In the meantime Florence Whittaker and her aunt, having been set down by
Wyn, waited in the housekeeper's room at Ravenshurst till Lady Carleton
was ready to see them. Mrs Warren was by no means confident of
Florence's success, and felt that she stretched a point in recommending
her. But Maud Florence Nellie was not quite the same girl as she had
been three weeks or a month before. Many new influences had been
brought to bear on her some very ordinary, and others not quite so
commonplace, and, like all young people, she was greatly influenced by
her surroundings. If she had found herself on the Rapley road beside
Carrie and Ada, she would probably have talked and acted exactly like
her old self; but she had thoughts that did not belong to her old self
at all. Her head had been filled with wider, other ideas than her own
little follies, faults, and pleasures. The mystery of the lost jewels,
the excitement of the strangers in the wood, the old grandmother, the
Cunningham family--the trees, even the birds and beasts--were all apart
from her own little selfish narrow interests, and were a great
improvement on Carrie's new hat, Ada's new acquaintance, and her own
newest scrape. Moreover, Mrs Warren's quiet refinement had a subduing
influence; Wyn was a thoroughly well-behaved little boy. Nobody nagged
at the keeper's lodge, and nobody quarrelled. To be saucy at Sunday
school to gentle old Mrs Murray, who taught the girls with all the
assured ease of long custom, was so out of keeping with the place that
she never dreamed of it. Besides, she was usually occupied with the
pleasure of sitting beside Miss Geraldine, who, when Mrs Murray was
there, took her place in the class with the others. All these
influences were doing Florence a great deal of good; and an odd sort of
partisanship for the lost Harry was stirring up all sorts of new ideas
in her mind.
It did not begin very worthily: chiefly consisting of the notion that he
was probably much nicer than George, and wondering whether he would have
been down upon herself for her tricks; but the thought of him, and of
"Miss Geraldine's brother," filled Ravenshurst with interest. Besides,
"dressing up to frighten people," if they were so silly as to be
frightened, was a proceeding with which Florrie had far too much
sympathy.
"Florrie, my dear," said Mrs Warren gently as they waited, "it's a good
deal that I'm undertaking for you. You've all to learn, remember, and
the nurse must tell you if you make mistakes; don't think to answer her
back. Remember she's your better, and set over you. And when you're
trusted with the little lady and gentleman you'll be a careful girl, and
never let them hear a word from you that isn't fitting. Put it in your
prayers, my dear, that you may do your duty by them. I'm not one to
talk, Florrie, but there's nothing _but_ praying can help us through
life."
"I'll try, Aunt Charlotte," said Florrie, colouring Mrs Warren's
gentleness always subdued her, and when the summons came she followed
her aunt, and made a sort of imitation of Mrs Warren's country curtsey
at the drawing-room door, as a proof that she meant to mind her manners.
Lady Carleton was very young and very pretty. Her manner was lively as
she asked a few questions about previous experience, and said that her
nurse preferred a girl who had not been out before.
"So you have only to attend to her directions. What is your name?"
"Her name is Florence Whittaker, my lady," said Mrs Warren. "My
husband wished me to name that at once. But she has been brought up
very careful, and her brother George is a clerk on the railway and most
respectable."
Lady Carleton coloured up, and a curious look came into her face.
"I should like to do something for Florence _Whittaker_," she said with
a slight emphasis. "We will consider it settled, Mrs Warren, that your
niece comes on trial."
"Your ladyship is very good. Florence will do her best, I am sure,"
said Mrs Warren.
Accordingly, in the course of an hour or so Florence found herself in
Lady Carleton's nursery, under the orders of a well-mannered superior
nurse, making friends with Lily and Malcolm, and admiring the baby.
"Things are not so tidy as they should be, Florence," said the nurse,
"for our last girl began with the mumps, and was sent off in a hurry.
Before you undress Miss Lily, please to straighten out her walking
things and put her toys to rights. I couldn't see properly to them
yesterday or to-day."
Lily Carleton was quite ready to make friends with the new nursemaid,
and Florence, who was good-natured with children, had soon told her the
names of her little sisters, and was hearing in return about the wood
and the squirrels, and the pretty puff-balls, and all the delights of a
London child in the country.
"What's this, Miss Lily?" said Florence, putting her hand into the
pocket of the little jacket which she was folding. "Have you been
putting a puff-ball in your pocket?"
"No," said Lily, "that's a letter from the fairies. I found it in the
wood; I told mother that I'd found a fairy letter, but she was too busy
to look and see."
Florence straightened out the crushed ball of damp paper, which, in
company with bits of moss and lichen-covered stick, filled Lily's little
pocket.
"Why, Miss Lily," she began, "this ain't a fairy letter," when she
suddenly stopped, catching sight of her own name in the short, clearly
written note: "Whittaker." "Whittaker has come with me. Remember I am
still your brother.--Alwyn Cunningham."
Florence would not have taken a letter off the table and read it; but in
the case of this mysterious paper no such scruple occurred to her. She
saw that it began, "Dear Edgar"--that it stated that the writer had
returned, had satisfactory explanations to give, and asked for a meeting
at the old ash-tree on the following day. Two things flashed at once
into Florence's mind: one that this was the letter Wyn had lost; the
other that the man who had spoken to herself and Miss Geraldine was Mr
Alwyn.
"Miss Lily, where did you find the letter? When was it you got it?"
"I found it down under the ferns," said Lily. "It wasn't yesterday--
mother took us out yesterday. It was Friday."
Florence stared at the letter. Wyn's poacher with the red beard--that
must have been Harry himself! And, oh! she and Wyn had set the keepers
to look out for him.
Florence turned quite pale. She had derived vague and awful notions of
Mr Cunningham's power from the way in which everything at Ashcroft was
referred to his pleasure. She did not know what he would do to a
"poacher"--also a vague character to the town-bred girl.
