ALL SHE COULD REMEMBER.
The London season was waning, and fewer carriages rolled westward to
the Park gates in the low sunlight of late afternoon, and fewer riders
trotted eastward towards Grosvenor Square in the brighter sunshine
before luncheon. Town was gay still; but the flood-tide of pleasure
was over. The river of London life was on the ebb, and people were
beginning to talk about grouse-moors in Scotland and sulphur-springs in
Germany.
Fay had lived in Upper Parchment Street nearly two months. It seemed
to her impatient spirit as if she had lived there half a lifetime. The
life would have been hateful to her without Mildred’s love. That made
amends for a good deal, but it could not make amends for everything;
not for Bell’s quiet insolence, for instance.
Bell had replenished the alien’s wardrobe. Everything she had bought
was of excellent quality, and expensive after its kind; but had a prize
been offered for bad taste, Bell would have taken it by her selections
of raiment on this occasion. Not once did she allow Fay to have a voice
in the matter.
“Mrs. Fausset deputed _me_ to choose the things, miss,” she said, “and
I hope _I_ know my duty.”
“I suppose I _am_ very ugly,” said Fay resignedly, as she contemplated
her small features in the glass, overshadowed by a mushroom hat of
coarse brown straw, with a big brown bow, “but in this hat I look
positively hideous.”
The hat was an excellent hat: that good coarse Dunstable, which costs
money and wears for ever, the ribbon of the best quality; but Hebe
herself would have looked plain under a hat shaped like a bell-glass.
Fay’s remark was recorded to Mrs. Fausset as the indication of a
discontented spirit.
Not being able to learn anything about Fay’s history from her mistress,
Bell had tried to obtain a little light from the girl herself, but
without avail. Questioned about her school, Fay had replied that she
hated her school, and didn’t want to talk of it. Questioned about her
mother, she answered that her mother’s name was too sacred to be spoken
about to a stranger; and on a subtle attempt to obtain information
about her father, the girl flushed crimson, started up angrily from her
chair, and told the highly respectable Bell that she was not in the
habit of chattering to servants, or being questioned by them.
After this it was war to the knife on Martha Bell’s part.
Miss Colville, the expensive morning governess, was in somewise above
prejudice, and was a person of liberal mind, allowing for the fact
that she had lived all her life in other people’s houses, looking on
at lives of fashionable frivolity in which she had no share, and had
been obliged to study Debrett’s annual volume as if it were her Bible,
lest she should commit herself in every other speech, so intricate
are the ramifications and intermarriages of the Upper Ten Thousand.
Miss Colville was not unkind to Fay Fausset, and was conscientious
in her instructions; but even she resented the mystery of the girl’s
existence, and felt that her presence blemished the respectability of
the household. By and by, when she should be seeking new employment,
and should have occasion to refer to Mrs. Fausset, and to talk of
her pupils in Upper Parchment Street, there would be a difficulty in
accounting for Fay. A ward of Mr. Fausset’s, a distant connection: the
whole thing sounded improbable. An heiress who had come to the house
with torn embroidery upon her under-linen. A mystery—yes, no doubt
a mystery. And in Miss Colville’s ultra-particular phase of life no
manner of mystery was considered respectable; except always those open
secrets in the very highest circles which society agrees to ignore.
In spite of these drawbacks, Miss Colville was fairly kind to her new
charge. Fay was backward in grammar and geography; she was a dullard
about science; but she could chatter French, she knew a little Italian,
and in music she was highly gifted. In this she resembled Mildred,
who adored music, and had taken her first lessons on the piano as a
water-fowl takes to a pond, joyously, as to her native element. Fay was
not advanced in the _technique_ of the art, but she played and sang
charmingly, for the most part by ear; and she used to play and sing to
Mildred in the summer twilight, till Bell came like a prison-warder and
insisted upon Mildred’s going to bed.
“I nursed your mamma, miss,” she would say, “and _I_ never allowed her
to spoil her complexion with late hours as Miss Fay is leading you on
to do.”
At seven Mildred cared neither for health nor complexion in the
abstract, and she loved Fay’s music and Fay’s stories. Fay would tell
her a fairy tale, with musical accompaniments, improvised to suit
the story. This was Beauty’s father groping through the dark wood.
Then came the swaying of branches, the rustling of summer leaves, the
long, long sigh of the night wind, the hoot of the owl, and the roll
of distant thunder. Here came Fatima’s brothers to the rescue, with
a triumphant march, and the trampling of fiery steeds, careering up
and down the piano in presto arpeggios, bursting open the gates of
Bluebeard’s Castle with a fortissimo volley of chords.
