CHAPTER IV.ALL SHE COULD REMEMBER.
TheLondon season was waning, and fewer carriages rolled westward to the Park gates in the low sunlight of late afternoon, and fewer riders trotted eastward towards Grosvenor Square in the brighter sunshine before luncheon. Town was gay still; but the flood-tide of pleasure was over. The river of London life was on the ebb, and people were beginning to talk about grouse-moors in Scotland and sulphur-springs in Germany.
Fay had lived in Upper Parchment Street nearly two months. It seemed to her impatient spirit as if she had lived there half a lifetime. The life would have been hateful to her without Mildred’s love. That made amends for a good deal, but it could not make amends for everything; not for Bell’s quiet insolence, for instance.
Bell had replenished the alien’s wardrobe.Everything she had bought was of excellent quality, and expensive after its kind; but had a prize been offered for bad taste, Bell would have taken it by her selections of raiment on this occasion. Not once did she allow Fay to have a voice in the matter.
“Mrs. Fausset deputedmeto choose the things, miss,” she said, “and I hopeIknow my duty.”
“I suppose Iamvery ugly,” said Fay resignedly, as she contemplated her small features in the glass, overshadowed by a mushroom hat of coarse brown straw, with a big brown bow, “but in this hat I look positively hideous.”
The hat was an excellent hat: that good coarse Dunstable, which costs money and wears for ever, the ribbon of the best quality; but Hebe herself would have looked plain under a hat shaped like a bell-glass.
Fay’s remark was recorded to Mrs. Fausset as the indication of a discontented spirit.
Not being able to learn anything about Fay’s history from her mistress, Bell had tried to obtain a little light from the girl herself, but without avail.Questioned about her school, Fay had replied that she hated her school, and didn’t want to talk of it. Questioned about her mother, she answered that her mother’s name was too sacred to be spoken about to a stranger; and on a subtle attempt to obtain information about her father, the girl flushed crimson, started up angrily from her chair, and told the highly respectable Bell that she was not in the habit of chattering to servants, or being questioned by them.
After this it was war to the knife on Martha Bell’s part.
Miss Colville, the expensive morning governess, was in somewise above prejudice, and was a person of liberal mind, allowing for the fact that she had lived all her life in other people’s houses, looking on at lives of fashionable frivolity in which she had no share, and had been obliged to study Debrett’s annual volume as if it were her Bible, lest she should commit herself in every other speech, so intricate are the ramifications and intermarriages of the Upper Ten Thousand. Miss Colville was not unkind to Fay Fausset, and was conscientious inher instructions; but even she resented the mystery of the girl’s existence, and felt that her presence blemished the respectability of the household. By and by, when she should be seeking new employment, and should have occasion to refer to Mrs. Fausset, and to talk of her pupils in Upper Parchment Street, there would be a difficulty in accounting for Fay. A ward of Mr. Fausset’s, a distant connection: the whole thing sounded improbable. An heiress who had come to the house with torn embroidery upon her under-linen. A mystery—yes, no doubt a mystery. And in Miss Colville’s ultra-particular phase of life no manner of mystery was considered respectable; except always those open secrets in the very highest circles which society agrees to ignore.
In spite of these drawbacks, Miss Colville was fairly kind to her new charge. Fay was backward in grammar and geography; she was a dullard about science; but she could chatter French, she knew a little Italian, and in music she was highly gifted. In this she resembled Mildred, who adored music, and had taken her first lessons on the piano as awater-fowl takes to a pond, joyously, as to her native element. Fay was not advanced in thetechniqueof the art, but she played and sang charmingly, for the most part by ear; and she used to play and sing to Mildred in the summer twilight, till Bell came like a prison-warder and insisted upon Mildred’s going to bed.
“I nursed your mamma, miss,” she would say, “andInever allowed her to spoil her complexion with late hours as Miss Fay is leading you on to do.”
At seven Mildred cared neither for health nor complexion in the abstract, and she loved Fay’s music and Fay’s stories. Fay would tell her a fairy tale, with musical accompaniments, improvised to suit the story. This was Beauty’s father groping through the dark wood. Then came the swaying of branches, the rustling of summer leaves, the long, long sigh of the night wind, the hoot of the owl, and the roll of distant thunder. Here came Fatima’s brothers to the rescue, with a triumphant march, and the trampling of fiery steeds, careering up and down the piano in presto arpeggios, bursting openthe gates of Bluebeard’s Castle with a fortissimo volley of chords.
