CHAPTER II.
CHAPTER III.
CHAPTER IV.
CHAPTER V.
CHAPTER VI.
CHAPTER VII.
CHAPTER VIII.
CHAPTER IX.
CHAPTER X.
PART II.
CHAPTER XI.
CHAPTER XII.
CHAPTER XIII.
CHAPTER XIV.
CHAPTER XV.
PART III.
CHAPTER XVI.
CHAPTER XVII.
CHAPTER XVIII.
CHAPTER XIX.
List of Illustrations
There Connie found Nora’s latest statement headed “List of Liabilities”
Constance sat in the shadow of a plane-tree with Falloden at her feet
The tea-party at Mrs. Hooper’s
Lady Connie had stood entranced by the playing of Radowitz
Connie sat down beside Radowitz and they looked at each other in silence
Lady Connie held in her horse, feeding her eyes upon Flood Castle and its woods
Herr Schwarz was examining a picture with a magnifying glass when Falloden entered
Douglas knelt, looking into his father’s face, and Radowitz moved farther away
[Illustration: There Connie found Nora’s latest statement headed
“List of Liabilities”]
PART I
CHAPTER I
“Well, now we’ve done all we can, and all I mean to do,” said Alice
Hooper, with a pettish accent of fatigue. “Everything’s perfectly
comfortable, and if she doesn’t like it, we can’t help it. I don’t know
why we make such a fuss.”
The speaker threw herself with a gesture of fatigue into a dilapidated
basket-chair that offered itself. It was a spring day, and the windows
of the old schoolroom in which she and her sister were sitting were
open to a back garden, untidily kept, but full of fruit-trees just
coming into blossom. Through their twinkling buds and interlacing
branches could be seen grey college walls—part of the famous garden
front of St. Cyprian’s College, Oxford. There seemed to be a slight
bluish mist over the garden and the building, a mist starred with
patches of white and dazzlingly green leaf. And, above all, there was
an evening sky, peaceful and luminous, from which a light wind blew
towards the two girls sitting by the open window. One, the elder, had a
face like a Watteau sketch, with black velvety eyes, hair drawn back
from a white forehead, delicate little mouth, with sharp indentations
at the corners, and a small chin. The other was much more solidly
built—a girl of seventeen, in a plump phase, which however an
intelligent eye would have read as not likely to last; a complexion of
red and brown tanned by exercise; an expression in her clear eyes which
was alternately frank and ironic; and an inconvenient mass of golden
brown hair.
“We make a fuss, my dear,” said the younger sister, “because we’re
bound to make a fuss. Connie, I understand, is to pay us a good round
sum for her board and lodging, so it’s only honest she should have a
decent room.”
“Yes, but you don’t know what she’ll call decent,” said the other
rather sulkily. “She’s probably been used to all sorts of silly
luxuries.”
“Why of course, considering Uncle Risborough was supposed to have
twenty-odd thousand a year. We’re paupers, and she’s got to put up with
us. But we couldn’t take her money and do nothing in return.”
Nora Hooper looked rather sharply at her sister. It fell to her in the
family to be constantly upholding the small daily traditions of honesty
and fair play. It was she who championed the servants, or insisted,
young as she was, on bills being paid, when it would have been more
agreeable to buy frocks and go to London for a theatre. She was a great
power in the house, and both her languid, incompetent mother, and her
pretty sister were often afraid of her. Nora was a “Home Student,” and
had just begun to work seriously for English Literature Honours. Alice
on the other hand was the domestic and social daughter. She helped her
mother in the house, had a head full of undergraduates, and regarded
the “Eights” week and Commemoration as the shining events of the year.
