MELICENT'S COUSINS
"Girls' heads are not like jam-pots, which, if you do not fill them
will remain empty; a filling there will be, of some kind."--JULIANA
HORATIA EWING.
They had been crawling for some time slowly up a steep lane with
hedges; now suddenly they emerged at the top, and a long sigh of
wonder escaped Millie as she saw the moorland spread before her in
all its untamed splendour. Great headlands, facing northwards,
jutted forth into the heather, as into a purple sea; and on the brink
of one of these the travellers found themselves, overlooking a vast
stretch of wild country. The descent down which they must go was
almost a precipice. Something in the keen racing air, the height,
the freedom, the glory of it all, took Melicent by the throat England
was like this--like this! Sunlight, colour, the adorable odour of
peat and bracken, drawn out by the sun, the blue mysteries of
distance ... it came about her like compelling arms. Solitude,
silence, spacious calm--here were elements that appealed to the depth
of her being. Reserved as she was, she had nearly cried aloud to her
unknown uncle for sympathy in her sudden rush of feeling for the land
of her forefathers. He had checked the mare to a walk, and was
coaxing her downhill with caution and skill.
"Our roads are not much to boast of hereabouts," he said at last, as
the cart slewed itself over a lump in the road, designed to prevent
heavy rainfall from washing out the roadway on the violent slope.
"But I daresay you are not much better off in Africa."
"Not much to boast of! They are glorious!" breathed Millie,
insensible of jolting in her admiration. "We have nothing like this
in Africa!"
"A few miles further on, I can show you a road, compared with which,
this might be a billiard-table," he said cheerfully.
Millie became aware that he referred to surface and gradients, and
not to landscape.
"Oh, I see," she replied lamely. "I was thinking of--of the heather."
"You will see plenty of that," was the composed answer. "It begins
to grow all over the road, at no great distance from here."
Conversation did not seem easy. Millie was at no time talkative, and
they fell silent, and so remained while they traversed several miles
of open moor, crossed a desolate ridge, and presently found
themselves dipping again into a lane with hedges, in all their autumn
glory of ripe blackberries, fluffy travellers' joy, coral honeysuckle
berries and wayfaring tree.
"Now we are in Fransdale," said Mr. Cooper.
They were labouring along, in narrow, sandy, toilsome windings, when
the hoot of a motor, up somewhere over their heads, made Mr. Cooper
start. He was leading the mare, and proceeded to drag her as far as
he possibly could to the side of the lane--half-way up the hedge, in
fact. The next moment the car came in sight, tearing downhill at a
speed which was evidently calculated upon the certainty of clear
roads. It began to bray loudly, as though, in response to the
warning, the vicar could cause his dog-cart to vanish into thin air.
Millie surveyed it with interest, and as it whizzed by, within an
inch of their off-wheel, she caught sight of a young, handsome, bored
face, and that of an older man beside it. They raised their hats as
they swept by, having most narrowly missed smashing the cart to
fragments: but the vicar seemed quite pleased, and not at all annoyed.
"Sir Joseph Burmester and his son--our big land-owners hereabouts,"
he explained.
"Oh!" said his niece; adding, after reflection: "Are they our social
equals?"
For some reason, the question annoyed the vicar; he relapsed into
silence.
Mrs. Cooper prided herself upon keeping all her Southern customs up
here in the North. When Melicent came downstairs to tea, she saw
none of that wonderful pastry without which no Cleveshire tea-table
is complete. Her five girl-cousins and their governess were
assembled to be introduced to their new relative. They stared at her
with a passive and stony indifference. Madeline was seventeen,
Gwendolen sixteen, Theodora fifteen, Barbara fourteen, and Beatrice
twelve. Even Beatrice was quite as tall as Melicent; and the elder
girls were vast, the two eldest nearing five-foot-ten, after the
fashion of the modern girl, and not in the least as yet knowing how
to manage their swelling proportions. In their outgrown, scanty
frocks, and big, thick legs, they looked rather like men in a farce,
dressed up to represent little girls. Two or three of them were
handsome, but they all struck Millie as singularly expressionless.
Their faces were like masks.
Mrs. Chetwynd-Cooper's hair was pale flaxen, and being brushed away
very tightly from the face, gave the impression of her having no hair
at all. The odd look of being out of date, achieved in her husband's
case by side-whiskers, was bestowed upon her by long earrings. The
couple looked like the Papa and Mamma of a virtuous family, in a very
early Victorian story-book.