“_I_ never heard any one make such a noise on a piano,” said Bell,
bristling with indignation.
At eight o’clock Fay’s day and evening were done. Mildred vanished like
the setting of the sun. She would like to have had Fay to sit beside
her bed and tell her stories, and talk to her, till she dropped to
sleep; but this happiness was sternly interdicted by Bell.
“She would keep you awake half the night, Miss Mildred, over-exciting
you with her stories; and what would your pa and the doctors say to
_me_?” exclaimed Bell.
The door of the bright, pretty bedchamber closed upon Mildred, and Fay
went back to the schoolroom heavy of heart, to enjoy the privilege of
sitting up by herself till half-past nine, a privilege conceded to
superior years. In that dismal hour and a half the girl had leisure
to contemplate the solitude of her friendless life. Take Mildred from
her, and she had no one—nothing. Mr. Fausset had meant to be kind to
her, perhaps. He had talked very kindly to her in the long drive
from Streatham. He had promised her a home and the love of kindred;
but evil influences had come in his way, and he had given her—Bell.
Perhaps she was of a jealous, exacting disposition; for, fondly as she
loved Mildred, she could not help comparing Mildred’s lot with her own:
Mildred’s bright, airy room and flower-decked windows, looking over
the tree-tops in the Park, with her dingy cell opening upon a forest
of chimneys, and tainted with odours of stables and kitchen; Mildred’s
butterfly frocks of lace and muslin, with the substantial ugliness
of her own attire; Mildred’s manifold possessions—trinkets, toys,
books, games, pictures, and flowers—with her empty dressing-table and
unadorned walls.
“At your age white frocks would be ridiculous,” said Bell; yet Fay
saw other girls of her age flaunting in white muslin all that summer
through.
Sometimes the footman forgot to bring her lamp, and she would sit in
the schoolroom window, looking down into the street, and watching the
carriages roll by in endless procession, with their lamps flaming in
the pale gray night, carrying their freight to balls and parties,
hurrying from pleasure to pleasure on swift-revolving wheels. A
melancholy hour this for the longing heart of youth, even when
the schoolgirl’s future participation in all these pleasures is a
certainty, or contingent only upon life; but what was it for this girl,
who had all girlhood’s yearnings for pleasure and excitement, and who
knew not if that sparkling draught would ever touch her lips, who felt
herself an alien in this fine house, a stranger at this fashionable end
of the town? It was no new thing for her to sit alone in the twilight,
a prey to melancholy thoughts. Ever since she could remember, her life
had been solitary and loveless. The home ties and tender associations
which sweeten other lives were unknown to her. She had never known
what love meant till she felt Mildred’s warm arms clinging round her
neck, and Mildred’s soft cheek pressed against hers. Her life had
been a shifting scene peopled with strangers. Dim and misty memories
of childhood’s earliest dawn conjured up a cottage-garden on a windy
hill; the sea stretching far away in the distance, bright and blue, but
unattainable; a patch of grass on one side, a patch of potatoes on the
other; a bed of wallflowers and stocks and yellow marigolds in front of
the parlour window; a family of hens and an arrogant cock strutting in
the foreground; and, standing out sharply against the sky and the sea,
a tall column surmounted by a statue.
How she had longed to get nearer that vast expanse of water, to find
out what the sea was like! From some points in the view it seemed so
near, almost as if she could touch it with her outstretched hands; from
other points it looked so far away. She used to stand on a bank behind
the cottage and watch the white-sailed boats going out to sea, and the
steamers with their trailing smoke melting and vanishing on the horizon.
“Where do they go?” she asked in her baby French. “Where do they go?”
Those were the first words she remembered speaking, and nobody seemed
ever to have answered that eager question.
No one had cared for her in those days. She was very sure of that,
looking back upon that monotonous childhood: a long series of empty
hours in a cottage garden, and with no companions except the fowls,
and no voice except that of the cow in the meadow hard by: a cow which
sent forth meaningless bellows occasionally, and which she feared as if
it had been a lion.