Both girls were however at one in the uneasy or excited anticipation
with which they were looking forward that evening to the arrival of a
newcomer, who was, it seemed, to make part of the household for some
time. Their father, Dr. Ewen Hooper, the holder of a recently founded
classical readership, had once possessed a younger sister of
considerable beauty, who, in the course of an independent and
adventurous career, had captured—by no ignoble arts—a widower, who
happened to be also an earl and a rich man. It happened while they were
both wintering at Florence, the girl working at paleography, in the
Ambrosian Library, while Lord Risborough, occupying a villa in the
neighbourhood of the Torre San Gallo, was giving himself to the
artistic researches and the cosmopolitan society which suited his
health and his tastes. He was a dilettante of the old sort, incurably
in love with living, in spite of the loss of his wife, and his only
son; in spite also of an impaired heart—in the physical sense—and
various other drawbacks. He came across the bright girl student,
discovered that she could talk very creditably about manuscripts and
illuminations, gave her leave to work in his own library, where he
possessed a few priceless things, and presently found her company, her
soft voice, and her eager, confiding eyes quite indispensable. His
elderly sister, Lady Winifred, who kept house for him, frowned on the
business in vain; and finally departed in a huff to join another maiden
sister, Lady Marcia, in an English country _ménage_, where for some
years she did little but lament the flesh-pots of Italy—Florence. The
married sister, Lady Langmoor, wrote reams of plaintive remonstrances,
which remained unanswered. Lord Risborough married the girl student,
Ella Hooper, and never regretted it. They had one daughter, to whom
they devoted themselves—preposterously, their friends thought; but for
twenty years, they were three happy people together. Then virulent
influenza, complicated with pneumonia, carried off the mother during a
spring visit to Rome, and six weeks later Lord Risborough died of the
damaged heart which had held out so long.
The daughter, Lady Constance Bledlow, had been herself attacked by the
influenza epidemic which had killed her mother, and the double blow of
her parents’ deaths, coming on a neurasthenic condition, had hit her
youth rather hard. Some old friends in Rome, with the full consent of
her guardian, the Oxford Reader, had carried her off, first to
Switzerland, and then to the Riviera for the winter, and now in May,
about a year after the death of her parents, she was coming for the
first time to make acquaintance with the Hooper family, with whom,
according to her father’s will, she was to make her home till she was
twenty-one. None of them had ever seen her, except on two occasions;
once, at a hotel in London; and once, some ten years before this date,
when Lord Risborough had been D.C.L-ed at the Encænia, as a reward for
some valuable gifts which he had made to the Bodleian, and he, his
wife, and his little girl, after they had duly appeared at the All
Souls’ luncheon, and the official fête in St. John’s Gardens, had found
their way to the house in Holywell, and taken tea with the Hoopers.
Nora’s mind, as she and her sister sat waiting for the fly in which
Mrs. Hooper had gone to meet her husband’s niece at the station, ran
persistently on her own childish recollections of this visit. She sat
in the window-sill, with her hand behind her, chattering to her sister.
“I remember thinking when Connie came in here to tea with us—‘What a
stuck-up thing you are!’ And I despised her, because she couldn’t climb
the mulberry in the garden, and because she hadn’t begun Latin. But all
the time, I envied her horribly, and I expect you did too, Alice. Can’t
you see her black silk stockings—and her new hat with those awfully
pretty flowers, made of feathers? She had a silk frock too—white, very
skimp, and short; and enormously long black legs, as thin as sticks;
and her hair in plaits. I felt a thick lump beside her. And I didn’t
like her at all. What horrid toads children are! She didn’t talk to us
much, but her eyes seemed to be always laughing at us, and when she
talked Italian to her mother, I thought she was showing off, and I
wanted to pinch her for being affected.”
“Why, of course she talked Italian,” said Alice, who was not much
interested in her sister’s recollections.
“Naturally. But that didn’t somehow occur to me. After all I was only
seven.”
“I wonder if she’s really good-looking,” said Alice slowly, glancing,
as she spoke, at the reflection of herself in an old dilapidated
mirror, which hung on the schoolroom wall.
