“I shall never forget your goodness to me, and how hard you tried to get me a situation. It was just a stroke of luck that Mr. Sedgwick has an eccentric uncle, who happened to be in want of a reader — for perhaps reading aloud is about the one thing I am likely to do best. Fate has been kind. If this gentleman were not an eccentric, he would never have taken me without a character — and what would have become of me? I couldn’t go on eating the bread of charity. You and Mr. Sedgwick have been angels of kindness. But I could not have gone on. I should have had to drown myself.” Mrs. Gurdon remonstrated with her for this wicked speech.
“Oh, my dear, you are so clever,” she said, “and you have read so many more books than I have. But you had better have read one Book with more diligence. I’m afraid you have never given your mind to that Book. I’m afraid you are wanting in the religious sense.”
“I think I am,” the girl answered with a deep sigh. “When I wanted God to help me He would not. If you had a friend, your dearest friend, whom you believed in as the soul of goodness, and if you went to him in a great trouble, and threw yourself at his feet, and implored him to help you — and he stood silent, and let you go out of his house without a word of comfort, would you ever again believe in that friend?”
“Oh, my dear, God is not like our poor human friends. His ways are past finding out.”
“I don’t think I shall ever find them.”
“Was your father an unbeliever?”
“No. He believed in Plato, and in Omar Khayyam; the Rubaiyat was his gospel.”
“Poor man!” sighed Mrs. Gurdon, who had never heard of the Rubaiyat, but had no doubt it was something dreadful.
Mary’s new trunk was taken up to Mrs. Gurdon’s private room, and all her packing was done there, so that the other women should not be envious or unhappy at sight of all those pretty things. Mrs. Gurdon helped Mary to pack, and admired everything, and praised Mary’s taste. The most useful of her frocks was to be sent home in three days, and by the end of the week Mary would be ready to enter Mr. Field’s service.
She had to approach Warburton House this time, without the protection of her one kind friend; and her heart sank when the cab rattled across the courtyard and drew up in front of that stately Georgian door, the common four-wheeler, with her big trunk on the roof, and a number of cardboard boxes inside.
Two young men in livery and a superior person in a black coat handed her out of the cab. The cabman was paid and dismissed while she was opening her purse. She offered the money to the butler, who waved it away with a haughty movement of his superior hand. He said something to somebody through a speaking tube, and Mary heard a silken rustling that she knew by instinct as the forerunner of the housekeeper.
Yes, it was Mrs. Tredgold, eager to take possession of her — Mrs. Tredgold, tall, buxom, good-looking, with grey hair elaborately arranged under Honiton lace lappets. Her gown was the housekeeper’s livery of black silk, but as unlike a housekeeper’s gown as a superior faiseuse could make it. Mrs. Tredgold loved dress, and her salary allowed her to indulge herself.
“Miss Smith, I believe,” she said, with a chilly smile, and with eyes that examined the newcomer as if they were scrutinizing a famous picture whose authenticity the owner of the eyes was prepared to dispute.
It was not easy to find fault with this human picture.
Mary stood firm as a rock, facing the unfriendly gaze. Tall, slender and graceful, a pale face under a neat crinoline hat, modestly trimmed with chiffon and lace, and without the suspicion of a feather, a plain cloth gown, perfectly fitting. Mary took Mrs. Tredgold by surprise.
“I will show you your rooms,” she said. “Mr. Field wishes you to read to him after luncheon. But perhaps you are not able to read after a meal. Some of his other girls used to be flushed and breathless, and annoyed him very much.”
The contemptuous utterance of the words “other girls” was not pleasing to the newcomer.
“I have not found any difference,” she said. “I am not accustomed to a substantial meal in the middle of the day. If I may have some biscuits or a little cake, and a glass of soda-water, I shall be able to read as soon as I am wanted.”
She followed the housekeeper up a secondary stone staircase, quite as good as the usual London stairs, and along a passage on the second floor, till Mrs. Tredgold opened a door, and ushered her into a good-sized room, plainly furnished as a sitting-room.
