‘And you are very tired?’
‘Tired! Yes; all my bones ache with tiredness.’
‘How old are you?’
‘Somewheres between seventeen and eighteen. That’s as much as I know.’
‘Have you no parents?’
‘Never had none to remember.’
‘No relatives or friends?’
‘None, except him that’s at Dover.’
‘What is your name?’
‘Bess.’
‘Your surname?’
‘Never knowed. I was allus called Bess.’
Lucille reflected for a minute or so, and then made up her mind what must be done with this worn-out wayfarer. It was more than a mile to the Castle, and it was evident that the girl could hardly walk half a dozen yards. She had dropped from sheer exhaustion. To offer her food and comfort and shelter at the end of a mile’s walk would be as meaningless as to offer her a refuge in one of the stars without supplying the means of transit. No, there was only one thing to be done: Puck must carry this poor creature to the Castle.
‘I want to take you to my father’s house, and to give you food and rest,’ said Lucille. ‘Do you think you could sit upon my pony if I were to lead him? He’s very quiet.’
‘ I don’t know, lady. I don’t know as I could stand, on my feet. Things look all of a swim like, as if I was in a merry-go-round.’
The weary head drooped upon Lady Lucille’s shoulder as the girl spoke; the tangled dusty hair and gaudy cotton kerchief rested unrepulsed on the young lady’s green habit. Never before had Lord Ingleshaw’s daughter come into such close contact with squalid nameless poverty.
‘ We must get you on to the pony somehow,’ she said. ‘ Rest your head against this tree while I bring him to you.’
She left the girl leaning, limp and inert, against the red-brown fir-trunk, and went over to Puck, who was contentedly nibbling the soft flowery turf at his feet. Lucille led him to the spot where Bess reclined, and then lifted the languid form from the ground, Bess giving what help she could, but that of the feeblest. She was evidently in a half-fainting condition, and would have to be held on the pony.
The aged and slumberous Puck lent himself very placidly to the operation, though wondering at it. Lucille managed to lift the helpless girl on to the saddle, and to support her in a sitting position, drooping listlessly forward over Puck’s mane, as she led the pony through the plantation, and by the nearest way to the Castle, crossing the broad stretch of velvet turf in the bright May sunshine.
All that glory of sunlight and greensward, old forest trees and fallow deer, the distant gleam of the lake in the hollow, the grandeur of the old Castle standing grim and gray against a wooded background, was lost on Bess, whose head was never raised from its drooping posture, and for whom this terrestrial globe was just now a dim dream hovering on the verge of darkness. It needed but the faintest swing of Life’s pendulum to make all dark.
Lucille went into the stable-yard with her strange companion. It was dinner-time, and the men were away, all things in the yard still and slumberous as in the castle of the Sleeping Beauty; but at the sound of the pony’s hoofs an old man came out of the stables, and advanced to meet his master’s daughter.
This was Tom Pike, the old groom who had special charge of Puck. He had taught Lady Lucille to ride, before she was advanced enough for her father to take her in hand, and he worshipped her. So when she told him to take the tatterdemalion in his arms and carry her into the Castle, he had no power to gainsay her, albeit he felt the proceeding was altogether out of keeping.
One feeble protest, and one alone he made.
‘Hadn’t I better take her into the saddle-room, Lady Lucille? I can get her a bit of meat and drink there.’
‘Nonsense, Pike; the poor thing is dreadfully ill. She wants ever so much care and nursing. Just bring her where I show you.’
Pike took Bess upon his shoulder, as if she had been a dead fawn, and carried her into the Castle, following Lucille, who led the way to a neat little bedchamber at the end of a long corridor, and very near to her own rooms. It was a room which was generally given to a visitor’s maid, and had been lately occupied by Lady Carlyon’s middle-aged abigail.
Here they laid the half-unconscious girl on the bed. As her head sank upon the pillow, her eyes closed, and she fell into a sleep which was almost stupor.
‘Go downstairs and get me a glass of port and a piece of sponge-cake, Pike. She must have something directly. She has been starved.’
‘Looks rather like it, Lady Lucille. But don’t you think my lord will be angry with me for bringing such offal into the Castle? She ought to have been took straight off to the Union.’