There was a woman in a white cap whom she called Nounou, and who seemed
too busy to care about anybody; a woman who did all the housework, and
dug the potato-garden, and looked after the fowls, and milked the cow
and made butter, and rode to market on a donkey once or twice a week:
a woman who was always in a hurry. There was a man who came home from
work at sundown, and there were two boys in blouses and sabots, the
youngest of whom was too old to play with the nurse-child. Long summer
days in the chalky garden, long hours of listless monotony in front of
the wide bright sea, had left a sense of oppression upon Fay’s mind.
She did not know even the name of the town she had seen far below the
long ridge of chalky hill—a town of tall white houses and domes and
spires, which had seemed a vast metropolis to the eyes of infancy.
She had but to shut her eyes in her evening solitude, and she could
conjure up the picture of roofs and spires, and hill and sea, and the
tall column in its railed enclosure; yet she knew no more of town or
hill than that they were on the other side of the Channel.
She remembered lying in a narrow little bed, that rocked desperately
on a windy day, and looking out at the white sea-foam dashing against
a curious oval window, like a giant’s eye; and then she remembered her
first wondering experience of railway travelling; a train flashing
past green fields and hop-gardens and houses; and then darkness and
the jolting of a cab; and after that being carried half-asleep into
a strange house, and waking to find herself in a strange room, all
very clean and neat, with a white-curtained bed and white muslin
window-curtains, and on looking out of the window, behold, there was a
patch of common all abloom with yellow gorse.
She remembered dimly that she had travelled in the charge of a little
gray-haired man, who disappeared after the journey. She found herself
now in the care of an elderly lady, very prim and strict, but not
absolutely unkind; who wore a silk gown, and a gold watch at her
waistband, and who talked in an unknown tongue. Everything here was
prettier than in Nounou’s house, and there was a better garden, a
garden where there were more flowers and no potatoes and there was the
common in the front of the garden, all hillocks and hollows, where
she was allowed to amuse herself in charge of a ruddy-faced girl in a
lavender cotton frock.
The old lady taught her the unknown tongue, which she discovered in
time to be English, and a good deal besides—reading and writing, for
instance, and the rudiments of music, a little arithmetic, grammar,
and geography. She took kindly to music and reading, and she liked to
dabble with ink; but the other lessons were abhorrent, and she gave
the orderly old lady a good deal of trouble. There was no love between
them, only endurance on either side; and the long days on the common
were almost as desolate as the days on the chalky hill above the sea.
At last there came a change. The dressmaker sent home three new frocks,
all uncompromisingly ugly; the little old gray-haired man reappeared,
looking exactly as he had looked on board the steamer, and a fly
carried Fay and this guardian to the railway-station on the common,
and thence the train took them to a great dark city, which the man
told Fay was London; and then they went in a cab through streets that
seemed endless, till at last the streets melted into a wide high-road,
with trees on either side, and the cab drove into a garden of shining
laurels and rhododendrons, and pulled up before a classic portico. Fay
had no memory of any house so grand as this, although it was only the
conventional suburban villa of sixty or seventy years ago.
Just at first the change seemed delightful. That circular
carriage-sweep, those shining rhododendrons with great rose-coloured
trusses of bloom, the drooping gold of the laburnums, and the masses
of perfumed lilac, were beautiful in her eyes. Not so beautiful the
long, bare schoolroom and the willow-pattern cups and saucers. Not so
beautiful that all-pervading atmosphere of restraint which made school
odious to Fay from the outset.
She stayed there for years—an eternity it seemed to her, looking back
upon its hopeless monotony. Pleasure, variety, excitement, she had
none. Life was an everlasting treadmill—up and down, down and up, over
and over again. The same dull round of lessons; a dismal uniformity
of food; Sunday penance in the shape of two long services in a badly
ventilated church, and one long catechism in a dreary schoolroom. No
gaol can be much duller than a well-regulated middle-class girls’
school. Fay could complain of no ill-treatment. She was well fed,
comfortably housed, warmly clad; but her life was a burden to her.
She had a bad temper; was irritable, impatient, quick to take
offence, and prone to fits of sullenness. This was the opinion of the
authorities; and her faults increased as she grew older. She was not
absolutely rebellious towards the governesses; but there was always
something amiss. She was idle and listless at her studies, took
no interest in anything but her music-lessons, and was altogether
an unsatisfactory pupil. She had no lasting friendships among her
schoolfellows. She was capricious in her likings, and was prone to
fancy herself slighted or ill-treated on the smallest provocation. The
general verdict condemned her as the most disagreeable girl in the
school. With the meaner souls among her schoolfellows it was considered
an affront that she should have no antecedents worth talking about,
no relatives, no home, and no hampers or presents. Even the servants
neglected her as a young person without surroundings, upon whom
kindness would be thrown away. The wardrobe-woman left her clothes
unmended, feeling that it mattered very little in what order they were
kept, since the girl never went home for the holidays, and there was no
mother or aunt to investigate her trunks. She was condemned on every
hand as a discreditable mystery; and when, one unlucky afternoon, a
sultry afternoon at the beginning of a hot summer, she lost her temper
in the middle of a class-lesson, burst into a torrent of angry speech,
half defiance, half reproach, bounced up from her seat, and rushed out
of the schoolroom, there were few to pity, and none to sympathise.
