thank you; it is all right. I oughtn't to have come. Good-bye."
There was nothing for it but to stand back and let her pass. The editor
went back slowly to his room. His friends had relighted their pipes.
"Appeased the outraged goddess?" asked one of them.
"Good old Aunt Kate!" said the other.
"Shut up, Sellars!" said the editor, frowning.
"Now, which of your correspondents is it?" pondered Sellars, ruffling
the bundle of papers in his hand. "Is it 'Wild Woodbine,' who wants to
know what will make her hands white? Chilcott, did you see her hands? Oh
no, of course--_bien chaussee, bien gantee_. All brown, too. Is it
'Sylph'?--no; she wants a pattern for a Zouave. What is a Zouave, if you
please, Mr Editor?"
"Dry up!" said the editor, but Sellars was busy with the papers.
"Eureka! I know her. She's 'Nut-brown Maid'--here's the letter--wants to
know if she may talk to 'a young gentleman she has not been properly
introduced to'--spells it 'interoduced,' too----"
The editor snatched the papers out of the other's hands.
"Now clear out," said he; "I'm busy."
"Am I dreaming?" said Sellars pensively; "or is this the editor who
invited us to collaborate with him in his 'Answers to Correspondents'?"
"I am the editor who will kick you down the entire five flights if he is
driven to it. You won't drive him, will you?"
The two laughed, but they took up their hats and went; Sellars put his
head round the door for a last word.
"What price love at first sight?" said he, and the office ruler dented
the door as he disappeared round it. The editor, left alone, sat down in
his chair and looked helplessly round him.
"Well!" he said musingly, "well, well, well, well!" Then after a long
silence he took up his pen and began the "Answers to Correspondents."
"_Dieu-donnee._--Your hair is a very nice colour. I should not
advise Aureoline.
"_Shy Fairy._--By all means consult your mother. Heliotrope
would suit your complexion, if it is, as you say, of a
brilliant fairness.
"_Contadina._--No, I should not advise scarlet velvet with the
pale blue. Try myrtle green."
Presently he threw down the pen. "I suppose I shall never see her
again," he said, and he actually sighed.
But he did see her again. For on her way home poor Kitty's imagination
suddenly spread its wings and alighted accurately on the truth; she
formed a sufficiently vivid picture of what had happened in the office
after she left. She _knew_ that those other young men--"the pigs," she
called them to herself--had speculated as to whether she was "Little
One," who wanted to make her hair curl, and to know whether short waists
would be worn; or "Moss Rose," who was anxious about her complexion, and
the proper way to treat a jibbing sweetheart. So that very night she
wrote a note to Aunt Kate, but she did not sign it "Sweet Nancy" in the
old manner, and she did not disguise her hand. She signed it George
Thompson, in inverted commas, and she said that she would call on
Thursday.
And on Thursday she called. And was shown into the editor's room at
once.
The editor rose to greet her.
"Aunt Kate is not here," said he hurriedly; "but if you can spare a few
moments I should like to talk to you about business; I did not know the
other day that you were the author of that charming story 'Evelyn's
Error.'"
The room was clear of tobacco smoke--the editor was alone--some red
roses lay on the table. Kitty caught herself wondering for whom he had
bought them. The chair he offered her was carefully dusted. She took
it--and he began to talk about her story; criticising, praising,
blaming, and that so skilfully that criticism seemed a subtle flattery,
and the very blame conveyed a compliment. Then he asked for more
stories. And a new heaven and a new earth seemed to unroll before the
girl's eyes. If she could only write--and succeed--and----
"Will you come again?" he said at last. "Aunt Kate----"
"Oh," she said, with eyes shining softly, "it doesn't matter about Aunt
Kate now! I shall be so busy trying to write stories."
"The fact is----" said the editor slowly, racking his brains for a
reason that should bring her to the office again--"the fact is--_I_ am
Aunt Kate."
Kitty sprang to her feet. Her face flamed scarlet. She stood silent a
moment. Then: "_You?_" she cried. "Oh, it's _not_ fair--it's mean--it's
shameful! Oh--how could you! And girls write to _you_--and they think
it's a woman--and they tell you about their troubles. It's horrible!
It's underhand--it's abominable! I hate you for it. Every one ought to
know. I shall write to the papers."
