When Anna woke next morning she had a confused idea that something
annoying had happened the evening before, but she had slept so heavily
that she could not at once recollect what it was. Then, the sun on her
face waking her up more thoroughly, she remembered that Susie had stayed
upstairs with Hilton till supper time, had then come down, glanced with
unutterable disgust at the raw ham, cold sausage, eggs, and tepid coffee
of which the evening meal was composed, refused to eat, refused to
speak, refused utterly to smile, and afterwards in the drawing-room had
announced her fixed intention of returning to England the next day.
Anna had protested and argued in vain; nothing could shake this sudden
determination. To all her expostulations and entreaties Susie replied
that she had never yet dwelt among savages and she was not going to
begin now; so Anna was forced to conclude that Hilton had been making a
scene, and knowing the effect of Hilton's scenes she gave up attempting
to persuade, but told her with outward firmness and inward quakings that
she herself could not possibly go too.
Susie had been very angry at this, and still more angry at the reason
Anna gave, which was that, having invited the parson and his wife to
dinner on Saturday, she could not break her engagement. Susie told her
that as she would never see either of them again--for surely she would
never again want to come to this place?--it was absurd to care twopence
what they thought of her. What on earth did it matter if two inhabitants
of the desert were offended or not offended once she was on the other
side of the sea? And what did it matter at all how she treated them? She
heaped such epithets as absurd, stupid, and idiotic on Anna's head, but
Anna was not to be moved. She threatened to take Miss Leech and Letty
away with her, and leave Anna a prey to the criticisms of Mrs. Grundy,
and Anna said she could not prevent her doing so if she chose. Susie
became more and more excited, more and more Dobbs, goaded by the
recollection of what she had gone through with Hilton, and Anna, as
usual under such circumstances, grew very silent. Letty sat listening in
an agony of fright lest this cup of new experiences were about to be
dashed prematurely from her eager lips; and Miss Leech discreetly left
the room, though not in the least knowing where to go, finally seeking
to drive away the nervous fears that assailed her in her lonely,
creaking bedroom, where rats were gnawing at the woodwork, by thinking
hard of Mr. Jessup, who on this occasion proved to be but a broken reed,
pitted against the stern reality of rats.
The end of it, after Susie had poured out the customary reproaches of
gross ingratitude and forgetfulness of all she had done for Anna for
fifteen long years, was that Miss Leech and Letty were to stay on as
originally intended, and come home with Anna towards the end of the
holidays, and Susie would leave with Hilton the very next day.
Anna's attempt to make it up when she said good-night was repulsed with
energy. Anna was for ever doing aggravating things, and then wanting to
make it up; but makings up without having given in an inch seemed to
Susie singularly unsatisfactory ceremonies. Oh, these Estcourts and
their obstinacy! She marched off to bed in high indignation, an
indignation not by any means allowed to cool by Hilton during the
process of undressing; and Anna, worn out, fell asleep the moment she
lay down, and woke up, as she had pictured herself doing in that odd
wooden bed, with the morning sun shining full on her face.
It was a bright and lovely day, and on the side of the house where she
slept she could not hear the wind, which was still blowing from the
north-west. She opened one of her three big windows and let the cold air
rush into her room, where the curious perfume of the baked evergreen
wreaths festooned round the walls and looking-glass and dressing-table,
joined to the heat from the stove, produced a heavy atmosphere that made
her gasp. Somebody must already have been in her room, for the stove had
been lit again, and she could see the peat blazing inside its open door.
