Chapter Seven.An Invitation.The summer was gone; autumn itself was almost giving place to winter. Ella St Quentin looked out of the window one morning as she finished dressing, and shivered as she saw the grass all silvered over, faintly gleaming in the cold thin sunshine.“How freezing it seems!” she said to herself. “I hate winter, especially in the country. I wish—if it weren’t for that old wretch I really think I would write to auntie and ask her to invite me for a week or two’s visit. It can’t be so cold, and certainly not so dull, at Bath as here. I do think I deserve a little fun—if it were even the chance of some shopping—after these last three or four months. To think how I’ve practised and bored at French and German—not that I dislike my lessons after all,” and she smiled a little at the consciousness thathadshe done so it would indeed have been a case of “twenty not making him drink.”“These teachers are really very good ones, and I don’t dislike reading English with Ermine, either. If she were a teacher and not my sister, I could really get very good friends with her. But all the same—whata different life it is from what I expected. If auntie could see me in this horrid rough frock that makes me look as if I had no waist at all,” and Ella impatiently tugged at the jacket of the very substantial sailor serge which Madelene had ordered for the cold weather, “and in this poky room.”For Ella was still “in the nursery.” She was not to inhabit her permanent room till the winter was over, for the chimney had been found to smoke, and there was a leakage from the roof which had left the wall damp. And Ella had caught a slight cold, thanks to her thin boots, which had alarmed her father quite unreasonably. So the decree had gone forth that in her present cosy quarters she was to remain till the milder weather returned, which gave her the delight of another grievance.As she stood gazing out at the wintry landscape which to less prejudiced eyes would have been full of its own beauty, the prayers bell rang. Ella started—her unpunctuality had been a frequent cause of annoyance for several weeks after her arrival at Coombesthorpe, but, perverse as she was, the girl was neither so stupid nor so small-minded as to persist in opposition when she distinctly saw that she was in the wrong. So this short-coming had to a great extent been mastered.She tugged at her belt, gave a parting pat to her hair, saying to herself as she caught sight of her reflection in the glass, “It certainly takes much less time to dress as I do now than in the old days,” and flew along the passages and down stairs just in time to avoid a collision with Mr Barnes, as, heading his underlings, he politely followed the long file of women-servants into the library, where Colonel St Quentin always read prayers.Ella took her place by the window; outside, a cheery red-breasted robin was hopping about on the gravel, and the sunshine, which was gathering strength, fell in a bright ray just where the little fellow stood. It is to be feared that much more of her attention was given to the bird than to her father’s voice.“What a little duck he is,” she exclaimed, as soon as prayers were over. “See, Madelene—” and as her elder sister came forward with ready response, Ella’s face lighted up with pleasure. The whole world seemed brighter to her; so impressionable and variable was she.“Yes,” said Miss St Quentin, “he is a dear. We can hardly help fancying it is always the same robin. For ever since Ermine and I were quite little there is one to be seen every winter on this terrace. It is here we have the birds’ Christmas tree, Ella—one of those over there. It is so pretty to see them. There are so many nice things in the country in winter—I really do not know sometimes which I like the best—summer or winter.”Ella felt a little pang of self-reproach—she remembered how five minutes before she had been grumbling up in her own room.“Madelene must be much nicer and better than I am in some ways,” she thought to herself; “perhaps I would have been like her if they had kept me with them, or had me back some years ago,” and the reflection hardened her again, just as the softer thought was about to blossom.At that moment Colonel St Quentin’s voice was heard from the adjoining dining-room.“Breakfast is ready and the letters have come,” he said.“Nothing for me?” said Ermine; “what are yours, Maddie?”“One from Flora at Cannes,” said Miss St Quentin, “two or three answers to the advertisement for a laundry-maid, and—oh, here’s something more interesting. The Belvoirs are giving a dance—on the 20th. Here’s the card,” and she tossed it over to Ermine, “and there’s a note from Mrs Belvoir, too, ‘to make sure of us,’ she says.”“Colonel and the Misses St Quentin,” murmured Ermine, “that means—I suppose—” and she looked up hesitatingly at Madelene.“Oh,” said Madelene, “it means what you choose, in the country. It isn’t like London, where one has to calculate the inches of standing and breathing space for each guest.”“It means of course,” said her father, “such of the Misses St Quentin as are—‘out.’” He pronounced the last word with a good deal of emphasis, then turned to his coffee and his own letters as if the question were settled.Ella had not lost a word. A flush of colour had come to her cheeks and a brightness to her eyes on first hearing her sister’s announcement.“Theycan’tmean not to take me,” she said to herself. “Just at Christmas too—why, girls who aren’t a bit out go to Christmas dances.”And Madelene, for her part, was wishing more devoutly than she had ever wished concerning a thing of the kind in her life, that she had not been so impulsive as to mention the invitation in her younger sister’s hearing.“I only long for her to go,” she said to Ermine when they were alone. “I’d give anything if papa would let her. And I don’t see that it could do any harm—a Christmas dance is different, and really she has been good about her lessons, especially about her practising. Three wouldn’t be too many, to such old friends.”“Not to go to the ball,” Ermine replied. “But I fancy they will want us to stay for a day or two. You see Mrs Belvoir says she will come over to make further arrangements. And three would be too many to go to stay. But Maddie, I—”“No. I know what you’re going to say, and you’re not to say it,” Madelene interrupted. “You are not to be the one to stay at home. You’re ever so much younger than I—”“One year, eleven months and a day,” said Ermine. “Twenty years—a hundred would come nearer it,” said Madelene. “I was born old and circumstances have not rejuvenated me. No—if we can get papa to agree to let Ella go,Ishall stay at home. It stands to reason. I am getting to an age when I should not be expected to go on dancing.”“Ah, well—we needn’t quarrel about it yet,” said Ermine lightly. “I am only afraid the occasion will not arise, and that papa will be inexorable. There was something far from propitious in the accent he put on that ‘out’ this morning.”She was right; inexorable he proved. Yet the sisters went about it diplomatically enough. They said very little at first, and were careful not to fret the thing into a sore from the start, as is so often done, and for a day or two they congratulated themselves that their gently suggested arguments had carried weight. But when the following week Mrs Belvoir wrote to say she was driving over to settle about the day they would come, and how many nights they would stay, and to discuss the whole programme—then the bolt fell.“Ella go? No, most certainly not,” said Colonel St Quentin. “I never thought of such a thing. I hope you haven’t been putting anything of the kind into her head?”“We have not mentioned it to her since the morning when the first note came,” said Madelene. “That morning unluckily I spoke of it before her.”“Why should you say ‘unluckily’? It is absurd to treat her in that way,” said her father. “There should be and there must be no question raised, in the faintest way even, of anything of the kind for her. She is not yet eighteen—why, Ermine never went out at all till she was nineteen—”“That was unusual however papa,” Miss St Quentin ventured to say.“Well, what can be more unusual than Ella’s case?Itcalls for unusual treatment certainly. She has been most injudiciously brought up, I see it more and more clearly. A life of dependence—dependence on her own exertions not improbably—”“Oh, papa,” murmured Madelene reproachfully—“for which she is about as fit as—as that kitten of yours,” contemptuously indicating Ermine’s Persian cat, who had long left all kittenishness behind it, and was sleeping on the hearth-rug in calm placidity.“Tartuffe isscarcelya kitten now, papa,” Ermine could not resist interrupting.“Ermine!” said Madelene in a tone of remonstrance.“And,” pursued Colonel St Quentin unmoved, “just as the silly child is settling down a little, you would go and spoil it all by stuffing her head with waltzing and admiration. No, no—I am surprised at you, Madelene, I really am. And if there were no other objection, there’s her health. You are afraid of her catching cold again if she changes her bedroom, and yet you would propose taking her off to a strange house, unaired beds possibly, and exposing her to the alternate heat and chills of a ball-room, and—”Colonel St Quentin was working himself up to thorough unreasonableness.“We won’t say any more about it, papa,” said Madelene, decidedly. “We have saidnothingto Ella, so you really needn’t be vexed about it.”She refrained from adding, as she might have done, that the scare about Ella’s health had entirely originated with himself, and she was wise in so doing. What human being, man, woman or child, was ever rendered more amenable to reason by being “put in the wrong?”“I mind it principally, of course,” she said to Ermine, “because itwillseem to her that it is our doing—negatively at least. She will think that if we had begged papa to let her go he would have given in. And I haven’t, in the faintest degree, let her think that we disagree with him about it. It would alienate her still more from him, and, besides, it would be disloyal to papa.”“And, besides,” added Ermine, “I hardly like to say so, but I doubt if Ella would believe our protestations. There is an element of suspiciousness in her character, which I don’t at all like in so young a person, and quite lately she has seemed to me to be wrapping herself up in it more and more.”“Yes, she has been very cold and stand-off to us lately,” Madelene agreed, “ever since that unlucky morning when I blurted out about the Belvoirs’ dance.”“She would have had to hear about it sooner or later,” said Ermine. “I don’t see that it would have made much difference.”“We might have managed it more diplomatically. We might have told her we were going away for a day or two, and mentioned that there was to be a dance, incidentally,” said Miss St Quentin.Ermine looked up at her, half amused, half distressed.“My dear Maddie,” she said. “I do think you’ve got Ella on the brain. You mustn’t give yourself such a lot of trouble about her—beating about the bush and worrying lest she should be put out. It will become a kind of slavery. I almost feel inclined to speak to papa about it fromyourpoint of view.”“No, no, you must not, Ermie,” her sister replied. “Papa is already irritated on the subject. It will come right in time, I dare say. I wish Aunt Anna were at home. She might have had some influence with papa about this dance. I do think he is making a mistake—I must tell Mélanie,” she went on, “that she need not do any more about the frock we were planning for Ella.”“It’s half made,” said Ermine.“Well, she must turn it into a dinner-dress. But there is no need for Ella to know about it at present. It would only tantalise her, poor little thing. When will Aunt Anna be back, Ermine? You heard from her last.”“A few days before Christmas—that was all she said,” Ermine replied, “Philip will be coming about the same time. I wonder what papa wants us to do at Christmas, Maddie. Shall we go to Cheynesacre, do you think, or will they come to us?”“I don’t know. If papa remains in his present mood, I should say neither,” Miss St Quentin replied with some asperity. “He would probably dislike the idea of Ella’s going there with us, and a party here would be as bad. And if he proposed such a thing as our going without her—well—I should certainly refuse. One must make a stand somewhere. How can he expect the child to get to love us?”“Madelene is making quite a personal grievance of it,” thought Ermine. “I am much more concerned for her than for Ella,”—“It is very tiresome that this should have happened just now,” she said aloud. “For one thing, I did so want Philip to see everything harmonious when he came back.”“So did I,” Madelene replied. “That is just another vexation.”The subject of the Manor dance was never named in Ella’s presence, but she was quick enough to see that it was in contemplation for her sisters.“Will they really go so far as to leave me all alone?” she said to herself. “It will be a scandal if they do. If I am to be distinctly treated in this way, ignored as if I were about seven years old—they should at least be consistent and get a governess to keep me company when they go off and leave me alone. As if either ofthemwas ever treated so at my age! What can Madelene want to go to a dance for—I am sure I wouldn’t if I were as old as she—and really, sometimes lately since she has had this cross fit, she has looked thirty.”It was almost true. Poor Madelene’s real distress of mind at the failure of all her hopes with regard to her half-sister, had preyed upon her. She was one of those much-to-be-pitied people who have but little spontaneous power of expressing their deeper feelings; indeed the more she felt the less she showed it, though her very silence and apparent indifference told their own tale to those who knew her well. Ermine had good reason for feeling at the present juncture much more concern for Madelene than for Ella.A week or two passed, uncomfortably enough. The weather, as in England is often the case, seemed to aggravate the dreary uneasiness of the mental atmosphere at Coombesthorpe. It rained—a steady, pitiless winter rain—almost incessantly for a week. There was no possibility of walking or driving, and more than once Ella found herself seriously picturing in her own mind the life she might now, had she exercised some diplomacy, have been leading with Mr and Mrs Burton, with actual regret.