Mrs. Palliser was much more rapturous when she heard the contents of the letter — much more interested in all details about Ida’s future home. She wanted to know what Miss Wendover was like — how many servants she kept — whether carriage or no carriage — what kind of a house she lived in, and how it was furnished.
‘You will be quite a grand lady,’ she said, with a touch of envy, when Ida had described the cosy red-brick cottage, the verandahed drawing-room and conservatory added by Miss Wendover, the pair of cobs which that lady drove, the large well-kept gardens; ‘you will look down upon us with our poor ways, and this house, in which all the rooms smell of whitewash.’
‘No, indeed, mamma, I shall always think of you with affection; for you have been very kind to me, although I know I have been a burden.’
‘Everything is a burden when one is poor,’ sighed her stepmother; ‘even one extra in the washing-bills makes a difference; and we shall feel it awfully when Vernon grows up. Boys are so extravagant; and one cannot talk to them as one can to girls.’
‘But I hope you will be better off then, mamma.’
‘My dear, you might as well hope we should be dukes and duchesses. What chance is there of any improvement? Your poor papa has no idea of earning money. I’m sure I have said to him, often and often, “Reginald, do something. Write for the magazines! Surely you can do that? Other men in your position do it.” “Yes,” he growled, “and that’s why the magazines are so stupid.” No, Ida, your father’s circumstances will never improve; and when the time comes for giving Vernon a proper education we shall be paupers.’
‘Poor papa!’ sighed Ida; ‘I am afraid he is not strong enough to make any great effort.’
‘He has given way, my dear; that is the root of it all. We shall never be better off, unless those two healthy, broad-shouldered young men were to go and get themselves swallowed up by an earthquake; and that is rather too much for anyone to expect.’
‘What young men?’ asked Ida, absently.
‘Your two cousins.’
‘Oh, Sir Vernon and his brother. No, I don’t suppose they will die to oblige us poor creatures.’
‘They went up the what’s-its-name Horn, in Switzerland,’ said Mrs. Palliser, plaintively. ‘It made my blood run cold to hear them talk about it. “By Jove, Peter, I thought it was all over with you,” said Sir Vernon, when he told us how foolhardy his brother had been. But you see they got to the bottom all safe and sound, though ever so many people have been killed on that very mountain.’
‘I’m glad they did, mamma. We may want their money very badly, but we are not murderers, even in thought.’
‘God forbid!’ sighed the little woman. ‘They are fine-grown, gentlemanly young men, too. Sir Vernon gave my Vernie a sovereign, and promised him a pony next year; but, good gracious! how could we afford to keep a pony, even if we had a stable? “You had better make it the other kind of pony,” says your father, and then they all burst out laughing.’
‘So little makes a man laugh!’ said Ida, somewhat contemptuously. That picture of her father making sport of his poverty irritated her. ‘Well, dear mamma,’ she said presently, moved by one of those generous impulses which were a part of her frank, unwise nature, ‘if ever I can earn a hundred a year — and there are many governesses who get as much — you shall have fifty to help pay Vernon’s schooling.’
‘You are a dear generous ‘arted girl,’ exclaimed the stepmother, and the two women kissed again with tears, an operation which they usually performed in the hour of domestic trouble.
Miss Wendover’s letter came next day, a hearty, frank, affectionate letter, offering a home that was really meant to be like home, and a salary of forty pounds a year, ‘just to buy your gowns,’ Miss Wendover said. ‘I know it is not sufficient remuneration for such accomplishments as yours, but I want you rather than your accomplishments and I am not rich enough to give as much as you are worth. But you will, at least, stave off the drudgery of a governess’s life till you are older, and better able to cope with domineering mothers and insolent pupils.’
Such a salary was a long way off that hundred per annum which Ida had set before her eyes as the golden goal to be gained by laborious pianoforte athletics and patient struggles with the profundities of German grammar; but, as Captain Palliser paid, it was a beginning; and Ida was very glad so to begin. She wrote to Miss Wendover gratefully accepting her offer, and in a very humble spirit.