But outside, what a divine coldness and purity! She leaned out, drinking
it in in long breaths, the warm March sun shining on her head. The
garden, a mere uncared-for piece of rough grass with big trees, was
radiant with rain-drops; the strip of sea was a deep blue now, with
crests of foam; the island coast opposite was a shadowy streak stretched
across the feet of the sun. Oh, it was beautiful to stand at that open
window in the freshness, listening to the robin on the bare lilac bush a
few yards away, to the quarrelling of the impudent sparrows on the path
below, to the wind in the branches of the trees, to all the happy
morning sounds of nature. A joyous feeling took possession of her heart,
a sudden overpowering delight in what are called common things--mere
earth, sky, sun, and wind. How lovely life was on such a morning, in
such a clean, rain-washed, wind-scoured world. The wet smell of the
garden came up to her, a whiff of marshy smell from the water, a long
breath from the pines in the forest on the other side of the house. How
had she ever breathed at Estcourt? How had she escaped suffocation
without this life-giving smell of sea and forest? She looked down with
delight at the wildness of the garden; after the trim Estcourt lawns,
what a relief this was. This was all liberty, freedom from
conventionality, absolute privacy; that was an everlasting clipping, and
trimming, and raking, a perpetual stumbling upon gardeners at every
step, for Susie would not be outdone by her greater neighbours in these
matters. What was Hill Street looking like this fine March morning? All
the blinds down, all the people in bed--how far away, how shadowy it
was; a street inhabited by sleepy ghosts, with phantom milkmen rattling
spectral cans beneath their windows. What a dream that life lived up to
three days ago seemed in this morning light of reality. White clouds,
like the clouds in Raphael's backgrounds, were floating so high overhead
that they could not be hurried by the wind; a black cat sat in a patch
of sunshine on the path washing itself; somebody opened a lower window,
and there was a noise of sweeping, presently made indistinguishable by
the chorale sung by the sweeper, no doubt Marie, in a pious, Good Friday
mood. "_Lob Gott ihr Christen allzugleich_," chanted Marie, keeping time
with her broom. Her voice was loud and monotonous, but Anna listened
with a smile, and would have liked to join in, and so let some of her
happiness find its way out.
She dressed quickly. There was no hot water, and no bell to ring for
some, and she did not choose to call down from the window and interrupt
the hymn, so she used cold water, assuring herself that it was bracing.
Then she put on her hat and coat and stole out, afraid of disturbing
Susie, who was lying a few yards away filled with smouldering wrath,
anxious to have at least one quiet hour before beginning a day that she
felt sure was going to be a day of worries. "There will be great peace
to-night when she is gone," she thought, and immediately felt ashamed
that she should look forward to being without her. "But I have never
been without her since I was ten," she explained apologetically to her
offended conscience, "and I want to see how I feel."
"_Guten Morgen_," said Marie, as Anna came into the drawing-room on her
way out through its French windows.
"_Guten Morgen_," said Anna cheerfully.
Marie leaned on her broom and watched her go down the garden, greedily
taking in every detail of her clothes, profoundly interested in a being
who went out into the mud where nobody could see her with such a dress
on, and whose shoes would not have been too big for Marie's small sister
aged nine.
The evening before, indeed, Marie had beheld such a vision as she had
never yet in her life seen, or so much as imagined; her new mistress had
appeared at supper in what was evidently a _herrschaftliche Ballkleid_,
with naked arms and shoulders, and the other ladies were attired in much
the same way. The young Fräulein, it is true, showed no bare flesh, but
even she was arrayed in white, and her hair magnificently tied up with
ribbons. Marie had rushed out to tell the cook, and the cook, refusing
to believe it, had carried in a supererogatory dish of compot as an
excuse for securing the assurance of her own eyes; and Bertha from the
farm, coming round with a message from the Frau Oberinspector, had seen
it too through the crack of the kitchen door as the ladies left the
dining-room, and had gone off breathlessly to spread the news; and the
post cart just leaving with the letters had carried it to Lohm, and
every inhabitant of every house between Kleinwalde and Stralsund knew
all about it before bedtime. "What did I tell thee, wife?" said Dellwig,
who, in spite of his superiority to the sex that served, listened as
eagerly as any member of it to gossip; and his wife was only too ready
to label Anna mad or eccentric as a slight private consolation for
having passed out of the service of a comprehensible German gentleman
into that of a woman and a foreigner.