“The photos are,” said Nora decidedly. “Goodness, I wish she’d come and
get it over. I want to get back to my work—and till she comes, I can’t
settle to anything.”
“Well, they’ll be here directly. I wonder what on earth she’ll do with
all her money. Father says she may spend it, if she wants to. He’s
trustee, but Uncle Risborough’s letter to him said she was to have the
income if she wished—_now_. Only she’s not to touch the capital till
she’s twenty-five.”
“It’s a good lot, isn’t it?” said Nora, walking about. “I wonder how
many people in Oxford have two thousand a year? A girl too. It’s really
rather exciting.”
“It won’t be very nice for us—she’ll be so different.” Alice’s tone was
a little sulky and depressed. The advent of this girl cousin, with her
title, her good looks, her money, and her unfair advantages in the way
of talking French and Italian, was only moderately pleasant to the
eldest Miss Hooper.
“What—you think she’ll snuff us out?” laughed Nora. “Not she! Oxford’s
not like London. People are not such snobs.”
“What a silly thing to say, Nora! As if it wasn’t an enormous pull
everywhere to have a handle to your name, and lots of money!”
“Well, I really think it’ll matter less here than anywhere. Oxford, my
dear—or some of it—pursues ‘the good and the beautiful’”—said Nora,
taking a flying leap on to the window-sill again, and beginning to poke
up some tadpoles in a jar, which stood on the window-ledge.
Alice did not think it worth while to continue the conversation. She
had little or nothing of Nora’s belief in the other-worldliness of
Oxford. At this period, some thirty odd years ago, the invasion of
Oxford on the north by whole new tribes of citizens had already begun.
The old days of University exclusiveness in a ring fence were long done
with; the days of much learning and simple ways, when there were only
two carriages in Oxford that were not doctors’ carriages, when the
wives of professors and tutors went out to dinner in “chairs” drawn by
men, and no person within the magic circle of the University knew
anybody—to speak of—in the town outside. The University indeed, at this
later moment, still more than held its own, socially, amid the waves of
new population that threatened to submerge it; and the occasional
spectacle of retired generals and colonels, the growing number of
broughams and victorias in the streets, or the rumours of persons with
“smart” or “county” connections to be found among the rows of new
villas spreading up the Banbury Road were still not sufficiently marked
to disturb the essential character of the old and beautiful place. But
new ways and new manners were creeping in, and the young were
sensitively aware of them, like birds that feel the signs of coming
weather.
Alice fell into a brown study. She was thinking about a recent dance
given at a house in the Parks, where some of her particular friends had
been present, and where, on the whole, she had enjoyed herself greatly.
Nothing is ever perfect, and she would have liked it better if Herbert
Pryce’s sister had not—past all denying—had more partners and a greater
success than herself, and if Herbert Pryce himself had not been—just a
little—casual and inattentive. But after all they had had two or three
glorious supper dances, and he certainly would have kissed her hand,
while they were sitting out in the garden, if she had not made haste to
put it out of his reach. “You never did anything of the kind till you
were sure he did not mean to kiss it!” said conscience. “I did not give
myself away in the least!”—was vanity’s angry reply. “I was perfectly
dignified.”
Herbert Pryce was a young fellow and tutor—a mathematical fellow; and
therefore, Alice’s father, for whom Greek was the only study worth the
brains of a rational being, could not be got to take the smallest
interest in him. But he was certainly very clever, and it was said he
was going to get a post at Cambridge—or something at the Treasury—which
would enable him to marry. Alice suddenly had a vague vision of her own
wedding; the beautiful central figure—she would certainly look
beautiful in her wedding dress!—bowing so gracefully; the bridesmaids
behind, in her favourite colours, white and pale green; and the tall
man beside her. But Herbert Pryce was not really tall, and not
particularly good-looking, though he had a rather distinguished hatchet
face, with a good forehead. Suppose Herbert and Vernon and all her
other friends, were to give up being “nice” to her as soon as Connie
Bledlow appeared? Suppose she was going to be altogether cut out and
put in the background? Alice had a kind of uneasy foreboding that
Herbert Pryce would think a title “interesting.”
