“I think not.”
“I know you better than you know yourself, Conway. You will tire of this last whim, and the girl will be turned away with a blighted character.”
“Skittles!”
“It is not skittles. The present position is impossible. No gentlewoman will take a girl who has been a solitary bachelor’s companion. When the door of Warburton House shuts upon her Miss Smith will be stranded.”
“She will never be stranded — as long as I live I shall want her — and I have provided for her when I am gone.”
“A girl you have known half a year!”
“You were uneasy about her future, yet you look horrified when I tell you she is secure against want.”
“If I am horrified, it is at the idea that you may have been imposed upon. The girl is clever enough to understand your whimsical character — your prejudices and your caprices. If she has obtained such an influence after half a year, what may not her power become in the future — a power that may shut your door against those who should be nearest and dearest.”
“If by nearest and dearest you mean my sisters, they are not going to be shut out — not even you yourself, who generally come to this house intent upon giving me a lecture. Your last complaint was about my partiality for Austin — I was making a favourite of Selina’s son to the detriment of my other relations. Now it is Austin’s protégée you object to.”
“I have the highest appreciation of Austin’s heart, but not much respect for his judgment — and I am sorry that a protégée of Austin’s, perhaps picked out of the gutter, should come between me and my only brother’s affection.”
Conway sighed wearily.
“I have told you that my reading girl is a lady, and that she suits me. Let that suffice, Guinevere — unless you want a quarrel.”
“Not for worlds. Every word you say tells me that Miss Smith’s influence is paramount. I am told she walks by your chair in the Park every morning.”
“Who told you?” he asked sharply.
“A friend of mine saw her with you.”
“Yes, she walks by my bath-chair; but I dare say she is as sick of the Park as I am. I am going to Venice in the early spring. A gondola will be better than a bath-chair, and Mary will go with me.”
“And you are not afraid of what people will say about such an arrangement?”
“Afraid! My dear creature, the outside world has no existence for me. I think no more of ‘people’ than of the myriads of invisible things that live and move in the air I breathe. In Venice I shall be more afraid of mosquitoes than of scandalmongers.”
After this, Guinevere, tremulous with suppressed indignation, tried to talk of general subjects — asked if her brother had bought any pictures this year — expatiated on the wonderful prices Chelsea china had been fetching at Christie’s — tried to be light and trivial and to make herself agreeable, and, utterly failing, departed with chilling dignity and a sisterly kiss, which Conway wiped off his forehead as the door closed upon her. His stroke upon the spring bell that summoned his valet was sharper than usual, and to Guinevere’s ear had a sound of finality. A bell in the hall answered like an echo, and Miss Field had three men-servants to escort her to her single brougham, quite the most perfect thing in miniature broughams, and so small that she could never be expected to give a friend a lift.
The ship-builder’s eldest daughter had planned her life on severe lines. She had deeply resented her father’s disposal of his property when he made an eldest son of Conway, then a boy at Eton. He had been infatuated about Conway. The lad was accomplished in the things that count. He was not a student, cared very little for books. But he was not a dunce, and he contrived to come through the scholastic part of his career respectably.
But it was in the playing fields that he shone. At cricket, at football, on the river, in the fencing school, in every attribute that youth delights in he was a head and shoulders over the best of his contemporaries. He made a name for himself before he left Eton, and he increased his reputation at Oxford. And when he spent his first idle winter at the place in Hampshire, and his father was able to see more of him, his horsemanship was the talk of every hunting man in the neighbourhood, and still more of the hunting women.
It was a kind of reputation that went far with the builder of ships, who wanted his son to be an English gentleman — a grand gentleman — and who made his will with that intent—” fifty thousand each to my daughters, and all the rest to my only son, Conway.”
All the rest included the ship-building business on the Clyde, Madingley in Hampshire, a vast mansion, with some two thousand acres in a ring fence, and Warburton House, Mayfair.