Unconscious of the interest and curiosity she was exciting for miles
round, pleased by Marie's artless piety, and filled with kindly feelings
towards all her neighbours, Anna stood at the end of the garden looking
over the low hedge that divided it from the marsh and the sea, and
thought that she had never seen a place where it would be so easy to be
good. Complete freedom from the wearisome obligations of society, an
ideal privacy surrounded by her woods and the water, a scanty population
of simple and devoted people--did not Dellwig shed tears at the
remembrance of his master?--every day spent here would be a day that
made her better, that would bring her nearer to that heaven in which all
good and simple souls dwelt while still on earth, the heaven of a serene
and quiet mind. Always she had longed to be good, and to help and
befriend those who had the same longing but in whom it had been
partially crushed by want of opportunity and want of peace. The healthy
goodness that goes hand in hand with happiness was what she meant; not
that tragic and futile goodness that grows out of grief, that lifts its
head miserably in stony places, that flourishes in sick rooms and among
desperate sorrows, and goes to God only because all else is lost. She
went round the house and crossed the road into the forest. The fresh
wind blew in her face, and shook down the drops from the branches on her
as she passed. The pine needles of other years made a thick carpet for
her feet. The sun gleamed through the straight trunks and warmed her.
The restless sighing overheard in the tree tops filled her ears with
sweetest music. "I do believe the place is pleased that I have come!"
she thought, with a happy laugh. She came to a clearing in the trees,
opening out towards the north, and she could see the flat fields and the
wide sky and the sunshine chasing the shadows across the vivid green
patches that she had learned were winter rye. A hole at her feet, where
a tree had been uprooted, still had snow in it; but the larks were
singing above in the blue, as though from those high places they could
see Spring far away in the south, coming up slowly with the first
anemones in her hands, her face turned at last towards the patient
north.
The strangest feeling of being for the first time in her life at home
came over Anna. This poor country, how sweet and touching it was. After
the English country, with its thickly scattered villages, and gardens,
and fields that looked like parks, it did seem very poor and very empty,
but intensely lovable. Like the furniture of her house, it struck her as
symbolic in its bareness of the sturdier virtues. The people who lived
in it must of necessity be frugal and hard-working if they would live at
all, wresting by sheer labour their life from the soil, braced by the
long winters to endurance and self-denial, their vices and their
languors frozen out of them whether they would or no. At least so
thought Anna, as she stood gazing out across the clearing at the fields
and sky. "Could one not be good here? Could one not be so, so good?" she
kept on murmuring. Then she remembered that she had been asking herself
vague questions like this ever since her arrival; and with a sudden
determination to face what was in her mind and think it out honestly,
she sat down on a tree stump, buttoned her coat up tight, for the wind
was blowing full on her, and fell to considering what she meant to do.
* * * * *
Susie did not go down to breakfast, but stayed in her bedroom on the
sofa drinking a glass of milk into which an egg had been beaten, and
listening to Hilton's criticisms of the German nation, delivered with
much venom while she packed. But Hilton, though her contempt for German
ways was so great as to be almost unutterable, was reconciled to a
mistress who had so quickly given in to her wish to be taken back to
Hill Street, and the venom was of an abstract nature, containing no
personal sting of unfavourable comparisons with duchesses; so that Susie
was sipping her milk in a fairly placid frame of mind when there was a
knock at the door, and Anna asked if she might come in.
"Oh, yes, come in. Have you looked out the trains?"
"Yes. There's only one decent one, and you'll have to leave directly
after luncheon. Won't you stay, Susie? You'll be so tired, going home
without resting."
"Can't we leave before luncheon?"
"Yes, of course, if you prefer to lunch at Stralsund."
"Much. Have you ordered the shandrydan?"
"Yes, for half-past one."
"Then order it for half-past twelve. Hilton can drive with me."
