His work went but slowly on that day—and in the days that followed. On the next Friday he went over to Rochester, and in the dusk of the evening he walked along the road, about a mile from “The Yews,” and then, going slowly, he cast handfuls of something dark from his hand, and kicked the white dust over it as it lay.
“I feel like the enemy sowing tares,” said he.
Then he went home, full of anxious anticipation. The next day was hot and bright. He took his armchair into the nightmare of a verandah, and sat there reading; only above the top of the book his eyes could follow the curve of the white road. This made it more difficult to follow the text. Presently the bicyclists began to go past, by ones and twos and threes; but a certain percentage was wheeling its machines—others stopped within sight to blow up their tyres. One man sat down under the hedge thirty yards away, and took his machine to pieces; presently he strolled up and asked for water. Brent gave it, in a tin basin, grudgingly, and without opening the gate.
“I overdid it,” he said, “a quarter of a pound would have been enough; yet I don’t know—perhaps it’s well to be on the safe side. Yet three pounds was perhaps excessive.”
Late in the afternoon a pink figure wheeling a bicycle came slowly down the road. He sat still, and tried to read. In a moment he should hear the click of the gate: then he would spring up and be very much astonished. But the gate did not click, and when next he raised his eyes the pink blousehad gone by, and was almost past the end of the five acres. Then he did spring up—and ran.
“Miss Redmayne, can’t I help you? What is it? Have you had a spill?” he said as he overtook her.
“Puncture,” said she laconically.
“You’re very unfortunate. Mayn’t I help you to mend it?”
“I’ll mend it as soon as I get to a shady place.”
“Come into the wilderness. See—here’s the side gate. I’ll fetch some water in a moment.”
She looked at him doubtfully, and then consented. She refused tea, but she stayed and talked till long after the bicycle was mended.
On the following Saturday he walked along the road, and back, and along, and again the place was alive with angry cyclists dealing, each after his fashion, with a punctured tyre. He came upon Miss Redmayne sitting by the ditch mending hers. That was the time when he sat on the roadside and told her all about himself—reserving only those points where his life had touched Camilla’s.
The week after he walked the road again, and this time he overtook Miss Redmayne, who was resolutely wheeling her bicycle back in the way by which she had come.
“Let me wheel it for you,” he said. “Whither bound?”
“I’m going back to Rochester,” she said. “I generally ride over to see my aunts at Felsenden on Saturdays, but I fear I must give it up, or go by train; this road isn’t safe.”
“Not safe?” he said with an agitation which could not escape her notice.
“Not safe,” she repeated. “Mr Brent, there is a very malicious person in this part of the country—a perfectly dreadful person.”
“What do you mean?” he managed to ask.
“These three Saturdays I have come along this road; each time I have had a puncture. And each time I have found embedded in my tyre the evidence of some one’s malice. This is one piece of evidence.” She held out her ungloved hand. On its pink palm lay a good sized tin-tack. “Once might be accident; twice a coincidence; three times is too much. The road’s impossible.”
“Do you think some one did it on purpose?”
“I know it,” she said calmly.
Then he grew desperate.
“Try to forgive me,” he said. “I was so lonely, and I wanted so much——”
She turned wide eyes on him.
“You!” she cried, and began to laugh.
Her laughter was very pretty, he thought.
“Then you didn’t know it was me?” said the Greek student.
“You!” she said again. “And has it amused you—to see all these poor people in difficulties, and to know that you’ve spoilt their poor little holiday for them—and three times, too.”
“I never thought aboutthem,” he said; “it was you I wanted to see. Try to forgive me; you don’t know how much I wanted you.” Something in his voice kept her silent. “And don’t laugh,” he went on. “I feel as if I wanted nothing in the world but you. Let me come to see you—let me try to make you care too.”
“You’re talking nonsense,” she said, for he stopped on a note that demanded an answer. “Why, you told Camilla——”
“Yes—but you—but I meantyou. Ithought I cared about her once—but I never cared really with all my heart and soul for any one but you.”
She looked at him calmly and earnestly.
“I’m going to forget all this,” she said; “but I like you very much, and if you want to come and see me, you may. I will introduce you to my aunts at Felsenden as—as a friend of Camilla’s. And I will be friends with you; but nothing else ever. Do you care to know my aunts?”
Maurice had inspirations of sense sometimes. One came to him now, and he said: “I care very much.”
“Then help me to mend my bicycle, and you can call there to-morrow. It’s ‘The Grange’—you can’t miss it. No, not another word of nonsense, please, or we can’t possibly be friends.”
He helped her to mend the bicycle, and they talked of the beauty of spring and of modern poetry.
It was at “The Grange,” Felsenden, that Maurice next saw Miss Redmayne—and it was from “The Grange,” Felsenden, that, in September, he married her.
“And why did you say you would never, never be anything but a friend?” he asked her on the day when that marriage was arranged. “Oh! you nearly made me believe you! Why did you say it?”
“One must say something!” she answered. “Besides, you’d never have respected me if I’d said ‘yes’ at once.”
“Could you have said it? Did you like me then?”
She looked at him, and her look was an answer. He stooped and gravely kissed her.
“And you really cared, even then? I wish you had been braver,” he said a little sadly.