‘I will take the responsibility of bringing her here, Pike,’ answered Lady Lucille. ‘I am. not afraid of my father being angry. He is more like the good Samaritan than the Levite.’
‘ In course, Lady Lucille; but you see in those days there was no Unions; and a gentleman as pays poor rates to the extent his lordship does wouldn’t lay himself out to have tramps brought into his bedrooms and. laid upon his beds.’
‘Will you go and get me that wine Pike, before this poor thing dies?’ asked Lucille piteously; whereupon Pike bolted, like an arrow from a bow.
The ever alert Miss Marjorum, not so deep in Dante’s Inferno as to be beyond earshot of mundane voices, heard steps in the corridor, and came tripping out to discover what was happening. She saw Pike’s receding figure, and the half-open door of the bedroom; and she flew to ascertain the cause of this unwonted violation of the noontide stillness. Her horror on beholding the figure on the bed, the limp rag of gown or petticoat, the tattered shawl, the bandaged; blood-stained foot, reduced her for the moment to speechlessness. Then her loathing found words, and she exclaimed,
‘ Lucille, in mercy’s name, WHAT is that?’ pointing to the bed.
‘A poor girl I found in the wood — dying of hunger and fatigue.’
‘My sweet pet, come away! Lady Lucille, come away from her this instant!’ shrieked the governess. ‘Look how dirty she is!’
‘Her clothes are dusty, Marjy dear, that’s all. Her poor face is not dirty. I daresay she tried to be clean, poor, helpless thing.’
‘And you brought her here — yourself! This is too dreadful!”
Just then Pike appeared with a small tumbler of port, and a hunch of sponge-cake, on a silver salver.
‘O Pike, Pike, how can you aid and abet your mistress in such dreadful goings on?’ asked Miss Marjorum.
Lucille took the wine, tenderly lifted the tired head upon her arm, and put the glass to the white wan lips. The girl’s eyes opened, and she drank a little wine with a choking sound like a sob; and then Lucille dipped the cake into the wine, and fed her, as she had often fed a young bird.
Lucille, come away!’ exclaimed Miss Marjorum, snatching the tumbler from her pupil’s hand. ‘She may have some contagious disease — small-pox, perhaps.’
‘Look at her beautiful face, Marjy. Does that look like small-pox?’
‘I don’t know; but I insist upon your leaving this room. You may have escaped from the schoolroom; you may shirk Dante; but I hope I have still a shred of authority.’
‘Dearest Marjy, I will do anything in reason,’ said Lucille; while Miss Marjorum sternly administered the rest of the wine, with as severe an air as if she had been offering the fatal goblet of poison to a superfluous member of some royal Indian race. ‘All I want is that this poor thing may be cared for and made comfortable for the next few days.’
‘In this house?’ demanded Miss Marjorum.
‘Certainly. I shall be very angry with any one who talks of sending her out of this house,’ replied Lucille, with that air of authority which Lord Ingleshaw’s only daughter very well knew how to assume upon occasion.
‘I said from the first she ought to have been took to the Union,’ murmured Pike, looking deferentially from the governess to her pupil, hardly knowing which of the two he
most feared.
‘Of course; the Union is too good for such a low creature. Look at her feet; she must have tramped for days. She must be a professional beggar.’
‘She did not beg of me,’ said Lucille, ringing the bell.’ You may go, Pike;’ whereupon Pike pulled an imaginary forelock, and retired.
Lady Lucille’s summons was answered promptly by her maid Tompion, who had been sitting at work in a room opening into the corridor.
‘Tompion, I want you to take particular care of this young woman, ‘said Lucille. ‘You will get her some soup immediately — a small cup of soup, for she has been a long time without food; and when she has eaten it, you will let her sleep as much as she likes for the next few hours. Then when she wakes you will get her a bath, and some clean linen out of my wardrobe, and one of my cotton gowns; and you will make her as comfortable as you possibly can. She is to occupy this room till she has recovered her strength. By that time I shall have made up my mind what to do with her.’