Meanwhile Nora, having looked through an essay on “Piers Plowman,”
which she was to take to her English Literature tutor on the following
day, went aimlessly upstairs and put her head into Connie’s room. The
old house was panelled, and its guest-room, though small and shabby,
had yet absorbed from its oaken walls, and its outlook on the garden
and St. Cyprian’s, a certain measure of the Oxford charm. The furniture
was extremely simple—a large hanging cupboard made by curtaining one of
the panelled recesses of the wall, a chest of drawers, a bed, a small
dressing-table and glass, a carpet that was the remains of one which
had originally covered the drawing-room for many years, an armchair, a
writing-table, and curtains which having once been blue had now been
dyed a serviceable though ugly dark red. In Nora’s eyes it was all
comfortable and nice. She herself had insisted on having the carpet and
curtains redipped, so that they really looked almost new, and the one
mattress on the bed “made over”; she had brought up the armchair, and
she had gathered the cherry-blossoms, which stood on the mantelpiece
shining against the darkness of the walls. She had also hung above it a
photograph of Watts “Love and Death.” Nora looked at the picture and
the flowers with a throb of pleasure. Alice never noticed such things.
And now what about the maid? Fancy bringing a maid! Nora’s sentiments
on the subject were extremely scornful. However Connie had simply taken
it for granted, and she had been housed somehow. Nora climbed up an
attic stair and looked into a room which had a dormer window in the
roof, two strips of carpet on the boards, a bed, a washing-stand, a
painted chest of drawers, a table, with an old looking-glass, and two
chairs. “Well, that’s all I have!” thought Nora defiantly. But a
certain hospitable or democratic instinct made her go downstairs again
and bring up a small vase of flowers like those in Connie’s room, and
put it on the maid’s table. The maid was English, but she had lived a
long time abroad with the Risboroughs.
Sounds! Yes, that was the fly stopping at the front door! Nora flew
downstairs, in a flush of excitement. Alice too had come out into the
hall, looking shy and uncomfortable. Dr. Hooper emerged from his study.
He was a big, loosely built man, with a shock of grizzled hair,
spectacles, and a cheerful expression.
A tall, slim girl, in a grey dust-cloak and a large hat, entered the
dark panelled hall, looking round her. “Welcome, my dear Connie!” said
Dr. Hooper, cordially, taking her hand and kissing her. “Your train
must have been a little late.”
“Twenty minutes!” said Mrs. Hooper, who had followed her niece into the
hall. “And the draughts in the station, Ewen, were something
appalling.”
The tone was fretful. It had even a touch of indignation as though the
speaker charged her husband with the draughts. Mrs. Hooper was a woman
between forty and fifty, small and plain, except for a pair of rather
fine eyes, which, in her youth, while her cheeks were still pink, and
the obstinate lines of her thin slit mouth and prominent chin were less
marked, had beguiled several lovers, Ewen Hooper at their head.
Dr. Hooper took no notice of her complaints. He was saying to his
niece—“This is Alice, Constance—and Nora! You’ll hardly remember each
other again, after all these years.”
“Oh, yes, I remember quite well,” said a clear, high-pitched voice.
“How do you do!—how do you do?”
And the girl held a hand out to each cousin in turn. She did not offer
to kiss either Alice or Nora. But she looked at them steadily, and
suddenly Nora was aware of that expression of which she had so vivid
although so childish a recollection—as though a satiric spirit sat
hidden and laughing in the eyes, while the rest of the face was quite
grave.
“Come in and have some tea. It’s quite ready,” said Alice, throwing
open the drawing-room door. Her face had cleared suddenly. It did not
seem to her, at least in the shadows of the hall, that her cousin
Constance was anything of a beauty.