‘I fear it is pity that prompts your kind offer,’ she wrote, ‘and that you take me because you know I left Mauleverer Manor in disgrace, and that nobody else would have me. I am a bad penny. That is what my father called me when I came home to him. And now I am to go back to Kingthorpe as a bad penny. But, please God, I will try to prove to you that I am not altogether worthless; and, whatever may happen, I shall love you and be grateful to you till the end of my life.
‘As you are so kind as to say I may come as soon as I like, I shall be with you on the day after you receive this letter.’
Ida’s preparations for departure were not elaborate. Her scanty wardrobe had been put in the neatest possible order. A few hours sufficed for packing trunk and bonnet-box. On the last afternoon Mrs. Palliser came to her highly elated, and proposed a walk to Dieppe, and a drive home in the diligence which left the Market Place at five o’clock.
‘I am going to give you a new hat,’ she said, triumphantly. ‘You must have a new hat.’
‘But, dear mamma, I know you can’t afford it.’
‘I will afford it, Ida. You will have to go to church at Kingthorpe’ — Mrs. Palliser regarded church-going as an oppressive condition of prosperous respectability. One of the few privileges of being hard up and quite out of society was that one need not go to church—’and I should like you to appear like a lady. You owe it to your pa and I. A hat you must ‘ave. I can pay for it out of the housekeeping money, and your pa will never know the difference.’
‘No, mamma, but you and Vernon will have to pinch for it,’ said Ida, knowing that there was positively no margin to that household’s narrow means of existence.
‘A little pinching won’t hurt us. Vernie is as bilious as he can be; he eats too many compots and little fours. I shall keep him to plain bread and butter for a bit, and it will do him a world of good. There’s no use talking, Ida, I mean you to ‘ave a ‘at; and if you won’t come and choose it I must choose it myself,’ concluded the little woman, dropping more aspirates as she grew more excited.
So mother and daughter walked to Dieppe in the dull November afternoon, Vernon trudging sturdily by his sister’s side. They bought the hat, a gray felt with partridge plumage, which became Ida’s rich dark bloom to perfection; and then they went to the Cathedral, and knelt in the dusky aisle, and heard the solemn melody of the organ, and the subdued voices of the choir, in the plaintive music of Vesper Psalms, monotonous somewhat, but with a sweet soothing influence, music that inspired gentle thoughts.
Then they went back to the Market-Place, and were in time to get good places on the banquette of the diligence, before the big white Norman horses trotted and ambled noisily along the stony street.
Ida left Dieppe late on the following evening, by the same steamer that had brought her from Newhaven. The British stewardess recognised her.
‘Why, you was only across the other day, miss!’ she said; ‘what a gad-about you must be!’
She arrived in London by ten o’clock next morning, and left Waterloo at a quarter-past eleven, reaching Winchester early in the day. How different were her feelings this time, as the train wound slowly over those chalky hills! how full of care was her soul! And yet she was no longer a visitor going among strangers — this time she went to an assured home, she was to be received among friends. But the knowledge that her liberty was forfeited for ever, that she was a free-agent only on sufferance, made her grave and depressed. Never again could she feel as glad and frank a creature as she had been in the golden prime of the summer that was
gone, when she and Bessie and Urania Rylance came by this same railway, over those green English hill-sides, to the city that was once the chief seat of England’s power and splendour.
A young man in a plain gray livery and irreproachable top-boots stood contemplatively regarding the train as it came into the station. He touched his hat at sight of Miss Palliser, and she remembered him as Miss Wendover’s groom.
‘Any luggage, ma’am?’ he asked, as she alighted; as if it were as likely as not that she had come without any.
‘There is one box, Needham. That is all besides these things.’
Her bonnet-box — frail ark of woman’s pride — was in the carriage, with a wrap and an umbrella, and her dressing bag.
‘All right, ma’am. If you’ll show me which it is I’ll tell the porter to bring it. I’ve got the cobs outside.’
‘Oh, I am so sorry, — how good of Miss Wendover!’
‘They wanted exercise, ‘um. They was a bit above themselves, and the drive has done ’em good.’