“The windows look west, and you can see the tops of the trees in the park,” she said almost graciously. “Mr. Field wished you to have nice rooms. The bedroom opens out of this. It is a very good room. I have done my best for you.”
“Thank you. Mr. Field is very kind.”
“He is always kind where he takes a liking, and I think he has taken a liking to you. His likings don’t last long as a rule, but perhaps you are going to suit him, and I hope you will, for I am sick of failures, and strange faces, and young women who come from heaven knows where. You will have to bear with him, and you won’t find your employment a bed of roses — in spite of the wealth, and the splendour, and the beauty of this house. You will have to remember what a sufferer he has been.”
“How can I forget, seeing him there before my eyes?”
“Girls are so frivolous. They are always thinking of their good looks, or of their clothes, or of the last theatre they have been to.”
“I am not likely to go to theatres, and I have not been brought up to think of my clothes.”
“I see you don’t go in for flashy hats and twopenny-halfpenny jewellery, which is a comfort. We have had girls in sham pearl necklaces, and as many beads as an Indian squaw.”
Mrs. Tredgold had now become condescending and friendly, and insisted on showing Mary the amenities of her bedroom — the electric lamps over toilet-table and bed, the superior spring mattress, down pillows, and satin-covered quilt, the pretty dressing-table, and spacious wardrobe.
“I don’t suppose you’ll want all that room for your things,” she said, with a little laugh, “but your frocks will last all the longer for not being crowded. Do let me help you unpack.”
“No, thank you. I’ll leave that till the evening.”
“Hadn’t you better take your frocks out at once? They will only get creased by being kept in your trunk.” Mary thought not.
The monotony of the housekeeper’s life, in a house where there was so little company, had made her curious about trifles. She wanted to know more about this delicate-looking Miss Smith, whom Austin Sedgwick had brought on to the scene — Austin, a bachelor of eight-and-twenty. This young person was obviously superior to all the other young persons who had aspired to the post of reader, and Mrs. Tredgold felt there must be something wrong about her, some skeleton in the cupboard, some secret hidden behind those thoughtful grey eyes, which still held the shadow of a great sorrow.
Stimulated by curiosity, Mrs. Tredgold became friendly to officiousness. She was distressed that Miss Smith would not allow her to unpack for her, still more distressed that she preferred a biscuit and a glass of milk in her own room, to “fried soles and a boiled chicken and asparagus,” with the housekeeper.
“You needn’t suppose you would have to sit down with the upper servants,” she said. “My table is distinct from theirs, and I keep myself completely aloof from them. Mr. Field’s valet and house-steward have their own room and never enter the servants’-hall, where the rest of the household have their meals and spend their evenings: twenty-one in all, if I am to be included, twenty-one people to wait upon one old gentleman who sits all day in his wheelchair!”
Mrs. Tredgold’s tone implied first, “Oh, the folly of it!” and then, “Isn’t it splendid?”
Mary Smith very soon discovered that if the Lincolnshire vicar’s widow was proud of her connection with the Anglican Church, she took a greater pride in the splendour of Warburton House, the luxuries and waste that go with a colossal income, the magnificence of her empire over twenty over-paid and over-fed servants.
She could imagine nothing more dignified than such a position. If her husband had lived to achieve a mitre, than which nothing was more unlikely, her standing as a bishop’s wife could hardly have given her more scope for arrogance; while no episcopal palace in England could compare for luxury with Warburton House, any more than five thousand a year could compare with a hundred thousand.
Perhaps the luckiest day of Mrs. Tredgold’s life was that on which Miss Field heard of her, as a clergyman’s widow, of spotless character and superior culture, in want of a situation of responsibility and importance, but in no manner menial.
To Miss Field the widow must always look as the founder of her fortune, and in this humble friend Conway Field’s eldest sister had an unfailing source of information about her brother’s surroundings and associates.