Tompion had not a word to oppose to the calm authority of these instructions. She was a strongly-built wholesome woman of about thirty, who had been Lucille’s attendant since the departure of nurse and nursery-maid. She idolised her young mistress, and was devoted to her duties, although she would gladly have drawn the line at attendance upon ragged and footsore tramps.
‘I’m sure I don’t know however I shall get them things off her, Lady Lucille,’ she said. ‘I expect they’ll all drop to pieces when I touch ‘em, like a’ Gyptian mummy.’
‘You must do your best, Tompion,’ said Lucille. ‘You are so kind-hearted that I know you’ll be good to the poor thing.’
‘Lucille, are you coming away?’ remonstrated Miss Marjorum.
Lucille put her arm round the governess’s skinny shoulders, and left the room with her. Bess had fallen asleep after that half-tumbler of port and half-dozen mouthfuls of cake. It was more nourishment than she had had for the last three days.
‘Lucille, you smell of tramps,’ said Miss Marjorum solemnly. ‘If you take my advice, you’ll give yourself a warm bath before you resume the usual occupations of the day.’
‘I will take your advice, dear. That poor thing was dreadfully dusty. But is she not a lovely creature?’
‘Her features may be well formed; but I cannot bring myself to see beauty in such abject degradation,’ replied the governess stiffly.
‘Why degraded, Marjy? Only poor and friendless and hungry. I don’t see any degradation in that. Think of Him who knew not where to lay His head.’
This was attacking Jane Marjoram on her weakest and best side, for she was honestly religious.
‘If I thought the girl were only poor, I would not object to your helping her,’ she said; ‘but I fear she belongs to the criminal classes.’
‘But why, dear?’
‘She looks like it,’ replied Miss Marjorum, not wishing to be explicit.
She had made up her mind that the girl was too pretty to be good.
CHAPTER II. MORE THAN KIN.
‘And let me feel that warm breath here and there,
To spread a rapture in my very hair,
O, the sweetness of the pain!
Give me those lips again!
Enough! enough! It is enough for me
To dream of thee.’
LUCILLE had her bath, and dressed herself in the prettiest of pale-pink gingham gowns, trimmed with pillow-lace — that pretty old-fashioned thread-lace which gives employment to many a village child in the leafy lanes of Buckinghamshire — and appeared radiant before her old governess at their tête-à-tête luncheon. The Earl had gone to London by the eleven o’clock express. They had the Castle all to themselves, a stately abode of quietness and peace, the old pictured faces smiling at them, or seeming to smile, in the sunlight, just as in gloomy weather the same faces seemed to frown; the perfume of myriad flowers breathing in upon them through all the open casements.
They lunched in the old schoolroom, which served them as a dining-room when the Earl was away. Opening out of this was Lucille’s morning-room — a white-panelled chamber, hung with water-colours, and much adorned with old china and new books. Here, in front of the wide low Tudor window, stood Lucille’s grand piano, her father’s gift on her seventeenth birthday; and across the ebony case was spread a tremendous work of art in the shape of a floral design on olive-green cloth, executed in gold and colours by the patient fingers of Miss Marjorum; and on this embroidered cloth stood a low, wide Venetian glass vase full of white azaleas and gardenias, an arrangement which satisfied all the requirements of high art.
Before Lucille sat down to luncheon, she was gratified by Tompion’s assurance that the tramp had eaten her soup, and was ‘ sleeping beautiful.’
‘Don’t call her a tramp, Tompion,’ said Lucille; ‘her name is Bess. She may be no more accustomed to tramping than you or I. It may be only an accident in her life.’
Tompion did not believe this; but was too well-trained a servant to argue, even with a mistress who had grown up to her hand.
Lucille laughed and talked gaily all luncheon-time. She was full of Bruno’s return.
‘What are we to do to amuse him, Marjy, now that there s no hunting or shooting?’ she asked. ‘We must have tennis. Those girls from the Vicarage must be allowed to come every afternoon. And we must have picnics and excursionising of all kinds. I wonder whether my father would object to my learning to throw a fly. I should so like to go trout-fishing with Bruno.’
Miss Marjorum held forth gravely on the impropriety of this suggestion.