“Inever heard any one make such a noise on a piano,” said Bell, bristling with indignation.
At eight o’clock Fay’s day and evening were done. Mildred vanished like the setting of the sun. She would like to have had Fay to sit beside her bed and tell her stories, and talk to her, till she dropped to sleep; but this happiness was sternly interdicted by Bell.
“She would keep you awake half the night, Miss Mildred, over-exciting you with her stories; and what would your pa and the doctors say tome?” exclaimed Bell.
The door of the bright, pretty bedchamber closed upon Mildred, and Fay went back to the schoolroom heavy of heart, to enjoy the privilege of sitting up by herself till half-past nine, a privilege conceded to superior years. In that dismal hour and a half the girl had leisure to contemplate the solitude of her friendless life. Take Mildred from her, and she had no one—nothing. Mr. Fausset had meant to be kind to her, perhaps. He had talked very kindlyto her in the long drive from Streatham. He had promised her a home and the love of kindred; but evil influences had come in his way, and he had given her—Bell. Perhaps she was of a jealous, exacting disposition; for, fondly as she loved Mildred, she could not help comparing Mildred’s lot with her own: Mildred’s bright, airy room and flower-decked windows, looking over the tree-tops in the Park, with her dingy cell opening upon a forest of chimneys, and tainted with odours of stables and kitchen; Mildred’s butterfly frocks of lace and muslin, with the substantial ugliness of her own attire; Mildred’s manifold possessions—trinkets, toys, books, games, pictures, and flowers—with her empty dressing-table and unadorned walls.
“At your age white frocks would be ridiculous,” said Bell; yet Fay saw other girls of her age flaunting in white muslin all that summer through.
Sometimes the footman forgot to bring her lamp, and she would sit in the schoolroom window, looking down into the street, and watching the carriages roll by in endless procession, with their lamps flaming in the pale gray night, carrying their freightto balls and parties, hurrying from pleasure to pleasure on swift-revolving wheels. A melancholy hour this for the longing heart of youth, even when the schoolgirl’s future participation in all these pleasures is a certainty, or contingent only upon life; but what was it for this girl, who had all girlhood’s yearnings for pleasure and excitement, and who knew not if that sparkling draught would ever touch her lips, who felt herself an alien in this fine house, a stranger at this fashionable end of the town? It was no new thing for her to sit alone in the twilight, a prey to melancholy thoughts. Ever since she could remember, her life had been solitary and loveless. The home ties and tender associations which sweeten other lives were unknown to her. She had never known what love meant till she felt Mildred’s warm arms clinging round her neck, and Mildred’s soft cheek pressed against hers. Her life had been a shifting scene peopled with strangers. Dim and misty memories of childhood’s earliest dawn conjured up a cottage-garden on a windy hill; the sea stretching far away in the distance, bright and blue, but unattainable; a patch of grass on one side, apatch of potatoes on the other; a bed of wallflowers and stocks and yellow marigolds in front of the parlour window; a family of hens and an arrogant cock strutting in the foreground; and, standing out sharply against the sky and the sea, a tall column surmounted by a statue.
How she had longed to get nearer that vast expanse of water, to find out what the sea was like! From some points in the view it seemed so near, almost as if she could touch it with her outstretched hands; from other points it looked so far away. She used to stand on a bank behind the cottage and watch the white-sailed boats going out to sea, and the steamers with their trailing smoke melting and vanishing on the horizon.
“Where do they go?” she asked in her baby French. “Where do they go?”
Those were the first words she remembered speaking, and nobody seemed ever to have answered that eager question.
No one had cared for her in those days. She was very sure of that, looking back upon that monotonous childhood: a long series of empty hours ina cottage garden, and with no companions except the fowls, and no voice except that of the cow in the meadow hard by: a cow which sent forth meaningless bellows occasionally, and which she feared as if it had been a lion.