“Ah, but,” she said, “I didn’t know you then—you must try to forgive me, dear. Think how much there was at stake! Suppose I had lost you!”
Aunt Kate was the great comfort of Kitty’s existence. Always kindly, helpful, sympathetic, no girlish trouble was too slight, no girlish question too difficult for her tender heart—her delicate insight. How different from grim Aunt Eliza, with whom it was Kitty’s fate to live. Aunt Eliza was severe, methodical, energetic. In household matters she spared neither herself nor her niece. Kitty could darn and mend and bake and dust and sweep in a way which might have turned the parents of the bluest Girtonian green with envy. She had read a great deal, too—the really solid works that are such a nuisance to get through, and that leave a mark on one’s mind like the track of a steamroller. That was Aunt Eliza’s doing. Kitty ought to have been grateful—but she wasn’t. She didn’t want to be improved with solidbooks. She wanted to write books herself. She did write little tales when her aunt was out on business, which was often, and she dreamed of the day when she should write beautiful books, poems, romances. These Aunt Eliza classed roughly as “stuff and nonsense”; and one day, when she found Kitty reading theGirls’ Very Own Friend, she tore that harmless little weekly across and across and flung it into the fire. Then she faced Kitty with flushed face and angry eyes.
“If I ever catch you bringing such rubbish into the house again, I’ll—I’ll stop your music lessons.”
This was a horrible threat. Kitty went twice a week to the Guildhall School of Music. She had no musical talent whatever, but the journey to London and back was her one glimpse of the world’s tide that flowed outside the neat, gloomy, ordered house at Streatham. Therefore Kitty was careful that Aunt Eliza should not again “catch her bringing such rubbish into the house.” But she went on reading the paper all the same, just as she went on writing her little stories. And presently she got one of her little stories typewritten, and sent it to theGirls’ Very Own Friend. It was a silly little story—theheroine wassvelte, I am sorry to say, and had red-gold hair and a soft,trainantevoice—and the hero was a “frank-looking young Englishman, with a bronzed face and honest blue eyes.” The plot was that with which I firmly believe every career of fiction begins—the girl who throws over her lover because he has jilted her friend. Then she finds out that it was not her lover, but his brother or cousin. We have all written this story in our time, and Kitty wrote it much worse than many, but not nearly so badly as most of us.
And theGirls’ Very Own Friendaccepted the story and printed it, and in its columns notified to “George Thompson” that the price, a whole guinea, was lying idle at the office till he should send his address. For, of course, Kitty had taken a man’s name for her pen-name, and almost equally, of course, had called herself “George.” George Sand began it, and it is a fashion which young authors seem quite unable to keep themselves from following.
Kitty longed to tell some one of her success—to ask admiration and advice; but Aunt Eliza was more severe and less approachable than usual that week. She was busy writingletters. She had always a sheaf of dull-looking letters to answer, so Kitty could only tell Mary in the kitchen under vows of secrecy, and Mary in the kitchen only said: “Well, to be sure, Miss, it’s beautiful! I suppose you wrote the story down out of some book?”
Therefore Kitty felt that it was vain to apply to her for intellectual sympathy.
“I will write to Aunt Kate,” said she, “shewill understand. Oh, how I wish I could see her! She must be a dear, soft, pussy, cuddly sort of person. Why shouldn’t I go and see her? I will.”
And on this desperate resolve she acted.
Now I find it quite impossible any longer to conceal from the intelligent reader that the reason why Kitty had never seen Aunt Kate was that “Aunt Kate” was merely the screen which sheltered from a vulgar publicity the gifted person who wrote the “Answers to Correspondents” for theGirls’ Very Own Friend.
In fear and trembling, and a disguised hand-writing; with a feigned name and a quickly-beating heart, Kitty, months before, had written to this mysterious and graciousbeing. In the following week’s number had appeared these memorable lines:
“Sweet Nancy.—So pleased, dear, with your little letter. Write to me quite freely. I love to help my girls.”
“Sweet Nancy.—So pleased, dear, with your little letter. Write to me quite freely. I love to help my girls.”
So Kitty wrote quite freely, and as honestly as any girl of eighteen ever writes: her hopes and fears, her household troubles, her literary ambitions. And in the columns of theGirls’ Very Own FriendAunt Kate replied with all the tender grace and delightful warmth that characterised her utterances.
The idea of calling on Aunt Kate occurred to Kitty as she was “putting on her things” to go to the Guildhall. She instantly threw the plain “everyday” hat from her, and pulled her best hat from its tissue-paper nest in the black bandbox. She put on her best blouse—the cream-coloured one with the browny lace on it, and her best brown silk skirt. She recklessly added her best brown shoes and gloves, and the lace pussy-boa. (I don’t know what the milliner’s name for the thing is. It goes round the neck, and hangs its soft and fluffy ends down nearly to one’s knees.) Then she looked at herself in theglass, gave a few last touches to her hair and veil, and nodded to herself.
“You’ll do, my dear,” said Kitty.
Aunt Eliza was providentially absent at Bath nursing a sick friend, and the black-bugled duenna, hastily imported from Tunbridge Wells, could not be expected to know which was Kitty’s best frock, and which the gloves that ought only to have been worn at church.
When Kitty’s music lesson was over, she stood for a moment on the steps of the Guildhall School, looking down towards the river. Then she shrugged her pretty shoulders.