"So I thought."
"Has that wretch been rubbing fish oil on it again?"
"I don't think so, after what I said yesterday."
"I shouldn't think what you said yesterday could have frightened him
much. You beamed at him as though he were your best friend."
"Did I?"
Anna was looking odd, Susie thought, and answering her remarks with a
nervous, abstracted air. She had apparently been out, for her dress was
muddy, and she was quite rosy, and her hair was not so neat as usual.
She stood about in an undecided sort of way, and glanced several times
at Hilton on her knees before a trunk.
"Is that all the breakfast you are going to have?" she asked, becoming
aware of the glass of milk.
"What other breakfast is there to have?" snapped Susie, who was hungry,
and would have liked a great deal more.
"Well, the eggs and butter are very nice, anyway," said Anna, quite
evidently thinking of other things.
"Now what has she got into her head?" Susie asked herself, watching her
sister-in-law with misgiving. Anna's new moods were never by any chance
of a sort to give Susie pleasure. Aloud she said tartly, "I can't eat
eggs and butter by themselves. I shouldn't have had anything at all if
it hadn't been for Hilton, who went into the kitchen and made me this
herself."
"Excellent Hilton," said Anna absently. "Haven't you done packing yet,
Hilton?"
"No, m'm."
Anna sat down on the end of the sofa and began to twist the frills of
Susie's dressing-gown round her fingers.
"I haven't closed my eyes all night," said Susie, putting on her martyr
look, "nor has Hilton."
"Haven't you? Why not? I slept the sleep of the just--better, indeed,
than any just that I ever heard of."
"What, didn't that man go into your room?"
"What man? Oh, yes, Miss Leech was telling me about it. He lit the
stoves, didn't he? I never heard a sound."
"You must have slept like a log then. Any one in the least sensitive
would have been frightened out of their senses. I was, and so was
Hilton. I wouldn't spend another night in this house for anything you
could give me."
It appeared that Susie really had just cause for complaint. She had been
nervous the night before after Hilton had left her, unable to sleep, and
scared by the thought of their defencelessness--six women alone in that
wild place. She wished then with all her heart that Dellwig did live in
the house. Rats scampering about in the attic above added to her
terrors. The wind shook the windows of her room and howled
disconsolately up and down. She bore it as long as she could, which was
longer than most women would have borne it, and then knocked on the wall
dividing her room from Hilton's. But Hilton, with the bedclothes over
her head and all the candles she had been able to collect alight, would
not have stirred out of her room to save her mistress from dying; and
Susie, desperate at the prospect of the awful hours round midnight, made
one great effort of courage and sallied out to fetch her. Poor Susie,
standing shivering before her maid's bolted door, scantily clothed,
anxiously watching the flame of her candle that threatened each second
to be blown out, alone on the wide, draughty landing, frightened at the
sound of her own calls mingling weirdly with the creakings and hangings
of the tempest-shaken house, was an object deserving of pity. It took
some minutes to induce Hilton to open the door, and such minutes Susie
had not, in the course of an ordered and normal existence, yet passed.
They both went into Susie's room, locked themselves in, and Hilton lay
down on the sofa; and after a long time they fell into an uneasy sleep.
At half-past three Susie started up in bed; some one was trying to open
the door and knocking. The candles had burnt themselves out, and she
could not tell what time it was, but thought it must be early morning
and that the servant wanted to bring her hot water; and she woke Hilton
and bade her open the door. Hilton did so, gave a faint scream, and
flung herself back on the sofa, where she lay as one dead, her face
buried in the pillow. A man with a lantern and no shoes on was at the
door, and came in noiselessly. Susie was never nearer fainting in her
life. She sat in her bed, her cold hands clasped tightly round her
knees, her eyes fixed on this dreadful apparition, unable to speak or
move, paralysed by terror. This was the end, then, of all her hopes and
ambitions--to come to Pomerania and die like a dog. Then the sickening
feeling of fear gave way to one of overwhelming wrath when she found
that all the man wanted was to light her stove. On the same principle
that a child is shaken who has not after all been lost or run over, she
was speechless with rage now that she found that she was not, after all,
to be murdered. He was a very old man, and the light from the lantern
cast strange reflections on his face and figure as he crouched before
the stove. He mumbled as he worked, talking to the fire he was making as
though it were a person. "_Du willst nicht, brennen, Lump? Was? Na,
warte mal!_" And when he had finished, crept out again without glancing
at the occupants of the room, still mumbling.