The proprietress of the school was elderly and lymphatic. Miss Fausset
had been stigmatised as a troublesome pupil for a long time. There
were continual complaints about Miss Fausset’s conduct, worrying
complaints, which spoilt Miss Constable’s dinner and interfered with
her digestion. Really, the only course open to that prosperous,
over-fed personage was to get rid of Miss Fausset. There was an amiable
family of three sisters—highly connected young persons, whose father
was in the wine trade—waiting for vacancies in that old-established
seminary.
“We will make a _tabula rasa_ of a troublesome past,” said Miss
Constable, who loved fine words. “Miss Fausset must go.”
Thus it was that John Fausset had been suddenly called upon to find a
new home for his ward; and thus it was that Fay had been brought to
Upper Parchment Street.
No doubt Upper Parchment Street was better than school; but if it had
not been for Mildred the atmosphere on the edge of Hyde Park would
have been no more congenial than the atmosphere at Streatham. Fay
felt herself an intruder in that splendid house, where, amidst that
multitude of pretty things, she could not put her finger upon one
gracious object that belonged to her—nothing that was her “very own,”
as Mildred called it; for she had refused Mildred’s doll and all other
proffered gifts, too proud to profit by a child’s lavish generosity.
Mrs. Fausset made her no gifts, never talked to her, rarely looked at
her.
Fay knew that Mrs. Fausset disliked her. She had divined as much from
the first, and she knew only too well that dislike had grown with
experience. She was allowed to go down to afternoon tea with Mildred;
but had she been deaf and dumb her society could not have been less
cultivated by the mistress of the house. Mrs. Fausset’s feelings were
patent to the whole household, and were common talk in the servants’
hall. “No wonder,” said the women; the men said “What a shame!” but
footmen and housemaids were at one in their treatment of Fay, which
was neglectful, and occasionally insolent. It would hardly have been
possible for them to behave well to the intruder and keep in favour
with Bell, who was absolute—a superior power to butler or housekeeper,
a person with no stated office, and the supreme right to interfere with
everybody.
Bell sighed and shook her head whenever Miss Fay was mentioned. She
bridled with pent-up indignation, as if the girl’s existence were an
injury to her, Martha Bell. “If _I_ hadn’t nursed Mrs. Fausset when
she was the loveliest infant that ever drew breath, _I_ shouldn’t feel
it so much,” said Bell; and then tears would spring to her eyes and
chokings would convulse her throat, and the housekeeper would shake her
head and sympathise mysteriously.
At the end of July the establishment migrated from Parchment Street to
The Hook, Mr. Fausset’s riverside villa between Chertsey and Windsor.
The Hook was an expanse of meadow-land bordered with willows, round
which the river made a loop; and on this enchanted bit of ground—a
spot loved by the river-god—Mr. Fausset had built for himself the most
delightful embodiment of that much-abused word villa; a long, low,
white house, with spacious rooms, broad corridors, a double flight of
marble stairs, meeting on a landing lit by an Italian cupola—a villa
surrounded with a classic colonnade, and looking out upon peerless
gardens sloping to the willow-shadowed stream.
To Fay The Hook seemed like a vision of Paradise. It was almost
happiness even to her impatient spirit to sit in a corner of those
lovely grounds, screened from the outer world by a dense wall of
Portugal laurels and arbutus, with the blue water and the low, flat
meadows of the further shore for her only prospect.
Miss Colville was left behind in London. For Fay and Mildred life was
a perpetual holiday. Mrs. Fausset was almost as much in society at The
Hook as she had been in London. Visitors came and visitors went. She
was never alone. There were parties at Henley and Marlow, and Wargrave
and Goring. Two pairs of horses were kept hard at work carrying Mr. and
Mrs. Fausset about that lovely riverside landscape to garden-parties
and dinners, picnics and regattas. John Fausset went because his wife
liked him to go, and because he liked to see her happy and admired.