Miss Wendover’s cherished brown cobs, animals which in the eyes of Kingthorpe were almost as sacred as that Egyptian beast whose profane slaughter was more deeply felt than the nation’s ruin — to think that these exalted brutes should have been sent to fetch that debased creature, a salaried companion. But then Aunt Betsy was never like anyone else.
Needham took the cobs across the hills at a pace which he would have highly disapproved in any other driver. Had Miss Wendover so driven them, he would have declared she was running them off their legs. But in his own hands, Brimstone and Treacle — so called to mark their difference of disposition — could come to no harm. ‘They wanted it,’ he told Miss Palliser, when she remarked upon their magnificent pace, ‘they never got half work enough.’
The hills looked lovely, even in this wintry season — yew trees and grass gave no token of November’s gloom. The sky was bright and blue, a faint mist hung like a veil over the city in the valley, the low Norman tower of the cathedral, the winding river, and flat fertile meadows — a vision very soon left far in the rear of Brimstone and Treacle.
‘How handsome they look!’ said Ida, admiring their strong, bold crests, like war-horses in a Ninevite picture, their shining black-brown coats. ‘Is Brimstone such a very vicious horse?’
‘Vicious, mum? no, not a bit of vice about him,’ answered Needham promptly, ‘but he’s a rare difficult horse to groom. There ain’t none but me as dares touch him. I let the boy try it once, and I found the poor lad half an hour afterwards standing in the middle of the big loose box like a statter, while Brimstone raced round him as hard as he could go, just like one of them circus horses. The boy dursn’t stir. If he’d moved a limb, Brimstone ‘ud have ‘molished him.’
‘What an awful horse! But isn’t that viciousness?’
‘Lor’, no mum. That ain’t vice,’ answered the groom smiling amusedly at the lady’s ignorance. Vice is crib-biting, or jibbing, or boring or summat o’ that kind. Brimstone is a game hoss, and he’s got a bit of a temper, but he ain’t got no vice.’
Here was Kingthorpe, looking almost as pretty as it had looked when she gazed upon it with tearful eyes in her sad farewell at the close of summer. The big forest trees were bare, but there were flowers in all the cottage gardens, even late lingering roses on southern walls, and the clipped yew-tree abominations — dumb-waiters, peacocks, and other monstrosities — were in their pride of winter beauty. The ducks were swimming gaily in the village pond, and the village inn was still glorious with red geraniums, in redder pots. The Knoll stood out grandly above all other dwellings — the beds full of chrysanthemums, and a bank of big scarlet geraniums on each side of the hall door.
It seemed strange to be driven swiftly past the familiar carriage-drive, and round into the lane leading to Miss Wendover’s cottage. It was only an accommodation lane — or a back-out lane, as the boys called it, since no two carriages could pass each other in that narrow channel — and in bad weather the approach to the Homestead was far from agreeable. A carriage and horses had been known to stick there, with wheels hopelessly embedded in the clay, while Miss Wendover’s guests picked their footsteps through the mud.
But the Homestead, when attained, was such a delightful house that one forgot all impediments in the way thither. The red brick front — old red brick, be it noted, which has a brightness and purity of colour never retained for above a twelvemonth by the red brick of to-day — glowing, athwart its surrounding greenery, like the warm welcome of a friend; the exquisite neatness of the garden, where every flower that could be coaxed into growing in the open air bloomed in perfection; the spick-and-span brightness of the windows; the elegant order that prevailed within, from cellar to garret; the old, carefully-chosen furniture, which had for the most part been collected from other old-world homesteads; the artistic colouring of draperies and carpets — all combined to make Miss Wendover’s house delightful.
‘My house had need be orderly,’ she said, when her friends waxed rapturous; ‘I have so little else to think about.’
Yet the sick and poor, within a radius of ten miles, might have testified that Miss Wendover had thought and care for all who needed them, and that she devoted the larger half of her life to other people’s interests.
It was a clear, balmy day, one of those lovely autumn days which hang upon the edge of winter, and Miss Wendover was pacing her garden walks bare-headed, armed with gardening scissors and formidable brown leather gauntlets, nipping a leaf here, or a withered rosebud there, with eyes whose eagle glance not so much as an aphis could escape. From the slope of her lawn Aunt Betsy saw the cobs turn into the lane, and she was standing at the gate to welcome the traveller when the carriage drew up.