“I’m afraid I must look after Annette first. She’s much more important
than I am!”
And the girl ran back to where a woman in a blue serge coat and skirt
was superintending the carrying in of the luggage. There was a great
deal of luggage, and Annette, who wore a rather cross, flushed air,
turned round every now and then to look frowningly at the old gabled
house into which it was being carried, as though she were more than
doubtful whether the building would hold the boxes. Yet as houses went,
in the older parts of Oxford, Medburn House, Holywell, was roomy.
“Annette, don’t do any unpacking till after tea!” cried Lady Constance.
“Just get the boxes carried up, and rest a bit. I’ll come and help you
later.”
The maid said nothing. Her lips seemed tightly compressed. She stepped
into the hall, and spoke peremptorily to the white-capped parlourmaid
who stood bewildered among the trunks.
“Have those boxes—” she pointed to four—two large American Saratogas,
and two smaller trunks—“carried up to her ladyship’s room. The other
two can go into mine.”
“Miss!” whispered the agitated maid in Nora’s ear, “we’ll never get any
of those boxes up the top-stairs. And if we put them four into her
ladyship’s room, she’ll not be able to move.”
“I’ll come and see to it,” said Nora, snatching up a bag. “They’ve got
to go somewhere!”
Mrs. Hooper repeated that Nora would manage it, and languidly waved her
niece towards the drawing-room. The girl hesitated, laughed, and
finally yielded, seeing that Nora was really in charge. Dr. Hooper led
her in, placed an armchair for her beside the tea-table, and stood
closely observing her.
“You’re like your mother,” he said, at last, in a low voice; “at least
in some points.” The girl turned away abruptly, as though what he said
jarred, and addressed herself to Alice.
“Poor Annette was very sick. It was a vile crossing.”
“Oh, the servants will look after her,” said Alice indifferently.
“Everybody has to look after Annette!—or she’ll know the reason why,”
laughed Lady Constance, removing her black gloves from a very small and
slender hand. She was dressed in deep mourning with crape still upon
her hat and dress, though it was more than a year since her mother’s
death. Such mourning was not customary in Oxford, and Alice Hooper
thought it affected.
Mrs. Hooper then made the tea. But the newcomer paid little attention
to the cup placed beside her. Her eyes wandered round the group at the
tea-table, her uncle, a man of originally strong physique, marred now
by the student’s stoop, and by weak eyes, tried by years of Greek and
German type; her aunt—
“What a very odd woman Aunt Ellen is!” thought Constance.
For, all the way from the station, Mrs. Hooper had talked about
scarcely anything but her own ailments, and the Oxford climate. “She
told us all about her rheumatisms—and the east winds—and how she ought
to go to Buxton every year—only Uncle Hooper wouldn’t take things
seriously. And she never asked us anything at all about our passage, or
our night journey! And there was Annette—as yellow as an egg—and as
_cross_—”
However Dr. Hooper was soon engaged in making up for his wife’s
shortcomings. He put his niece through many questions as to the year
which had elapsed since her parent’s death; her summer in the high
Alps, and her winter at Cannes.
“I never met your friends—Colonel and Mrs. King. We are not military in
Oxford. But they seem—to judge from their letters—to be very nice
people,” said the Professor, his tone, quite unconsciously, suggesting
the slightest shade of patronage.
“Oh, they’re dears,” said the girl warmly. “They were awfully good to
me.”
“Cannes was very gay, I suppose?”
“We saw a great many people in the afternoons. The Kings knew
everybody. But I didn’t go out in the evenings.”
“You weren’t strong enough?”
“I was in mourning,” said the girl, looking at him with her large and
brilliant eyes.