Mrs. Cooper sat down to table with a determined cheerfulness which
Melicent soon learned was her characteristic. It somehow succeeded
in producing deep depression in others. At least, nobody spoke; and
the girl found herself with her attention fixed, with a fatal
fascination, upon her aunt's smile and her aunt's earrings, and
longing for something to divert her eye.
Her uncle's depression was a very real and well-defined thing that
evening. There was something about his new niece which he found
himself disliking with quite unchristian vehemence. He had confided
to his wife that extreme care would be necessary, and that the
new-comer must by no means be let loose among their own children.
Mrs. Cooper could not share his depression. She had the boundless
self-confidence of an entirely stupid woman. She had made her own
girls models of all that girls should be. No slang was ever heard in
the Vicarage; no loud voices; no unruly expression of opinion. Why
should she not be equally successful with this raw material,
doubtless sent by Providence to her good guidance?
Melicent sat watching her five munching cousins, and thought they
were something like cows. Their eyes were vacant, their appetites
steady. She was just wondering whether all talking at meals was
forbidden, when Gwendolen, who sat next her, tossed back her long
hair, and asked:
"How did you hurt your arm?"
Melicent's voice was soft, but singularly clear. It had a carrying
quality.
"Uncle Edmund says I am not to tell you," she replied.
Mr. Cooper was all the more angry, because he felt sure that his
niece could and would have skated ably over this thin ice had he not
repudiated all wish to "keep things dark." She had done exactly what
he told her to do, and he wanted to box her ears.
"Give us news of your Cochin China hen, Gwendolen," he broke in.
"Has she been laying away again?"
"Yes, in the hedge," said his daughter, giving her reply in lifeless
tone and fewest words; and silence fell again.
"Oh, by the way, I have a pleasant surprise for Melicent," said Mrs.
Cooper suddenly, her countenance wreathed in smiles. She always
spoke as though coaxing a very young child, who needed encouragement
and reassurance; and her niece resented it as actively as did the
villagers. "What do you think arrived for you this morning,
Melicent? Theo, darling, if you look on mother's desk, you will find
a letter for Cousin Melicent. I suppose the mail travels faster than
the boat you came in, Melicent."
Theo brought a letter and handed it to her cousin, who took it with
composure.
"I wonder whom that comes from?" said Mrs. Cooper archly.
"It's from Hubert Mestaer."
"And who is that?" pursued the lady, delighted that everybody's
attention was so skilfully diverted from the broken arm.
"He is one of the men who wanted to marry me," said Millie clearly.
In the deadly pause that followed, she caught a glance, hastily
passing under lowered lids, between Miss Lathom and her two elder
pupils.
But the valiant Mrs. Cooper was equal even to this occasion.
"When dear Melicent has been with us a little longer, she will know
that we do not talk of such things," she cooed, blushing as coyly as
the heroine in a novel by Charles Reade.
The blush was not to be seen reflected on the stolid countenances of
her daughters. They chewed on.
"What things?" asked Millie, bewildered.
"Our offers of--marriage," said her aunt, bringing out the bold word
with a gulp. "You are a little young, darling, to be thinking of
marriage for a great many years, are you not?"
"Yes; that is what I told them," replied Millie simply, fixing
surprised eyes upon the lady's embarrassment.
The vicar cleared his throat.
"Perhaps you had better give that letter to your aunt, Melicent, and
let her judge whether it is a fit one for you to receive."
Melicent removed her look of surprise from one end of the table to
another.
"I think it would be playing it very low down on Bert to let anybody
see his letter," she said, with decision.
"My girls show me all their letters," said her aunt, still smiling
and coaxing.
"I beg your pardon if it sounds rude," replied her niece, "but I
shall not show you mine."
The vicar rose from table with decision.
"We will discuss this at another time," he said. "Melicent will, of
course, conform to the rules of the house while she is with us. For
what we have received, etc. A word, Miss Lathom, please." Then, as
the girls filed past, he said low in the governess's ear: "On no
account is she to be left alone with her cousins for a moment."
The girls filed soberly out, led the way upstairs, through a
swing-door, along a passage, into a shabby old room with deep
window-seats, an aged rocking-horse, shelves of story books and
disabled toys, an ink-stained, battered table, a high fire-guard, and
all the usual accessories of the nursery turned schoolroom.
They fastened the swing-door behind them as they went through,
carefully closing the door of the school-room also; and then all, as
it were, exhaling a gasp of relief, turned to their cousin again with
transfigured faces.
"Now we can talk! Now we can be ourselves! Now we can have some
fun!" they cried, surrounding her.
The masks were dropped, the real girls appeared, tossing back their
hair, stretching their limbs, assuming every possible attitude of
comfort and inelegance. They all talked at once, crowding round; and
the transition was so abrupt and so complete as to bewilder her.