Mary Smith went to Mr. Field’s room at two o’clock and read to him till four.
“I’m afraid you may get weary of the books I shall want you to read,” he said politely, as he pointed to the chair where she was to sit at a little distance from his own sad seat, with its wheels, and mechanical contrivances that told too plainly of his helpless condition. By their aid he could move himself about his rooms — making a tour of his pictures or his books, as inclination moved him — for though his valet was always within call, and was dextrous in helping him, this invalid of thirty years liked to help himself.
“I want to be sure that I am alive — to just that miserable extent,” he told Austin, one morning after he had travelled round his library, and chosen his books for the day. He had a bookstand near his chair, where he ranged the volumes it was his fancy to read or to look at, and which he exchanged for others when he tired of them. He was a desultory reader, turning from book to book, unable to concentrate himself long upon any subject, but reading the authors he loved over and over again, finding always something new, even in the book he had been reading for thirty years. —
“Fielding and Thackeray are always new, just as Horace is,” he told Austin; “books to open at random. Scott’s novels and Boswell’s Johnson I read once a year. Shakespeare is my daily food — and for history, well, that is inexhaustible. There is a Frenchman who has given his life to the fifteen years of the Revolution. Such microscopic historians, such relentless labourers deserve a sick man’s gratitude. I owe the possibility of living to the men who have written books for me.”
The book that was lying ready for the new reading girl was the second volume of Grote’s Plato; rather a tough subject for the beginner, and Mary Smith could but think of Mr. Boffin’s Gibbon, and Wegg’s manœuvre for escaping difficulties.
“Please correct me, if I mispronounce the Greek names,” she said shyly.
“Perhaps you have never heard of Plato.”
“I used to read the Republic and the Phaedo to my father.”
“Then you will feel at home with Grote.”
There was a ribbon to mark the page where the last reading girl had been told to stop, at the end of the thirty-fifth chapter. Mary began the thirty-sixth, Timaeus and Kritias, and read on in her quiet voice without one indication of fatigue or inattention, till the clock struck four, when the butler brought his master’s tea-tray, followed by the valet Ridley, who waited on his master while he sipped his tea and ate a little semi-transparent toast.
“You can bring another tray for Miss Smith,” Mr. Field told the butler. The man was too well trained to express surprise by the faintest change of countenance, but this was a new departure. Not one of those previous failures had ever been given tea in that room.
“This young person seems likely to catch on, ma’am, Mr. Drayson told Mrs. Tredgold, whom he happened to meet on his way to the still-room. “The governor has ordered tea for her in his room.”
“I hope he is not going to put ideas in her head, Mrs. Tredgold replied severely.
“You have a good voice,” Mr. Field said, as Mary finished the chapter, “and I believe you understand what you are reading.”
“I dare not pretend to understand Plato, but I am interested in all I read of his.”
“You will be more interested, as you read more. And now take your tea, and let me hear you talk. Tell me a little more about yourself.”
“I have so little to tell.”
“Then tell me about your father, if it doesn’t hurt you to speak of him.”
It was from the face which those keen eyes were reading that Conway Field knew there was pain in the story of the past, pain in the association of father and daughter.
“It hurts me to think that I was a cause of unhappiness to him,” she answered sadly. “But that is a pain that will never cease. I would have loved him with all my heart and strength, if he had let me — and then perhaps things would have been different afterwards. I should have been stronger, better, if he had given me his love. But he could not. His heart was buried in my mother s grave. I tried to be useful to him — and all I could do was to read aloud to him, or to write at his dictation, when his sight began to fail.”
“He made you a drudge; his unsalaried servant.
“No, no. He knew that I thought it a privilege to read the books he liked. It was my only education. He could not afford the expense of a governess for me, or to send me to a boarding school.”
“Then you had no woman to take care of you.
“I had the two maids — good creatures.”
“And for the rest, you ran wild, as people say.”