"It's the custom of the country, I suppose," said Anna.
"Is it? Well the sooner we get out of such a country the better. You are
determined to stay in spite of everything? I can tell you I don't at all
like my child being here, but you force me to leave her because you know
very well that I can't let you stay here alone."
Anna glanced at Hilton, folding a dress with immense deliberation.
"Oh, Hilton knows what I think," said Susie, with a shrug.
"But she doesn't know what _I_ think," said Anna. "I must talk to you
before you leave, so please let her finish packing afterwards. Go and
have your breakfast, Hilton."
"Did you say breakfast, m'm?" inquired Hilton with an innocent look.
"Breakfast?" repeated Susie; "poor thing, I'd like to know how and where
she is to get any."
"Well, then, go and don't have your breakfast," said Anna impatiently.
She had something to tell Susie that must be told soon, and was not in a
mood to bear with Hilton's ways.
"How hospitable," remarked Susie as the door closed. "Really you are a
delightful hostess."
Anna laughed. "I don't mean to be brutal," she said, "but if we can
exist on the food without looking tragic I suppose she can too,
especially as it is only for one day."
"My one consolation in leaving Letty here is that she will be dieted in
spite of herself. I expect you to bring her back quite thin."
Anna got up restlessly and went to the window.
"And whatever you do, don't forget that the return tickets only last
till the 24th. But you'll be sick of it long before then."
Anna turned round and leaned her back against the window. The strong
morning light was on her hair, and her face was in shadow, yet Susie had
a feeling that she was looking guilty.
"Susie, I've been thinking," she said with an effort.
"Really? How nice."
"Yes, it was, for I found out what it is that I must do if I mean to be
happy. But I'm afraid that _you_ won't think it nice, and will scold me.
Now don't scold me."
"Well, tell me what it is." Susie lay staring at Anna's form against the
light, bracing herself to hear something disagreeable. She knew very
well from past experience that Anna's new plan, whatever it was, was
certain to be wild and foolish.
"I am going to stay here."
"I know you are, and I know that nothing I can say will make you change
your mind. Peter is just like you--the more I show him what a fool he's
going to make of himself the more he insists on doing it. He calls it
determination. Average people like myself, with smaller and more easily
managed brains than you two wonders have got, call it pigheadedness."
"I don't mean only for Letty's holidays; I mean for good."
"For good?" Susie opened her mouth and stared in much the same blank
consternation that Dellwig had shown on hearing that she did not like
eating pig.
"Don't be angry with me," said Anna, coming over to the sofa and sitting
on the floor by Susie's side; and she caught hold of her hand and began
to talk fast and eagerly. "I always intended spending this money in
helping poor people, but didn't quite know in what way--now I see my way
clearly, and I must, _must_ go it. Don't you remember in the catechism
there's the duty towards God and the duty towards one's neighbour----"
"Oh, if you're going to talk religion----" said Susie, pulling away her
hand in great disgust.
"No, no, do listen," said Anna, catching it again and stroking it while
she talked, to Susie's intense irritation, who hated being stroked.
"If you are going into the catechism," she said, "Hilton had better come
in again. It might do her good."
"No, no--I only wanted to say that there's another duty not in the
catechism, greater than the duty towards one's neighbour----"
"My dear Anna, it isn't likely that you can improve on the catechism.