"One moment," said Gwendolen, who was the handsomest, and seemed to
take the lead, rather than the petulant and anæmic-looking Madeline.
"Be cautious, girls! we may very likely be raided this evening; she's
sure to poke her nose in after Melicent. Put out the things. Did
you hoist the weight, Babs?"
"Yes, I did," said Barbara.
"That's all right. If you hear the weight fall in the passage,
that's mother," said Madeline, explaining to Melicent: "You see, it
gives us a minute to reform in."
They all went to a cupboard, pulled out work, thimbles, and so on,
arranged them on the table, chairs in place; then threw themselves on
the floor, in the various attitudes which their weak, overgrown
spines demanded, with pillows wedged under them.
"Now for peace and happiness," said Gwen. "Oh, it was grand to hear
you stand up to them, my dear! But it's no good, you know; you will
have to knuckle under. They've got nothing else to do but bully us;
and after all, it's not much they can do, you know. It's as easy as
possible to circumvent them."
"Oh, hold your tongue, Gwen! don't chatter so," said Madeline
crossly. "Give Melicent a chance. Go on, Melicent, tell us all
about it. How was your arm hurt?"
Melicent looked surprised. "I told you I promised Uncle Edmund not
to say," she replied.
"Oh, gammon! we absolve you from that," laughed Theo, slipping a warm
arm about her cousin's neck.
"But I can't absolve myself, you see," said Millie soberly.
"Do you mean to say you won't tell us?"
"I never break my word."
Gwendolen laughed.
"We're five against one, and the youngest is as big as you," she
said, half in fun, half menacing.
Millie smiled her own little smile of disdain.
"I'm more than a match for the lot of you," she said coolly. "I
shall say just what I think to you, as I did to Aunt Minna. And it's
this. I hate underhand ways."
Miss Lathom, who was seemingly poring over the correction of some
exercises, grew uncomfortably red.
"We're not underhand," said Gwen hotly. "'Tommy'"--indicating her
preceptress with a wave of the hand--"knows all about our goings on."
"Tommy" looked up nervously.
"When you have lived here a little while, Miss Lutwyche," she said,
"you will see that the poor girls must have some indulgences. Their
mother expects impossibilities."
"Well, why do they stand it?" asked Millie.
"We don't stand it," returned Maddie. "But you had better all shut
up, girls; perhaps Melicent's a tell-tale."
"If you had any sense, you'd see that I've just proved that I'm not,"
remarked Melicent.
"How have you proved it?"
"If I keep my word to Uncle Edmund, of course I shall keep my word to
you. I promise not to tell tales; and, when I promise, you can go
away and bet on it."
The universal squeal of merriment at her funny phrase restored
harmony.
"Of course," said Gwen, "I see that it's best to be straightforward;
but we're not allowed to be. We simply have to make our own
pleasures, unknown to them. We should never read a book, nor get a
letter, nor meet a soul, nor do anything but get up, have meals, do
lessons, go to bed. Mother won't let us read a book she hasn't read
first; and as she never opens a book herself from year's end to
year's end, there is an end of that. We mustn't have a letter unless
she sees it; so of course we have to have our letters sent, addressed
to Tommy, to Bensdale Post Office; and then there's the adventure of
walking over to fetch them. You mayn't go out without saying where
you've been, nor spend a halfpenny without telling her what you
bought. She must really expect us to cheat, you know; and so we do."
"Maddie's going on for eighteen, and Gwen only a year younger,"
chimed in Theo, "and they're not supposed even to know what a young
man is, let alone think about one. Gwen's awfully gone on
Freshfield, who is Sir Joseph Burmester's agent. Well, if it was
guessed, I don't know what would happen, for you see Freshfield is
not our social equal--"
"My dears," broke in Miss Lathom, who was on thorns, "I think all
this is very imprudent. Let your cousin wait a while, and see how
she likes her aunt's system."
"I shall dislike it very much," said Melicent; "but I shall say so.
Why don't you speak out?"
"Because we're dead sick of rows," said Maddie sulkily. "There were
nothing but rows till Tommy came. No governess would stay; they
simply couldn't stand mother. Then at last Tommy turned up, and we
saw what a decent old sort she was, so we thought out our plans, and
now we do get our fun somehow, and as long as we hold our tongues at
meals, it's all right."
"Well, I'm very sorry for you," said Millie, "but I think it would be
much simpler to say what you mean. The strongest always wins. If
you stuck together, they would have to give in."
The girls laughed sardonically. "You don't know mother," they said.