‘My dear Lucille, you really ought to remember that you might actually have been presented this season,’ she said; and this was her most solemn form of reproval.
‘I am very glad I wasn’t,’ answered the girl. ‘I am most grateful to his lordship for the year’s reprieve.’
‘Most girls in your position would long to be out.’
‘I haven’t the faintest longing. I daresay I shall enjoy society very well when I am in it; and I do long for the opera, to hear all the music I know so well upon the piano, sung by grand singers. Yes, that must be too delightful. But I don’t suppose I shall ever be happier than I have been at Ingleshaw.’
‘My dear, however happy your lot may be, you will discover the hollowness of life,’ answered Miss Marjorum, winding up a very substantial lunch with cream cheese, spring radishes, and Bath Olivers. ‘We all do that as we advance in years.’
‘Dear Miss Marjorum, I hope your life has not been very hollow,’ said Lucille, wondering a little wherein the hollowness of such a life could lie; seeing that, for the last ten years, Jane Marjoram had lived upon the fat of the land, had been in receipt of a handsome salary, had been petted and made much of by her pupil, and most generously treated by the Earl; while her duties were ever of the lightest.
But Jane Marjorum was not taken aback by this question.
‘I am one of those who find out the hollowness of life before the bloom of youth has departed,’ she said, in a solemn voice. ‘I was engaged for five years to a young man whom I believed an apostle. I assisted him to keep his college terms at St. Catherine’s, Cambridge (vulgarly called Cat’s); and no sooner was he ordained than he proved hollow.’
‘In what way, Marjy?’
‘He sent me back my letters and. presents, and told me that he should ever honour me as his friend and benefactress, but that Fate had willed that he was to fall in love with a milliner’s apprentice at Cambridge, and that Duty impelled him to marry her. He is now rector of a parish in the East Riding; and that milliner’s apprentice is on visiting terms with the county families,’ concluded Miss Marjorum, as if this were the crowning wrong. ‘So I think you will admit that I soon discovered the hollowness of life,’ she added after a pause.
‘It was very dishonourable of him,’ said Lucille, wondering whether the milliner’s apprentice was pretty, and wondering a little also what kind of a person dear old Marjorum was in her day of freshness an
d bloom. The good creature belonged to that section of the elderly whom it is almost impossible to imagine as ever having been young.
After luncheon Miss Marjoram again suggested the Inferno; but Lucille was in no mood for serious study. That idea of Bruno’s return, added to her interest in her new protégée, completely filled her mind.
‘It would be no use, Marjy dear,’ she said; ‘ I should be only pretending to understand. I’ll practise this afternoon; and you and I will go for a long walk after five-o’clock tea.’
She went to her beloved piano, and played Mozart’s sonatas for the next two hours. It was music which she knew well, and which allowed her thoughts and fancies to wander fetterless.
Would he be much changed, this old companion of her childhood, she wondered, as her fingers ran over the airy passages of an allegro movement, in that close delicate playing which is the result of much careful practice? Would he despise the simple pleasures of Ingleshaw?- the woods, the rural lanes, the meadows golden with buttercups, and flashed here and there with ruddy patches of wild sorrel; the hawthorn thickets where the thrushes sang so divinely at eventide; the village church, whose old-fashioned homely services Lucille had attended all her life? Would all these things have lost their charm for him, now that he had seen every great city of Europe, steeping himself in the romance of a historical past, climbing Swiss mountains, fishing in Norwegian lakes?
‘He used to be very fond of the country,’ she told herself; ‘ but I am afraid it will all seem very small to him after the wonders he has seen abroad.’
Just before the eight-o’clock dinner Lady Lucille went to the room where the wanderer was lying. She found her much restored, but still very weak. Tompion had washed her, and put on clean linen; and the perfect face upon the pillow looked all the more beautiful now the bronze-brown hair had been carefully brushed, and was coiled in a loose plait at the back of the small head.
‘How good you have been to mo, lady!’ she murmured softly, looking up with a grateful expression in her large dark eyes. ‘I did not think there was anybody in this world so good as you.’
Delphi Works of M. E. Braddon Page 1103