And fancy wanting to, at breakfast time. Don't stroke my hand--it gives
me the fidgets."
"But I want to explain things--do listen. The duty the catechism leaves
out is the duty towards oneself. You can't get away from your duties,
you know, Susie----" And she knit her brows in her effort to follow out
her thought.
"My goodness, as though I ever tried! If ever a poor woman did her duty,
I'm that woman."
"--and I believe that if I do those two duties, towards my neighbour and
myself, I shall be doing my duty towards God."
Susie gave her body an impatient twist. She thought it positively
indecent to speak of sacred things so early in the morning in cold
blood. "What has this drivel to do with your stopping here?" she asked
angrily.
"It has everything to do with it--my duty towards myself is to be as
happy and as good as possible, and my duty towards my neighbour----"
"Oh, bother your neighbour and your duty!" cried Susie in exasperation.
"--is to help him to be good and happy too."
"Him? Her, I hope. Don't forget decency, my dear. A girl has no duties
whatever towards male neighbours."
"Well, I do mean her," said Anna, looking up and laughing.
"So you think that by living here you'll make yourself happy?"
"Yes, I do--I do think so. Perhaps I am wrong, and shall find out I'm
wrong, but I must try."
"You'll leave all your friends and relations and stay in this
God-forsaken place where you can't even live like a lady?"
"Uncle Joachim said it was my one chance of leading the better life."
"Unutterable old fool," said Susie with bitterest contempt. "That money,
then, is going to be thrown away on Germans? As though there weren't
poor people enough in England, if your ambition is to pose as a
benefactress!"
"Oh, I don't want to pose as anything--I only want to help unhappy
wretches," cried Anna, laying her cheek caressingly on Susie's unwilling
hand. "Now don't scold me--forgive me if I'm silly, and be patient with
me till I find out that I've made a goose of myself and come creeping
back to you and Peter. But I _must_ do it--I _must_ try--I _will_ do
what I think is right."
"And who are the wretches, pray, who are to be made happy?"
"Oh, those I am sorriest for--that no one else helps--the genteel ones,
if I can only get at them."
"I never heard of genteel wretches," said Susie.
Anna laughed again. "I was thinking it all out in the forest this
morning," she said, "and it suddenly flashed across me that this big
roomy house was never meant not to be used, and that instead of going to
see poor people and giving them money in the ordinary way, it would be
so much better to let women of the better classes, who have no money,
and who are dependent and miserable, come and live with me and share
mine, and have everything that I have--exactly the same, with no
difference of any sort. There is room for twelve at least, and wouldn't
it be beautiful to make twelve people, who had lost all hope and all
courage, happy for the rest of their days?"
"Oh, the girl's mad!" cried Susie, springing up from the sofa, no longer
able to bear herself. She began to walk about the room, not knowing what
to say or do, absolutely without sympathy for beneficent impulses, at
all times possessed of a fine scorn for ideals, feeling that no argument
would be of any avail with an Estcourt whose mind was made up, shocked
that good money, so hard to get, and so very precious when got, should
be thrown away in such a manner, bewildered by the difficulties of the
situation, for how could a girl of Anna's age live alone, and direct a
house full of objects of charity? Would the objects themselves be a
sufficient chaperonage? Would her friends at home think so? Would they
not blame her, Susie, for having allowed all this? As though she could
prevent it! Or would they expect her to stay with Anna in this place
till she should marry? As though anybody would ever marry such a
lunatic! "Mad, mad, mad!" cried Susie, wringing her hands.
"I was afraid that you wouldn't like it," said the culprit on the floor,
watching her with a distressed face.
"Like it? Oh--mad, mad!" And she continued to walk and wring her hands.