There was a woman in a white cap whom she called Nounou, and who seemed too busy to care about anybody; a woman who did all the housework, and dug the potato-garden, and looked after the fowls, and milked the cow and made butter, and rode to market on a donkey once or twice a week: a woman who was always in a hurry. There was a man who came home from work at sundown, and there were two boys in blouses and sabots, the youngest of whom was too old to play with the nurse-child. Long summer days in the chalky garden, long hours of listless monotony in front of the wide bright sea, had left a sense of oppression upon Fay’s mind. She did not know even the name of the town she had seen far below the long ridge of chalky hill—a town of tall white houses and domes and spires, which had seemed a vast metropolis to the eyes of infancy. She had but to shut her eyes in her eveningsolitude, and she could conjure up the picture of roofs and spires, and hill and sea, and the tall column in its railed enclosure; yet she knew no more of town or hill than that they were on the other side of the Channel.
She remembered lying in a narrow little bed, that rocked desperately on a windy day, and looking out at the white sea-foam dashing against a curious oval window, like a giant’s eye; and then she remembered her first wondering experience of railway travelling; a train flashing past green fields and hop-gardens and houses; and then darkness and the jolting of a cab; and after that being carried half-asleep into a strange house, and waking to find herself in a strange room, all very clean and neat, with a white-curtained bed and white muslin window-curtains, and on looking out of the window, behold, there was a patch of common all abloom with yellow gorse.
She remembered dimly that she had travelled in the charge of a little gray-haired man, who disappeared after the journey. She found herself now in the care of an elderly lady, very prim and strict, but not absolutely unkind; who wore a silkgown, and a gold watch at her waistband, and who talked in an unknown tongue. Everything here was prettier than in Nounou’s house, and there was a better garden, a garden where there were more flowers and no potatoes and there was the common in the front of the garden, all hillocks and hollows, where she was allowed to amuse herself in charge of a ruddy-faced girl in a lavender cotton frock.
The old lady taught her the unknown tongue, which she discovered in time to be English, and a good deal besides—reading and writing, for instance, and the rudiments of music, a little arithmetic, grammar, and geography. She took kindly to music and reading, and she liked to dabble with ink; but the other lessons were abhorrent, and she gave the orderly old lady a good deal of trouble. There was no love between them, only endurance on either side; and the long days on the common were almost as desolate as the days on the chalky hill above the sea.
At last there came a change. The dressmaker sent home three new frocks, all uncompromisingly ugly; the little old gray-haired man reappeared,looking exactly as he had looked on board the steamer, and a fly carried Fay and this guardian to the railway-station on the common, and thence the train took them to a great dark city, which the man told Fay was London; and then they went in a cab through streets that seemed endless, till at last the streets melted into a wide high-road, with trees on either side, and the cab drove into a garden of shining laurels and rhododendrons, and pulled up before a classic portico. Fay had no memory of any house so grand as this, although it was only the conventional suburban villa of sixty or seventy years ago.
Just at first the change seemed delightful. That circular carriage-sweep, those shining rhododendrons with great rose-coloured trusses of bloom, the drooping gold of the laburnums, and the masses of perfumed lilac, were beautiful in her eyes. Not so beautiful the long, bare schoolroom and the willow-pattern cups and saucers. Not so beautiful that all-pervading atmosphere of restraint which made school odious to Fay from the outset.
She stayed there for years—an eternity it seemed to her, looking back upon its hopeless monotony.Pleasure, variety, excitement, she had none. Life was an everlasting treadmill—up and down, down and up, over and over again. The same dull round of lessons; a dismal uniformity of food; Sunday penance in the shape of two long services in a badly ventilated church, and one long catechism in a dreary schoolroom. No gaol can be much duller than a well-regulated middle-class girls’ school. Fay could complain of no ill-treatment. She was well fed, comfortably housed, warmly clad; but her life was a burden to her.
She had a bad temper; was irritable, impatient, quick to take offence, and prone to fits of sullenness. This was the opinion of the authorities; and her faults increased as she grew older. She was not absolutely rebellious towards the governesses; but there was always something amiss. She was idle and listless at her studies, took no interest in anything but her music-lessons, and was altogether an unsatisfactory pupil. She had no lasting friendships among her schoolfellows. She was capricious in her likings, and was prone to fancy herself slighted or ill-treated on the smallest provocation. The generalverdict condemned her as the most disagreeable girl in the school. With the meaner souls among her schoolfellows it was considered an affront that she should have no antecedents worth talking about, no relatives, no home, and no hampers or presents. Even the servants neglected her as a young person without surroundings, upon whom kindness would be thrown away. The wardrobe-woman left her clothes unmended, feeling that it mattered very little in what order they were kept, since the girl never went home for the holidays, and there was no mother or aunt to investigate her trunks. She was condemned on every hand as a discreditable mystery; and when, one unlucky afternoon, a sultry afternoon at the beginning of a hot summer, she lost her temper in the middle of a class-lesson, burst into a torrent of angry speech, half defiance, half reproach, bounced up from her seat, and rushed out of the schoolroom, there were few to pity, and none to sympathise.