“At worst, I might have gone out sometimes. In a town however it rains one can always get out alittle—and here,”—and she moved away with a gesture of something approaching despair, as her glance fell on the gravel paths sodden with rain, on the dripping trees, on the stretch of park beyond the garden, where faint mists or clouds—it was difficult to say which—hid the horizon, and made one feel as if shut in in a universe of hopeless grey.In those days Ermine, it must be owned, was barely kind, certainly not sympathetic towards the girl. She was sorry for her in her heart, but this very feeling caused a certain irritation, for Ermine’s nature was more prejudiced than Madelene’s; she was vehement in her affections, and where these were strongly engaged, she was apt to be one-sided. In one direction the two younger Misses St Quentin got on well together—Ella had shown herself from the first an apt and interested pupil, and about this time Ermine, rather to her surprise, remarked a distinct increase in her zeal and attention.“This composition of yours is really very good—very good indeed, Ella,” she said one morning when she had been looking over an essay of her young sister’s, compiled from notes of various writers on a certain period of history. “At your age I could not have done nearly so well.”Ella’s eyes flashed, and there was a peculiar expression about her mouth—there was however a distinct mingling of satisfaction in her tone as she replied, though coldly.“I am glad you approve of it. I am glad that you think it above the average of what girls of my age can do.”“Decidedly,” said Ermine warmly. But as she glanced at Ella, she felt chilled again by the hard look on the round young face. She would have felt more than chilled had she read the thoughts at that moment passing through the girl’s brain.“Yes,” she was saying to herself, “I am clever, and they can’t deny it. I shall learn all I can, and then, if this goes on, I shall run away and become a governess. I should manage it somehow, I am sure.” Two days later, as they were going to bed one evening, Madelene called her for a moment into her own room.“Ella,” she said, “Ermine and I are going away from home for a few days. We are going to the Belvoirs; you may remember our speaking of the invitation one morning when it came. Mrs Belvoir was here the other day, but you were out. They are nice people, and they give nice dances. When—when you are out I shall like you to go there.”“Then they didn’t invite me this time?” asked Ella drily.“They invited ‘the Misses St Quentin,’” Madelene replied. “That meant what we liked to decide ourselves of course. It does not rest with outsiders to determine if a girl is out or not.”“Of course not,” said Ella. “Then,” she went on, “will you tell me what you wish me to do while you are away? Am I to be quite alone with Mrs Green (the housekeeper) as chaperon?”“No,” her sister replied, irritated by the scarcely veiled impertinence of Ella’s tone, though a moment before she had been longing to express to her some of her own feeling on the matter, “no, certainly not. I am writing to ask Miss Harter, Mrs Hewitt’s sister, whom you have seen at Waire, to come to stay with you.”“Oh, indeed,” said Ella. Miss Harter was a pleasant, intelligent woman of thirty, whom Ella had found amusing and agreeable enough once or twice when she had met her, though it now suited her to describe her to herself as “a fusty old maid.”Things both great and small butveryrarely turn out as we expect. Two days before that on which Colonel St Quentin and his two daughters were to leave home he fell ill. His illness was not very serious, but sufficiently so to put his going out of the question. And as he said that the presence of a stranger in the house would be an annoyance to him, Miss Harter’s visit was put off, Ella manifesting livelier satisfaction at this than she had condescended for long to show about anything.“What an incomprehensible girl she is,” said Madelene, as she and Ermine drove away. “I think I must give up trying to make her out.”“I think her present phase is comprehensible enough,” Ermine replied. “She is violently in love with the idea of being a martyr, a suffering saint—no, neither of those expresses it quite. I have it—a Cinderella.”A smile broke slowly over Madelene’s face.“Yes,” she said, “that does express it. And we are the two cruel sisters—step-sisters, not half-sisters—a little poetic licence must here be allowed—going off in triumph to the ball! What a pity we have not got black corkscrew curls, Ermine, and an aigrette of three plumes apiece to appear in to-morrow evening!”
The summer was gone; autumn itself was almost giving place to winter. Ella St Quentin looked out of the window one morning as she finished dressing, and shivered as she saw the grass all silvered over, faintly gleaming in the cold thin sunshine.
“How freezing it seems!” she said to herself. “I hate winter, especially in the country. I wish—if it weren’t for that old wretch I really think I would write to auntie and ask her to invite me for a week or two’s visit. It can’t be so cold, and certainly not so dull, at Bath as here. I do think I deserve a little fun—if it were even the chance of some shopping—after these last three or four months. To think how I’ve practised and bored at French and German—not that I dislike my lessons after all,” and she smiled a little at the consciousness thathadshe done so it would indeed have been a case of “twenty not making him drink.”
“These teachers are really very good ones, and I don’t dislike reading English with Ermine, either. If she were a teacher and not my sister, I could really get very good friends with her. But all the same—whata different life it is from what I expected. If auntie could see me in this horrid rough frock that makes me look as if I had no waist at all,” and Ella impatiently tugged at the jacket of the very substantial sailor serge which Madelene had ordered for the cold weather, “and in this poky room.”
For Ella was still “in the nursery.” She was not to inhabit her permanent room till the winter was over, for the chimney had been found to smoke, and there was a leakage from the roof which had left the wall damp. And Ella had caught a slight cold, thanks to her thin boots, which had alarmed her father quite unreasonably. So the decree had gone forth that in her present cosy quarters she was to remain till the milder weather returned, which gave her the delight of another grievance.
As she stood gazing out at the wintry landscape which to less prejudiced eyes would have been full of its own beauty, the prayers bell rang. Ella started—her unpunctuality had been a frequent cause of annoyance for several weeks after her arrival at Coombesthorpe, but, perverse as she was, the girl was neither so stupid nor so small-minded as to persist in opposition when she distinctly saw that she was in the wrong. So this short-coming had to a great extent been mastered.
She tugged at her belt, gave a parting pat to her hair, saying to herself as she caught sight of her reflection in the glass, “It certainly takes much less time to dress as I do now than in the old days,” and flew along the passages and down stairs just in time to avoid a collision with Mr Barnes, as, heading his underlings, he politely followed the long file of women-servants into the library, where Colonel St Quentin always read prayers.
Ella took her place by the window; outside, a cheery red-breasted robin was hopping about on the gravel, and the sunshine, which was gathering strength, fell in a bright ray just where the little fellow stood. It is to be feared that much more of her attention was given to the bird than to her father’s voice.
“What a little duck he is,” she exclaimed, as soon as prayers were over. “See, Madelene—” and as her elder sister came forward with ready response, Ella’s face lighted up with pleasure. The whole world seemed brighter to her; so impressionable and variable was she.
“Yes,” said Miss St Quentin, “he is a dear. We can hardly help fancying it is always the same robin. For ever since Ermine and I were quite little there is one to be seen every winter on this terrace. It is here we have the birds’ Christmas tree, Ella—one of those over there. It is so pretty to see them. There are so many nice things in the country in winter—I really do not know sometimes which I like the best—summer or winter.”
Ella felt a little pang of self-reproach—she remembered how five minutes before she had been grumbling up in her own room.
“Madelene must be much nicer and better than I am in some ways,” she thought to herself; “perhaps I would have been like her if they had kept me with them, or had me back some years ago,” and the reflection hardened her again, just as the softer thought was about to blossom.
At that moment Colonel St Quentin’s voice was heard from the adjoining dining-room.
“Breakfast is ready and the letters have come,” he said.
“Nothing for me?” said Ermine; “what are yours, Maddie?”
“One from Flora at Cannes,” said Miss St Quentin, “two or three answers to the advertisement for a laundry-maid, and—oh, here’s something more interesting. The Belvoirs are giving a dance—on the 20th. Here’s the card,” and she tossed it over to Ermine, “and there’s a note from Mrs Belvoir, too, ‘to make sure of us,’ she says.”
“Colonel and the Misses St Quentin,” murmured Ermine, “that means—I suppose—” and she looked up hesitatingly at Madelene.
“Oh,” said Madelene, “it means what you choose, in the country. It isn’t like London, where one has to calculate the inches of standing and breathing space for each guest.”
“It means of course,” said her father, “such of the Misses St Quentin as are—‘out.’” He pronounced the last word with a good deal of emphasis, then turned to his coffee and his own letters as if the question were settled.
Ella had not lost a word. A flush of colour had come to her cheeks and a brightness to her eyes on first hearing her sister’s announcement.
“Theycan’tmean not to take me,” she said to herself. “Just at Christmas too—why, girls who aren’t a bit out go to Christmas dances.”
And Madelene, for her part, was wishing more devoutly than she had ever wished concerning a thing of the kind in her life, that she had not been so impulsive as to mention the invitation in her younger sister’s hearing.
“I only long for her to go,” she said to Ermine when they were alone. “I’d give anything if papa would let her. And I don’t see that it could do any harm—a Christmas dance is different, and really she has been good about her lessons, especially about her practising. Three wouldn’t be too many, to such old friends.”
“Not to go to the ball,” Ermine replied. “But I fancy they will want us to stay for a day or two. You see Mrs Belvoir says she will come over to make further arrangements. And three would be too many to go to stay. But Maddie, I—”
“No. I know what you’re going to say, and you’re not to say it,” Madelene interrupted. “You are not to be the one to stay at home. You’re ever so much younger than I—”
“One year, eleven months and a day,” said Ermine. “Twenty years—a hundred would come nearer it,” said Madelene. “I was born old and circumstances have not rejuvenated me. No—if we can get papa to agree to let Ella go,Ishall stay at home. It stands to reason. I am getting to an age when I should not be expected to go on dancing.”
“Ah, well—we needn’t quarrel about it yet,” said Ermine lightly. “I am only afraid the occasion will not arise, and that papa will be inexorable. There was something far from propitious in the accent he put on that ‘out’ this morning.”
She was right; inexorable he proved. Yet the sisters went about it diplomatically enough. They said very little at first, and were careful not to fret the thing into a sore from the start, as is so often done, and for a day or two they congratulated themselves that their gently suggested arguments had carried weight. But when the following week Mrs Belvoir wrote to say she was driving over to settle about the day they would come, and how many nights they would stay, and to discuss the whole programme—then the bolt fell.
“Ella go? No, most certainly not,” said Colonel St Quentin. “I never thought of such a thing. I hope you haven’t been putting anything of the kind into her head?”
“We have not mentioned it to her since the morning when the first note came,” said Madelene. “That morning unluckily I spoke of it before her.”
“Why should you say ‘unluckily’? It is absurd to treat her in that way,” said her father. “There should be and there must be no question raised, in the faintest way even, of anything of the kind for her. She is not yet eighteen—why, Ermine never went out at all till she was nineteen—”
“That was unusual however papa,” Miss St Quentin ventured to say.
“Well, what can be more unusual than Ella’s case?Itcalls for unusual treatment certainly. She has been most injudiciously brought up, I see it more and more clearly. A life of dependence—dependence on her own exertions not improbably—”
“Oh, papa,” murmured Madelene reproachfully—“for which she is about as fit as—as that kitten of yours,” contemptuously indicating Ermine’s Persian cat, who had long left all kittenishness behind it, and was sleeping on the hearth-rug in calm placidity.
“Tartuffe isscarcelya kitten now, papa,” Ermine could not resist interrupting.
“Ermine!” said Madelene in a tone of remonstrance.
“And,” pursued Colonel St Quentin unmoved, “just as the silly child is settling down a little, you would go and spoil it all by stuffing her head with waltzing and admiration. No, no—I am surprised at you, Madelene, I really am. And if there were no other objection, there’s her health. You are afraid of her catching cold again if she changes her bedroom, and yet you would propose taking her off to a strange house, unaired beds possibly, and exposing her to the alternate heat and chills of a ball-room, and—”
Colonel St Quentin was working himself up to thorough unreasonableness.