"Well, you'll stay, then," she said, suddenly stopping in front of Anna,
"I know you well enough, and shall waste no breath arguing. That
infatuated old man's money has turned your head--I didn't know it was so
weak. But look into your heart when I am gone--you'll have time enough
and quiet enough--and ask yourself honestly whether what you are going
to do is a proper way of paying back all I have done for you, and all
the expense you have been. You know what my wishes are about you, and
you don't care one jot. Gratitude! There isn't a spark of it in your
whole body. Never was there a more selfish creature, and I can't believe
that ingratitude and selfishness are the stuff that makes saints. Don't
dare to talk any more rot about duty to your neighbour to me. An
Englishwoman to come and spend her money on German charities----"
"It's German money," murmured Anna.
"And to _live_ here--to live _here_--oh, mad, mad!" And Susie's
indignation threatening to choke her, she resumed her walk and her
gesticulations, her high heels tapping furiously on the bare boards.
She longed to take Letty and Miss Leech away with her that very morning,
and punish Anna by leaving her entirely alone; but she did not dare
because of Peter. Peter was always on Anna's side when there were
differences, and would be sure to do something dreadful when he heard of
it--perhaps come and live here too, and never go back to his wife any
more. Oh, these half Germans! Why had she married into a family with
such a taint in its blood? "You will have to have some one here," she
said, turning on Anna, who still sat on the floor by the sofa, a look on
her face of apology and penitence mixed with firmness that Susie well
knew. "How can you stay here alone? I shall leave Miss Leech with you
till the end of the holidays, though I hate to seem to encourage you;
but then you see I do my duty and always have, though I don't talk about
it. When I get home I shall look for some elderly woman who won't mind
coming here and seeing that you don't make yourself too much of a
by-word, and the day she comes you are to send me back my child."
"It is good of you to let me keep Letty, dear Susie----"
"Dear Susie!"
"But I don't mean to be a by-word, as you call it," continued Anna, the
ghost of a smile lurking in her eyes, "and I don't want an Englishwoman.
What use would she be here? She wouldn't understand if it was a German
by-word that I turned into. I thought about asking the parson how I had
better set about getting a German lady--a grave and sober female,
advanced in years, as Uncle Joachim wrote."
"Oh, Uncle Joachim----" Susie could hardly endure to hear the name. It
was that odious old man who had filled Anna's head with these ideas. To
leave her money was admirable, but to influence a weak girl's mind with
his wishy-washy German philosophy about the better life and such
rubbish, as he evidently had done during those excursions with her, was
conduct so shameful that she found no words strong enough to express her
opinion of it. Everyone would blame her for what had happened, everyone
would jeer at her, and say that the moment an opportunity of escape had
presented itself Anna had seized it, preferring an existence of
loneliness and hardship--any sort of existence--to all the pleasures of
civilised life in Susie's company. Peter would certainly be very angry
with her, and reproach her with not having made Anna happy enough. Happy
enough! The girl had cost her at least three hundred a year, what with
her expensive education and all her clothes since she came out; and if
three hundred good pounds spent on a girl could not make her happy,
she'd like to know what could. And no one--not one of those odious
people in London whom she secretly hated--would have a single word of
censure for Anna. No one ever had. All her vagaries and absurdities
during the last few years when she had been so provoking had been smiled
at, had been, Susie knew, put down to her treatment of her. Treatment of
her, indeed! The thought of these things made Susie writhe. She had been
looking forward to the next season, to having her pretty sister-in-law
with her in the happy mood she had been in since she heard of her good
fortune, and had foreseen nothing but advantages to herself from Anna's
presence in her house--an Anna spending and not being spent upon, and no
doubt to be persuaded to share the expenses of housekeeping. And now she
must go home by herself to blame, scoldings, and derision. The prospect
was almost more than she could bear. She went to the door, opened it,
and turning to Anna fired a parting shot. "Let no one," she said, her
voice shaken by deepest disgust, "who wants to be happy, ever spend a
penny on her husband's relations."
And then she called Hilton; nor did she leave off calling till Hilton
appeared, and so prevented Anna from saying another word.