“I don’t care. I’m going to,” she said, and turned resolutely towards Tudor Street. Kitty had been to a high school: therefore she was not obviously shy. She asked her way frankly and easily of carman, or clerk, or errand-boy; and though, at the door of the dingy office in a little court off Fleet Street, her heart beat thickly as she read the blue-enamelled words,Girls’ Very Own Friend, her manner as she walked into the office betrayed no nervousness, and, indeed, struck the grinning idle office boy as that of “a bloomin’ duchess.”
“I want to see——” she began; and then suddenly the awkwardness of her position struck her. She did not know Aunt Kate’s surname. Abruptly to ask this grinning lout for “Aunt Kate” seemed absolutely indecorous. “I want to see the editor,” she ended.
She waited in the grimy office while the boy disappeared through an inner door, marked in dingy white letters with the magic words, “Editor—Private.” A low buzz of voices came to her through the door. She looked at the pigeon-holes where heaps of back numbers of theGirls’ Very Ownlay in a dusty retirement. She looked at the insurance company’s tasteless almanack that hung all awry on the wall, and still the buzz went on. Then suddenly some one laughed inside, and the laugh did not please Kitty. The next moment the boy returned, grinning more repulsively than ever, and said: “Walk this way.”
She walked that way, past the boy; the door fell to behind her, and she found herself in a cloud of tobacco smoke, compressed into a small room—a very dusty, untidy room—in which stood three young men. Their faces were grave and serious, but Kate couldnot forget that one of them had laughed, and laughedlike that. Her chin went up about a quarter of an inch further.
“I am sorry to have disturbed you,” she said severely. “I wanted to see—to see the lady who signs herself Aunt Kate.”
There was a moment of silence which seemed almost breathless. Two of the young men exchanged a glance, but though Kitty perceived it to be significant, she could not interpret its meaning. Then one of the three turned to gaze out of the window at the blackened glass roof of the printing office below. Kitty felt certain he was concealing a smile; and the second hurriedly arranged a bundle of papers beside him.
The third young man spoke, and Kitty liked the gentle drawl, the peculiar enunciation. The poor girl, in her Streatham seclusion, had never before heard the “Oxford voice.”
“I am very sorry,” he said, “but ‘Aunt Kate’ is not here to-day. Perhaps—is there anything I could do?”
“No, thank you,” said Kitty, wishing herself miles away; the tobacco smoke choked her, the backs of the two other men seemed an outrage. She turned away with a haughty bow, and went down the grimy stairs fullof fury. She could have slapped herself. How could she have been such a fool as to come there? There were feet coming down the stair behind her—she quickened her pace. The feet came more quickly. She stopped on the landing and turned with an odd feeling of being at bay. It was the fair-haired young man with the Oxford voice.
“I am so very sorry,” he said gently, “but I did not know. I did not expect to see—I mean, I did not know who you were. And we had all been smoking—I am so sorry,” he said again, rather lamely.
“It doesn’t matter,” said Kitty, more shyly than she had ever spoken in her life. She liked his eyes and his voice as much as she loathed the expressive backs of his two companions.
“If you could come again: perhaps Aunt Kate will be here on Thursday. I know she will be sorry to miss you,” the young man went on.
“I think I won’t call again, thank you,” said Kitty. “I—I’ll write, thank you; it is all right. I oughtn’t to have come. Good-bye.”
There was nothing for it but to standback and let her pass. The editor went back slowly to his room. His friends had relighted their pipes.
“Appeased the outraged goddess?” asked one of them.
“Good old Aunt Kate!” said the other.
“Shut up, Sellars!” said the editor, frowning.
“Now, which of your correspondents is it?” pondered Sellars, ruffling the bundle of papers in his hand. “Is it ‘Wild Woodbine,’ who wants to know what will make her hands white? Chilcott, did you see her hands? Oh no, of course—bien chaussée, bien gantée. All brown, too. Is it ‘Sylph’?—no; she wants a pattern for a Zouave. What is a Zouave, if you please, Mr Editor?”
“Dry up!” said the editor, but Sellars was busy with the papers.
“Eureka! I know her. She’s ‘Nut-brown Maid’—here’s the letter—wants to know if she may talk to ‘a young gentleman she has not been properly introduced to’—spells it ‘interoduced,’ too——”
The editor snatched the papers out of the other’s hands.
“Now clear out,” said he; “I’m busy.”
“Am I dreaming?” said Sellars pensively;“or is this the editor who invited us to collaborate with him in his ‘Answers to Correspondents’?”
“I am the editor who will kick you down the entire five flights if he is driven to it. You won’t drive him, will you?”
The two laughed, but they took up their hats and went; Sellars put his head round the door for a last word.
“What price love at first sight?” said he, and the office ruler dented the door as he disappeared round it. The editor, left alone, sat down in his chair and looked helplessly round him.
“Well!” he said musingly, “well, well, well, well!” Then after a long silence he took up his pen and began the “Answers to Correspondents.”
“Dieu-donnée.—Your hair is a very nice colour. I should not advise Aureoline.“Shy Fairy.—By all means consult your mother. Heliotrope would suit your complexion, if it is, as you say, of a brilliant fairness.“Contadina.—No, I should not advise scarlet velvet with the pale blue. Try myrtle green.”