The two girls were left, for the most part, to their own devices,
under the supervision of Bell. They lived in the gardens, with an
occasional excursion into the unknown world along the river. There
was a trustworthy under-gardener, who was a good oarsman, and in his
charge Mildred was allowed to go on the water in a big wherry, which
looked substantial enough to have carried a select boarding-school.
This life by the Thames was the nearest approach to absolute happiness
which Fay had ever known; but for her there was to be no such thing as
unbroken bliss. In the midst of the sultry August weather Mildred fell
ill—a mild attack of scarlet fever, which sounded less alarming to Mrs.
Fausset’s ear, because the doctor spoke of it as scarlatina. It was a
very mild case, the local practitioner told Mrs. Fausset; there was
no occasion to send for a London physician; there was no occasion for
alarm. Mildred must keep her bed for a fortnight, and must be isolated
from the rest of the house. Her own maid might nurse her if she had had
the complaint.
“How could she have caught the fever?” Mrs. Fausset asked, with an
injured air; and there was a grand investigation, but no scarlet fever
to be heard of nearer than Maidenhead.
“People are so artful in hiding these things,” said Mrs. Fausset; and
ten minutes afterwards she begged the doctor not to mention Mildred’s
malady to any of her neighbours.
“We have such a host of engagements, and crowds of visitors coming from
London,” she said. “People are so ridiculously nervous. Of course I
shall be extremely careful.”
The doctor gave elaborate instructions about isolation. Such measures
being taken, Mrs. Fausset might receive all fashionable London with
safety.
“And it is really such a mild case that you need not put yourself about
in any way,” concluded the doctor.
“Dear, sweet pet, we must do all we can to amuse her,” sighed the fond
mother.
Mild as the case might be, the patient had to suffer thirst and
headache, a dry and swollen throat, and restless nights. Her most eager
desire was for Fay’s company, and as it was ascertained that Fay had
suffered from scarlet fever some years before in a somewhat severe
form, it was considered she might safely assist in the sick-room.
She was there almost all day, and very often in the night. She read
to Mildred, and sang to her, and played with her, and indulged every
changing fancy and caprice of sickness. Her love was inexhaustible,
indefatigable, for ever on the watch. If Mildred woke from a feverish
dream in the deep of night, with a little agitated sob or cry, she
found a figure in a white dressing-gown bending over her, and loving
arms encircling her before she had time to feel frightened. Fay slept
in a little dressing-room opening out of Mildred’s large, airy bedroom,
so as to be near her darling. It was a mere closet, with a truckle-bed
brought down from the servants’ attic; but it was good enough for Fay,
whose only thought was of the child who loved her as none other had
ever loved within her memory.
Mrs. Fausset was prettily anxious about her child. She would come
to Mildred’s room in her dressing-gown before her leisurely morning
toilet, to hear the last report. She would sit by the bed for five
minutes showering kisses on the pale cheeks, and then she would go
away to her long summer-day of frivolous pleasures and society talk.
Ripples of laughter and snatches of speech came floating in at the
open windows; and at Mildred’s behest Fay would stand at a window and
report the proceedings of that happy world outside.
“They are going out in the boat. They are going to have tea on the
lawn. Your mamma is walking up and down with Sir Horace Clavering. Miss
Grenville and her sister are playing croquet;” and so on, and so on,
all day.
Mildred tossed about on her pretty white bed impatiently.
“It is very horrid being shut up here on these fine days,” she said;
“or it would be horrid without you, Fay. Mamma does not come to see me
much.”
Mamma came three or four times a day; but her visits were of the
briefest. She would come into the room beaming with smiles, looking
like living sunlight in her exquisite white gown, with its delicate
ribbons and cloudy lace—a fleecy white cloud just touched with
rose-colour, as if she were an embodiment of the summer dawn. Sometimes
she brought Mildred a peach, or a bunch of hothouse grapes, or an
orchid, or a new picture-book; but beautiful as these offerings were,
the child did not always value them. She would push the plate of
grapes or the peach aside impatiently when her mother was gone, or she
would entreat Fay to eat the dainty.
“Mamma thinks I am greedy,” she said; “but I ain’t, am I, Fay?”