“We won’t say any more about it, papa,” said Madelene, decidedly. “We have saidnothingto Ella, so you really needn’t be vexed about it.”
She refrained from adding, as she might have done, that the scare about Ella’s health had entirely originated with himself, and she was wise in so doing. What human being, man, woman or child, was ever rendered more amenable to reason by being “put in the wrong?”
“I mind it principally, of course,” she said to Ermine, “because itwillseem to her that it is our doing—negatively at least. She will think that if we had begged papa to let her go he would have given in. And I haven’t, in the faintest degree, let her think that we disagree with him about it. It would alienate her still more from him, and, besides, it would be disloyal to papa.”
“And, besides,” added Ermine, “I hardly like to say so, but I doubt if Ella would believe our protestations. There is an element of suspiciousness in her character, which I don’t at all like in so young a person, and quite lately she has seemed to me to be wrapping herself up in it more and more.”
“Yes, she has been very cold and stand-off to us lately,” Madelene agreed, “ever since that unlucky morning when I blurted out about the Belvoirs’ dance.”
“She would have had to hear about it sooner or later,” said Ermine. “I don’t see that it would have made much difference.”
“We might have managed it more diplomatically. We might have told her we were going away for a day or two, and mentioned that there was to be a dance, incidentally,” said Miss St Quentin.
Ermine looked up at her, half amused, half distressed.
“My dear Maddie,” she said. “I do think you’ve got Ella on the brain. You mustn’t give yourself such a lot of trouble about her—beating about the bush and worrying lest she should be put out. It will become a kind of slavery. I almost feel inclined to speak to papa about it fromyourpoint of view.”
“No, no, you must not, Ermie,” her sister replied. “Papa is already irritated on the subject. It will come right in time, I dare say. I wish Aunt Anna were at home. She might have had some influence with papa about this dance. I do think he is making a mistake—I must tell Mélanie,” she went on, “that she need not do any more about the frock we were planning for Ella.”
“It’s half made,” said Ermine.
“Well, she must turn it into a dinner-dress. But there is no need for Ella to know about it at present. It would only tantalise her, poor little thing. When will Aunt Anna be back, Ermine? You heard from her last.”
“A few days before Christmas—that was all she said,” Ermine replied, “Philip will be coming about the same time. I wonder what papa wants us to do at Christmas, Maddie. Shall we go to Cheynesacre, do you think, or will they come to us?”
“I don’t know. If papa remains in his present mood, I should say neither,” Miss St Quentin replied with some asperity. “He would probably dislike the idea of Ella’s going there with us, and a party here would be as bad. And if he proposed such a thing as our going without her—well—I should certainly refuse. One must make a stand somewhere. How can he expect the child to get to love us?”
“Madelene is making quite a personal grievance of it,” thought Ermine. “I am much more concerned for her than for Ella,”—“It is very tiresome that this should have happened just now,” she said aloud. “For one thing, I did so want Philip to see everything harmonious when he came back.”
“So did I,” Madelene replied. “That is just another vexation.”
The subject of the Manor dance was never named in Ella’s presence, but she was quick enough to see that it was in contemplation for her sisters.
“Will they really go so far as to leave me all alone?” she said to herself. “It will be a scandal if they do. If I am to be distinctly treated in this way, ignored as if I were about seven years old—they should at least be consistent and get a governess to keep me company when they go off and leave me alone. As if either ofthemwas ever treated so at my age! What can Madelene want to go to a dance for—I am sure I wouldn’t if I were as old as she—and really, sometimes lately since she has had this cross fit, she has looked thirty.”
It was almost true. Poor Madelene’s real distress of mind at the failure of all her hopes with regard to her half-sister, had preyed upon her. She was one of those much-to-be-pitied people who have but little spontaneous power of expressing their deeper feelings; indeed the more she felt the less she showed it, though her very silence and apparent indifference told their own tale to those who knew her well. Ermine had good reason for feeling at the present juncture much more concern for Madelene than for Ella.
A week or two passed, uncomfortably enough. The weather, as in England is often the case, seemed to aggravate the dreary uneasiness of the mental atmosphere at Coombesthorpe. It rained—a steady, pitiless winter rain—almost incessantly for a week. There was no possibility of walking or driving, and more than once Ella found herself seriously picturing in her own mind the life she might now, had she exercised some diplomacy, have been leading with Mr and Mrs Burton, with actual regret.
“At worst, I might have gone out sometimes. In a town however it rains one can always get out alittle—and here,”—and she moved away with a gesture of something approaching despair, as her glance fell on the gravel paths sodden with rain, on the dripping trees, on the stretch of park beyond the garden, where faint mists or clouds—it was difficult to say which—hid the horizon, and made one feel as if shut in in a universe of hopeless grey.
In those days Ermine, it must be owned, was barely kind, certainly not sympathetic towards the girl. She was sorry for her in her heart, but this very feeling caused a certain irritation, for Ermine’s nature was more prejudiced than Madelene’s; she was vehement in her affections, and where these were strongly engaged, she was apt to be one-sided. In one direction the two younger Misses St Quentin got on well together—Ella had shown herself from the first an apt and interested pupil, and about this time Ermine, rather to her surprise, remarked a distinct increase in her zeal and attention.
“This composition of yours is really very good—very good indeed, Ella,” she said one morning when she had been looking over an essay of her young sister’s, compiled from notes of various writers on a certain period of history. “At your age I could not have done nearly so well.”
Ella’s eyes flashed, and there was a peculiar expression about her mouth—there was however a distinct mingling of satisfaction in her tone as she replied, though coldly.
“I am glad you approve of it. I am glad that you think it above the average of what girls of my age can do.”
“Decidedly,” said Ermine warmly. But as she glanced at Ella, she felt chilled again by the hard look on the round young face. She would have felt more than chilled had she read the thoughts at that moment passing through the girl’s brain.
“Yes,” she was saying to herself, “I am clever, and they can’t deny it. I shall learn all I can, and then, if this goes on, I shall run away and become a governess. I should manage it somehow, I am sure.” Two days later, as they were going to bed one evening, Madelene called her for a moment into her own room.
“Ella,” she said, “Ermine and I are going away from home for a few days. We are going to the Belvoirs; you may remember our speaking of the invitation one morning when it came. Mrs Belvoir was here the other day, but you were out. They are nice people, and they give nice dances. When—when you are out I shall like you to go there.”
“Then they didn’t invite me this time?” asked Ella drily.
“They invited ‘the Misses St Quentin,’” Madelene replied. “That meant what we liked to decide ourselves of course. It does not rest with outsiders to determine if a girl is out or not.”
“Of course not,” said Ella. “Then,” she went on, “will you tell me what you wish me to do while you are away? Am I to be quite alone with Mrs Green (the housekeeper) as chaperon?”
“No,” her sister replied, irritated by the scarcely veiled impertinence of Ella’s tone, though a moment before she had been longing to express to her some of her own feeling on the matter, “no, certainly not. I am writing to ask Miss Harter, Mrs Hewitt’s sister, whom you have seen at Waire, to come to stay with you.”
“Oh, indeed,” said Ella. Miss Harter was a pleasant, intelligent woman of thirty, whom Ella had found amusing and agreeable enough once or twice when she had met her, though it now suited her to describe her to herself as “a fusty old maid.”
Things both great and small butveryrarely turn out as we expect. Two days before that on which Colonel St Quentin and his two daughters were to leave home he fell ill. His illness was not very serious, but sufficiently so to put his going out of the question. And as he said that the presence of a stranger in the house would be an annoyance to him, Miss Harter’s visit was put off, Ella manifesting livelier satisfaction at this than she had condescended for long to show about anything.
“What an incomprehensible girl she is,” said Madelene, as she and Ermine drove away. “I think I must give up trying to make her out.”
“I think her present phase is comprehensible enough,” Ermine replied. “She is violently in love with the idea of being a martyr, a suffering saint—no, neither of those expresses it quite. I have it—a Cinderella.”
A smile broke slowly over Madelene’s face.
“Yes,” she said, “that does express it. And we are the two cruel sisters—step-sisters, not half-sisters—a little poetic licence must here be allowed—going off in triumph to the ball! What a pity we have not got black corkscrew curls, Ermine, and an aigrette of three plumes apiece to appear in to-morrow evening!”
Chapter Eight.Left Behind.Ella spent the afternoon of her sisters’ departure in praiseworthy fashion. She acted up that is to say to therôle, she had chosen to adopt. She prepared her lessons perfectly, she practised the most uninteresting of her piano exercises for an hour and a half; then she went up to her own room and looked out her oldest and shabbiest clothes, to see if she could not find anything in want of repair among them. It was not easy to do so. Stevens, who was an excellent needlewoman, kept Ella’s things by Madelene’s directions in perfect order, and it took some hunting on the girl’s part, before she succeeded in finding a stocking or two with incipient holes, or a skirt which looked as if it would not be the worse for a new braid round the edge.On these she set to work, huddling herself up in shawl, for it was very cold, and sitting on the straightest-backed and hardest chair in her room.“I wish they would give me an allowance for my clothes, however small,” she said to herself. “I could save out of it, I am sure, for I could dress much more plainly than I do even, which would certainly not distress my sisters. And I would have a right to what I saved in that way, surely. Every child can claim food and clothing from its parents till it is of age,” and she smiled bitterly. “Perhaps if I can make Madelene see that it would cost less to give me a small allowance, I may persuade her to make papa agree to it.”Just then her meditations were interrupted by a knock at the door, and old Hester, the head housemaid, who had been deputed by Madelene to take care of Ella, so far as her material comforts were concerned, came in.“Miss Ella,” she exclaimed, “whatever are you about? Sitting up here without a fire when it’s as cold as cold. Wouldn’t the Colonel be in a taking if he knew! You could have had a fire lighted if you’d only said the word. And there’s the library, and the little drawing-room as bright and cheery as can be, at your service.”“I am busy working, thank you, Hester,” Ella replied primly. “I could not take work like this down stairs.”She did not resent Hester’s reproaches, for the housemaid was an old servant, who had been at Coombesthorpe during the life of Ella’s mother, and was much attached to her.Hester looked at what Ella was sewing.“Darning stockings,” she exclaimed. “Now upon my word, I do call that too bad of Stevens. Not but what it’s a very right thing for a young lady, be she who she may, to know how to turn her hand to darning a stocking, but you’ve your studies, my dear, and other things to see to, and—”“It’s—it’s not exactly Stevens’ fault, Hester,” said Ella, too honest to leave Hester under such a mistaken idea. “She does mend all my things; it is not often she overlooks a hole. But I prefer to do more myself, and I want to accustom myself to going without fires and little things like that, for there is no knowing how I may be placed some day, and I want to be independent.”Hester looked at her in surprise and perplexity. She knew that the second wife had been portionless, and she knew too, though vaguely, that Coombesthorpe and the bulk of the family revenues had come from the mother of the two elder daughters—but she could not believe that they would ever allow their half-sister to realise this practically in any painful way.“We none of us know how we may be placed any day for that matter, Miss Ella, my dear. The best of us is in God’s hands and subject to His will, and even if it seems hard we must bow to it. But—you’ve a good home and kind friends—it’s a sort of tempting of Providence like, for you to speak that way.”She looked at Ella half-inquiringly as she spoke; she wondered how much “the child,” as she mentally called her, knew. “They might have left her in her innocence a bit,” she said to herself half indignantly. On her side Ella was struck by Hester’s tone.“She speaks almost as she might if I had been anadoptedchild, with no real right here,” she said to herself. “It just shows—”“And of course, Hester,” she replied haughtily, “it mustseemas if I were one of the last women in the world ever to have to think of managing for myself or earning my own livelihood, but there are things that it is better not to explain. I may have my own feelings.”“To be sure,” Hester replied, more and more perplexed. “But any way, Miss Ella, you’ll let me light a fire for you. It’d be far from independent if you was to fall ill of a bad cold, and your papa ill already, and just for this day or two with no one but you to see to him.”Ella started.“I forgot,” she said. “I forgot about papa. Perhaps I had better go and see if there is anything I can do for him.”She was not exactly to blame for this thoughtlessness. Since her coming to Coombesthorpe her relations with her father had continued uncertain and constrained, and Madelene had judged it better to trust to time to bring about a better state of things, for the least effort on her part to force this would have been at once perceived and resented by Colonel St Quentin.“Don’t tell that child to look after me while you and Ermine are away,” had been almost his last words to Madelene before she left. “If she thinks of it of herself that would be a different matter.”And in ordinary circumstances the chances are that Ella would not have gone near her father. But Hester’s words reminded her that he was ill, and her conscience struck her.“I’ll go to papa now,” she said. “He is in the study, isn’t he, Hester? He was to get up after luncheon.”