neat, faded, comfortable room, as soon as possible, to sit with them.
The little boy had gone to bed, I was told. A gaunt maid served us with
excellent food--things that, belonging peculiarly to supper, make you
wonder why we are ever such fools as to dine at night. I can scarcely
say that our talk was lively, but I had a vivid sense that they meant it
to be so. Whether they were bent on proving that they were not out of
the current, or merely anxious to set me at my ease, I could not tell.
Old Mr. Fenby was both pompous and nervous; evidently accustomed to be
deferred to, yet suspicious of the world’s having gone beyond him. His
wife seemed--but of course I knew my imagination might be playing me
tricks--to be secretly deriding, in some polished corner of her mind,
both his pretensions and his fears. She was a small woman, white-haired
and very wrinkled, and her mouth twisted a little to one side. She
scarcely spoke, except to ask me a question or to agree very positively
with her husband. Probably it was the unnatural twist of her lips that
gave at once a sardonic effect to her stilted, harmless talk. The first
night, as I said, was not so bad. The Fenbys seemed, if not precisely
eager to please me, at least unwilling that I should think ill of them.
Old Mr. Fenby, I remember, mentioned explicitly various privileges that
would be mine--the run of his library for my own purposes, complete
control over Carol’s mind and morals, a horse to ride if I cared for
one, and (this from him surprised me exceedingly) breakfast in my own
room. Of course, nothing of any sort could be settled off-hand; I should
have to grow into the house and its ways. I merely expressed myself
politely with reference to his kind suggestions. As the clock struck, I
saw by certain mechanical gestures, some little involuntary stir on
their part, that something usually happened at that hour.
“We retire very early,” began Mr. Fenby.
“And always have prayers at nine,” his wife concluded for him.
Four women entered the room. My coachman was evidently exempt. Three of
them--the maid who had served us and two others--might have been
(forgive the undignified word) triplets. I had not noticed the waitress
particularly; but their joint effect was very grim. They were like the
Grææ. The fourth was younger and of a different mould and race. The
three who had not yet seen me--the young one and two of the Grææ--gave
me one respectful, curious stare. I was puzzled by the respectfulness of
the youngest one. She did not have the air, as she came in, of
respecting any one in the room except me. Prayers over, Mrs. Fenby
mentioned to me the names of the maids, as they filed out: “Hannah” (the
waitress) “you know; Martha--the cook; Rachel--the chambermaid.”
“And--?” I pointed to the back of the younger woman.
Mrs. Fenby looked at her husband and busied herself with extinguishing
one of the lamps.
“Miss Susan.” Mr. Fenby answered me. “She would prefer to be called Miss
Susan. She is accustomed to it. Her position is a little anomalous,
perhaps, but we are used to her. She has no employment, yet we keep her
busy. She sews for my wife, puts up preserves, orders the meals.
She”--he smiled a little--“she does not consider herself precisely a
servant. Nor do we. She has been with us a great many years.”
“I see,” and I was turning away.
“No, perhaps you do not see. We have spoiled her, I admit, but she is
not of the servant class. We treat her more or less as one of the
family. She is a dependent, but of good birth. I only mention all this
to explain to you why perhaps it would be better for you not to ask any
service of her. She makes herself indispensable to us, but she has never
lived with any one in a menial capacity. Indeed, she has never lived in
any house but this.”
“Except, of course, her parents’.” Again Mrs. Fenby concluded her
husband’s sentence for him.
“Of course, except her parents’. Mr. Sladen understood me. I meant
‘lived’ as one says it of servants. I really need not have gone into it
so extensively, but I wished to warn Mr. Sladen not to treat her like
the others. Miss Susan is so quiet that her own manner might not have
made it clear.”
“Quite so. Good-night, Mr. Sladen.” Mrs. Fenby offered me an exquisite
claw. “You will not see much of Miss Susan, in any case. She sits with
me a good deal; and Carol is not fond of her. He is delighted that you
have come. I could hardly get him to go to sleep to-night. Hannah will
leave a tray outside your door at eight.”
Mr. Fenby saw me to my room.
It did not take me long to get acquainted with my pupil. He did indeed
seem glad to see me; and who could blame him? The Fenbys were obviously
respectable and rich; and I gathered vaguely that they intended to send
Carol to a good preparatory school (if I could get him ready) and then
to the oldest college in the country. Their moral attitude seemed to
have been transmitted to them intact from worthy ancestors. But they
were not cheerful people for a child to consort with, especially as all
future benefits to Carol were explicitly contingent on his good
behavior. I did not believe for a moment that his grandparents, if he
turned out badly at school, would send him to work in the gaunt factory
beyond their gates, but if Carol had said that he believed it, I should
not necessarily have thought him stupid. The Fifth Commandment was all
over the place, and there was, besides, a tang of Isaac Watts in the
air. The old people seemed fond of the boy, yet anxious to conceal their
fondness both from him and from all the other inmates of the household.
That twist of attitude I had seen before: they were simply marching with
their own generation, in the rut of their racial tradition.
I grew fond of him, of course. He was an attractive child, with
something mutinous and elfin in him that occasionally gave me pause. He
would grow up into either a charmer or a beast, was my conclusion at the
end of a few weeks. He had good parts, but loathed coercion; was
willing to learn like lightning at certain hours, or to have adorable
manners when he happened to be in a ruffled and powdered mood. He was
very fond of me, I may say, so far as I could tell; and I kept him with
me as much as possible. After all, it didn’t matter what he said before
me, and I jealously didn’t want him making temperamental breaks before
his grandparents, who might not like them. We worked in the morning, and
walked or did other outdoor things in the afternoon. After supper Carol
went to bed; and the big library--really a fine collection in a rather
magnificent old room--stood open to me during the evening hours. Mr.