Those three weeks in the sick-room, those wakeful nights and long, slow
summer days, strengthened the bond of love between the two girls. By
the time Mildred was convalescent they seemed to have loved each other
for years. Mildred could hardly remember what her life was like before
she had Fay for a companion. Mrs. Fausset saw this growing affection
not without jealousy; but it was very convenient that there should be
some one in the house whose companionship kept Mildred happy, and she
even went so far as to admit that Fay was “useful.”
“I cannot be with the dear child half so much as I should like to be,”
she said; “visitors are so exacting.”
Fay had slept very little during Mildred’s illness, and now that the
child was nearly well the elder girl began to flag somewhat, and was
tired early in the evening, and glad to go to bed at the same hour as
the patient, who, under Bell’s supervision, was made to retire before
eight. She was now well enough to sit up all day, and to drive out in a
pony-carriage in the sunny hours after early dinner. Fay went with her,
of course. Pony and landscape would have been wanting in charm without
Fay’s company. Both girls had gone to bed one sultry evening in the
faint gray twilight. Fay was sleeping profoundly; but Mildred, after
dozing a little, was lying half-awake, with closed eyelids, in the
flower-scented room. The day had been exceptionally warm. The windows
were all open, and a door between Mildred’s bedroom and sitting-room
had been left ajar.
Bell was in the sitting-room at her favourite task of clearing up the
scattered toys and books, and reducing all things to mathematical
precision. Meta, Mildred’s German maid, was sitting at needlework
near the window by the light of a shaded lamp. The light shone in the
twilight through the partly-open door, and gave Mildred a sense of
company. They began to talk presently, and Mildred listened, idly at
first, and soothed by the sound of their voices, but afterwards with
keen curiosity.
“I know I shouldn’t like to be treated so,” said Meta.
“_I_ don’t see that she has anything to complain of,” answered Bell.
“She has a good home, and everything provided for her. What more can
she want?”
“I should want a good deal more if I was a heiress.”
“_An_ heiress,” corrected Bell, who prided herself on having cultivated
her mind, and was somewhat pedantic of speech. “That’s all nonsense,
Meta. She’s no more an heiress than I am. Mr. Fausset told my poor
young mistress that just to throw dust in her eyes. Heiress, indeed!
An heiress without a relative in the world that she can speak of—an
heiress that has dropped from the moon. Don’t tell _me_.”
Nobody was telling Mrs. Bell anything; but she had a resentful air, as
if combating the arguments of an invisible adversary.
There was a silence during which Mildred nearly fell asleep; and then
the voices began again.
“It’s impossible for sisters to be fonder of each other than those two
are,” said Meta.
“There’s nothing strange in that, considering they _are_ sisters,”
answered Bell angrily.
“O, but you’ve no right to say that, Mrs. Bell; it’s going too far.”
“Haven’t I a right to use my eyes and ears? Can’t I see the family
look in those two faces, though Miss Mildred is pretty and Miss Fay is
plain? Can’t I hear the same tones in the two voices, and haven’t I
seen his way of bringing that girl into the house, and his guilty look
before my poor injured mistress? Of course they’re sisters. Who could
ever doubt it? _She_ doesn’t, I know, poor dear.”
She, in this connection, meant Mrs. Fausset.
There was only one point in this speech which the innocent child
seized upon. She and Fay were said to be sisters. O, how she had
longed for a sister in the last year or so of her life, since she had
found out the meaning of solitude among fairest surroundings! How all
the brightest things she possessed had palled upon her for want of
sisterly companionship! How she had longed for a baby-sister even, and
had envied the children in households where a new baby was an annual
institution! She had wondered why her mother did not treat herself to a
new baby occasionally, as so many of her mother’s friends did. And now
Fay had been given to her, ever so much better than a baby, which would
have taken such a long time to grow up. Mildred had never calculated
how long, but she concluded that it would be some months before the
most forward baby would be of a companionable age. Fay had been given
to her—a ready-made companion, versed in fairy tales, able to conjure
up an enchanted world out of the schoolroom piano, skilful with pencil
and colour-box, able to draw the faces and figures and palaces and
woodlands of that fairy world, able to amuse and entertain her in a
hundred ways. And Fay was her sister after all. She dropped asleep in a
flutter of pleasurable excitement. She would ask her mother all about
it to-morrow; and in the meantime she would say nothing to Fay. It was
fun to have a secret from Fay.
A batch of visitors left next day after lunch. Mr. and Mrs. Fausset
were to be alone for forty-eight hours, a rare oasis of domesticity in
the society desert. Mildred had been promised that the first day there
was no company she was to have tea with mamma in the tent on the lawn.