“Yes, Miss Ella, you’ll find him in the study. But maybe he’s asleep. Tap gently at the door.”Ella’s tap revealed the fact that her father was awake.“Come in,” he said, his voice sounding rather sharp and irritable.“Cross old thing,” muttered Ella to herself, “I wish I hadn’t come down. Can I do anything for you, papa?” she asked aloud as she entered the room. “Would you like me to read to you, perhaps?”Colonel St Quentin was lying on a couch by the fire; his books and newspapers on a little stand beside him. He glanced at Ella hesitatingly. He was feeling very lost and dull without his two elder daughters, and his eyes were tired.“No, thank you,” he began to say, but his tone was not very decided.“I—I think I read aloud pretty well,” the girl went on. Her quick impressionable nature was touched by her father’s looks: he was very pale, and she knew that he had suffered a good deal. “How selfish of them to have left him,” was her next reflection. “Do let me try, papa,” she went on more eagerly and naturally, “it must be rather dull for you alone, when you can’t get about.”“And for you too, my dear,” he said kindly. “What have you been doing with yourself all day—since your sisters left, I mean?”Ella grew rather red.“Oh,” she replied, “I’ve been practising, and doing my French and German—much the same as usual. And then I’ve been sewing.”It did not sound very lively. The “much as usual,” struck Colonel St Quentin too, and again he glanced at his youngest daughter. It struck him that she looked paler and thinner than formerly, and less bright and spirited. The fact was that Ella was blue and pinched with having sat in her fireless room for more than an hour, but this her father did not know. He moved uneasily on his couch.“You can read to me if you like,” he said. “I think I have exhausted the papers, but this book is rather interesting. Madelene is reading it to me but she can finish it to herself afterwards.”Half pleased and half frightened, Ella took the book. She had done herself scant justice in saying she read “pretty well.” She read very well indeed, and at the end of three-quarters of an hour Colonel St Quentin looked up with real gratification.“Thank you, my dear,” he said. “That is a good place to stop at, I think. I have enjoyed it very much. Now I shall rest a while, for I hope to be able to come in to dine with you. It would be too dreary for you all alone.”Ella did not reply, but her father saw that her face flushed again a little.“You are not looking as well as I should like to see you,” he said. “Do you not feel well?”“Oh, yes,” said Ella, touched in spite of herself. “I’m quite well, thank you, papa, but,” and here, in spite of all her heroic resolutions to endure in silence, the girl’s impulsive nature burst out—“it is rather dull. I have tried to do as you wished about my lessons and practising, and I like them, but it is rather dull,” she repeated.“While your sisters are away, you mean? Just this day or two?” asked Colonel St Quentin.“No, I meant altogether,” answered Ella frankly. “I—I’ve been accustomed to more variety I suppose, and at auntie’s I wasn’t considered a mere child. I think it’s that that makes it seem so dull.”Colonel St Quentin made no reply for a moment or two. He sat, leaning his head on his hand, considering deeply. It seemed as if what Madelene had tried to warn him of had come true. Had he made a mistake in the tone he had insisted upon being taken with Ella? He had never liked her so well as to-day, nor felt so drawn to her, and quite unreasonably he became almost inclined to blame his elder daughters for not “managing better.”“I have given in to their wish that no formal explanations should be made to her, not,” they said, “till they had gained her affection and confidence.”“I certainly don’t think they are much nearer doing so than they were the day she came. It is an uncomfortable state of things altogether,” he said to himself.Suddenly he looked up.“How oldareyou, Ella?” he said abruptly.“Nearly eighteen, papa. I shall be eighteen in two months,” she replied promptly.“That is seventeen and ten months,” Colonel St Quentin replied dryly. “Well now, my dear, you can run away. I think I shall manage to get into the dining-room by dinner-time.”Ella went off.”‘Run away,’ indeed,” she repeated to herself, “as if I were about three! I wonder he doesn’t ring for my nurse to fetch me.”Still, on the whole, the interview with her father had raised her spirits.“Ialmostthink,” reflected Ella, “Ialmostthink that if it were all to come over again, papa would tell Madelene Iwasto go. Nobody scarcely but would pity me, left here alone, and it would have seemed so much more natural for me to go than either of the others, who have had years and years of it. I’m quite sure, when I’m as old as Madelene I shan’t care about dances and things like that,especiallyif I’m an old maid.”The evening passed tranquilly. Colonel St Quentin dined with his daughter, Ella greatly enjoying her seat at the head of the table. And after dinner they spent an hour together in the drawing-room, when Ella very prettily volunteered to play, for her father to judge of her improvement.Colonel St Quentin was pleased and touched.“You must have practised diligently, my dear,” he said. “You find it less tedious now, do you not?”Ella hesitated.“I shall never care much for playing,” she said. “But I am glad you think I have improved. May I sing to you a little?”“Certainly—you are sure you have no cold? You must never sing if you have the least cold,” said her father anxiously.But Ella’s clear notes set all such fears at defiance. She chose two or three of the songs which she knew to have been her mother’s favourites, and she felt that she sang them beautifully. Her father said little, but she knew that she had pleased him.A few minutes’ silence followed; then Colonel St Quentin said he felt tired and would go to his own room.“I hope to be quite well to-morrow, or nearly so at least,” he said as he kissed Ella. “I really begin to hope I may escape easily this time,” for the poor man was from time to time a martyr to gout. “I am only sorry to have to leave you so early, but it gives me a better chance for to-morrow. Good-night, my dear.”“Good-night, papa,” said Ella dutifully. “It isn’t very early. I generally go to bed at ten, and it is half-past nine,” this with the tiniest of tiny sighs. “What will they be doing to-night, papa? Do you think they will be dancing, just the party in the house, to try the floor, perhaps?”“I can’t say, I’m sure. No, no, I should scarcely think so,” replied Colonel St Quentin, half consolingly, half irritably. Ella’s small shaft had gone home.And Ella went up to her own room, and as she settled herself comfortably in the old nursery easy chair before the now brightly blazing fire, a “Mudie book,” which Madelene had thoughtfully provided for her in her hand, she did not look altogether an object of pity.“Yes,” she said to herself, “I really do think if it came over again, papa would make them take me. I’ll try again to-morrow to make him understand better.”But to-morrow, alas! brought disappointment. To begin with, the weather was atrocious. It continued bitterly cold, with the aggravation of just falling short of frost, and by nine o’clock the rain set in again, the cruel, pitiless winter rain, blurring the sky and the land with its grim veil.Ella, who had planned a brisk walk early in the morning, gazed out of the dining-room window in despair.“WhatcanI do all day long?” she thought, and then as her eyes fell on the table where breakfast was waiting, she moved from it impatiently. “They might have let me have my meals in one of the smaller rooms,” she thought. “It looks too ghastly—that table and only poor me. I wish I had pretended to have a cold and stayed in bed.”Just then her father’s servant came in with a message—a message not calculated to raise her spirits. Colonel St Quentin was not so well, very much less well this morning indeed. He was very sorry, the man went on, not to be able to get up. He would send for Miss Ella later in the day, but just now he was going to try to sleep a little.“It’s too bad,” thought Ella, “just as we seemed to be getting to know each other better! And very likely Madelene and Ermine will make out that I’ve made him ill, somehow. Oh dear, I wish I hadn’t quarrelled with old Burton and then I could have asked auntie to have me on a visit?”She had been so diligent the day before, that this morning there was even less than usual for her to do, and after the hour-and-a-half’s piano practising there was literally no obligation on her of any kind.The library books were in perfect order, the flowers in the drawing-room had been all attended to, and if not, thought Ella bitterly, what was the use of dressing up the room for nobody to see!The morning seemed interminable. Tired of the big, empty rooms Ella at last went off up stairs to give herself another dose of stocking-darning, as a preparation for the governessing which again began to fill her imagination as the only possible escape from this unendurable state of things.The fire was not lighted. Hester had felt so certain that her remonstrance of the day before would be effectual, that she had not thought it needful to take further precautions. Hence it came about that Ella was seated like the day before, muffled up in a shawl, which did not prevent her looking blue and pinched, her eyes slightly reddened by tears of sympathy with her own woes, when, in answer to her rather startled “come in,” (Ella’s conscience made her cowardly of Hester) a tap at the door was followed by an unexpected apparition.“Godmother,” the girl exclaimed, scarcely able to believe her eyes, and starting to her feet as she spoke.“Yes, godmother herself,” said Lady Cheynes, coming forward. “But, my dear child, what are you thinking of—what is everybody thinking of to allow it?—you sitting up here in the cold on a bitter day like this? Do you want to get ill? Why it’s enough to give you a sore throat or bronchitis or a frightful cold in your head to say the least.”“I don’t feel so very cold, thank you, godmother,” said Ella meekly. “I don’t catch cold easily, and I want to make myself hardy. I—I had some little things to do up in my own room.”Lady Cheynes glanced at the stockings Ella had not had time to put out of sight.“Darning stockings!—hum—can’t one of the maids do that for you? You don’t mean to say Madelene expects you to do this sort of thing. And—surely—if you do want to sit up in your own room you can give orders to have a fire lighted, can’t you?”Lady Cheynes frowned. Ella had never seen her look so stern.“Oh—I’m sure—Hester would have lighted it if I had wanted it. And I might have stayed down stairs only—it’s very dull,” she burst out nervously. “Papa isn’t any better to-day—he can’t leave his room, and down stairs it all seems so big and lonely.”Ella’s voice quivered before she got to the end of the sentence; she was so very sorry for herself. Her godmother eyed her keenly.“When do Madelene and Ermine come home?” she asked. “This afternoon, I suppose.”“Oh, no,” said Ella. “The ball—the dance at the Belvoirs’ is only this evening. They are staying, I think, till to-morrow.”“Humph,” said Lady Cheynes. “You don’t care for dancing, I suppose?”This was too much. Ella’s face was a study. “Me” she exclaimed, “not care for dancing. Who ever said so?”The old lady laughed a little.“I don’t know—nobody perhaps. I was judging by circumstantial evidence. A girl of your age, who did care for it, would have managed by hook or by crook to get leave to go.”Ella gasped.“Do you really think so?” she exclaimed. “Why, godmother, the question was never raised in the least; thepossibilityof such a thing was never alluded to. If I had thought there was the faintest chance of it I should have nearly gone out of my mind.”“Did you never tell your sisters how much you would have liked to go?” asked Lady Cheynes.“No,” said Ella. “They may have guessed it, but we hardly alluded to it at all. But oh, godmother, please don’t saynowthere might have been any chance of my going. It is—it is more than I can bear to think of it.”She clasped her hands together and looked up in the old lady’s face, her lovely brown eyes brimming over with tears.Lady Cheynes said nothing. She walked to the window and stood there looking out.“How well I remember the view from this room,” she said dreamily, speaking as much to herself as to Ella. “This was our nursery, too. I recollect one day my doll’s falling out, between the bars, and when she was picked up and brought to me her face was all disfigured and cracked. Wax dolls cost a small fortune in those days. I remember thinking I nevernevercould be happy again! Dear me—it is only a question of proportion after all—a child’s bitter sorrow is as bad to it, as what seem more real sorrows are to older people. It seems a pity to—to add,” but here she stopped, rather abruptly.Ella had left off crying in the interest of listening to her godmother. She was disappointed that Lady Cheynes said no more.“Yes?” she said insinuatingly; “what were you saying, godmother? ‘A pity to add to’?”“Never mind, child. I was thinking aloud. Now, take off that shawl and run down to the warm library, like a sensible girl. If you must finish darning your stockings, take one or two of them with you. There is no one but Barnes to be shocked. I am going to see your father if he is not asleep, and then I shall ask you to give me a scrap of luncheon. I only came home last night, and I heard Marcus was ill and drove over at once.”Ella obeyed. The two went down stairs together. Then in reply to Lady Cheynes’ message came one from her nephew, saying that he was awake, and begged her to go to see him.Ella sat alone in the library. She felt considerably less desolate and depressed, and it certainly was more comfortable than up stairs in the cold. She was very glad to have her godmother’s company at luncheon, anything was better than sitting alone through the meal with Barnes and his subordinates fidgeting about. And she was by no means sorry that the old lady should have come upon her as she had done, for however fond she was of her grand-nieces Ella felt certain Lady Cheynes did not approve of the present state of things.“If she had been at home, I do believe I should have gone,” thought Ella.Suddenly the door opened and her godmother reappeared. Her eyes looked very bright, there was a slight flush upon her soft old cheeks and a smile, a peculiar smile, flickered about her mouth.“Godmother,” exclaimed Ella, as she had done up stairs in her own room. “What is it?” she went on, feeling a sort of vague excitement. “You look as if you had something to tell me. You are smiling, so it can’t be anything wrong. What have you been talking about to papa?”Lady Cheynes drew a chair close to Ella’s, and sat down.“Supposing I were afairygodmother, Ella, just for fun, you know, what would you ask me to do to cheer you up a little this dreary day?”Ella opened her eyes wide, very wide—and I almost think she opened her mouth too.“Godmother?” she said, while a rosy colour crept over her face, “oh, godmother, whatdoyou mean?”