"Please, please," said the editor hurriedly and humbly--"it's not my
fault. It _is_ a lady who does it generally, but she had to go away--and
I couldn't get any one else to do it. And I didn't see--till after you'd
been the other day--that it wasn't fair. And I was going to ask if _you_
would do it--the correspondence, I mean--just for this week. I wish you
would!"
"Could I?" she said doubtfully.
"Of course you could! And if you'd bring the copy on Monday--about two
columns, you know--we could go through it together and----"
"Well, I'll try," said Kitty abruptly, reaching out for the sheaf of
letters which he was gathering together.
And now who was happier than Kitty, seated behind her locked bedroom
door advising "Dieu-donnee" and "Shy Fairy" and "Contadina" out of the
unfathomable depths of her girlish inexperience. Her advice looked
wonderfully practical, though, in print, she thought, as with a thrill
of pride and joy she corrected the first proofs. And she wrote stories,
too, and they, too, were printed. It was indeed a bright and beautiful
world. Aunt Eliza stayed away for five glorious weeks. Kitty, with an
enthralling sense of reckless wickedness, gave up her useless music
lessons, and in going three times a week to the office experienced a
glowing consciousness of the joy and dignity of honest toil.
The editor, by the way, during these five weeks fell in love with Kitty,
exactly as he had known he would do when first he saw her grey eyes.
Kitty had never been so happy in all her life. The child honestly
believed hers to be the happiness that comes from congenial work. And
her editor was so clever and so kind! No one ever smoked in the office
now, and there were always roses. And Kitty took them home with her, so
that now there was no need to wonder for whom he had bought them.
Then came the inevitable hour. He met her one day with a clouded face
and a letter in his hand.
"It's all over," he said; "the real original old Aunt Kate is coming
back. She's the dearest old thing, so kind and jolly--but--but--but--
whatever shall we do?"
"I can still write stories, I suppose," said Kitty, but she realised
with a gasp that congenial toil would not be quite, quite the same
without congenial companionship.
"Yes," said he, picking up the bunch of red roses, "but--here are your
flowers--don't you know yet that I can't possibly do without you? In a
few months I'm to have the editorship of a new weekly, a much better
berth than this. If only you would----"
"Write the correspondence?" said Kitty, brightening; "of course I will.
I don't know what I should do without----"
"I wish," he interrupted, "that I could think it was _me_ you couldn't
do without." Her pretty eyes met his over the red roses, and he caught
her hands with the flowers in them. "Is it? Oh, say you can't do without
me either. Say it, say it!"
"I--I--don't want to do without you," said Kitty at last. He was holding
her hands fast, and she was trying, not very earnestly, perhaps, to pull
them away. The pair made a pretty picture.
"Oh, Kitty, Kitty, Kitty!" he said softly, and then the door opened, and
suddenly, without the least warning, a middle-aged lady became a
spectator of the little tableau. The newcomer wore a mantle with beads
on it, a black bonnet wherein nodded a violet flower--and beads and
flower and bonnet were absolutely familiar to each of the astonished
ones now standing consciously with the breadth of the office between
them. For in that middle-aged lady the editor recognised Aunt Kate, the
pleasant, sensible, companionable woman who for years had written those
sympathetic "Answers to Correspondents" in the _Girls' Very Own Friend_.
And at the same moment Kitty recognised, beyond all possibility of
doubt, Aunt Eliza--her own grim, harsh, uncongenial Aunt Eliza.
Kitty cowered--in her frightened soul she cowered. But her little figure
drew itself up, and the point of her chin rose a quarter of an inch.
"Aunt Eliza," she said firmly, "I know you will----"
"_Your Aunt Eliza_, Kitty?" cried the editor.
"'Kitty'?" said the aunt.
And now the situation hung all too nicely balanced on the extreme edge
of the absolutely impossible. Would this middle-aged lady--an aunt
beyond doubt--an aunt who so long had played a double _role_, assume,
now that one _role_ must be chosen, the part of Aunt Eliza the Terrible
or of Aunt Kate the Kind? The aunt was dumb. Kitty was dumb. But the
editor had his wits about him, and Kate, though shaken, was not
absolutely paralysed.
"It's almost too good to be true," he said, "that _my_ Aunt Kate is
really _your_ Aunt Eliza. Aunt Kate, Kitty and I have just decided that
we can't do without each other. I am so glad that you are the first to
wish us joy."