“Dieu-donnée.—Your hair is a very nice colour. I should not advise Aureoline.
“Shy Fairy.—By all means consult your mother. Heliotrope would suit your complexion, if it is, as you say, of a brilliant fairness.
“Contadina.—No, I should not advise scarlet velvet with the pale blue. Try myrtle green.”
Presently he threw down the pen. “Isuppose I shall never see her again,” he said, and he actually sighed.
But he did see her again. For on her way home poor Kitty’s imagination suddenly spread its wings and alighted accurately on the truth; she formed a sufficiently vivid picture of what had happened in the office after she left. Sheknewthat those other young men—“the pigs,” she called them to herself—had speculated as to whether she was “Little One,” who wanted to make her hair curl, and to know whether short waists would be worn; or “Moss Rose,” who was anxious about her complexion, and the proper way to treat a jibbing sweetheart. So that very night she wrote a note to Aunt Kate, but she did not sign it “Sweet Nancy” in the old manner, and she did not disguise her hand. She signed it George Thompson, in inverted commas, and she said that she would call on Thursday.
And on Thursday she called. And was shown into the editor’s room at once.
The editor rose to greet her.
“Aunt Kate is not here,” said he hurriedly; “but if you can spare a few moments I should like to talk to you about business; I did not know the other day that you werethe author of that charming story ‘Evelyn’s Error.’”
The room was clear of tobacco smoke—the editor was alone—some red roses lay on the table. Kitty caught herself wondering for whom he had bought them. The chair he offered her was carefully dusted. She took it—and he began to talk about her story; criticising, praising, blaming, and that so skilfully that criticism seemed a subtle flattery, and the very blame conveyed a compliment. Then he asked for more stories. And a new heaven and a new earth seemed to unroll before the girl’s eyes. If she could only write—and succeed—and——
“Will you come again?” he said at last. “Aunt Kate——”
“Oh,” she said, with eyes shining softly, “it doesn’t matter about Aunt Kate now! I shall be so busy trying to write stories.”
“The fact is——” said the editor slowly, racking his brains for a reason that should bring her to the office again—“the fact is—Iam Aunt Kate.”
Kitty sprang to her feet. Her face flamed scarlet. She stood silent a moment. Then: “You?” she cried. “Oh, it’snotfair—it’s mean—it’s shameful! Oh—how could you!And girls write toyou—and they think it’s a woman—and they tell you about their troubles. It’s horrible! It’s underhand—it’s abominable! I hate you for it. Every one ought to know. I shall write to the papers.”
“Please, please,” said the editor hurriedly and humbly—“it’s not my fault. Itisa lady who does it generally, but she had to go away—and I couldn’t get any one else to do it. And I didn’t see—till after you’d been the other day—that it wasn’t fair. And I was going to ask ifyouwould do it—the correspondence, I mean—just for this week. I wish you would!”
“Could I?” she said doubtfully.
“Of course you could! And if you’d bring the copy on Monday—about two columns, you know—we could go through it together and——”
“Well, I’ll try,” said Kitty abruptly, reaching out for the sheaf of letters which he was gathering together.
And now who was happier than Kitty, seated behind her locked bedroom door advising “Dieu-donnée” and “Shy Fairy” and “Contadina” out of the unfathomable depths of her girlish inexperience. Her advice looked wonderfully practical, though,in print, she thought, as with a thrill of pride and joy she corrected the first proofs. And she wrote stories, too, and they, too, were printed. It was indeed a bright and beautiful world. Aunt Eliza stayed away for five glorious weeks. Kitty, with an enthralling sense of reckless wickedness, gave up her useless music lessons, and in going three times a week to the office experienced a glowing consciousness of the joy and dignity of honest toil.
The editor, by the way, during these five weeks fell in love with Kitty, exactly as he had known he would do when first he saw her grey eyes. Kitty had never been so happy in all her life. The child honestly believed hers to be the happiness that comes from congenial work. And her editor was so clever and so kind! No one ever smoked in the office now, and there were always roses. And Kitty took them home with her, so that now there was no need to wonder for whom he had bought them.
Then came the inevitable hour. He met her one day with a clouded face and a letter in his hand.
“It’s all over,” he said; “the real original old Aunt Kate is coming back. She’s thedearest old thing, so kind and jolly—but—but—but—whatever shall we do?”
“I can still write stories, I suppose,” said Kitty, but she realised with a gasp that congenial toil would not be quite, quite the same without congenial companionship.
“Yes,” said he, picking up the bunch of red roses, “but—here are your flowers—don’t you know yet that I can’t possibly do without you? In a few months I’m to have the editorship of a new weekly, a much better berth than this. If only you would——”
“Write the correspondence?” said Kitty, brightening; “of course I will. I don’t know what I should do without——”
“I wish,” he interrupted, “that I could think it wasmeyou couldn’t do without.” Her pretty eyes met his over the red roses, and he caught her hands with the flowers in them. “Is it? Oh, say you can’t do without me either. Say it, say it!”
“I—I—don’t want to do without you,” said Kitty at last. He was holding her hands fast, and she was trying, not very earnestly, perhaps, to pull them away. The pair made a pretty picture.