There was no carriage-drive on this side of the house, only a lawn with a world of flower-beds. Those visitors who wanted to enter in a ceremonious manner had to drive round by shrubbery and orchard to the back, where there were an old oak door and an entrance-hall. On this garden front there were only glass doors and long French windows, verandahs, and sunny parlours, opening one out of another.
‘How do you do, my dear?’ said the spinster heartily, as Ida alighted; ‘I am very glad to see you. Why, how bright and blooming you look — not a bit like a sea-sick traveller.’
‘Dear Miss Wendover, I ought to look bright when I am so glad to come to you; and, as to the other thing, I am never sea-sick.’
‘What a splendid girl! That unhappy little Bessie can’t cross to the
Wight without being a martyr. But, Ida, I am not going to be called Miss
Wendover. Only bishops and county magnates, and people of that kind, call
me by that name. To you I am to be Aunt Betsy, as I am to the children at
The Knoll.’
‘Is not that putting me too much on a level—’
‘With my own flesh and blood? Nonsense! I mean you to be as my own flesh and blood. I could not bear to have anyone about me who was not.’
‘You are too good,’ faltered Ida. ‘How can I ever repay you?’
‘You have only to be happy. It is your nature to be frank and truthful, so I will say nothing about that.’
Ida blushed deepest scarlet. Frank and truthful — she — whose very name was a lie! And yet there could be no wrong done to Miss Wendover, she told herself, by her suppression of the truth. It was a suppression that concerned only Brian Walford and herself. No one else could have any interest in the matter.
Betsy Wendover herself led the way to the bed-chamber that had been prepared for the new inmate. It was a dear old room, not spacious, but provided with two most capacious closets, in each of which a small gang of burglars could have hidden — dear old closets, with odd little corner cupboards inside them, and a most elaborate system of shelves. One closet had a little swing window at the top for ventilation, and this, Miss Wendover told Ida, was generally taken for a haunted corner, as the ventilating window gave utterance to unearthly noises in the dead watches
of the night, and sometimes gave entrance to a stray cat from adjacent tiles. A cat less agile than the rest of his species had been known to entangle himself in the little swing window, and to hang there all the night, sending forth unearthly caterwaulings, to the unspeakable terror of Miss Wendover’s guest, unfamiliar with the mechanism of the room, and wondering what breed of Hampshire demon or afrit was thus making night hideous.
There was a painted wooden dado halfway up the wall, and a florid rose and butterfly paper above it. There was a neat little brass bedstead on one side of the room, a tall Chippendale chest of drawers, with writing-table and pigeon-holes on the other side; the dearest, oldest dressing-table and shield-shaped glass in front of the broad latticed window; while in another window there was a cushioned seat, such as Mariana of the Moated Grange sat upon when she looked across the fens and bewailed her dead-and-gone joys. There were old cups and saucers on the high, narrow chimney-piece, below which a cosy fire burned in a little old basket grate. Altogether the room was the picture of homely comfort.
‘Oh, what a lovely room!’ cried Ida, inwardly contrasting this cheery chamber with that white-washed den at Les Fontaines, with its tawdry mahogany and brass fittings, its florid six feet of carpet on a deal floor stained brown, its alabaster clock and tin candelabra — a cheap caricature of Parisian elegance.
‘I’m glad you like it, my dear, ‘answered Miss Wendover. ‘Bessie said it would suit you; and all I ask you is to keep it tidy. I hope I am not a tyrant; but I am an old maid. Of course, I shall never pry into your room; but I warn you that I have an eye which takes in everything at a flash; and if I happen to go past when your door is open, and see a bonnet and shawl on your bed, or a gown sprawling on your sofa, my teeth will be set on edge for the next half-hour.’
‘Dear Miss Wen — , dear Aunt Betsy,’ said Ida, corrected by a frown, ‘I hope you will come into my room every day, and give me a good scolding if it is not exactly as you like. Everything in this house looks lovely. I want to learn your nice neat ways.’
Delphi Works of M. E. Braddon Page 807