The proprietress of the school was elderly and lymphatic. Miss Fausset had been stigmatised as a troublesome pupil for a long time. There were continual complaints about Miss Fausset’s conduct,worrying complaints, which spoilt Miss Constable’s dinner and interfered with her digestion. Really, the only course open to that prosperous, over-fed personage was to get rid of Miss Fausset. There was an amiable family of three sisters—highly connected young persons, whose father was in the wine trade—waiting for vacancies in that old-established seminary.
“We will make atabula rasaof a troublesome past,” said Miss Constable, who loved fine words. “Miss Fausset must go.”
Thus it was that John Fausset had been suddenly called upon to find a new home for his ward; and thus it was that Fay had been brought to Upper Parchment Street.
No doubt Upper Parchment Street was better than school; but if it had not been for Mildred the atmosphere on the edge of Hyde Park would have been no more congenial than the atmosphere at Streatham. Fay felt herself an intruder in that splendid house, where, amidst that multitude of pretty things, she could not put her finger upon one gracious object that belonged to her—nothing thatwas her “very own,” as Mildred called it; for she had refused Mildred’s doll and all other proffered gifts, too proud to profit by a child’s lavish generosity. Mrs. Fausset made her no gifts, never talked to her, rarely looked at her.
Fay knew that Mrs. Fausset disliked her. She had divined as much from the first, and she knew only too well that dislike had grown with experience. She was allowed to go down to afternoon tea with Mildred; but had she been deaf and dumb her society could not have been less cultivated by the mistress of the house. Mrs. Fausset’s feelings were patent to the whole household, and were common talk in the servants’ hall. “No wonder,” said the women; the men said “What a shame!” but footmen and housemaids were at one in their treatment of Fay, which was neglectful, and occasionally insolent. It would hardly have been possible for them to behave well to the intruder and keep in favour with Bell, who was absolute—a superior power to butler or housekeeper, a person with no stated office, and the supreme right to interfere with everybody.
Bell sighed and shook her head whenever MissFay was mentioned. She bridled with pent-up indignation, as if the girl’s existence were an injury to her, Martha Bell. “IfIhadn’t nursed Mrs. Fausset when she was the loveliest infant that ever drew breath,Ishouldn’t feel it so much,” said Bell; and then tears would spring to her eyes and chokings would convulse her throat, and the housekeeper would shake her head and sympathise mysteriously.
At the end of July the establishment migrated from Parchment Street to The Hook, Mr. Fausset’s riverside villa between Chertsey and Windsor. The Hook was an expanse of meadow-land bordered with willows, round which the river made a loop; and on this enchanted bit of ground—a spot loved by the river-god—Mr. Fausset had built for himself the most delightful embodiment of that much-abused word villa; a long, low, white house, with spacious rooms, broad corridors, a double flight of marble stairs, meeting on a landing lit by an Italian cupola—a villa surrounded with a classic colonnade, and looking out upon peerless gardens sloping to the willow-shadowed stream.
To Fay The Hook seemed like a vision of Paradise.It was almost happiness even to her impatient spirit to sit in a corner of those lovely grounds, screened from the outer world by a dense wall of Portugal laurels and arbutus, with the blue water and the low, flat meadows of the further shore for her only prospect.
Miss Colville was left behind in London. For Fay and Mildred life was a perpetual holiday. Mrs. Fausset was almost as much in society at The Hook as she had been in London. Visitors came and visitors went. She was never alone. There were parties at Henley and Marlow, and Wargrave and Goring. Two pairs of horses were kept hard at work carrying Mr. and Mrs. Fausset about that lovely riverside landscape to garden-parties and dinners, picnics and regattas. John Fausset went because his wife liked him to go, and because he liked to see her happy and admired. The two girls were left, for the most part, to their own devices, under the supervision of Bell. They lived in the gardens, with an occasional excursion into the unknown world along the river. There was a trustworthy under-gardener, who was a good oarsman,and in his charge Mildred was allowed to go on the water in a big wherry, which looked substantial enough to have carried a select boarding-school.