At his words all the "Kate" in the aunt rose triumphant, trampling down
the "Eliza."
"My dear boy," she said--and she said it in a voice which Kitty had
never heard before--the sound of that voice drew Kitty like a magnet.
She did the only possible thing--she put her arms timidly round her
aunt's neck and whispered: "Oh, don't be Aunt Eliza any more, be Aunt
Kate!"
It was Aunt Kate's arms undoubtedly that went round the girl. Certainly
not Aunt Eliza's.
"I will take a walk down Fleet Street," said the editor discreetly.
Then there were explanations in the office.
"But why," said Kitty, when all the questions had been asked and
answered, "why were you Aunt Eliza to me, and Aunt Kate to him?"
"My dear, one must spoil somebody, and I was determined not to spoil
_you_; I wanted to save you. All my life was ruined because I was a
spoiled child--and because I tried to write. I had such dreams, such
ambitions--just like yours, you silly child! But then I was never
clever--perhaps you may be--and it all ended in my losing my lover. He
married a nice, quiet, domestic girl, and I never made name or fame at
all--I never got anything taken but fashion articles--and 'Answers to
Correspondents.' Now, that's the whole tale. Don't mention it again."
"But you did love me, even when----"
"Of course I did," said Aunt Kate in the testy tones of Aunt Eliza; "or
why should I have bothered at all about whether you were going to be
happy or not? Now, Kitty, you're not to expect me to gush. I've
forgotten how to be sentimental except on paper."
"I don't want to be sentimental," said Kitty, a little injured, "neither
does----"
Here the editor came in.
"You don't want to be sentimental either," Kitty went on; "do you--Mr
Editor?"
The editor looked a little doubtful.
"I want to be happy, at any rate," said he, "and I mean to be."
"And he can't be happy unless you smile on him. Smile on him, Auntie!"
cried a new, radiant Kitty, to whom aunts no longer presented any
terrors. "Say 'Bless you, my children!' Auntie--do!"
"Get along with your nonsense!" said Aunt Eliza. Or was it Aunt Kate?
VIII
MISS MOUSE
They were poor, not with the desperate poverty that has to look on both
sides of a penny, but with the decent bearable poverty that must look at
a shilling with attention, and with respect at half-a-crown. There was
money for the necessities of life, the mother said, but no money to
waste. This was what she always tried to say when Maisie came in with
rainbow representations of the glories of local "sales" piteous pictures
of beautiful things going almost for nothing--things not absolutely
needed, but which would "come in useful." Maisie's dress was never
allowed those touches of cheap finery which would have made it
characteristic of her. Her clothes were good, and she had to patch and
mend and contrive so much that sometimes it seemed to her as though all
her life was going by in the effort to achieve, by a distasteful
process, a result which she abhorred. For her artistic sense was too
weak to show her how the bright, soft freshness of her tints gained by
contrast with the dull greys and browns and drabs that were her mother's
choice--good wearing colours, from which the pink and white of her face
rose triumphantly, like a beautiful flower out of a rough calyx.
The house was like Maisie, in that it never seemed to have anything
new--none of those bright, picturesque cushions and screens and
Japaneseries which she adored through the plate-glass windows of the big
local draper. The curtains were of old damask, faded but rich; the
furniture was mahogany, old and solid; the carpets were Turkey and
Aubusson--patched and darned this last, but still beautiful. Maisie knew
all about old oak--she had read her _Home Hints_ and her _Gentlewoman's
Guide_--but she had no idea that mahogany could be fashionable. None of
the photographs of the drawing-rooms of celebrities in her favourite
papers were anything like the little sitting-room where her mother sat
knitting by the hearth, surrounded by the relics of a house that had
been handsome in the 'sixties, when it was her girlhood's home. Maisie
hated it all: the chairs covered in Berlin-wool needlework, the dark,
polished surfaces of the tables and bureaux, the tinkling lustres of
Bohemian glass, the shining brass trivet on which the toast kept itself
warm, the crude colours of the tea-service, the smell of eau-de-Cologne
mingling with the faint scent of beeswax and cedar-wood. She would have
liked to change the old water-colours in their rubbed gilt frames for
dark-mounted autotypes. How should she know that those hideous pigs were
Morlands, and that the cow picture was a David Cox. She would have liked
Japanese blue transfers instead of the gold-and-white china--old
Bristol, by the way, but Maisie knew nothing of Bristol. The regular,
sober orderliness of the house chafed and fretted her; the recurrent
duties, all dull; the few guests who came to tea. Decent poverty cannot
give dinner parties or dances. She visited her school friends, and when
she came home again it seemed to her sometimes as though the atmosphere
of the place would choke her.