“Yes,” she answered, with a sudden lighting up of the pale face. “I ran wild. Oh, what a happy life it is to run wild on the Cornish hills, beside the Cornish sea.”
“The sea that Hook used to paint. I have three of his best pictures in the next room.”
“I saw them as I came through the room. I think I know the very spots where he painted them. Dear old man! I have seen him sitting at his easel under a white umbrella, on the hill.”
“Then your girlhood was neither dull nor unhappy?”
“No, I was very happy. I think the lonely life suited me. I loved my father’s quiet room, and his conversation when he cared to talk — for he talked beautifully. I didn’t want girl friends or amusements. I was quite happy — till—”
“Till you fell among thieves,” Conway Field said gravely, echoing Austin’s words. “We won’t think about that. If you will be my slave of the lamp, as you were your father’s, I will try to make your life pleasant, if I cannot make it happy.”
“I shall be quite happy, if I can read well enough to please you.”
“You can read well enough. But I am a selfish old man and you must not let me impose upon you. Now I should like you to come back at eleven o’clock, and read Shakespeare to me for an hour. Would it tire you to read at that late hour?”
“Not at all.”
“From nine to eleven is the time when a friend sometimes drops in for a chat. He knows he will find me at home. Or if I am alone, I fall asleep over a newspaper — and then at eleven I am wide awake again, and it quiets my nerves to be read to for an hour before I go to bed.”
“I will come at eleven,” she answered gently, and left the room.
“She knows how to go out of a room,” thought Conway Field, “which so few of her sex do.”
VI
MARY dined with Mrs. Tredgold, whom she found in a curious mood, polite, but melancholy, and indisposed for conversation. The dinner was choice of its kind, and carefully served by a footman whose particular duty was to wait upon the lady-housekeeper. He was in a manner her servant.
Mary, who was a small eater, and had plenty of leisure during the five courses, could but see that this young man was puzzled by the great lady’s manner, and looked at her furtively very often — when he handed the dishes.
He was indeed in the habit of being honoured by her conversation occasionally in the course of the attendance. She would ask him questions about his fellow-servants, and even accept scraps of information about the outside world — piquant details of the latest scandal in M
ayfair — Mrs. A’s card debts, or Mrs. B’s divorce suit — or the terrible collapse of Mr. C’s libel suit against a society paper. But to-night Mrs. Tredgold seemed unconscious of his existence till he was scraping the crumbs off the table-cloth.
“I believe it was Robert who took you your tea this afternoon in Mr. Field’s room,” she said to Mary. “I hope it was made to your liking, neither too strong nor too weak?”
“It was very nice.”
“You would have had a more lively tea with me. Mr. Cobb, the senior curate at St. Michael’s, dropped in — as he often does, and his conversation is quite delightful — serious and yet gay — these fervent Christians have sometimes a playful vein. He has, and you lost something by not being with us.”
“I may be more fortunate another time.”
“Very likely. I don’t suppose Mr. Field will often want you to take tea in his room. He has never done such a thing before — but he is full of whims.”
“If he were well enough to talk, I should think his conversation would be as interesting as the curate’s,” Mary said quietly. “He must have read so much and thought so much in those sad years.”
“Yes, he has a great mind — as my husband had: the mind of a scholar and a philosopher. But in Mr. Tredgold’s case philosophy went along with deep-rooted faith. He was a churchman and a Christian — while Mr. Field, alas! is an infidel, and glories in his unbelief. Mr. Cobb has had a melancholy experience in his endeavours to bring that lost sheep back to the fold — but, though his efforts have so far been wasted, he will never take his hand from the plough till he leaves this parish, which will be a sad day for his congregation.”
After this burst of speech Mrs. Tredgold relapsed into gloomy silence, trifled with some strawberries, took one glass of port, and then retired to her armchair, without further notice of Mary Smith, who took the hint, and wished her good-night.
“Are you going to bed at nine o’clock?”
Delphi Works of M. E. Braddon Page 1006