This life by the Thames was the nearest approach to absolute happiness which Fay had ever known; but for her there was to be no such thing as unbroken bliss. In the midst of the sultry August weather Mildred fell ill—a mild attack of scarlet fever, which sounded less alarming to Mrs. Fausset’s ear, because the doctor spoke of it as scarlatina. It was a very mild case, the local practitioner told Mrs. Fausset; there was no occasion to send for a London physician; there was no occasion for alarm. Mildred must keep her bed for a fortnight, and must be isolated from the rest of the house. Her own maid might nurse her if she had had the complaint.
“How could she have caught the fever?” Mrs. Fausset asked, with an injured air; and there was a grand investigation, but no scarlet fever to be heard of nearer than Maidenhead.
“People are so artful in hiding these things,” said Mrs. Fausset; and ten minutes afterwards shebegged the doctor not to mention Mildred’s malady to any of her neighbours.
“We have such a host of engagements, and crowds of visitors coming from London,” she said. “People are so ridiculously nervous. Of course I shall be extremely careful.”
The doctor gave elaborate instructions about isolation. Such measures being taken, Mrs. Fausset might receive all fashionable London with safety.
“And it is really such a mild case that you need not put yourself about in any way,” concluded the doctor.
“Dear, sweet pet, we must do all we can to amuse her,” sighed the fond mother.
Mild as the case might be, the patient had to suffer thirst and headache, a dry and swollen throat, and restless nights. Her most eager desire was for Fay’s company, and as it was ascertained that Fay had suffered from scarlet fever some years before in a somewhat severe form, it was considered she might safely assist in the sick-room.
She was there almost all day, and very often in the night. She read to Mildred, and sang to her,and played with her, and indulged every changing fancy and caprice of sickness. Her love was inexhaustible, indefatigable, for ever on the watch. If Mildred woke from a feverish dream in the deep of night, with a little agitated sob or cry, she found a figure in a white dressing-gown bending over her, and loving arms encircling her before she had time to feel frightened. Fay slept in a little dressing-room opening out of Mildred’s large, airy bedroom, so as to be near her darling. It was a mere closet, with a truckle-bed brought down from the servants’ attic; but it was good enough for Fay, whose only thought was of the child who loved her as none other had ever loved within her memory.
Mrs. Fausset was prettily anxious about her child. She would come to Mildred’s room in her dressing-gown before her leisurely morning toilet, to hear the last report. She would sit by the bed for five minutes showering kisses on the pale cheeks, and then she would go away to her long summer-day of frivolous pleasures and society talk. Ripples of laughter and snatches of speech came floating in at the open windows; and at Mildred’s behest Faywould stand at a window and report the proceedings of that happy world outside.
“They are going out in the boat. They are going to have tea on the lawn. Your mamma is walking up and down with Sir Horace Clavering. Miss Grenville and her sister are playing croquet;” and so on, and so on, all day.
Mildred tossed about on her pretty white bed impatiently.
“It is very horrid being shut up here on these fine days,” she said; “or it would be horrid without you, Fay. Mamma does not come to see me much.”
Mamma came three or four times a day; but her visits were of the briefest. She would come into the room beaming with smiles, looking like living sunlight in her exquisite white gown, with its delicate ribbons and cloudy lace—a fleecy white cloud just touched with rose-colour, as if she were an embodiment of the summer dawn. Sometimes she brought Mildred a peach, or a bunch of hothouse grapes, or an orchid, or a new picture-book; but beautiful as these offerings were, the child did not always value them. She would push the plate ofgrapes or the peach aside impatiently when her mother was gone, or she would entreat Fay to eat the dainty.
“Mamma thinks I am greedy,” she said; “but I ain’t, am I, Fay?”