“Oh, Kitty, Kitty, Kitty!” he said softly, and then the door opened, and suddenly, without the least warning, a middle-aged lady became a spectator of the little tableau. The newcomer wore a mantle with beads on it, a black bonnet wherein nodded a violet flower—and beads and flower and bonnet were absolutely familiar to each of the astonished ones now standing consciously with the breadth of the office between them. For in that middle-aged lady the editor recognised Aunt Kate, the pleasant, sensible, companionable woman who for years had written those sympathetic “Answers to Correspondents” in theGirls’ Very Own Friend. And at the same moment Kitty recognised, beyond all possibility of doubt, Aunt Eliza—her own grim, harsh, uncongenial Aunt Eliza.
Kitty cowered—in her frightened soul she cowered. But her little figure drew itself up, and the point of her chin rose a quarter of an inch.
“Aunt Eliza,” she said firmly, “I know you will——”
“Your Aunt Eliza, Kitty?” cried the editor.
“‘Kitty’?” said the aunt.
And now the situation hung all too nicely balanced on the extreme edge of the absolutely impossible. Would this middle-aged lady—an aunt beyond doubt—an aunt who so long had played a doublerôle, assume, now that onerôlemust be chosen, the part of Aunt Eliza the Terrible or of Aunt Kate the Kind? The aunt was dumb. Kitty was dumb. But the editor had his wits about him, and Kate, though shaken, was not absolutely paralysed.
“It’s almost too good to be true,” he said, “thatmyAunt Kate is reallyyourAunt Eliza. Aunt Kate, Kitty and I have just decided that we can’t do without each other. I am so glad that you are the first to wish us joy.”
At his words all the “Kate” in the aunt rose triumphant, trampling down the “Eliza.”
“My dear boy,” she said—and she said it in a voice which Kitty had never heard before—the sound of that voice drew Kitty like a magnet. She did the only possible thing—she put her arms timidly round her aunt’s neck and whispered: “Oh, don’t be Aunt Eliza any more, be Aunt Kate!”
It was Aunt Kate’s arms undoubtedly thatwent round the girl. Certainly not Aunt Eliza’s.
“I will take a walk down Fleet Street,” said the editor discreetly.
Then there were explanations in the office.
“But why,” said Kitty, when all the questions had been asked and answered, “why were you Aunt Eliza to me, and Aunt Kate to him?”
“My dear, one must spoil somebody, and I was determined not to spoilyou; I wanted to save you. All my life was ruined because I was a spoiled child—and because I tried to write. I had such dreams, such ambitions—just like yours, you silly child! But then I was never clever—perhaps you may be—and it all ended in my losing my lover. He married a nice, quiet, domestic girl, and I never made name or fame at all—I never got anything taken but fashion articles—and ‘Answers to Correspondents.’ Now, that’s the whole tale. Don’t mention it again.”
“But you did love me, even when——”
“Of course I did,” said Aunt Kate in the testy tones of Aunt Eliza; “or why should I have bothered at all about whether you were going to be happy or not? Now, Kitty, you’re not to expect me to gush.I’ve forgotten how to be sentimental except on paper.”
“I don’t want to be sentimental,” said Kitty, a little injured, “neither does——”
Here the editor came in.
“You don’t want to be sentimental either,” Kitty went on; “do you—Mr Editor?”
The editor looked a little doubtful.
“I want to be happy, at any rate,” said he, “and I mean to be.”
“And he can’t be happy unless you smile on him. Smile on him, Auntie!” cried a new, radiant Kitty, to whom aunts no longer presented any terrors. “Say ‘Bless you, my children!’ Auntie—do!”
“Get along with your nonsense!” said Aunt Eliza. Or was it Aunt Kate?
They were poor, not with the desperate poverty that has to look on both sides of a penny, but with the decent bearable poverty that must look at a shilling with attention, and with respect at half-a-crown. There was money for the necessities of life, the mother said, but no money to waste. This was what she always tried to say when Maisie came in with rainbow representations of the glories of local “sales” piteous pictures of beautiful things going almost for nothing—things not absolutely needed, but which would “come in useful.” Maisie’s dress was never allowed those touches of cheap finery which would have made it characteristic of her. Her clothes were good, and she had to patch and mend and contrive so much that sometimes it seemed to her as though all her life was going by in the effort to achieve, by adistasteful process, a result which she abhorred. For her artistic sense was too weak to show her how the bright, soft freshness of her tints gained by contrast with the dull greys and browns and drabs that were her mother’s choice—good wearing colours, from which the pink and white of her face rose triumphantly, like a beautiful flower out of a rough calyx.