Ella spent the afternoon of her sisters’ departure in praiseworthy fashion. She acted up that is to say to therôle, she had chosen to adopt. She prepared her lessons perfectly, she practised the most uninteresting of her piano exercises for an hour and a half; then she went up to her own room and looked out her oldest and shabbiest clothes, to see if she could not find anything in want of repair among them. It was not easy to do so. Stevens, who was an excellent needlewoman, kept Ella’s things by Madelene’s directions in perfect order, and it took some hunting on the girl’s part, before she succeeded in finding a stocking or two with incipient holes, or a skirt which looked as if it would not be the worse for a new braid round the edge.
On these she set to work, huddling herself up in shawl, for it was very cold, and sitting on the straightest-backed and hardest chair in her room.
“I wish they would give me an allowance for my clothes, however small,” she said to herself. “I could save out of it, I am sure, for I could dress much more plainly than I do even, which would certainly not distress my sisters. And I would have a right to what I saved in that way, surely. Every child can claim food and clothing from its parents till it is of age,” and she smiled bitterly. “Perhaps if I can make Madelene see that it would cost less to give me a small allowance, I may persuade her to make papa agree to it.”
Just then her meditations were interrupted by a knock at the door, and old Hester, the head housemaid, who had been deputed by Madelene to take care of Ella, so far as her material comforts were concerned, came in.
“Miss Ella,” she exclaimed, “whatever are you about? Sitting up here without a fire when it’s as cold as cold. Wouldn’t the Colonel be in a taking if he knew! You could have had a fire lighted if you’d only said the word. And there’s the library, and the little drawing-room as bright and cheery as can be, at your service.”
“I am busy working, thank you, Hester,” Ella replied primly. “I could not take work like this down stairs.”
She did not resent Hester’s reproaches, for the housemaid was an old servant, who had been at Coombesthorpe during the life of Ella’s mother, and was much attached to her.
Hester looked at what Ella was sewing.
“Darning stockings,” she exclaimed. “Now upon my word, I do call that too bad of Stevens. Not but what it’s a very right thing for a young lady, be she who she may, to know how to turn her hand to darning a stocking, but you’ve your studies, my dear, and other things to see to, and—”
“It’s—it’s not exactly Stevens’ fault, Hester,” said Ella, too honest to leave Hester under such a mistaken idea. “She does mend all my things; it is not often she overlooks a hole. But I prefer to do more myself, and I want to accustom myself to going without fires and little things like that, for there is no knowing how I may be placed some day, and I want to be independent.”
Hester looked at her in surprise and perplexity. She knew that the second wife had been portionless, and she knew too, though vaguely, that Coombesthorpe and the bulk of the family revenues had come from the mother of the two elder daughters—but she could not believe that they would ever allow their half-sister to realise this practically in any painful way.
“We none of us know how we may be placed any day for that matter, Miss Ella, my dear. The best of us is in God’s hands and subject to His will, and even if it seems hard we must bow to it. But—you’ve a good home and kind friends—it’s a sort of tempting of Providence like, for you to speak that way.”
She looked at Ella half-inquiringly as she spoke; she wondered how much “the child,” as she mentally called her, knew. “They might have left her in her innocence a bit,” she said to herself half indignantly. On her side Ella was struck by Hester’s tone.
“She speaks almost as she might if I had been anadoptedchild, with no real right here,” she said to herself. “It just shows—”
“And of course, Hester,” she replied haughtily, “it mustseemas if I were one of the last women in the world ever to have to think of managing for myself or earning my own livelihood, but there are things that it is better not to explain. I may have my own feelings.”
“To be sure,” Hester replied, more and more perplexed. “But any way, Miss Ella, you’ll let me light a fire for you. It’d be far from independent if you was to fall ill of a bad cold, and your papa ill already, and just for this day or two with no one but you to see to him.”
Ella started.
“I forgot,” she said. “I forgot about papa. Perhaps I had better go and see if there is anything I can do for him.”
She was not exactly to blame for this thoughtlessness. Since her coming to Coombesthorpe her relations with her father had continued uncertain and constrained, and Madelene had judged it better to trust to time to bring about a better state of things, for the least effort on her part to force this would have been at once perceived and resented by Colonel St Quentin.
“Don’t tell that child to look after me while you and Ermine are away,” had been almost his last words to Madelene before she left. “If she thinks of it of herself that would be a different matter.”
And in ordinary circumstances the chances are that Ella would not have gone near her father. But Hester’s words reminded her that he was ill, and her conscience struck her.
“I’ll go to papa now,” she said. “He is in the study, isn’t he, Hester? He was to get up after luncheon.”
“Yes, Miss Ella, you’ll find him in the study. But maybe he’s asleep. Tap gently at the door.”
Ella’s tap revealed the fact that her father was awake.
“Come in,” he said, his voice sounding rather sharp and irritable.
“Cross old thing,” muttered Ella to herself, “I wish I hadn’t come down. Can I do anything for you, papa?” she asked aloud as she entered the room. “Would you like me to read to you, perhaps?”
Colonel St Quentin was lying on a couch by the fire; his books and newspapers on a little stand beside him. He glanced at Ella hesitatingly. He was feeling very lost and dull without his two elder daughters, and his eyes were tired.
“No, thank you,” he began to say, but his tone was not very decided.
“I—I think I read aloud pretty well,” the girl went on. Her quick impressionable nature was touched by her father’s looks: he was very pale, and she knew that he had suffered a good deal. “How selfish of them to have left him,” was her next reflection. “Do let me try, papa,” she went on more eagerly and naturally, “it must be rather dull for you alone, when you can’t get about.”
“And for you too, my dear,” he said kindly. “What have you been doing with yourself all day—since your sisters left, I mean?”
Ella grew rather red.
“Oh,” she replied, “I’ve been practising, and doing my French and German—much the same as usual. And then I’ve been sewing.”
It did not sound very lively. The “much as usual,” struck Colonel St Quentin too, and again he glanced at his youngest daughter. It struck him that she looked paler and thinner than formerly, and less bright and spirited. The fact was that Ella was blue and pinched with having sat in her fireless room for more than an hour, but this her father did not know. He moved uneasily on his couch.
“You can read to me if you like,” he said. “I think I have exhausted the papers, but this book is rather interesting. Madelene is reading it to me but she can finish it to herself afterwards.”
Half pleased and half frightened, Ella took the book. She had done herself scant justice in saying she read “pretty well.” She read very well indeed, and at the end of three-quarters of an hour Colonel St Quentin looked up with real gratification.
“Thank you, my dear,” he said. “That is a good place to stop at, I think. I have enjoyed it very much. Now I shall rest a while, for I hope to be able to come in to dine with you. It would be too dreary for you all alone.”
Ella did not reply, but her father saw that her face flushed again a little.
“You are not looking as well as I should like to see you,” he said. “Do you not feel well?”
“Oh, yes,” said Ella, touched in spite of herself. “I’m quite well, thank you, papa, but,” and here, in spite of all her heroic resolutions to endure in silence, the girl’s impulsive nature burst out—“it is rather dull. I have tried to do as you wished about my lessons and practising, and I like them, but it is rather dull,” she repeated.
“While your sisters are away, you mean? Just this day or two?” asked Colonel St Quentin.
“No, I meant altogether,” answered Ella frankly. “I—I’ve been accustomed to more variety I suppose, and at auntie’s I wasn’t considered a mere child. I think it’s that that makes it seem so dull.”
Colonel St Quentin made no reply for a moment or two. He sat, leaning his head on his hand, considering deeply. It seemed as if what Madelene had tried to warn him of had come true. Had he made a mistake in the tone he had insisted upon being taken with Ella? He had never liked her so well as to-day, nor felt so drawn to her, and quite unreasonably he became almost inclined to blame his elder daughters for not “managing better.”
“I have given in to their wish that no formal explanations should be made to her, not,” they said, “till they had gained her affection and confidence.”
“I certainly don’t think they are much nearer doing so than they were the day she came. It is an uncomfortable state of things altogether,” he said to himself.
Suddenly he looked up.
“How oldareyou, Ella?” he said abruptly.
“Nearly eighteen, papa. I shall be eighteen in two months,” she replied promptly.
“That is seventeen and ten months,” Colonel St Quentin replied dryly. “Well now, my dear, you can run away. I think I shall manage to get into the dining-room by dinner-time.”
Ella went off.
”‘Run away,’ indeed,” she repeated to herself, “as if I were about three! I wonder he doesn’t ring for my nurse to fetch me.”
Still, on the whole, the interview with her father had raised her spirits.
“Ialmostthink,” reflected Ella, “Ialmostthink that if it were all to come over again, papa would tell Madelene Iwasto go. Nobody scarcely but would pity me, left here alone, and it would have seemed so much more natural for me to go than either of the others, who have had years and years of it. I’m quite sure, when I’m as old as Madelene I shan’t care about dances and things like that,especiallyif I’m an old maid.”
The evening passed tranquilly. Colonel St Quentin dined with his daughter, Ella greatly enjoying her seat at the head of the table. And after dinner they spent an hour together in the drawing-room, when Ella very prettily volunteered to play, for her father to judge of her improvement.
Colonel St Quentin was pleased and touched.
“You must have practised diligently, my dear,” he said. “You find it less tedious now, do you not?”
Ella hesitated.
“I shall never care much for playing,” she said. “But I am glad you think I have improved. May I sing to you a little?”
“Certainly—you are sure you have no cold? You must never sing if you have the least cold,” said her father anxiously.
But Ella’s clear notes set all such fears at defiance. She chose two or three of the songs which she knew to have been her mother’s favourites, and she felt that she sang them beautifully. Her father said little, but she knew that she had pleased him.
A few minutes’ silence followed; then Colonel St Quentin said he felt tired and would go to his own room.
“I hope to be quite well to-morrow, or nearly so at least,” he said as he kissed Ella. “I really begin to hope I may escape easily this time,” for the poor man was from time to time a martyr to gout. “I am only sorry to have to leave you so early, but it gives me a better chance for to-morrow. Good-night, my dear.”