"Well, we shall soon see," said Barbie, who was the silent one of the
five. "Let Millie try her way, and see what happens."
Millie laughed. "I certainly shan't try yours," she said.
"But you won't side against us with mother?" suddenly said Gwen.
"Rather not. That isn't my way."
"Are you never afraid of anybody?" asked Theo earnestly.
"Of course not; what can people do?" contemptuously asked the girl
who had been sjambokked.
Theo cuddled up against this new champion as if the sense of strength
were pleasant to her.
"Show us your love-letter, won't you, darling?" she said persuasively.
"Certainly not," replied Millie at once.
"Then I won't show you my notes from Freshfield," said Gwen.
"Of course not. It's mean to show men's letters."
"We shouldn't do such a thing, except just among ourselves," replied
Maddie indignantly; "and we hoped you'd be one of us, though goodness
knows there's more than enough of us already."
"Look here," said Gwen eagerly, "we know you must be the real kind of
natural girl--not the sort like mother believes in, Ethel May in the
Daisy Chain, you know--we know you are not that sort, or you would
not be having lovers to write to you all the way from Africa. You do
like pretty clothes, and dancing, and young men--"
"No, I don't," said Millie, in her decided way. "I've had enough of
young men to last me a good while. I want to see no more young men
for years to come. I only want one thing really badly"--she looked
almost pleadingly at Tommy's red, snub-nosed countenance, as if her
sole hope lay there--"I want to learn!" cried out the girl who was to
corrupt the Vicarage household.
"To learn!" The words were echoed in six different tones.
"Not _lessons_?" asked Babs incredulously.
"Everything," replied Millie, resting her pointed chin on her small
hand. "I want to know things, and understand them, and find out how
to earn my living; to do something ... or make something ... I don't
know what, as yet. I want to get a grip on the world, and watch for
my place there, and take it!"
There was complete silence for quite a long time. At last--
"You talk as if you were a boy," said Gwen. "What can girls do?"
"Everybody can do what they must do," quietly replied Millie. "I've
got to earn my living, and so have you, I suppose."
"Earn our living! Mother would have a fit!" cried Maddie.
"But Uncle Edmund said in his letter that he was poor," said Millie,
puzzled. "What should you do if he died?"
"Get married, if we could," laughed Theo. "Willie and Georgie say
we're such frights, we never shall. But we think Gwen is
good-looking, and you see she's got a lover already; and she says
when she's married she'll see after all of us--take us out of this
hateful old Dale, and go to live at Brighton or London or some place
where we could make friends. Nobody will make friends here, because
mother's such an old stick-in-the-mud--"
The filial sentiment died away, for there was the sound of a soft
thud.
"The weight, girls! Mother!" whispered Bee; and in a moment, with a
dexterity born of long practice, the whole flock of lounging girls
had arisen, slipped into place, and were busily stitching when Mrs.
Cooper, with her smile, her long neck, and her earrings, peeped
archly round the door.
"Making friends?" said she, beaming.
"Yes, Mrs. Cooper," said Tommy, looking up.
The governess was feeling decidedly uncomfortable. She had
repeatedly warned her pupils, during the preceding days, to hold
aloof at first from the new-comer, until they had decided whether she
could be taken into confidence. But Millie's love-letter, and still
more, her calm refusal to show it, had sent the barriers down with a
rush, and the girls had not been able to think of prudence with such
a keen new interest in their blank lives. Tommy's heart was full of
apprehension. She was afraid of this girl who wanted to learn. She
knew that she had nothing to teach her.
Melicent had not moved a muscle when the general rush was made. She
sat still in the window-seat, upright and solitary.
"Dear Melicent must join our happy little sewing circle," said Mrs.
Cooper, beaming round. "No idle hands at the Vicarage, as you see,
darling."
"I cannot use my arm very well yet," said Melicent.
"Oh, we give you one evening's grace," responded the lady playfully.
"Have you been taught to work?"
"No."
"Oh, how sad! Why, Miss Lathom, we have a task before us! Can you
not use a needle at all?"
"Oh, yes. I can make and mend my clothes, and so on. But I had to
teach myself."
There was a silence. "You don't mean that you made the suit you have
on?"
"Yes."
"Oh," said Mrs. Cooper. The wind was taken out of her sails. "Why,
you are quite a _genius_! We shall have to take _lessons_. But now,
I came to ask you to come with me, and I will show you your room, and
we will have a little talk."
Millie rose obediently, and followed her aunt from the room; as they
went, the masks dropped, the girls lifted their heads and looked at
each other with intense interest.
"She's going to make her show the letter."