The house was like Maisie, in that it never seemed to have anything new—none of those bright, picturesque cushions and screens and Japaneseries which she adored through the plate-glass windows of the big local draper. The curtains were of old damask, faded but rich; the furniture was mahogany, old and solid; the carpets were Turkey and Aubusson—patched and darned this last, but still beautiful. Maisie knew all about old oak—she had read herHome Hintsand herGentlewoman’s Guide—but she had no idea that mahogany could be fashionable. None of the photographs of the drawing-rooms of celebrities in her favourite papers were anything like the little sitting-room where her mother sat knitting by the hearth, surrounded by the relics of a house that had been handsome in the ’sixties, when it was her girlhood’shome. Maisie hated it all: the chairs covered in Berlin-wool needlework, the dark, polished surfaces of the tables and bureaux, the tinkling lustres of Bohemian glass, the shining brass trivet on which the toast kept itself warm, the crude colours of the tea-service, the smell of eau-de-Cologne mingling with the faint scent of beeswax and cedar-wood. She would have liked to change the old water-colours in their rubbed gilt frames for dark-mounted autotypes. How should she know that those hideous pigs were Morlands, and that the cow picture was a David Cox. She would have liked Japanese blue transfers instead of the gold-and-white china—old Bristol, by the way, but Maisie knew nothing of Bristol. The regular, sober orderliness of the house chafed and fretted her; the recurrent duties, all dull; the few guests who came to tea. Decent poverty cannot give dinner parties or dances. She visited her school friends, and when she came home again it seemed to her sometimes as though the atmosphere of the place would choke her.
“I want to go out and earn my own living,” she said to her cousin Edward one Sunday afternoon when her mother was resting and he and she were roasting chestnuts on thebars of the dining-room fire. “I’m simply useless here.”
Edward was a second cousin. To him the little house was the ideal home, just as Maisie was—well, not, perhaps, the ideal girl, but the only girl in the world, which comes to much the same thing. But he never told her so: he dared not risk losing the cousin’s place and missing for ever the lover’s.
So, in his anxiety lest she should know how much he cared, he scolded her a good deal. But he took her to picture galleries and tomatinées, and softened her life in a hundred ways that she never noticed. He was only “Poor old Edward,” and he knew it.
“How can you?” he said. “Why, what on earth would Aunt do without you? Here, have this one—it’s a beauty.”
“I ought to have been taught a trade, like other poor girls,” she went on, waving away the roasted chestnut. “Lots of the girls I was at school with are earning as much as a pound a week now—typewriting or painting birthday cards, and some of them are in the Post Office—and I do nothing but drudge away at home. It’s too bad.”
Edward would have given a decent sum at that moment to be inspired with exactly theright thing to say. As it was he looked at her helplessly.
“I don’t understand, I’m afraid,” said he.
“You never do,” she answered crossly. There was a silence in which she felt the growth of a need to justify herself—to herself as well as to him. “Why, don’t you see,” she urged, “it’s my plain duty to go out and earn something. Why, we’re as poor as ever we can be—I haven’t any pocket-money hardly—I can’t even buy presents for people. I have tomakepresents out of odds and ends of old things, instead of buying them, like other girls.”
“I think you make awfully pretty things,” he said; “much prettier than any one can buy.”
“You’re thinking of that handkerchief-case I gave Aunt Emma at Christmas. Why, you silly, it was only a bit of one of mother’s old dresses. I do wish you’d talk to mother about it. I might go out as companion or something.”
The word came before the thought, but the thought was brought by the word and the thought stayed.
That very evening Maisie began to lay siege to her mother’s desired consent.
She put her arguments very neatly, so neatly that it was hard for the mother to oppose them without being betrayed into an attitude that would seem grossly selfish.
She sat looking into the fire, thinking of all the little, unceasing sacrifices that had been her life ever since Maisie had been hers—even the giving up of that treasured silk, her wedding dress, last Christmas, because Maisie wanted something pretty to make Christmas presents out of. She remembered it all; and now this new great sacrifice was called for. She had given up to Maisie everything but her taste in dress, and now it seemed that she was desired to give up even Maisie herself. But the other sacrifices had been for Maisie’s good or for her pleasure. Would this one be for either?
She saw her little girl alone among strangers, snubbed, looked down upon, a sort of upper servant with none of a servant’s privileges; she nerved herself to what was always to her an almost unbearable effort. Her heart was beating and her hands trembling as she said: “My dear, it’s quite impossible; I couldn’t possibly allow it.”
“I must say I don’t see why,” said Maisie, with tears in her voice.
Her mother dropped the mass of fleecy white wool and the clinking knitting needles and grasped the arms of her chair intensely. Her eyes behind the spectacles clouded with tears. It seemed to her that her child should surely understand the agony it was to her mother to refuse her anything.
“I could earn money for you—it’s not myself I’m thinking about,” the girl went on; the half-lie came out quite without her conscious volition. “I wish you didn’t always think I do everything for selfish reasons.”
“I don’t, my dear,” said the mother feebly.
“I’m sure it’s my duty,” Maisie went on, with more tears than ever in her voice. “I’m eighteen, and I ought to be earning something, instead of being a burden to you.”
The mother looked hopelessly into the fire. She had always tried to explain things to Maisie; how was it that Maisie never understood?
“I’m sure,” said Maisie, echoing her mother’s thought, “I always try to tell you how I think about things, and you never seem to understand. Of course, I won’t go if you wish it, but Idothink——”
She left the room in tears, and the motherremained to torment herself with the eternal questions, What had she done wrong? Why was Maisie not contented? What could she do to please her? Would nothing please her but the things that were not for her good—smart clothes, change, novelty? How could she bear her life if Maisie was not pleased?
She went down to supper shivering with misery and apprehension. What a meal it would be with Maisie cold and aloof, polite and indifferent! But Maisie was cheerful, gay almost, and her mother felt a passion of gratitude to her daughter for not being sulky or unapproachable. Maisie, however, was only stepping back to jump the better.