“Good-night, papa,” said Ella dutifully. “It isn’t very early. I generally go to bed at ten, and it is half-past nine,” this with the tiniest of tiny sighs. “What will they be doing to-night, papa? Do you think they will be dancing, just the party in the house, to try the floor, perhaps?”
“I can’t say, I’m sure. No, no, I should scarcely think so,” replied Colonel St Quentin, half consolingly, half irritably. Ella’s small shaft had gone home.
And Ella went up to her own room, and as she settled herself comfortably in the old nursery easy chair before the now brightly blazing fire, a “Mudie book,” which Madelene had thoughtfully provided for her in her hand, she did not look altogether an object of pity.
“Yes,” she said to herself, “I really do think if it came over again, papa would make them take me. I’ll try again to-morrow to make him understand better.”
But to-morrow, alas! brought disappointment. To begin with, the weather was atrocious. It continued bitterly cold, with the aggravation of just falling short of frost, and by nine o’clock the rain set in again, the cruel, pitiless winter rain, blurring the sky and the land with its grim veil.
Ella, who had planned a brisk walk early in the morning, gazed out of the dining-room window in despair.
“WhatcanI do all day long?” she thought, and then as her eyes fell on the table where breakfast was waiting, she moved from it impatiently. “They might have let me have my meals in one of the smaller rooms,” she thought. “It looks too ghastly—that table and only poor me. I wish I had pretended to have a cold and stayed in bed.”
Just then her father’s servant came in with a message—a message not calculated to raise her spirits. Colonel St Quentin was not so well, very much less well this morning indeed. He was very sorry, the man went on, not to be able to get up. He would send for Miss Ella later in the day, but just now he was going to try to sleep a little.
“It’s too bad,” thought Ella, “just as we seemed to be getting to know each other better! And very likely Madelene and Ermine will make out that I’ve made him ill, somehow. Oh dear, I wish I hadn’t quarrelled with old Burton and then I could have asked auntie to have me on a visit?”
She had been so diligent the day before, that this morning there was even less than usual for her to do, and after the hour-and-a-half’s piano practising there was literally no obligation on her of any kind.
The library books were in perfect order, the flowers in the drawing-room had been all attended to, and if not, thought Ella bitterly, what was the use of dressing up the room for nobody to see!
The morning seemed interminable. Tired of the big, empty rooms Ella at last went off up stairs to give herself another dose of stocking-darning, as a preparation for the governessing which again began to fill her imagination as the only possible escape from this unendurable state of things.
The fire was not lighted. Hester had felt so certain that her remonstrance of the day before would be effectual, that she had not thought it needful to take further precautions. Hence it came about that Ella was seated like the day before, muffled up in a shawl, which did not prevent her looking blue and pinched, her eyes slightly reddened by tears of sympathy with her own woes, when, in answer to her rather startled “come in,” (Ella’s conscience made her cowardly of Hester) a tap at the door was followed by an unexpected apparition.
“Godmother,” the girl exclaimed, scarcely able to believe her eyes, and starting to her feet as she spoke.
“Yes, godmother herself,” said Lady Cheynes, coming forward. “But, my dear child, what are you thinking of—what is everybody thinking of to allow it?—you sitting up here in the cold on a bitter day like this? Do you want to get ill? Why it’s enough to give you a sore throat or bronchitis or a frightful cold in your head to say the least.”
“I don’t feel so very cold, thank you, godmother,” said Ella meekly. “I don’t catch cold easily, and I want to make myself hardy. I—I had some little things to do up in my own room.”
Lady Cheynes glanced at the stockings Ella had not had time to put out of sight.
“Darning stockings!—hum—can’t one of the maids do that for you? You don’t mean to say Madelene expects you to do this sort of thing. And—surely—if you do want to sit up in your own room you can give orders to have a fire lighted, can’t you?”
Lady Cheynes frowned. Ella had never seen her look so stern.
“Oh—I’m sure—Hester would have lighted it if I had wanted it. And I might have stayed down stairs only—it’s very dull,” she burst out nervously. “Papa isn’t any better to-day—he can’t leave his room, and down stairs it all seems so big and lonely.”
Ella’s voice quivered before she got to the end of the sentence; she was so very sorry for herself. Her godmother eyed her keenly.
“When do Madelene and Ermine come home?” she asked. “This afternoon, I suppose.”
“Oh, no,” said Ella. “The ball—the dance at the Belvoirs’ is only this evening. They are staying, I think, till to-morrow.”
“Humph,” said Lady Cheynes. “You don’t care for dancing, I suppose?”
This was too much. Ella’s face was a study. “Me” she exclaimed, “not care for dancing. Who ever said so?”
The old lady laughed a little.
“I don’t know—nobody perhaps. I was judging by circumstantial evidence. A girl of your age, who did care for it, would have managed by hook or by crook to get leave to go.”
Ella gasped.
“Do you really think so?” she exclaimed. “Why, godmother, the question was never raised in the least; thepossibilityof such a thing was never alluded to. If I had thought there was the faintest chance of it I should have nearly gone out of my mind.”
“Did you never tell your sisters how much you would have liked to go?” asked Lady Cheynes.
“No,” said Ella. “They may have guessed it, but we hardly alluded to it at all. But oh, godmother, please don’t saynowthere might have been any chance of my going. It is—it is more than I can bear to think of it.”
She clasped her hands together and looked up in the old lady’s face, her lovely brown eyes brimming over with tears.
Lady Cheynes said nothing. She walked to the window and stood there looking out.
“How well I remember the view from this room,” she said dreamily, speaking as much to herself as to Ella. “This was our nursery, too. I recollect one day my doll’s falling out, between the bars, and when she was picked up and brought to me her face was all disfigured and cracked. Wax dolls cost a small fortune in those days. I remember thinking I nevernevercould be happy again! Dear me—it is only a question of proportion after all—a child’s bitter sorrow is as bad to it, as what seem more real sorrows are to older people. It seems a pity to—to add,” but here she stopped, rather abruptly.
Ella had left off crying in the interest of listening to her godmother. She was disappointed that Lady Cheynes said no more.
“Yes?” she said insinuatingly; “what were you saying, godmother? ‘A pity to add to’?”
“Never mind, child. I was thinking aloud. Now, take off that shawl and run down to the warm library, like a sensible girl. If you must finish darning your stockings, take one or two of them with you. There is no one but Barnes to be shocked. I am going to see your father if he is not asleep, and then I shall ask you to give me a scrap of luncheon. I only came home last night, and I heard Marcus was ill and drove over at once.”
Ella obeyed. The two went down stairs together. Then in reply to Lady Cheynes’ message came one from her nephew, saying that he was awake, and begged her to go to see him.
Ella sat alone in the library. She felt considerably less desolate and depressed, and it certainly was more comfortable than up stairs in the cold. She was very glad to have her godmother’s company at luncheon, anything was better than sitting alone through the meal with Barnes and his subordinates fidgeting about. And she was by no means sorry that the old lady should have come upon her as she had done, for however fond she was of her grand-nieces Ella felt certain Lady Cheynes did not approve of the present state of things.
“If she had been at home, I do believe I should have gone,” thought Ella.
Suddenly the door opened and her godmother reappeared. Her eyes looked very bright, there was a slight flush upon her soft old cheeks and a smile, a peculiar smile, flickered about her mouth.
“Godmother,” exclaimed Ella, as she had done up stairs in her own room. “What is it?” she went on, feeling a sort of vague excitement. “You look as if you had something to tell me. You are smiling, so it can’t be anything wrong. What have you been talking about to papa?”
Lady Cheynes drew a chair close to Ella’s, and sat down.
“Supposing I were afairygodmother, Ella, just for fun, you know, what would you ask me to do to cheer you up a little this dreary day?”
Ella opened her eyes wide, very wide—and I almost think she opened her mouth too.
“Godmother?” she said, while a rosy colour crept over her face, “oh, godmother, whatdoyou mean?”
Chapter Nine.Too Good to be True.“Godmother,” Ella repeated, “what do you mean?”Lady Cheynes smiled.“Supposing I were to tell you you were to go to the dance at the Belvoirs’ to-night after all?” she said.Ella’s face fell a little.“Godmother,” she replied, “I’m afraid you’re teasing me; Icouldn’tgo now.”“Not if I took you? I was asked of course—they are very old friends, and I did not answer definitely, not being sure when I was returning home. Indeed till this morning I thought it was over, that it was last night.”“But,” Ella went on, the corners of her mouth drooping like a little child’s, “I haven’t any frock, godmother. That makes it quite impossible.”“I don’t know. Hester tells me there is a very pretty little white tulle frock almost ready for you. Madelene has been having it made by Mélanie—in case of anything unexpected, I suppose,” said Lady Cheynes quietly.Ella looked as if she could scarcely believe her ears.“Madelenehas been getting a frock ready for me,” she said. “Perhaps, perhaps, godmother it was for a surprise. Wouldn’t she be vexed at my knowing it? Do you—would youdareto let me wear it? Oh, godmother,” and her eyes sparkled, “how lovely it would be!”“Willbe,” said her godmother, smiling more and more. “Listen, Ella, I’ve got your father’s leave to take you. You are to drive home with me immediately after luncheon. Hester is putting up the frock and my maid will set to work and finish it. Now think, have you everything else you need—gloves—shoes?”“I have gloves—tan-coloured ones, but they’re quite new and nice and long. They are the last pair of those poor auntie gave me. I have never needed to wear such long ones here! And shoes—I have no white ones, godmother.”“You must have white ones,” said Lady Cheynes. “Ah well—perhaps we can get some at Weevilscoombe. I can send a man in to the shoemaker’s there. Or if not—” and the old lady hesitated. “Never mind—we’ll manage somehow. Now, my dear, run up stairs and show Hester all that you want packed up. You must be quick, for we shall leave immediately after luncheon.”Scarcely knowing if she were standing on her head or her heels, off flew Ella. Up stairs in her room she found Hester, who now that the young lady was in such luck thought it well to sober her down a little by looking rather grim.“Oh, Hester,” cried Ella, flying at the old servant, seizing her by the shoulders and whirling her round, “did you ever know anything so lovely? Have you packed up the frock? Do tell me about it—how did you know about it? Was it to be a surprise and oh! Hester, what will my sisters say when they see me there? I’m so awfully afraid they’ll be vexed, even though they won’t show it to her ladyship.”Hester stopped short in the packing she was already in the midst of.“Now, Miss Ella,” she said, “that just shows how little you know your sisters. Vexed indeed—they’ll be just as pleased as pleased, Miss St Quentin especially. If only you knew—No, miss, you can’t see the frock—it’s all pinned up neatly, and you must let Jones undo it herself,” and Hester laid a protecting hand on the white puffy-looking packet she was reserving for the top of the trunk.“You cross old thing,” said Ella. “However I’ll forgive you. I’m too happy to mind. All the same if my sisters did want me to go, why didn’t they ask papa—he gave in the moment godmother tackled him?”Hester grunted, but said nothing.“That reminds me,” Ella went on, “I must run in to see papa for a moment, to thank him. You’ve got all my things in now, Hester. I haven’t time to change this frock, though I should have liked to,” glancing at her thick grey homespun with contempt; “and besides, my Sunday frock—fancy me having come back to Sunday frocks like a good little girl!—is rather the uglier of the two. It is so clumsily made; I’d havelikedto take my dark green cashmere that I brought from auntie’s.”“And catch your death of cold. You forget, Miss Ella, it’s a deal colder here than at Bath, and in a town too it’s always warmer.”“Oh, well, I don’t care. I shall come back first thing to-morrow morning; so it won’t matter. Oh, Hester, I am so happy—here, catch, these are my gloves. Yes, I’m sure I’ve all now.”And with another series of pirouettes Ella took herself off.She flew to her father’s room this time.