Naturally, the daughters considered themselves left out in the cold, not to say defrauded, by their father’s will — though they all maintained a certain decent reticence, and kept their feelings to themselves, except in the family circle, where, as the years went by, and the cost of living increased, the husbands were more inclined to grumble than the wives.
Guinevere had no husband to nibble at her fortune, and could manage it as she pleased. She came to the conclusion that fifty thousand pounds was not much, and that she must spend her income scrupulously on herself. Even those friends of many years who loved Guinevere most — in a somewhat tepid way — admitted that Miss Field was near. That was the measured and moderate phrase — she was near. Her servants and her purveyors put the thing in broader speech — with them Miss Field was “a holy terror,” “an out-and-out stinge.”
With this concentrated view of her duty to herself, Miss Field made a better use of her income than any of her sisters. What could they do, wretched creatures with husbands, sons, or daughters always nibbling with a continuous depredation like the small sharp teeth of rats eating away a wainscot? How could they make a rational use of something between two and three thousand a year? Selina Sedgwick could not even afford herself a motor-car, at which deprivation her daughters never ceased to bewail themselves. Enid gave her son the larger part of her pin-money, and wheedled that brilliant goose, the K.C., into paying her milliner. Elaine had married a hopeless person: a certain Walter Hailing, who had nothing to be proud of but his Saxon name, and whose only idea of industry was to write blank verse plays which no manager would read.
His wife being the only person who believed in Mr. Halling’s talent, he had allowed her to settle a fifth of her fortune upon a country house and grounds in Wiltshire, where he finished his useless life with a certain pomp as recluse and cynic, and where Elaine, now a widow, devoted herself to her garden, and wasted her means upon new daffodils at forty shillings apiece, which did not always justify her by producing handsome blooms. Elaine used to cry when an expensive daffodil failed.
Guinevere looked with profound contempt upon these weaker sisters. She liked keeping accounts, and considered herself good at mental arithmetic. She went about calculating the cost of things, and by close calculation she contrived to maintain her second-floor flat in Mayfair, with a side view of the omnibuses in Park Lane, her perfect butler and tall footman, and her accomplished French maid, her miniature brougham, and her expensive dress-maker, and to spend four to six weeks at a superior hotel in an English or foreign cure-place, where she only consorted with the best people. She did not care for the newly rich, however magnificent, nor did the newly rich care for her. They voted her an egregrious bore, and if they sent her a card for their sumptuous entertainments it was sent grudgingly.
She drove straight to Eaton Square, and sat with “poor Selina” for half an hour, talking over Conway’s infatuation, and they were both of one mind.
“How Austin could have cut his own throat in such a manner passes my comprehension,” said Guinevere, sinking into the most comfortable chair in the room. She always knew where that chair was to be found in everybody’s drawing-room, and always took it. “My dear, I have just come from Warburton House, and I tell you that his infatuation for that white-faced minx is absolutely revolting.”
“But you don’t think he will disinherit his favourite nephew?”
“I should hardly be surprised if he left the girl the bulk of his fortune. You have not studied human nature as closely as I have, Selina. And you may not know the pernicious influence an artful woman of attractive appearance can exercise upon a man of Conway’s age — a man who has always shown a queer side in his character.”
“But do you really think this young woman attractive? Mrs. Tredgold made nothing of her appearance — said she was almost plain.”
“I set no value upon Tredgold’s judgment. Miss Smith is not beautiful, but she is worse. She has that kind of subtle charm that there is in a pale face and green eyes. She is what people call refined: looks as if she had come of a good stock. So no doubt she did, and went to the bad before your Austin found her. Where did he find her, by the way?”
“We have never been able to get that out of him. He is quite as infatuated as his uncle.”
“He has not bought her a poodle,” Guinevere said sententiously, and left her sister to brood upon that enigmatical remark.