The same scene, with intenser variations, was played about twice a week till the girl got her way, as she always did in the end, except in the matter of cheap finery. Taste in dress was as vital to the mother as her religion. Then, through the influence of an old governess of her mother’s, Maisie got her wish. She was to go as companion to an old lady, the mother of Lady Yalding, and she was to live at Yalding Towers. Here was splendour—here would be life, incident, opportunity! For her reading had sometimes strayed fromHome Hintsto theFamily Herald, and she knew exactly what are the chances of romance to a humble companion in the family of a lady of title.
And now Maisie’s mother gave way to her, finally and completely, even on the question of dress. The old wardrobe was ransacked to find materials to fit her out with clothes for her new venture. It was a beautiful time for Maisie. New things, and old things made to look as good as new, or better. It was like having a trousseau. The mother lavished on her child every inch of the old lace, every one of the treasured trinkets—even the little old locket that had been the dead husband’s first love-gift.
And Maisie, in the flutter of her excitement and anticipation, was loving and tender and charming, and the mother had her reward.
Edward opposed a stolid and stony disapproval to all the new enthusiasm. He said little because he feared to say too much.
“Poor little Maisie!” he said. “You’ll soon find out that you didn’t know when you were well off.”
“Edward, I hate you,” said Maisie, and she thought she did.
But when all the beautiful new clothes were packed and her cab was at the door,some sense of what she was leaving did come to the girl, and she flung her arms round her mother in an embrace such as she had never given in her life.
“I don’t want to go,” she cried. “Mummy darling, I’ve been a little beast about it. I won’t go if you say you’d rather not. Shall I send the cab away? I will if you say so, my own dear old Mummy!”
Maisie’s mother was not a very wise woman, but she was not fool enough to trust this new softness.
“No, no, dearest,” she said; “go and try your own way. God bless you, my darling! You’ll miss the train if you stay. God bless you, my darling!”
And Maisie went away crying hard through the new veil with the black velvet spots on it; as for the mother—but she was elderly, and plain, and foolishly fond, and her emotions can have but little interest for the readers of romances.
And now Maisie, for the first time, knew the meaning of home. And before she had been at Yalding a week she had learned to analyse home and to give names to its constituents: love, interest, sympathy, liberty—these were some.
At Yalding Towers Maisie was nothing to any one. No one knew or cared one single little bit of a straw whether she was unhappy or no. Her time was filled, and overfilled, by the attentions exacted by an old, eccentric, and very disagreeable lady. When she put on, for the first evening, the least pretty of the pretty dresses she had brought with her, the old lady looked at her with a disapproval almost rising to repulsion, and said: “I expect you to wear black; and a linen collar and cuffs.”
So another black dress had to be ordered from home, and all the pretty, dainty things lay creasing themselves with disuse in the ample drawers and cupboards of her vast, dreary bedroom.
Her employer was exacting and irritable. When on the third day Maisie broke into tears under the constant flood of nagging, the old lady told her to go away and not to come back till she could control her temper.
“I’ll come back when you send for me, and not before, you hateful old thing!” said Maisie to herself.
And she sat down in her fireless bedroom and wrote a long letter to her mother, saying how happy she felt, and how kind every onewas, and what a lovely and altogether desirable place was Yalding Towers. Who shall say whether pride or love, or both, dictated that letter?
When her employer did send for her, it was to tell her, very sharply, that one more such exhibition of sullenness would cost her her situation. So she had to learn to school herself. And she did it. But the learning was hard, very hard, and in the learning she grew thinner, and some of the pretty pink in her cheeks faded away.
Lady Yalding, when she swept in, in beautiful dream-dresses, always spoke to the companion quite kindly and nicely and pleasantly, but there were none of those invitations to come into the drawing-room after dinner which theFamily Heraldhad led her to expect. Lady Yalding was always charming to every one, and Maisie tortured herself with the thought that it was only because she had no opportunity to explain herself that Lady Yalding failed to see how very much out of the common she was. She read Ruskin industriously, and once she left her own book of Browning selections that Edward had given her in the conservatory. She imagined Lady Yalding returning it toher with, “So, are you fond of poetry?” or, “It’s delightful to find that you are a lover of Browning!” But the book was brought back to her by a footman, and the old lady lectured her for leaving her rubbish littering about.
But towards Christmas a change came. Maisie had hoped—more intensely than she had ever in her life hoped for anything—for a few days’ grace, for a sight of her mother, and the mahogany, and the damask curtains, and—yes—of Edward. But the old lady, who really was exceptionally horrid, wondered how she could ask for a holiday when she had only been in her situation six weeks.
Then the old lady went off at half an hour’s notice to spend Christmas with her other daughter—Maisie would have suspected a “row” if Lady Yalding had been a shade less charming—and the girl was left. Thus it happened that Lord Yalding’s brother lounged into Lady Yalding’s room one day, and said: “Who’s the piteous black mouse you’ve tamed?”
“I beg your pardon, Jim?” said Lady Yalding.
“The crushed apple-blossom in a blackfrock—one meets her about the corridors. Gloomy sight. Chestnut hair. Princess-in-exile sort of look.”
“Oh,that! It’s mother’s companion.”