Those three weeks in the sick-room, those wakeful nights and long, slow summer days, strengthened the bond of love between the two girls. By the time Mildred was convalescent they seemed to have loved each other for years. Mildred could hardly remember what her life was like before she had Fay for a companion. Mrs. Fausset saw this growing affection not without jealousy; but it was very convenient that there should be some one in the house whose companionship kept Mildred happy, and she even went so far as to admit that Fay was “useful.”
“I cannot be with the dear child half so much as I should like to be,” she said; “visitors are so exacting.”
Fay had slept very little during Mildred’s illness, and now that the child was nearly well the elder girl began to flag somewhat, and was tired early in the evening, and glad to go to bed at the same hour asthe patient, who, under Bell’s supervision, was made to retire before eight. She was now well enough to sit up all day, and to drive out in a pony-carriage in the sunny hours after early dinner. Fay went with her, of course. Pony and landscape would have been wanting in charm without Fay’s company. Both girls had gone to bed one sultry evening in the faint gray twilight. Fay was sleeping profoundly; but Mildred, after dozing a little, was lying half-awake, with closed eyelids, in the flower-scented room. The day had been exceptionally warm. The windows were all open, and a door between Mildred’s bedroom and sitting-room had been left ajar.
Bell was in the sitting-room at her favourite task of clearing up the scattered toys and books, and reducing all things to mathematical precision. Meta, Mildred’s German maid, was sitting at needlework near the window by the light of a shaded lamp. The light shone in the twilight through the partly-open door, and gave Mildred a sense of company. They began to talk presently, and Mildred listened, idly at first, and soothed by the sound of their voices, but afterwards with keen curiosity.
“I know I shouldn’t like to be treated so,” said Meta.
“Idon’t see that she has anything to complain of,” answered Bell. “She has a good home, and everything provided for her. What more can she want?”
“I should want a good deal more if I was a heiress.”
“Anheiress,” corrected Bell, who prided herself on having cultivated her mind, and was somewhat pedantic of speech. “That’s all nonsense, Meta. She’s no more an heiress than I am. Mr. Fausset told my poor young mistress that just to throw dust in her eyes. Heiress, indeed! An heiress without a relative in the world that she can speak of—an heiress that has dropped from the moon. Don’t tellme.”
Nobody was telling Mrs. Bell anything; but she had a resentful air, as if combating the arguments of an invisible adversary.
There was a silence during which Mildred nearly fell asleep; and then the voices began again.
“It’s impossible for sisters to be fonder of each other than those two are,” said Meta.
“There’s nothing strange in that, considering theyaresisters,” answered Bell angrily.
“O, but you’ve no right to say that, Mrs. Bell; it’s going too far.”
“Haven’t I a right to use my eyes and ears? Can’t I see the family look in those two faces, though Miss Mildred is pretty and Miss Fay is plain? Can’t I hear the same tones in the two voices, and haven’t I seen his way of bringing that girl into the house, and his guilty look before my poor injured mistress? Of course they’re sisters. Who could ever doubt it?Shedoesn’t, I know, poor dear.”
She, in this connection, meant Mrs. Fausset.
There was only one point in this speech which the innocent child seized upon. She and Fay were said to be sisters. O, how she had longed for a sister in the last year or so of her life, since she had found out the meaning of solitude among fairest surroundings! How all the brightest things she possessed had palled upon her for want of sisterlycompanionship! How she had longed for a baby-sister even, and had envied the children in households where a new baby was an annual institution! She had wondered why her mother did not treat herself to a new baby occasionally, as so many of her mother’s friends did. And now Fay had been given to her, ever so much better than a baby, which would have taken such a long time to grow up. Mildred had never calculated how long, but she concluded that it would be some months before the most forward baby would be of a companionable age. Fay had been given to her—a ready-made companion, versed in fairy tales, able to conjure up an enchanted world out of the schoolroom piano, skilful with pencil and colour-box, able to draw the faces and figures and palaces and woodlands of that fairy world, able to amuse and entertain her in a hundred ways. And Fay was her sister after all. She dropped asleep in a flutter of pleasurable excitement. She would ask her mother all about it to-morrow; and in the meantime she would say nothing to Fay. It was fun to have a secret from Fay.
A batch of visitors left next day after lunch.Mr. and Mrs. Fausset were to be alone for forty-eight hours, a rare oasis of domesticity in the society desert. Mildred had been promised that the first day there was no company she was to have tea with mamma in the tent on the lawn. She claimed the fulfilment of that promise to-day.