The poodle had more offended Miss Field than anything else in her brother’s conduct. He had never given her a dog, and the one dog she esteemed worthy to sit in a lady’s brougham was a highly educated French poodle, and she had been quick to perceive Zamiel’s expensive perfections. A dog that could not have cost less than twenty-five pounds; bought to amuse Mary Smith!
X
IT was early spring, the time of daffodils in the London streets, and dog violets and wild anemones in the woods, and of early primroses peeping out here and there under the hedges and on the banks, which they would make glorious by and by.
Mr. Field had been seized with a roving humour, and he and Mary had come to Madingley, with valet, and footman, and the oldest and steadiest and most estimable of the Warburton House women-servants as Mary’s own maid: promoted to that post because she was of mature age, nice-looking, and had been altogether satisfactory as upper housemaid, in seven years’ service. “A person who has never given me any trouble,” Mrs. Tredgold affirmed, when Mr. Field told her what he required; “and if you want a respectable maid for Miss Smith — and some such person she must of course have for decency’s sake if she is to travel with you, as your reader — you cannot do better than take Susan Garland. She may not be accomplished as a lady’s-maid, but Miss Smith has not been used to a maid, and will not want much in that line. But as a conscientious servant I can answer for her.” Upon this Susan was promoted, and became Garland instead of Susan. She was to have higher wages and to leave off caps. Mr. Field even insisted that she should have lessons in his art from a Bond Street hairdresser — much to Mrs. Tredgold’s disgust, which she imparted all the more freely to Mr. Drayson, the butler, because she was obliged to suppress it in her conversation with her master.
They were going to Madingley for a few days, and then in the second week of April they were going from Southampton to Genoa by steamer and thence by long sea to Venice.
Mrs. Tredgold told Drayson that things had come to a pass — a phrase which might mean anything or nothing, but which seemed to relieve her mind.
Things had come to a pass, and Mary saw the first glory of the wind-flowers in the woods near Madingley.
Things had come to a pass, Mrs. Tredgold repeated. Never had Mr. Field been so full of whims and fancies till Miss Smith came into his service.
“I consider that young woman a most pernicious influence,” said the housekeeper, with a sigh.
The butler, who agreed with her about most things, was of a different opinion in this instance.
“Not a bit of it, ma’am. She rouses him, and that does him good. Anything is better for him than the doldrums, and he was nearly always in the doldrums before Miss Smith came to amuse him.”
“You don’t look as deep into things as I do, Mr. Drayson. I know Mr. Field was sometimes in low spirits, and always trying as to temper. But no doldrums could be as dangerous for a man of his age as an artful young woman like Mary Smith. I knew she was a deep one the first time I set eyes upon her — before she had gone halfway up the staircase.”
Mary had always this one enemy in Warburton House, but the other servants liked her, and Susan Garland, who took her the morning tea, and the Morning Post, went about the house praising her. She had no side, and she was just as clever as she could stick. Susan had certainly deserved her promotion, but while Mrs. Tredgold was sick with jealousy of Miss Smith, the four other housemaids, except the one who rose a step and was now “head,” were all jealous of Garland, jealous but not rancorous, being ready to admit that Sue was a good sort.
It mattered nothing to Mary, sitting among the last of the wind-flowers, with Zamiel nestling against her, and a pocket edition of “Pippa Passes” in her lap, what people in Warburton House were thinking about her. She had long ago accepted her relations with Mrs. Tredgold as a part of the day’s work, and dismissed that lady from her thoughts. Sitting with her dog in the balmy April stillness, with flickering patches of light falling through the pine trees, and the blue heaven overhead, she was nearer absolute happiness than she had been since those young days when she had wandered about the shore with some stray mongrel for her companion, and when the sea and the moor were to her as living things that filled her life with joy. The sea and the moor and the mongrel and the inborn joyousness of her fifteenth year had been enough then; and now it was enough to have changed the dull splendour of Warburton House and the flatness and formality of Hyde Park for the beauty of this untrodden woodland, which seemed infinite in her ignorance of its extent. Hampshire is the most richly-wooded county in England, and Mr. Field’s four or five hundred acres of beech and fir counted for very little within twenty miles of the New Forest.