“Yes, yes, of course!” murmured the Reader, not quite understanding why
he felt himself a trifle snubbed. He asked a few more questions, and
his niece, who seemed to have no shyness, gave a rapid description, as
she sipped her tea, of the villa at Cannes in which she had passed the
winter months, and of the half dozen families, with whom she and her
friends had been mostly thrown. Alice Hooper was secretly thrilled by
some of the names which dropped out casually. She always read the
accounts in the _Queen_, or the _Sketch_, of “smart society” on the
Riviera, and it was plain to her that Constance had been dreadfully “in
it.” It would not apparently have been possible to be more “in it.” She
was again conscious of a hot envy of her cousin which made her unhappy.
Also Connie’s good looks were becoming more evident. She had taken off
her hat, and all the distinction of her small head, her slender neck
and sloping shoulders, was more visible; her self-possession, too, the
ease and vivacity of her gestures. Her manner was that of one
accustomed to a large and varied world, who took all things without
surprise, as they came. Dr. Hooper had felt some emotion, and betrayed
some, in this meeting with his sister’s motherless child; but the
girl’s only betrayal of feeling had lain in the sharpness with which
she had turned away from her uncle’s threatened effusion. “And how she
looks at us!” thought Alice. “She looks at us through and through. Yet
she doesn’t stare.”
But at that moment Alice heard the word “prince,” and her attention was
instantly arrested.
“We had some Russian neighbours,” the newcomer was saying; “Prince and
Princess Jaroslav; and they had an English party at Christmas. It was
great fun. They used to take us out riding into the mountains, or into
Italy.” She paused a moment, and then said carelessly—as though to keep
up the conversation—“There was a Mr. Falloden with them—an
undergraduate at Marmion College, I think. Do you know him, Aunt
Ellen?” She turned towards her aunt.
But Mrs. Hooper only looked blank. She was just thinking anxiously that
she had forgotten to take her tabloids after lunch, because Ewen had
hustled her off so much too soon to the station.
“I don’t think we know him,” she said vaguely, turning towards Alice.
“We know all about him. He was introduced to me once.”
The tone of the eldest Miss Hooper could scarcely have been colder. The
eyes of the girl opposite suddenly sparkled into laughter.
“You didn’t like him?”
“Nobody does. He gives himself such ridiculous airs.”
“Does he?” said Constance. The information seemed to be of no interest
to her. She asked for another cup of tea.
“Oh, Falloden of Marmion?” said Dr. Hooper. “I know him quite well. One
of the best pupils I have. But I understand he’s the heir to his old
uncle, Lord Dagnall, and is going to be enormously rich. His father’s a
millionaire already. So of course he’ll soon forget his Greek. A horrid
waste!”
“He’s detested in college!” Alice’s small face lit up vindictively.
“There’s a whole set of them. Other people call them ‘the bloods.’ The
dons would like to send them all down.”
“They won’t send Falloden down, my dear, before he gets his First in
Greats, which he will do this summer. But this is his last term. I
never knew any one write better Greek iambics than that fellow,” said
the Reader, pausing in the middle of his cup of tea to murmur certain
Greek lines to himself. They were part of the brilliant copy of verses
by which Douglas Falloden of Marmion, in a fiercely contested year, had
finally won the Ireland, Ewen Hooper being one of the examiners.
“That’s what’s so abominable,” said Alice, setting her small mouth.
“You don’t expect reading men to drink, and get into rows.”
“Drink?” said Constance Bledlow, raising her eyebrows.
Alice went into details. The dons of Marmion, she said, were really
frightened by the spread of drinking in college, all caused by the bad
example of the Falloden set. She talked fast and angrily, and her
cousin listened, half scornfully, but still attentively.
“Why don’t they keep him in order?” she said at last. “We did!” And she
made a little gesture with her hand, impatient and masterful, as though
dismissing the subject.
And at that moment Nora came into the room, flushed either with
physical exertion, or the consciousness of her own virtue. She found a
place at the tea-table, and panting a little demanded to be fed.
“It’s hungry work, carrying up trunks!”