“May I come in? Oh, papa, I don’t know how to thank you,” she cried. And as her father looked up, she seemed to him a transfigured creature from the meek, subdued Ella of the night before. There she stood, radiant and glowing with a delight which one could have fancied illumined even the dull folds of her grey frock as with sunshine.A smile broke over Colonel St Quentin’s pale worn face.“My poor little girl,” he ejaculated involuntarily, “do you really care so much about it?”“Of course I do. Oh! you don’t know how happy I am. But oh, papa, you don’t think Madelene will mind, do you?”Colonel St Quentin’s face changed.“Madelenemind!” he repeated. “My dear Ella, how extraordinarily you misapprehend your sister.” Just, in other words, what Hester had said. For a moment Ella’s face looked grave. If it were the case after all that Madelene was not to blame? But no—how could it be so? For papa, had been so easy to persuade—was now so plainly enjoying her delight. The girl’s expression darkened. Madelene, she felt almost inclined to believe, was worse than she had yet imagined. She must be cleverer and more cunning, thought Ella, not only to keep her in the position she did, but to make it seem that she wished it otherwise. But these reflections of course were not to be expressed. And come what would, Ella decided triumphantly, her sister could not deprive her of this one evening’s enjoyment.“I’m glad you don’t think Madelene will be vexed,” she said quietly.Colonel St Quentin gave a slight smile. “You must promise me, Ella,” he went on, “to be very nice—biddable and considerate you know, to your—to Lady Cheynes. It is really very good, very good indeed of her to take you. Don’t tease her to stay late, or anything of that kind. I suppose it’s all right about your dress—she says so. Now, good-bye, my dear. Enjoy yourself and don’t fancy that any one will grudge your doing so.”“Good-bye, papa,” said Ella, stooping to kiss him.They set off immediately after luncheon. Arrived at Cheynesacre, a great consultation took place. Jones was fortunately good-natured as well as skilful—she surveyed the snowy mass which old Hester had packed up so carefully with grave consideration.“Yes, my lady,” she said, “boolyooners of toole, quite simple, I see. The bodice is complete, luckily. Well—if Harriet can work with me—Harriet is a handy girl, I don’t see but that it may be ready by eight o’clock—or even a little sooner.”“Sooner, decidedly,” said Lady Cheynes, “we must start at half-past eight. It’s a long drive and of course an early dance. You must have some white flowers Ella—not a bouquet, but a spray or two on the bodice. And was there not something else you needed?”“Shoes, godmother. I have no white ones.”“Oh, to be sure. What do you think, Jones, could we get a decent pair at Weevilscoombe?”Jones shook her wise head.“Then—run down stairs, Ella, and ring for the head-gardener to speak to me in the conservatory. I will follow you immediately.”Five minutes later, the old lady entered the drawing-room with a small, carefully enveloped parcel in her hand. There was a look in her face that Ella had never seen there before—a look which in a younger woman would have been accentuated by tears in her eyes. But old age weeps rarely and painfully. Lady Cheynes’ bright, dark eyes were undimmed, yet they had a very tender light in them as she unfolded the packet.“Look, child,” she said. “Here is a pair of slippers which I little thought would ever have danced again. They belonged to my own child. You have never heard of her of course. She would have been an old woman in your eyes, had she been alive still. They were the last white slippers she ever wore; you see they are perfectly clean, only yellowed a little with age, in spite of my blue paper!”Ella took them carefully and admiringly in her hands. They were very dainty little shoes, and on the front of each sparkled an old-fashioned buckle.“How pretty they are!” said the girl. “Are these diamonds, godmother?” and she touched the buckles.“No, they would be too valuable in that case to be left stitched on the slippers,” Lady Cheynes replied. “They are only old paste, but very good old paste. I gave them to Clarice to wear at the fancy dress ball she got the shoes for, and they were old even then. You see the shoes have high heels, Ella, which suits them for present fashions rather too well, in my opinion. That was because they were for a fancy dress. When Clarice was a girl, high heels were not worn. Now try them on, child—I only hope they are not too small.”Ella slipped off her own shoe and drew on one of the white ones without the least difficulty.“Do they fit you?” asked Lady Cheynes quickly, “Quite; perfectly,” said Ella, proceeding to try the second slipper. “The left foot is perhaps, yes, just a trifle too large,” she went on. “You see they are botheasy, and my left foot is a little tiny bit smaller than my right—and then I have thicker stockings on than in the evening. But I am sure they will do, godmother, beautifully; and it is soverygood of you.”Lady Cheynes stooped to look at the little feet in their motley clothing of red stockings and white shoes.“Humph,” she said, with a mingling of admiration and contrariety in her voice, “humph—I thought Clarice’s feet the smallest that ever were seen. You can put a bit of cotton-wool in the toes if you like, Ella.”“Oh, no, thank you, they’re not as bad as that,” said Ella, jumping up. “I can dance in them splendidly—IfeelI can,” and she gave herself a twirl or two. “Oh, dear godmother,” she went on, “I can scarcely believe that I’m going. I reallycan’t.” Jones and the handy Harriet worked their best. Before eight o’clock all was ready, and Ella stood arrayed for her godmother’s inspection.“Very nice, yes, very nice,” said the old lady. “Put out your foot, Ella—yes, there won’t be another pair of shoes and shoe-buckles like those, there. Now, what have you to put on over you? No! no,” as Ella held up a gauzy mantle or shawl, “that’s not half enough. You must have something over that. My dark-brown fur-lined cloak, Jones, will be the very thing. You are not used to a long drive in winter such as we shall have to-night. And it is freezing now, I hear—the roads are getting slippery. We cannot go fast.”“You must have plenty of hot-water bottles, my lady,” said Jones, as she returned with the cloak. “And I’ll tell Henry to be sure and have them filled again to come home with.”“We shall not stay so late as all that,” the old lady replied. “However, it will do no harm to speak to Henry. What are you making such grimaces about, Ella?”“The cloak, godmother. It is so awfully heavy—I am afraid it will crush me dreadfully, and see, it quite trails on the floor. Don’t you think, in the warm carriage—if I doubled my shawl?”“No, nonsense,” said Lady Cheynes, decidedly. “That cloak is the proper thing. You can shake yourself out when you get there. Good tulle is elastic,” and she turned away inexorably.It was a long drive—longer than Ella had realised. And it was so cold outside that the carriage windows had to be kept up the whole way, not admitting a breath of air; and they quickly became so opaque that even if the night had been brighter and clearer than it was, Ella could have seen nothing. In spite of her excitement and eager anticipation she felt herself growing drowsy, and when they at last drew up, though she had not been actually asleep she had been so near it that all about her seemed dreamy and unreal. Hardly understanding where she was, she found herself following her godmother across a great square hall, whose dark oak panelling was decorated with Christmas evergreens and holly, down a short passage into a room crowded with ladies’ shawls and wraps and attendant maidens.“Shake yourself out, Ella,” said Lady Cheynes. “Yes, that is right,” as her god-daughter half mechanically obeyed her, under the supervision of one of the ladies’-maids. “You are not at all crushed. Keep our cloaks where they will be easily got at, we shall be leaving early,” she went on to the woman, who evidently recognised her. “Now, Ella, my dear. But for goodness’ sake, child, don’t look so solemn. No one would recognise you.”“I—I didn’t mean to look solemn, godmother,” said the girl, glancing up in the old lady’s face with a little smile of deprecation in her lovely eyes.At that instant a young man hastily crossing the hall, just behind them, caught sight of her. He stopped short and hesitated.“By Jove!” he ejaculated under his breath, then drew back. He was out of the range of seeing or being seen by Lady Cheynes.“Who can she be?” he said to himself.The old lady moved on calmly till she reached the doorway where Mrs Belvoir was standing, and the greetings and introduction of Ella took place.“We are later than I expected,” said Lady Cheynes. “You see it was such a sudden idea of mine.”“A delightful idea,” Mrs Belvoir replied. “Where will you establish yourself, Lady Cheynes? There are a few seats in the ball-room—or would you prefer staying here?”“I will stay here, thank you,” Ella’s godmother replied, seating herself beside her hostess. “But this child here,” she added in a lower voice, “I should like her to dance. Her sisters don’t know she is coming. It will be quite a surprise to them to see her.”“They are both dancing,” said Mrs Belvoir. “Of course she must dance. Ah! there is Louis,”—as she caught sight of one of her sons and beckoned to him. “Louis,” and a word or two of whispered explanation followed, before he was brought up and introduced, nothing loth, to the lovely stranger.He did not catch the name clearly; Mrs Belvoir’s special care to introduce the young girl correctly, as “MissEllaSt Quentin,” had a curious result.“Miss Ellison Winton,” young Belvoir repeated to himself; “who in the world can she be? I have never seen her before, that’s certain.”But long ere his fragment of a dance with her came to an end, he found himself hoping that he should see her again!“She is quite bewitching,” he thought, “and she dances beautifully. I wish I were not engaged so deep.”“May I introduce a partner or two to you, Miss—Miss Winton?” he said, and Ella did not notice the mistake, as she acquiesced, and two or three new men were led up to her.“Major Frost, Mr Littleton, Sir Philip Cheynes,” followed each other in quick succession, and each in turn was informed privately by young Belvoir that the young lady was “a Miss Ellison Winton, a perfect stranger,” he added, “staying at some house in the neighbourhood;” and Ella herself, a little bewildered still, heard the various names but indistinctly—the “Sir Philip,” she caught but not the surname. And it never occurred to her to associate the bearer of it with her godmother’s grandson, whom she believed to be still in the north.There was dancing in two rooms; during Ella’s next dance, a waltz with Major Frost, the elder Misses St Quentin were in the other room. The next, which she danced with Mr Littleton, was a square, and though she once caught sight of Madelene’s head through a doorway, they did not come more nearly together! which Ella, still more than half afraid of being seen by her sisters, was not sorry for.“It must come, sooner or later,” she thought; “but I should like to be beside my godmother when they first see me.”
“Godmother,” Ella repeated, “what do you mean?”
Lady Cheynes smiled.
“Supposing I were to tell you you were to go to the dance at the Belvoirs’ to-night after all?” she said.
Ella’s face fell a little.
“Godmother,” she replied, “I’m afraid you’re teasing me; Icouldn’tgo now.”
“Not if I took you? I was asked of course—they are very old friends, and I did not answer definitely, not being sure when I was returning home. Indeed till this morning I thought it was over, that it was last night.”
“But,” Ella went on, the corners of her mouth drooping like a little child’s, “I haven’t any frock, godmother. That makes it quite impossible.”
“I don’t know. Hester tells me there is a very pretty little white tulle frock almost ready for you. Madelene has been having it made by Mélanie—in case of anything unexpected, I suppose,” said Lady Cheynes quietly.
Ella looked as if she could scarcely believe her ears.
“Madelenehas been getting a frock ready for me,” she said. “Perhaps, perhaps, godmother it was for a surprise. Wouldn’t she be vexed at my knowing it? Do you—would youdareto let me wear it? Oh, godmother,” and her eyes sparkled, “how lovely it would be!”
“Willbe,” said her godmother, smiling more and more. “Listen, Ella, I’ve got your father’s leave to take you. You are to drive home with me immediately after luncheon. Hester is putting up the frock and my maid will set to work and finish it. Now think, have you everything else you need—gloves—shoes?”
“I have gloves—tan-coloured ones, but they’re quite new and nice and long. They are the last pair of those poor auntie gave me. I have never needed to wear such long ones here! And shoes—I have no white ones, godmother.”
“You must have white ones,” said Lady Cheynes. “Ah well—perhaps we can get some at Weevilscoombe. I can send a man in to the shoemaker’s there. Or if not—” and the old lady hesitated. “Never mind—we’ll manage somehow. Now, my dear, run up stairs and show Hester all that you want packed up. You must be quick, for we shall leave immediately after luncheon.”
Scarcely knowing if she were standing on her head or her heels, off flew Ella. Up stairs in her room she found Hester, who now that the young lady was in such luck thought it well to sober her down a little by looking rather grim.