Mary was not often alone, as her duties began early and ended late, but she had stolen this morning hour for an exploring walk with her poodle.
“I had to show him the woods, and he was so wild with delight at first that I think he must be a cockney,” she told Mr. Field when she met him near the house, in his out-of-door chair, wheeled about by his valet.
“So you have been showing Zamiel the woods, and now I want to show you the gardens and the stables and the house. We shall only be here three days, and there is a good deal for you to see.”
“How lovely!”
“What a vivid smile! You look as fresh as the morning. The country seems to suit you better than London.”
“It is such a change! And the wood is new. There were no woods where I lived.”
“If you are so pleased with Hampshire, what will you say to Venice?”
“Oh, this is a delicious reality. That will be a dream of wonder. Let me read you the Venetian chapter in Dickens’s ‘Italy.’”
“And in Rogers and in Ruskin — and in Shelley and Byron. They can all rave about Venice. I think we had better stick to Ruskin. He is nearer the ground. Come, my dear, we will go through the gardens first, and then to the stables. I like to see them now and then, though they are heart-breaking.”
The gardens were a surprise to Mary — so beautiful, so modern, and in such perfect order. They had the picturesque loveliness of old-world gardens, which is the most modern note in horticulture now that people with space and money at command can call back the charm of a day that is dead, and make their grounds Jacobean or Tudor as fancy prompts.
It was the season of tulips, and everything that could be done with brilliant colour had been done at Madingley — great crimson and amber chalices, waving on tall stems, crowding close together, purple tulips three feet high in the background of a long border. Parrot tulips, gaudy and ragged, and the pale beauty of pink and white tulips in oval beds cut in turf that was like green velvet. There were more men than Mary could count, moving about with the serene and leisurely aspect of gardeners at Kew or Hampton Court, gardeners whose work and wages went on from year’s end to year’s end, and who meant to live and die at Madingley. As a central point amid
st all the colour and splendour of the tulip beds there rose a tall shaft of water, golden in the sunlight, from a circular pond in which Zamiel had been quick to see living creatures that he would like to get at, and was meditating a plunge, when Mary called him to heel.
Mary gazed and admired in silence. Behind her sense of the charm of the garden there was her thought of the owner of all this beauty, who had not seen the place for some years. Ridley had told her that it was a long time since his master had wanted to see Madingley, and in all that time the little regiment of gardeners had been going about with wheelbarrows and water-engines, and Dutch hoes, and the great chestnut horse with the long whity-brown tail and mane had been moving slowly over the lawns with mowing machine or roller, and the tall shaft of sparkling water had been shooting up towards the blue sky, and all the loveliest flowers of spring and summer and autumn had bloomed and faded, and the master had never seen them.
And yet he might have been there. He had but to give the order, and he would have been carried in ease and comfort to this wonderful garden, and the woodland upon which it bordered. There was the pity of it. He did not care. The will to enjoy was wanting, the pleasure in beautiful possessions and the pride of life were over and done with.
“Well, Mary? Do you like my garden?” he asked languidly.
Her eyes filled with tears.
“It is too lovely,” she said.
“I ought hardly to call it my garden. My father created it, as he did everything that is best at Madingley. There were the ruins of a Jacobean garden, that had been neglected for a century, and these served for his ground plan. All the rest was his work.”
“Not that Tudor house over there?” she said, pointing to a long low red house in a garden, which was divided from one of the Madingley lawns by a sunk fence. “Surely that is old.”
“No, my father pulled down a trumpery stuccoed villa in which the last owner’s land-agent had lived, and built that Tudor house for his man. It is the exact reproduction of a small Elizabethan Manor house, even to the linen panelling in the parlours.”
Delphi Works of M. E. Braddon Page 1012