"I want to go out and earn my own living," she said to her cousin Edward
one Sunday afternoon when her mother was resting and he and she were
roasting chestnuts on the bars of the dining-room fire. "I'm simply
useless here."
Edward was a second cousin. To him the little house was the ideal home,
just as Maisie was--well, not, perhaps, the ideal girl, but the only
girl in the world, which comes to much the same thing. But he never told
her so: he dared not risk losing the cousin's place and missing for ever
the lover's.
So, in his anxiety lest she should know how much he cared, he scolded
her a good deal. But he took her to picture galleries and to _matinees_,
and softened her life in a hundred ways that she never noticed. He was
only "Poor old Edward," and he knew it.
"How can you?" he said. "Why, what on earth would Aunt do without you?
Here, have this one--it's a beauty."
"I ought to have been taught a trade, like other poor girls," she went
on, waving away the roasted chestnut. "Lots of the girls I was at school
with are earning as much as a pound a week now--typewriting or painting
birthday cards, and some of them are in the Post Office--and I do
nothing but drudge away at home. It's too bad."
Edward would have given a decent sum at that moment to be inspired with
exactly the right thing to say. As it was he looked at her helplessly.
"I don't understand, I'm afraid," said he.
"You never do," she answered crossly. There was a silence in which she
felt the growth of a need to justify herself--to herself as well as to
him. "Why, don't you see," she urged, "it's my plain duty to go out and
earn something. Why, we're as poor as ever we can be--I haven't any
pocket-money hardly--I can't even buy presents for people. I have to
_make_ presents out of odds and ends of old things, instead of buying
them, like other girls."
"I think you make awfully pretty things," he said; "much prettier than
any one can buy."
"You're thinking of that handkerchief-case I gave Aunt Emma at
Christmas. Why, you silly, it was only a bit of one of mother's old
dresses. I do wish you'd talk to mother about it. I might go out as
companion or something."
The word came before the thought, but the thought was brought by the
word and the thought stayed.
That very evening Maisie began to lay siege to her mother's desired
consent.
She put her arguments very neatly, so neatly that it was hard for the
mother to oppose them without being betrayed into an attitude that would
seem grossly selfish.
She sat looking into the fire, thinking of all the little, unceasing
sacrifices that had been her life ever since Maisie had been hers--even
the giving up of that treasured silk, her wedding dress, last Christmas,
because Maisie wanted something pretty to make Christmas presents out
of. She remembered it all; and now this new great sacrifice was called
for. She had given up to Maisie everything but her taste in dress, and
now it seemed that she was desired to give up even Maisie herself. But
the other sacrifices had been for Maisie's good or for her pleasure.
Would this one be for either?
She saw her little girl alone among strangers, snubbed, looked down
upon, a sort of upper servant with none of a servant's privileges; she
nerved herself to what was always to her an almost unbearable effort.
Her heart was beating and her hands trembling as she said: "My dear,
it's quite impossible; I couldn't possibly allow it."
"I must say I don't see why," said Maisie, with tears in her voice.
Her mother dropped the mass of fleecy white wool and the clinking
knitting needles and grasped the arms of her chair intensely. Her eyes
behind the spectacles clouded with tears. It seemed to her that her
child should surely understand the agony it was to her mother to refuse
her anything.
"I could earn money for you--it's not myself I'm thinking about," the
girl went on; the half-lie came out quite without her conscious
volition. "I wish you didn't always think I do everything for selfish
reasons."
"I don't, my dear," said the mother feebly.
"I'm sure it's my duty," Maisie went on, with more tears than ever in
her voice. "I'm eighteen, and I ought to be earning something, instead
of being a burden to you."
The mother looked hopelessly into the fire. She had always tried to
explain things to Maisie; how was it that Maisie never understood?