It was a lovely day after the sultry, thundery night. Mrs. Fausset reclined in her basket-chair in the shelter of the tent. Fay and Mildred sat side by side on a low bamboo bench on the grass: the little girl, fairy-like, in her white muslin and flowing flaxen hair, the big girl in olive-coloured alpaca, with dark hair clustering in short curls about the small intelligent head. There could hardly have been a stronger contrast than that between the two girls; and yet Bell was right. There was a family look, an undefinable resemblance of contour and expression which would have struck a very attentive observer—something in the line of the delicate eyebrow, something in the angle of the forehead.
“Mamma,” said Mildred suddenly, clambering into her mother’s lap, “why mayn’t I call Fay sister?”
Mrs. Fausset started, and flushed crimson.
“What nonsense, child! Why, because it would be most ridiculous.”
“But sheismy sister,” urged Mildred, looking full into her mother’s eyes, with tremendous resolution in her own. “I love her like a sister, and she is my sister. Bell says so.”
“Bell is an impertinent person,” cried Mrs. Fausset angrily. “When did she say so?”
“Last night, when she thought I was asleep. Mayn’t I call Fay sister?” persisted Mildred coaxingly.
“On no account. I never heard anything so shameful. To think that Bell should gossip! An old servant like Bell—my own old nurse. It is too cruel!” cried Mrs. Fausset, forgetting herself in her anger.
Fay stood tall and straight in the sunshine outside the tent, wondering at the storm. She had an instinctive apprehension that Mrs. Fausset’s anger was humiliating to her. She knew not why, but she felt a sense of despair darker than any other evilmoment in her life; and yet her evil moments had been many.
“You need not be afraid that I shall ask Mildred to call me sister,” she said. “I love her dearly, but I hate everybody else in this house.”
“You are a wicked, ungrateful girl,” exclaimed Mrs. Fausset, “and I am very sorry I ever saw your face.”
Fay drew herself up, looked at the speaker indignantly for a moment or so, and then walked quietly away towards the house.
She passed the footman with the tea-tray as she crossed the lawn, and a little further on she passed John Fausset, who looked at her wonderingly.
Mildred burst out crying.
“How unkind you are, mamma!” she sobbed. “If I mayn’t call her my sister I shall always love her like a sister—always, always, always.”
“What is the matter with my Mildred?” asked Mr. Fausset, arriving at this moment.
“Nothing. She has only been silly,” his wife answered pettishly.
“And Fay—has she been silly, too?”
“Fay, yourprotégée, has been most impertinent to me. But I suppose that does not count.”
“It does count, for a good deal, if she has been intentionally impertinent,” answered Fausset gravely.
He looked back after Fay’s vanishing figure with a troubled expression. He had so sighed for peace. He had hoped that the motherless girl might be taken into his home and cared for and made happy, without evil feeling upon any one’s part; and now he could see by his wife’s countenance that the hope of union and peace was at an end.
“I don’t know what you mean about intention,” said his wife; “I only know that the girl you are so fond of has just said she hates everybody in this house except Mildred. That sound rather like intentional impertinence, I think.”
“Go and play, darling,” said Fausset to his child; “or run after Fay, and bring her back to tea.”
“You show a vast amount of consideration for your wife,” said Mrs. Fausset.
“My dear Maud, I want you to show a little more consideration for that girl, who has been so devoted to Mildred all through her illness, and whohas one very strong claim upon a mother’s heart—she is motherless.”
“I should think more of that claim, perhaps, if I knew who her mother was, and what she was to you,” said Maud Fausset.
“She was once near and dear to me. That is all I can tell you, Maud; and it ought to be enough.”
“It is more than enough,” his wife answered, trembling from head to foot, as she rose from her low chair, and walked away from the tent.
John Fausset looked after her irresolutely, went a few steps as if he meant to follow her, and then turned back to the tent, just as Mildred reappeared with Fay from another direction.
“We three will have tea together,” he exclaimed, with demonstrative cheerfulness. “Mamma is not very well, Mildred; she has gone back to the house. You shall pour out my tea.”
He seated himself in his wife’s chair, and Mildred sat on his knee, and put her arms round his neck, and adored him with all her power of adoration. Her household divinity had ever been the father.Perhaps her baby mind had found out the weakness of one parent and the strength of the other.