“Poor little devil!” said the Honourable James. “What does she do now the cat’s away? I beg your pardon—my mind was running on mice.”
“Do? I don’t know,” said Lady Yalding a little guiltily. “She’s a good, quiet little thing—literary tastes, reads Browning, and all that sort of rot. She’s all right.”
“Why don’t you give her a show? She’d take the shine out of some of the girls here if you had her dressed.”
“My dear Jim,” Lady Yalding said, “she’s all right as she is. What’s the good of turning the child’s head and giving her notions out of her proper station?”
“If I were that child I’d like to have a little bit of a fling just for once. The poor little rat looks starved, as though it hadn’t laughed for a year. Then it’s Christmas—peace and goodwill, and all that, don’t you know. If I were you I’d ask her down a bit——”
Lady Yalding thought—a thing she rarely did.
“Well,” she said, “itispretty slow for her, I suppose. I’ll send her home to her people.”
“On Christmas Eve? Fog and frost, and the trains all anyhow? Fanny, Fanny!”
“Oh, very well. We’ll have her down, and go the whole hog. Only don’t make a fool of the child, Jim; she’s a good little thing.”
And that was how the dream-dressed Lady Yalding came to sweep into the old lady’s sitting-room—it was as full of mahogany, by the way, as Maisie’s home in Lewisham—and spoke so kindly of Maisie’s loneliness, that the girl could have fallen down and worshipped at her Paris shoes.
When Maisie, in the figured lavender satin that had been her mother’s, swept across the great hall on the arm of the Honourable James, she felt that this indeed was life. Here was the great world with its infinite possibilities.
“How did you get on?” his sister-in-law asked him later.
“Oh, it’s quite a decent sort of little mouse,” he said. “Wants to make sure you see how cultivated it is, quotes poetry—what?—and talks about art. It’s a littletouching and all that to see how busy it is putting all its poor little stock in the tiny shop-window.”
Maisie, alone in her room, was walking up and down, trailing the lavender satin, recalling with kindled eyes and red-rose cheeks every word, every look of her cavalier. How kindly he had spoken, yet how deferentially; how he had looked, how he had smiled! At dinner she supposed it was his business to talk to her. But afterwards, when she was sitting, a little forlornly and apart from the noisy chatter of the bright-plumaged house-party, how he had come straight over to her directly the gentlemen came into the drawing-room! And she felt that she had not been wanting to herself on so great an occasion.
“IknowI talked well. I’m certain he saw directly that I wasn’t a silly idiot.”
She lay long awake, and, as the men trooped up the stairs, she tried to fancy that she could already distinguish his footsteps.
The letter she wrote to her mother next day was, compared to those other lying letters, as a lit chandelier to a stable-lantern. And the mother knew the difference.
“Poor darling!” she thought. “She musthave been very miserable all this time. But she’s happy now, God bless her!”
By the week’s end, every thought, every dream, every hope of Maisie’s life was centred in the Honourable James; her tenderness, her ambition turned towards him as flowers to the sun.
And her happiness lighted a thousand little candles all around her. No one could see the candles, of course, but every one saw the radiant illumination of her beauty. And the other men of the house-party saw it too. Even Lord Yalding distinguished her by asking whether she had read some horrid book about earthworms.
“You’re making a fool of that girl, Jim,” said Lady Yalding. “I really think it’s too bad.”
“My good Fanny, don’t be an adorable idiot! I’m only trying to give the poor little duffer a good time. There’s nothing else to do. The other girls really are—now, you know they are, Fanny—between ourselves——”
“They’re all duty people, of course,” she said. “Well, only do be careful.”
He was careful. He subdued his impulses to tenderness and gentle raillery. He talkedseriously to little Miss Mouse, and presently he found that she was seriously talking to him—telling him, for instance, how she wrote poetry, and how she longed to show it to some one and ask whether it really was so bad as she sometimes feared.
What could he do but beg her to show it to him? But there he pulled himself up short.
“There’s skating to-morrow. We’re going to drive over to Dansent. Would you like to come?”
Her grey eyes looked up quickly, and the long lashes drooped over them. She had read of that trick in a book, and for the life of him he could not help knowing it. Her answer to his question came from a book, too, though it also came from her heart.
“Ah,” she said, “you know!”
Then the Honourable James was honestly frightened. Next day he had a telegram, and departed abruptly. And as abruptly the old lady returned.
And now Maisie had a secret joy to feed on—a manna to sustain her in the wilderness of her tiresome life. She thought ofhim. He loved her; she was certain of it.Miss Mouse could imagine no reason but love for the kindness he had shown her. He had gone away without a word, but that was for some good reason. Probably he had gone to confess to his mother how he had given his whole heart to a penniless orphan—well, she was half an orphan, anyway. But the days slipped by and he did not come back. All that bright time at Christmas had faded like a picture from a magic-lantern when the slide is covered. Lady Yalding was quite nice and kind, but she left Maisie to the work Maisie was paid for.
Maisie’s mother perceived, through Maisie’s studied accounts of her happiness, more than a glimpse of the reality.
Then, at last, when the days grew unbearable, Maisie wrote to him, a prim little letter with agitated heart-beats between the lines, where he, being no fool, did not fail to find them. Yet he had to answer the letter. He did it briefly.