“You didn’t!” exclaimed Constance, in large-eyed astonishment. “I say,
I am sorry! Why did you? I’m sure they were too heavy. Why didn’t
Annette get a man?”
And sitting up, she bent across the table, all charm suddenly, and soft
distress.
“We did get one, but he was a wretched thing. I was worth two of him,”
said Nora triumphantly. “You should feel my biceps. There!”
And slipping up her loose sleeve, she showed an arm, at which Constance
Bledlow laughed. And her laugh touched her face with something
audacious—something wild—which transformed it.
“I shall take care how I offend you!”
Nora nodded over her tea.
“Your maid was shocked. She said I might as well have been a man.”
“It’s quite true,” sighed Mrs. Hooper. “You always were such a tomboy,
Nora.”
“Not at all! But I wish to develop my muscles. That’s why I do Swedish
exercises every morning. It’s ridiculous how flabby girls are. There
isn’t a girl in my lecture I can’t put down. If you like, I’ll teach
you my exercises,” said Nora, her mouth full of tea-cake, and her
expression half friendly, half patronising.
Connie Bledlow did not immediately reply. She seemed to be quietly
examining Nora, as she had already examined Alice, and that odd gleam
in the eyes under depths appeared again. But at last she said, smiling—
“Thank you. But my muscles are quite strong enough for the only
exercise I want. You said I might have a horse, Uncle Ewen, didn’t
you?” She turned eagerly to the master of the house.
Dr. Hooper looked at his wife with some embarrassment. “I want you to
have anything you wish for—in reason—my dear Connie; but your aunt is
rather exercised about the proprieties.”
The small dried-up woman behind the tea-urn said sharply:
“A girl can’t ride alone in Oxford—she’d be talked about at once!”
Lady Connie flushed mutinously.
“I could take a groom, Aunt Ellen!”
“Well, I don’t approve of it,” said Mrs. Hooper, in the half plaintive
tone of one who must speak although no one listens. “But of course your
uncle must decide.”
“We’ll talk it over, my dear Connie, we’ll talk it over,” said Dr.
Hooper cheerfully. “Now wouldn’t you like Nora to show you to your
room?”
The girls went upstairs together, Nora leading the way.
“It’s an awful squash in your room,” said Nora abruptly. “I don’t know
how you’ll manage.”
“My fault, I suppose, for bringing so many things! But where else could
I put them?”
Nora nodded gravely, as though considering the excuse. The newcomer
suddenly felt herself criticised by this odd schoolgirl and resented
it.
The door of the spare-room was open, and the girls entered upon a scene
of chaos. Annette rose from her knees, showing a brick-red countenance
of wrath that strove in vain for any sort of dignity. And again that
look of distant laughter came into Lady Connie’s eyes.
“My dear Annette, why aren’t you having a rest, as I told you! I can do
with anything to-night.”
“Well, my lady, if you’ll tell me how you’ll get into bed, unless I put
some of these things away, I should be obliged!” said Annette, with a
dark look at Nora. “I’ve asked for a wardrobe for you, and this young
lady says there isn’t one. There’s that hanging cupboard”—she pointed
witheringly to the curtained recess—“your dresses will be ruined there
in a fortnight. And there’s that chest of drawers. Your things will
have to stay in the trunks, as far as I can see, and then you might as
well sleep on them. It would give you more room!”
With which stroke of sarcasm, Annette returned to the angry unpacking
of her mistress’s bag.
“I must buy a wardrobe,” said Connie, looking round her in perplexity.
“Never mind, Annette, I can easily buy one.”
It was now Nora’s turn to colour.
“You mustn’t do that,” she said firmly. “Father wouldn’t like it. We’ll
find something. But do you want such a lot of things?”
