more silver stuff and finery in her room than any of us girls had at Castle Cullen; she hasn't a friend in the world nor an idea in her head; and we've an instance," with a glance up at the ceiling, "near enough at hand, where beauty with nothing else can bring a woman."
Mrs. Barbour's eyes began to fill. Not a single harsh truth but voiced a reproach that had been nibbling her own heart for years.
"Why don't you send her to school? Do you know that if you were a poor woman you could be fined or sent to prison?"
"Schools are so dear."
"Stuff! They're cheaper and better than they ever were. There's nothing young folk can't do now. You can go from a boarding school to the 'varsity on a string. Let's send her to school, Mrs. B.," she persisted. "You've no time to look after her, and neither have I."
"Not boarding school," the mother pleaded. "I couldn't be parted from her now."
"Who said anything about boarding schools? There are plenty of day schools. None of them are perfect, I know. But it can't be put off. All the danger isn't out of doors. Let her go and get a little honest mud on the bottom of her skirts, and come home every evening to have it brushed off."
The poor woman struggled with her trouble. "It isn't that," she said brokenly, "but—but, I can't explain it. There are things that don't brush off—ever. She is so ignorant of what the world thinks of—of people like me. They'll teach her it all at school; they'll teach her to despise her m-m-mother...."
She broke down and, burying her face in her hands, wept the unrestrained tears of her class.
"Oh, dear! oh, dear!" she moaned. "I knew it must come. She's so pretty—so pretty; such a little aristocrat. I'm only her mother by accident, really. And she'll make fine friends and be asked out, and wonder why she can't ask 'em back, and I'll have to tell her: 'Nelly, dear, it's because your mother is only a poor woman that father married to save her name, that lets lodgings to her betters for a living, and wouldn't let you go to your own people when they asked for you; and you can never have a friend of your own class as long as you live with her.'"
Lady Anne kept her arm across the broad, bowed shoulders.
"Let's try it," she said cheerily. "I'll answer for Nelly, and I think I can answer for the others. You have no conception how the world is changing. I have the very school in my eye, too. I know the principal. Sunlight and science, and knowledge that's innocent because it's thorough, and open windows upon life that blow away all the whispers in the corners, and a proper reverence for the body that, after all, is all we're sure of. As for the money—well, I'm a meddlesome old body, and you can heap coals of fire on my head by letting me be responsible. I don't blame you for spending money on her clothes: besides—Sharland College is dressy."
She wrote to her friend that night:
"Dear Louisa:"I'm sending you a little girl who is the daughter of a dear, dead chum of mine. She's extravagantly pretty, very dull, quite poor—is being brought up as though she were an heiress and has a heart that I believe will prove a greater danger to her than her face or her poverty. For God's sake, Louisa, find out if she has any special talent that will help her to a living, and ground her and grind her until she's taken hold. I'm fond of the child, and shouldn't die happy if I thought there was any risk of her joining the one profession for which previous experience isn't essential."The old pain in the side has come back; the Swedish massage did it no permanent good. But I can still ride, so I don't squeal."
"Dear Louisa:
"I'm sending you a little girl who is the daughter of a dear, dead chum of mine. She's extravagantly pretty, very dull, quite poor—is being brought up as though she were an heiress and has a heart that I believe will prove a greater danger to her than her face or her poverty. For God's sake, Louisa, find out if she has any special talent that will help her to a living, and ground her and grind her until she's taken hold. I'm fond of the child, and shouldn't die happy if I thought there was any risk of her joining the one profession for which previous experience isn't essential.
"The old pain in the side has come back; the Swedish massage did it no permanent good. But I can still ride, so I don't squeal."