“Fay shall pour out the tea,” she said, with a sense of self-sacrifice. “It will be a treat for Fay.”
So Fay poured out the tea, and they all three sat in the tent, and were happy and merry—or seemingly so, perhaps, as concerned John Fausset—for one whole sunshiny hour, and for the first time Fay felt that she was not an outsider. Yet there lurked in her mind the memory of Mrs. Fausset’s anger, and that memory was bitter.
“What am I, that almost everybody should be rude to me?” she asked herself, as she sat alone that night after Mildred had gone to bed.
From the open windows below came the languid sweetness of a nocturne by Chopin. Mrs. Fausset was playing her husband to sleep after dinner. Sure token of reconciliation between husband and wife.
The doctor came next morning. He appeared upon alternate days now, and looked at Mildred in a casual manner, after exhausting the local gossip with Mrs. Fausset. This morning he and Mrs.Fausset were particularly confidential before the patient was sent for.
“Admirable!” he exclaimed, when he had looked at her tongue and felt her pulse; “we are as nearly well as we can be. All we want now is a little sea-air to set us up for the winter. The great point, my dear madam”—to Mrs. Fausset—“is to avoid all risk ofsequelæ. A fortnight at Brighton or Eastbourne will restore our little friend to perfect health.”
There were no difficulties in the way of such people as the Faussets, no question of ways and means. Bell was sent for, and despatched to Eastbourne by an afternoon train. She was to take lodgings in a perfect position, and of impeccable repute as to sanitation. Mildred was to follow next day, under convoy of Meta and the under-butler, a responsible person of thirty-five.
“Fay must go, too,” exclaimed Mildred; whereupon followed a tragic scene.
Fay was not to go to Eastbourne. No reasons were assigned for the decision. Mildred was to ride a donkey; she was to have a pony-carriage at herdisposition; but she was to be without Fay for a whole fortnight. In a fortnight she would be able to come home again.
“How many days are there in a fortnight?” she asked piteously.
“Fourteen.”
“O Fay, fourteen days away from you!” she exclaimed, clinging with fond arms round Fay’s neck, and pulling down the dark head on a level with her own bright hair.
Fay was pale, but tearless, and said not a word. She let Mildred kiss her, and kissed back again, but in a dead silence. She went into the hall with the child, and to the carriage-door, and they kissed each other on the doorstep, and they kissed at the carriage-window; and then the horses trotted away along the gravel drive, and Fay had a last glimpse of the fair head thrust out of the window, and the lilies and roses of a child’s face framed in pale gold hair.
It was a little more than a fortnight before Bell and her charge went back to The Hook. Mildred had sorely missed her playfellow, but had consoledherself with a spade and pail on the beach, and a donkey of venerable aspect, whose chief distinction was his white linen panoply, on the long dusty roads.
Mrs. Fausset was not at home to receive her daughter. She had a superior duty at Chertsey, where people of some social importance were giving a lawn-party. The house seemed empty and silent, and all its brightness and graceful furniture, and flowers in the hall and on the staircase, could not atone for that want of human life.
“Where is Fay?” cried Mildred, taking alarm.
Nobody answered a question which was addressed to everybody.
“Fay, Fay, where are you?” cried the child, and then rushed up-stairs to the schoolroom, light as a lapwing, distracted with that sudden fear. “Fay, Fay!” The treble cry rang through the house.
No one in the schoolroom, nor in Mildred’s bedroom, nor in the little room where Fay had slept, nor in the drawing-rooms, whither Mildred came running, after that futile quest up-stairs.
Bell met her in the hall, with a letter in her hand.
“Your mamma wished to break it to you herself, miss,” said Bell. “Miss Fay has gone.”
“Gone, where?”
“To Brussels.”
“Where is Brussels?”
“Ibelieve, miss, that it is the capital of Belgium.”
Mildred tore open the letter, which Bell read aloud over the child’s shoulder.
“I hope you won’t be grieved at losing your playfellow, my dearest pet. Fay is dreadfully backward in her education, and has no manners. She has gone to a finishing-school at Brussels, and you may not see her again for some years.”
And so the years go by, and this story passes on to a time when the child Mildred is a child no more, but the happy mother of a fair young daughter, and the wife of an idolised husband.