She looked at the floor heaped with every variety of delicate mourning,
black dresses, thick and thin, for morning and afternoon; and black and
white, or pure white, for the evening. And what had happened to the
bed? It was already divested of the twilled cotton sheets and marcella
quilt which were all the Hoopers ever allowed either to themselves or
their guests. They had been replaced by sheets ‘of the finest and
smoothest linen, embroidered with a crest and monogram in the corners,
and by a coverlet of old Italian lace lined with pale blue silk; while
the down pillows at the head with their embroidered and lace-trimmed
slips completed the transformation of what had been a bed, and was now
almost a work of art.
And the dressing-table! Nora went up to it in amazement. It too was
spread with lace lined with silk, and covered with a toilet-set of
mother-of-pearl and silver. Every brush and bottle was crested and
initialled. The humble looking-glass, which Nora, who was something of
a carpenter, had herself mended before her cousin’s arrival, was
standing on the floor in a corner, and a folding mirror framed in
embossed silver had taken its place.
“I say, do you always travel with these things?” The girl stood
open-mouthed, half astonished, half contemptuous.
“What things?”
Nora pointed to the toilet-table and the bed.
Connie’s expression showed an answering astonishment.
“I have had them all my life,” she said stiffly. “We always took our
own linen to hotels, and made our rooms nice.”
“I should think you’d be afraid of their being stolen!” Nora took up
one of the costly brushes, and examined it in wonder.
“Why should I be? They’re nothing. They’re just like other people’s!”
With a slight but haughty change of manner, the girl turned away, and
began to talk Italian to her maid.
“I never saw anything like them!” said Nora stoutly.
Constance Bledlow took no notice. She and Annette were chattering fast,
and Nora could not understand a word. She stood by awkward and
superfluous, feeling certain that the maid who was gesticulating, now
towards the ceiling, and now towards the floor, was complaining both of
her own room and of the kitchen accommodation. Her mistress listened
carelessly, occasionally trying to soothe her, and in the middle of the
stream of talk, Nora slipped away.
“It’s horrid!—spending all that money on yourself,” thought the girl of
seventeen indignantly. “And in Oxford too!—as if anybody wanted such
things here.”
Meanwhile, she was no sooner gone than her cousin sank down on the
armchair, and broke into a slightly hysterical fit of laughter.
“Can we stand it, Annette? We’ve got to try. Of course you can leave me
if you choose.”
“And I should like to know how you’d get on then!” said Annette,
grimly, beginning again upon the boxes.
“Well, of course, I shouldn’t get on at all. But really we might give
away a lot of these clothes! I shall never want them.”
The speaker looked frowning at the stacks of dresses and lingerie.
Annette made no reply; but went on busily with her unpacking. If the
clothes were to be got rid of, they were her perquisites. She was
devoted to Constance, but she stood on her rights.
Presently a little space was cleared on the floor, and Constance,
seeing that it was nearly seven o’clock, and the Hoopers supped at half
past, took off her black dress with its crape, and put on a white one,
high to the throat and long-sleeved; a French demi-toilette, plain, and
even severe in make, but cut by the best dressmaker in Nice. She looked
extraordinarily tall and slim in it and very foreign. Her maid clasped
a long string of opals, which was her only ornament, about her neck.
She gave one look at herself in the glass, holding herself proudly, one
might have said arrogantly. But as she turned away, and so that Annette
could not see her, she raised the opals, and held them a moment softly
to her lips. Her mother had habitually worn them. Then she moved to the
window, and looked out over the Hoopers’ private garden, to the
spreading college lawns, and the grey front beyond.
“Am I really going to stay here a whole year—nearly?” she asked
herself, half laughing, half rebellious.
Then her eye fell upon a medley of photographs; snaps from her own
camera, which had tumbled out of her bag in unpacking. The topmost one
represented a group of young men and maidens standing under a group of
stone pines in a Riviera landscape. She herself was in front, with a
tall youth beside her. She bent down to look at it.
“I shall come across him I suppose—before long.” And raising herself,
she stood awhile, thinking; her face alive with an excitement that was
half expectation, and half angry recollection.