"You had better undress Miss Lily," said the nurse, fearing that her new
underling was a dawdle.
"Read me what the fairies say," said Lily.
"Not to-night," said Florence, stuffing the letter in her pocket. "You
tell Florrie about the fairies to-morrow."
She bustled about and did her work, till, Lily's toilet being complete,
she knelt up in her bed in her little nightgown, and said her prayers.
She went through the usual baby prayers, which were pretty much all that
Florence herself had to say, since she had never felt the need of any
others; but when she had finished she still knelt with her two little
hands clasped together, and said in a clear, parrot-like little voice:
"Please, God, make all wrongs right, and bring travellers safe home, for
Jesus' sake."
"Miss Lily--who's a traveller?" said Florence, startled.
"I don't know; mother told me to say that prayer always," she said as
she curled herself up in her little white bed and shut her eyes.
Florence stood by the window looking out over the garden into the mass
of trees that bounded it, under which the level evening light was
pouring. If she could only get that letter back to Wyn! only tell him
to stop the keepers from minding her foolish talk! With the letter in
her pocket, she really did feel a sense of great responsibility; she
really did try to think what it would be right to do. She had never
felt so serious in her life. Come what come might, she must get at Wyn.
She must run home across the forest. Lose her place for it! Perhaps
she would; but, if she had lost one place to amuse herself, she could
lose another to prevent such dreadful mischief.
"I don't care," said Florence, as she had said once before. There was
good in her motive now, but it was the old daring, heedless Florence
that never stopped to think. She slipped out of the bedroom by an outer
door that did not lead through the nursery, downstairs along the
passage, out at a side door, open to the summer evening, across the
grass of the garden, and right into the wood. She ran on through the
band of fir trees that divided Ravenshurst from Ashcroft, and, crossing
the stile between the two properties, found herself, though she did not
know it, close to the place where the letter had been picked up, and not
far from the ash-tree named in it.
Then she began to grow puzzled about the way. The long yellow lines of
light faded, the tall trees rustled overhead, the heavy whir and flap of
a startled pheasant sounded close at hand. Deadly fear seized on
Florence. If she had been frightened in the sunny morning, she was
doubly frightened now in the twilight. Besides, it would really get
dark soon, and then what would become of her? She had said "I don't
care!" but where was the use of saying "don't care" to darkness and
silence and confusion as to the right way? Should she go back? she knew
the way back.
"No," said Florence to herself, "I may have been a silly to come; but
I'll get that there letter to Wyn if I walk all night. And I'll not be
afraid of the wood. Miss Geraldine ain't--but oh, dear, I wish I had to
go down the broad path in the cemetery at home, all nice and straight,
instead. If I go on I'll have to get somewhere at last!"
Florence knew quite well that she had done a very serious thing, for
which she would have to answer, and in the midst of her fear of the
solitude came an involuntary fear of the scolding that would meet her
arrival anywhere. She had rather enjoyed scolding when she knew she was
wrong: why did she dread it when she thought she was right? The wood
did grow darker, much darker than Florence had expected, judging by the
light that she knew was outside it; and the poor girl's knees trembled
as she hurried along. It was a perfectly formless terror that seized on
her; she had had too utterly matter-of-fact a training to fill the wood
with any imaginary inhabitants, and she was too old and had too much
sense to people it with wolves or bears. It did occur to her that the
keepers she had herself stirred up might shoot her through the bushes,
and her cheeks tingled at the thought of being seen and recognised by
them; while, if she met her Uncle Warren--
"I'll go through with it--rather than bring my own brother to the
gallows," she thought with a vividness worthy of her Aunt Stroud. But
which _was_ the way? what _should_ she do? Florence was so accustomed
to trust to her own wits that where her wits were perfectly useless she
felt like another person. She did not know the way, she could not get
at Wyn, she could not undo the mischief! There was no one to help her!
Suddenly there struck into her mind a new thought:
"God."
Now Florence had never _thought_ about God in her life. She knew about
Him: on the very last Sunday before she left Rapley she had answered
Miss Mordaunt's questions about His nature with a glib tongue, but
without a trace of reverence in her manner or of awe in her heart. He
was everywhere; He could see her in the dark and in the light; He knew
her thoughts; He could hear her prayers. Such awful truths had been
taught to her, and had been just as much a lesson as the multiplication
table. But now, in the greatest need she had ever known, it did
suddenly strike Florence that perhaps God would help her if she asked
Him. She looked up--up through the dark trees to the pale clear sky
above them, and associating praying with nothing but with "saying her
prayers," she began to repeat the childish formulary which she was in
the habit of scurrying over every night, and with a sudden thought added
the words which little Lily had been taught to say: "Set wrongs right,
bring travellers home."
"Oh, God," whispered Florence, clasping her hands, "bring _me_--there!
Save _them_ somehow." Something seemed let loose within her, and for
the first time in her life she really prayed. And "Oh say not, dream
not," that those unrealised lessons, that formal habit of prayer, had
been hitherto all in vain. How could she have heard without a teacher?
There was the knowledge, there was the instinct, so soon as the naughty,
graceless girl felt the need.
As she looked round, with a somewhat calmer inspection of the various
footpaths, suddenly, in the stillness of the summer evening, she heard
the tramp of a foot, and in a moment, round the great tree by which she
stood, came the tall broad figure of a man with a long beard--surely the
"character" who had given Wyn the letter.
"Hullo, my girl," he said, stopping with a start at sight of a hatless
maiden in a white apron, "what's the matter? Have you lost your way?"
"Oh!" cried Florence, precipitating herself towards him, "I've got your
letter--but--but, if you're my brother Harry that's come home--the
keepers are going to seize you for a poacher!"