She claimed the fulfilment of that promise to-day.
It was a lovely day after the sultry, thundery night. Mrs. Fausset
reclined in her basket-chair in the shelter of the tent. Fay and
Mildred sat side by side on a low bamboo bench on the grass: the
little girl, fairy-like, in her white muslin and flowing flaxen hair,
the big girl in olive-coloured alpaca, with dark hair clustering in
short curls about the small intelligent head. There could hardly have
been a stronger contrast than that between the two girls; and yet
Bell was right. There was a family look, an undefinable resemblance
of contour and expression which would have struck a very attentive
observer—something in the line of the delicate eyebrow, something in
the angle of the forehead.
“Mamma,” said Mildred suddenly, clambering into her mother’s lap, “why
mayn’t I call Fay sister?”
Mrs. Fausset started, and flushed crimson.
“What nonsense, child! Why, because it would be most ridiculous.”
“But she _is_ my sister,” urged Mildred, looking full into her mother’s
eyes, with tremendous resolution in her own. “I love her like a sister,
and she is my sister. Bell says so.”
“Bell is an impertinent person,” cried Mrs. Fausset angrily. “When did
she say so?”
“Last night, when she thought I was asleep. Mayn’t I call Fay sister?”
persisted Mildred coaxingly.
“On no account. I never heard anything so shameful. To think that Bell
should gossip! An old servant like Bell—my own old nurse. It is too
cruel!” cried Mrs. Fausset, forgetting herself in her anger.
Fay stood tall and straight in the sunshine outside the tent, wondering
at the storm. She had an instinctive apprehension that Mrs. Fausset’s
anger was humiliating to her. She knew not why, but she felt a sense
of despair darker than any other evil moment in her life; and yet her
evil moments had been many.
“You need not be afraid that I shall ask Mildred to call me sister,”
she said. “I love her dearly, but I hate everybody else in this house.”
“You are a wicked, ungrateful girl,” exclaimed Mrs. Fausset, “and I am
very sorry I ever saw your face.”
Fay drew herself up, looked at the speaker indignantly for a moment or
so, and then walked quietly away towards the house.
She passed the footman with the tea-tray as she crossed the lawn,
and a little further on she passed John Fausset, who looked at her
wonderingly.
Mildred burst out crying.
“How unkind you are, mamma!” she sobbed. “If I mayn’t call her my
sister I shall always love her like a sister—always, always, always.”
“What is the matter with my Mildred?” asked Mr. Fausset, arriving at
this moment.
“Nothing. She has only been silly,” his wife answered pettishly.
“And Fay—has she been silly, too?”
“Fay, your _protégée_, has been most impertinent to me. But I suppose
that does not count.”
“It does count, for a good deal, if she has been intentionally
impertinent,” answered Fausset gravely.
He looked back after Fay’s vanishing figure with a troubled expression.
He had so sighed for peace. He had hoped that the motherless girl
might be taken into his home and cared for and made happy, without
evil feeling upon any one’s part; and now he could see by his wife’s
countenance that the hope of union and peace was at an end.
“I don’t know what you mean about intention,” said his wife; “I only
know that the girl you are so fond of has just said she hates everybody
in this house except Mildred. That sound rather like intentional
impertinence, I think.”
“Go and play, darling,” said Fausset to his child; “or run after Fay,
and bring her back to tea.”
“You show a vast amount of consideration for your wife,” said Mrs.
Fausset.
“My dear Maud, I want you to show a little more consideration for that
girl, who has been so devoted to Mildred all through her illness, and
who has one very strong claim upon a mother’s heart—she is motherless.”
“I should think more of that claim, perhaps, if I knew who her mother
was, and what she was to you,” said Maud Fausset.
“She was once near and dear to me. That is all I can tell you, Maud;
and it ought to be enough.”
“It is more than enough,” his wife answered, trembling from head to
foot, as she rose from her low chair, and walked away from the tent.
John Fausset looked after her irresolutely, went a few steps as if he
meant to follow her, and then turned back to the tent, just as Mildred
reappeared with Fay from another direction.
“We three will have tea together,” he exclaimed, with demonstrative
cheerfulness. “Mamma is not very well, Mildred; she has gone back to
the house. You shall pour out my tea.”
He seated himself in his wife’s chair, and Mildred sat on his knee,
and put her arms round his neck, and adored him with all her power of
adoration. Her household divinity had ever been the father. Perhaps
her baby mind had found out the weakness of one parent and the strength
of the other.