"I'm sure," said Maisie, echoing her mother's thought, "I always try to
tell you how I think about things, and you never seem to understand. Of
course, I won't go if you wish it, but I _do_ think----"
She left the room in tears, and the mother remained to torment herself
with the eternal questions, What had she done wrong? Why was Maisie not
contented? What could she do to please her? Would nothing please her but
the things that were not for her good--smart clothes, change, novelty?
How could she bear her life if Maisie was not pleased?
She went down to supper shivering with misery and apprehension. What a
meal it would be with Maisie cold and aloof, polite and indifferent! But
Maisie was cheerful, gay almost, and her mother felt a passion of
gratitude to her daughter for not being sulky or unapproachable. Maisie,
however, was only stepping back to jump the better.
The same scene, with intenser variations, was played about twice a week
till the girl got her way, as she always did in the end, except in the
matter of cheap finery. Taste in dress was as vital to the mother as her
religion. Then, through the influence of an old governess of her
mother's, Maisie got her wish. She was to go as companion to an old
lady, the mother of Lady Yalding, and she was to live at Yalding Towers.
Here was splendour--here would be life, incident, opportunity! For her
reading had sometimes strayed from _Home Hints_ to the _Family Herald_,
and she knew exactly what are the chances of romance to a humble
companion in the family of a lady of title.
And now Maisie's mother gave way to her, finally and completely, even on
the question of dress. The old wardrobe was ransacked to find materials
to fit her out with clothes for her new venture. It was a beautiful time
for Maisie. New things, and old things made to look as good as new, or
better. It was like having a trousseau. The mother lavished on her child
every inch of the old lace, every one of the treasured trinkets--even
the little old locket that had been the dead husband's first love-gift.
And Maisie, in the flutter of her excitement and anticipation, was
loving and tender and charming, and the mother had her reward.
Edward opposed a stolid and stony disapproval to all the new enthusiasm.
He said little because he feared to say too much.
"Poor little Maisie!" he said. "You'll soon find out that you didn't
know when you were well off."
"Edward, I hate you," said Maisie, and she thought she did.
But when all the beautiful new clothes were packed and her cab was at
the door, some sense of what she was leaving did come to the girl, and
she flung her arms round her mother in an embrace such as she had never
given in her life.
"I don't want to go," she cried. "Mummy darling, I've been a little
beast about it. I won't go if you say you'd rather not. Shall I send the
cab away? I will if you say so, my own dear old Mummy!"
Maisie's mother was not a very wise woman, but she was not fool enough
to trust this new softness.
"No, no, dearest," she said; "go and try your own way. God bless you, my
darling! You'll miss the train if you stay. God bless you, my darling!"
And Maisie went away crying hard through the new veil with the black
velvet spots on it; as for the mother--but she was elderly, and plain,
and foolishly fond, and her emotions can have but little interest for
the readers of romances.
And now Maisie, for the first time, knew the meaning of home. And before
she had been at Yalding a week she had learned to analyse home and to
give names to its constituents: love, interest, sympathy, liberty--these
were some.
At Yalding Towers Maisie was nothing to any one. No one knew or cared
one single little bit of a straw whether she was unhappy or no. Her time
was filled, and overfilled, by the attentions exacted by an old,
eccentric, and very disagreeable lady. When she put on, for the first
evening, the least pretty of the pretty dresses she had brought with
her, the old lady looked at her with a disapproval almost rising to
repulsion, and said: "I expect you to wear black; and a linen collar and
cuffs."
So another black dress had to be ordered from home, and all the pretty,
dainty things lay creasing themselves with disuse in the ample drawers
and cupboards of her vast, dreary bedroom.
Her employer was exacting and irritable. When on the third day Maisie
broke into tears under the constant flood of nagging, the old lady told
her to go away and not to come back till she could control her temper.
"I'll come back when you send for me, and not before, you hateful old
thing!" said Maisie to herself.
And she sat down in her fireless bedroom and wrote a long letter to her
mother, saying how happy she felt, and how kind every one was, and what
a lovely and altogether desirable place was Yalding Towers. Who shall
say whether pride or love, or both, dictated that letter?
When her employer did send for her, it was to tell her, very sharply,
that one more such exhibition of sullenness would cost her her
situation. So she had to learn to school herself. And she did it. But
the learning was hard, very hard, and in the learning she grew thinner,
and some of the pretty pink in her cheeks faded away.