“Oh, Hester,” cried Ella, flying at the old servant, seizing her by the shoulders and whirling her round, “did you ever know anything so lovely? Have you packed up the frock? Do tell me about it—how did you know about it? Was it to be a surprise and oh! Hester, what will my sisters say when they see me there? I’m so awfully afraid they’ll be vexed, even though they won’t show it to her ladyship.”
Hester stopped short in the packing she was already in the midst of.
“Now, Miss Ella,” she said, “that just shows how little you know your sisters. Vexed indeed—they’ll be just as pleased as pleased, Miss St Quentin especially. If only you knew—No, miss, you can’t see the frock—it’s all pinned up neatly, and you must let Jones undo it herself,” and Hester laid a protecting hand on the white puffy-looking packet she was reserving for the top of the trunk.
“You cross old thing,” said Ella. “However I’ll forgive you. I’m too happy to mind. All the same if my sisters did want me to go, why didn’t they ask papa—he gave in the moment godmother tackled him?”
Hester grunted, but said nothing.
“That reminds me,” Ella went on, “I must run in to see papa for a moment, to thank him. You’ve got all my things in now, Hester. I haven’t time to change this frock, though I should have liked to,” glancing at her thick grey homespun with contempt; “and besides, my Sunday frock—fancy me having come back to Sunday frocks like a good little girl!—is rather the uglier of the two. It is so clumsily made; I’d havelikedto take my dark green cashmere that I brought from auntie’s.”
“And catch your death of cold. You forget, Miss Ella, it’s a deal colder here than at Bath, and in a town too it’s always warmer.”
“Oh, well, I don’t care. I shall come back first thing to-morrow morning; so it won’t matter. Oh, Hester, I am so happy—here, catch, these are my gloves. Yes, I’m sure I’ve all now.”
And with another series of pirouettes Ella took herself off.
She flew to her father’s room this time.
“May I come in? Oh, papa, I don’t know how to thank you,” she cried. And as her father looked up, she seemed to him a transfigured creature from the meek, subdued Ella of the night before. There she stood, radiant and glowing with a delight which one could have fancied illumined even the dull folds of her grey frock as with sunshine.
A smile broke over Colonel St Quentin’s pale worn face.
“My poor little girl,” he ejaculated involuntarily, “do you really care so much about it?”
“Of course I do. Oh! you don’t know how happy I am. But oh, papa, you don’t think Madelene will mind, do you?”
Colonel St Quentin’s face changed.
“Madelenemind!” he repeated. “My dear Ella, how extraordinarily you misapprehend your sister.” Just, in other words, what Hester had said. For a moment Ella’s face looked grave. If it were the case after all that Madelene was not to blame? But no—how could it be so? For papa, had been so easy to persuade—was now so plainly enjoying her delight. The girl’s expression darkened. Madelene, she felt almost inclined to believe, was worse than she had yet imagined. She must be cleverer and more cunning, thought Ella, not only to keep her in the position she did, but to make it seem that she wished it otherwise. But these reflections of course were not to be expressed. And come what would, Ella decided triumphantly, her sister could not deprive her of this one evening’s enjoyment.
“I’m glad you don’t think Madelene will be vexed,” she said quietly.
Colonel St Quentin gave a slight smile. “You must promise me, Ella,” he went on, “to be very nice—biddable and considerate you know, to your—to Lady Cheynes. It is really very good, very good indeed of her to take you. Don’t tease her to stay late, or anything of that kind. I suppose it’s all right about your dress—she says so. Now, good-bye, my dear. Enjoy yourself and don’t fancy that any one will grudge your doing so.”
“Good-bye, papa,” said Ella, stooping to kiss him.
They set off immediately after luncheon. Arrived at Cheynesacre, a great consultation took place. Jones was fortunately good-natured as well as skilful—she surveyed the snowy mass which old Hester had packed up so carefully with grave consideration.
“Yes, my lady,” she said, “boolyooners of toole, quite simple, I see. The bodice is complete, luckily. Well—if Harriet can work with me—Harriet is a handy girl, I don’t see but that it may be ready by eight o’clock—or even a little sooner.”
“Sooner, decidedly,” said Lady Cheynes, “we must start at half-past eight. It’s a long drive and of course an early dance. You must have some white flowers Ella—not a bouquet, but a spray or two on the bodice. And was there not something else you needed?”
“Shoes, godmother. I have no white ones.”
“Oh, to be sure. What do you think, Jones, could we get a decent pair at Weevilscoombe?”
Jones shook her wise head.
“Then—run down stairs, Ella, and ring for the head-gardener to speak to me in the conservatory. I will follow you immediately.”
Five minutes later, the old lady entered the drawing-room with a small, carefully enveloped parcel in her hand. There was a look in her face that Ella had never seen there before—a look which in a younger woman would have been accentuated by tears in her eyes. But old age weeps rarely and painfully. Lady Cheynes’ bright, dark eyes were undimmed, yet they had a very tender light in them as she unfolded the packet.
“Look, child,” she said. “Here is a pair of slippers which I little thought would ever have danced again. They belonged to my own child. You have never heard of her of course. She would have been an old woman in your eyes, had she been alive still. They were the last white slippers she ever wore; you see they are perfectly clean, only yellowed a little with age, in spite of my blue paper!”
Ella took them carefully and admiringly in her hands. They were very dainty little shoes, and on the front of each sparkled an old-fashioned buckle.
“How pretty they are!” said the girl. “Are these diamonds, godmother?” and she touched the buckles.
“No, they would be too valuable in that case to be left stitched on the slippers,” Lady Cheynes replied. “They are only old paste, but very good old paste. I gave them to Clarice to wear at the fancy dress ball she got the shoes for, and they were old even then. You see the shoes have high heels, Ella, which suits them for present fashions rather too well, in my opinion. That was because they were for a fancy dress. When Clarice was a girl, high heels were not worn. Now try them on, child—I only hope they are not too small.”
Ella slipped off her own shoe and drew on one of the white ones without the least difficulty.
“Do they fit you?” asked Lady Cheynes quickly, “Quite; perfectly,” said Ella, proceeding to try the second slipper. “The left foot is perhaps, yes, just a trifle too large,” she went on. “You see they are botheasy, and my left foot is a little tiny bit smaller than my right—and then I have thicker stockings on than in the evening. But I am sure they will do, godmother, beautifully; and it is soverygood of you.”
Lady Cheynes stooped to look at the little feet in their motley clothing of red stockings and white shoes.
“Humph,” she said, with a mingling of admiration and contrariety in her voice, “humph—I thought Clarice’s feet the smallest that ever were seen. You can put a bit of cotton-wool in the toes if you like, Ella.”
“Oh, no, thank you, they’re not as bad as that,” said Ella, jumping up. “I can dance in them splendidly—IfeelI can,” and she gave herself a twirl or two. “Oh, dear godmother,” she went on, “I can scarcely believe that I’m going. I reallycan’t.” Jones and the handy Harriet worked their best. Before eight o’clock all was ready, and Ella stood arrayed for her godmother’s inspection.
“Very nice, yes, very nice,” said the old lady. “Put out your foot, Ella—yes, there won’t be another pair of shoes and shoe-buckles like those, there. Now, what have you to put on over you? No! no,” as Ella held up a gauzy mantle or shawl, “that’s not half enough. You must have something over that. My dark-brown fur-lined cloak, Jones, will be the very thing. You are not used to a long drive in winter such as we shall have to-night. And it is freezing now, I hear—the roads are getting slippery. We cannot go fast.”
“You must have plenty of hot-water bottles, my lady,” said Jones, as she returned with the cloak. “And I’ll tell Henry to be sure and have them filled again to come home with.”
“We shall not stay so late as all that,” the old lady replied. “However, it will do no harm to speak to Henry. What are you making such grimaces about, Ella?”
“The cloak, godmother. It is so awfully heavy—I am afraid it will crush me dreadfully, and see, it quite trails on the floor. Don’t you think, in the warm carriage—if I doubled my shawl?”
“No, nonsense,” said Lady Cheynes, decidedly. “That cloak is the proper thing. You can shake yourself out when you get there. Good tulle is elastic,” and she turned away inexorably.
It was a long drive—longer than Ella had realised. And it was so cold outside that the carriage windows had to be kept up the whole way, not admitting a breath of air; and they quickly became so opaque that even if the night had been brighter and clearer than it was, Ella could have seen nothing. In spite of her excitement and eager anticipation she felt herself growing drowsy, and when they at last drew up, though she had not been actually asleep she had been so near it that all about her seemed dreamy and unreal. Hardly understanding where she was, she found herself following her godmother across a great square hall, whose dark oak panelling was decorated with Christmas evergreens and holly, down a short passage into a room crowded with ladies’ shawls and wraps and attendant maidens.
“Shake yourself out, Ella,” said Lady Cheynes. “Yes, that is right,” as her god-daughter half mechanically obeyed her, under the supervision of one of the ladies’-maids. “You are not at all crushed. Keep our cloaks where they will be easily got at, we shall be leaving early,” she went on to the woman, who evidently recognised her. “Now, Ella, my dear. But for goodness’ sake, child, don’t look so solemn. No one would recognise you.”
“I—I didn’t mean to look solemn, godmother,” said the girl, glancing up in the old lady’s face with a little smile of deprecation in her lovely eyes.
At that instant a young man hastily crossing the hall, just behind them, caught sight of her. He stopped short and hesitated.
“By Jove!” he ejaculated under his breath, then drew back. He was out of the range of seeing or being seen by Lady Cheynes.
“Who can she be?” he said to himself.
The old lady moved on calmly till she reached the doorway where Mrs Belvoir was standing, and the greetings and introduction of Ella took place.
“We are later than I expected,” said Lady Cheynes. “You see it was such a sudden idea of mine.”
“A delightful idea,” Mrs Belvoir replied. “Where will you establish yourself, Lady Cheynes? There are a few seats in the ball-room—or would you prefer staying here?”
“I will stay here, thank you,” Ella’s godmother replied, seating herself beside her hostess. “But this child here,” she added in a lower voice, “I should like her to dance. Her sisters don’t know she is coming. It will be quite a surprise to them to see her.”
“They are both dancing,” said Mrs Belvoir. “Of course she must dance. Ah! there is Louis,”—as she caught sight of one of her sons and beckoned to him. “Louis,” and a word or two of whispered explanation followed, before he was brought up and introduced, nothing loth, to the lovely stranger.
He did not catch the name clearly; Mrs Belvoir’s special care to introduce the young girl correctly, as “MissEllaSt Quentin,” had a curious result.
“Miss Ellison Winton,” young Belvoir repeated to himself; “who in the world can she be? I have never seen her before, that’s certain.”
But long ere his fragment of a dance with her came to an end, he found himself hoping that he should see her again!
“She is quite bewitching,” he thought, “and she dances beautifully. I wish I were not engaged so deep.”
“May I introduce a partner or two to you, Miss—Miss Winton?” he said, and Ella did not notice the mistake, as she acquiesced, and two or three new men were led up to her.
“Major Frost, Mr Littleton, Sir Philip Cheynes,” followed each other in quick succession, and each in turn was informed privately by young Belvoir that the young lady was “a Miss Ellison Winton, a perfect stranger,” he added, “staying at some house in the neighbourhood;” and Ella herself, a little bewildered still, heard the various names but indistinctly—the “Sir Philip,” she caught but not the surname. And it never occurred to her to associate the bearer of it with her godmother’s grandson, whom she believed to be still in the north.
There was dancing in two rooms; during Ella’s next dance, a waltz with Major Frost, the elder Misses St Quentin were in the other room. The next, which she danced with Mr Littleton, was a square, and though she once caught sight of Madelene’s head through a doorway, they did not come more nearly together! which Ella, still more than half afraid of being seen by her sisters, was not sorry for.
“It must come, sooner or later,” she thought; “but I should like to be beside my godmother when they first see me.”