“Fay shall pour out the tea,” she said, with a sense of self-sacrifice.
“It will be a treat for Fay.”
So Fay poured out the tea, and they all three sat in the tent, and were
happy and merry—or seemingly so, perhaps, as concerned John Fausset—for
one whole sunshiny hour, and for the first time Fay felt that she
was not an outsider. Yet there lurked in her mind the memory of Mrs.
Fausset’s anger, and that memory was bitter.
“What am I, that almost everybody should be rude to me?” she asked
herself, as she sat alone that night after Mildred had gone to bed.
From the open windows below came the languid sweetness of a nocturne
by Chopin. Mrs. Fausset was playing her husband to sleep after dinner.
Sure token of reconciliation between husband and wife.
* * * * *
The doctor came next morning. He appeared upon alternate days now, and
looked at Mildred in a casual manner, after exhausting the local gossip
with Mrs. Fausset. This morning he and Mrs. Fausset were particularly
confidential before the patient was sent for.
“Admirable!” he exclaimed, when he had looked at her tongue and felt
her pulse; “we are as nearly well as we can be. All we want now is a
little sea-air to set us up for the winter. The great point, my dear
madam”—to Mrs. Fausset—“is to avoid all risk of _sequelæ_. A fortnight
at Brighton or Eastbourne will restore our little friend to perfect
health.”
There were no difficulties in the way of such people as the Faussets,
no question of ways and means. Bell was sent for, and despatched
to Eastbourne by an afternoon train. She was to take lodgings in a
perfect position, and of impeccable repute as to sanitation. Mildred
was to follow next day, under convoy of Meta and the under-butler, a
responsible person of thirty-five.
“Fay must go, too,” exclaimed Mildred; whereupon followed a tragic
scene.
Fay was not to go to Eastbourne. No reasons were assigned for the
decision. Mildred was to ride a donkey; she was to have a pony-carriage
at her disposition; but she was to be without Fay for a whole
fortnight. In a fortnight she would be able to come home again.
“How many days are there in a fortnight?” she asked piteously.
“Fourteen.”
“O Fay, fourteen days away from you!” she exclaimed, clinging with fond
arms round Fay’s neck, and pulling down the dark head on a level with
her own bright hair.
Fay was pale, but tearless, and said not a word. She let Mildred kiss
her, and kissed back again, but in a dead silence. She went into the
hall with the child, and to the carriage-door, and they kissed each
other on the doorstep, and they kissed at the carriage-window; and then
the horses trotted away along the gravel drive, and Fay had a last
glimpse of the fair head thrust out of the window, and the lilies and
roses of a child’s face framed in pale gold hair.
It was a little more than a fortnight before Bell and her charge went
back to The Hook. Mildred had sorely missed her playfellow, but had
consoled herself with a spade and pail on the beach, and a donkey of
venerable aspect, whose chief distinction was his white linen panoply,
on the long dusty roads.
Mrs. Fausset was not at home to receive her daughter. She had a
superior duty at Chertsey, where people of some social importance were
giving a lawn-party. The house seemed empty and silent, and all its
brightness and graceful furniture, and flowers in the hall and on the
staircase, could not atone for that want of human life.
“Where is Fay?” cried Mildred, taking alarm.
Nobody answered a question which was addressed to everybody.
“Fay, Fay, where are you?” cried the child, and then rushed up-stairs
to the schoolroom, light as a lapwing, distracted with that sudden
fear. “Fay, Fay!” The treble cry rang through the house.
No one in the schoolroom, nor in Mildred’s bedroom, nor in the little
room where Fay had slept, nor in the drawing-rooms, whither Mildred
came running, after that futile quest up-stairs.
Bell met her in the hall, with a letter in her hand.
“Your mamma wished to break it to you herself, miss,” said Bell. “Miss
Fay has gone.”
“Gone, where?”
“To Brussels.”
“Where is Brussels?”
“_I_ believe, miss, that it is the capital of Belgium.”
Mildred tore open the letter, which Bell read aloud over the child’s
shoulder.
“I hope you won’t be grieved at losing your playfellow, my dearest pet.
Fay is dreadfully backward in her education, and has no manners. She
has gone to a finishing-school at Brussels, and you may not see her
again for some years.”
And so the years go by, and this story passes on to a time when the
child Mildred is a child no more, but the happy mother of a fair young
daughter, and the wife of an idolised husband.