Fenby always sat with his wife after supper; and they went to bed after
nine-o’clock prayers. Many enchanted midnights found me beneath a mild
old lamp in the Fenbys’ library. That was real freedom; they asked of me
only to remain in the room five minutes after extinguishing the lamp,
and to go up-stairs without a candle. Old Mrs. Fenby was mortally afraid
of fire; as well she may have been, for no help could have come to us
except from the coachman and gardener. By the time anything arrived from
the town, the place would have been in ruins.
It was a curious household--so much bodily comfort and so little
amenity. The Gray Sisters cooked, cleaned, and waited with a grim and
noiseless perfection; but I never saw one of them smile, even at Carol.
They were, of course, not really sisters--could not have been, I mean;
for I never knew the facts. Nature does not provide three such in one
hour of labor. But they might easily have been kin in the spiritual
sense--lay sisters of some harsh and secret order, fruit of some strange
Protestant aberration. Their silent co-operation seemed more than habit:
they seemed to be bound by a like vow; their minds, like their faces,
were all in one mould. I inwardly congratulated Mrs. Fenby; no triumph
of perfectly matched footmen could equal the psychologic
indistinguishability of Hannah, Martha, and Rachel. Miss Susan was
another matter. Perhaps, I thought, you have to pay for three such maids
with a discord like Miss Susan. She was as quiet as Mrs. Fenby had said;
and I hardly ever had occasion to speak to her. I gathered from Carol
that she sometimes came to meals with them when they were alone; but she
never did while I was there. “Doesn’t want to, I suppose,” he suggested
in his charming treble. “Does what she pleases, I guess. I don’t like
her.” I could not discover the ground of his dislike. Certainly she
never, so far as I could see, interfered with him in any way. I didn’t
like to probe Carol; but I wondered whether he, with his sensitive
precocity, had noticed, as I had, the strange barometric effect of her
changing expression. There were times when, scarce seen, she lowered
over the house like a dull and thunderous sky; and once, coming upon her
at the turn of a winding corridor, I seemed to be face to face with a
wandering flame. For the most part, however, she effaced herself into
oblivion; and it has often happened to me to be startled, on passing
Mrs. Fenby’s open door, to see Miss Susan sitting beside the old lady’s
couch. I did not mean, a moment since, to hint that Miss Susan was
beautiful. Usually you passed her by without looking or wishing to look.
She wore habitually a black frock with a white apron; her eyes were
always lowered; her thick chestnut hair was done precisely like Hannah’s
or Rachel’s. She spoke, if at all, so briefly that one scarcely knew if
her voice or her diction were good. Carol’s remarks surprised me. I
should have said that she was terribly afraid of both her employers;
afraid, in true servile fashion, of endangering her position, losing her
asylum. I did not hear her subjected to verbal harshness, but Mrs. Fenby
had a way of watching her that was scarcely short of insult.
I am recording all this because I feel that it is important: it clears
up a little for me that turbid interlude to recall, back to the very
beginning, any detail I can of the Fenby household. These scattered
notes of memory may be insignificant, considering the shape events
presently took, yet I like to clarify my recollections to that extent.
One night in early July, I was sitting late in the library. The day had
been hot; the evening was blessedly cool. With a kind of wonder I had
heard the family and servants depart to their rooms. How could one
refuse to await Nature’s apology for the heat of noon? A west wind
wandered in through the screened windows, carrying with it the
close-blended sweetness of flowering shrubs outside on the lawn. Even
the oil-lamp beside me did not oppress. I found no end of things, first
and last, in old Mr. Fenby’s library--books that I had always meant to
read and never had read. There was time in those peaceful evening
periods for works in many volumes. There was nothing to hurry me: it
would take me a year at least to get Carol ready for any school.
I was turning a page of _Sir Charles Grandison_, somewhere midway of the
work, where he is practising his steps among Clementina’s relatives. You
can imagine that, if I had time for eight volumes of punctilio and
smelling-salts, I was wrapped thick in leisure. It must have been near
midnight; and that I was not weary of Harriet Byron shows, I think, that
I was not sleepy.
It was not a noise that reft me from Harriet Byron; it was a vague
visual sense of a companion in the room. Slowly I looked up, wondering;
for it was three hours since every one else in the house had gone to
bed. It is difficult to trace the history of a sense-impression on its
path to the brain, but I must have thought that it was Mrs. Fenby, for I
remember rising, alarmed that such a frail old creature should be
wandering about at night without a candle. The woman shut the door, very
slowly and softly--as slowly and softly as she must have opened it--and
I saw, completely at a loss to know why, that it was Miss Susan.
She glided--only thus can I express her noiseless progress--across to
the window, and closed that, with infinite precaution, and still without
speaking. We were now shut into the library together. Apparently then
she felt safe, though she breathed heavily and her hand went to her
heart in the typical feminine gesture. She came and stood very close to
me before she spoke. Her chestnut hair was loosened about her face, and
was drawn forward over her shoulders in two magnificent braids. Her face
was very white, with two beautiful feverish spots of color on the
cheek-bones. She was swathed from neck to foot in some sort of
dressing-gown--a wadded, brocaded, sea-green garment, shapeless and rich
and ancient like a cere-cloth; something, I judged automatically, that
Mrs. Fenby must have pulled out of a cedar chest and given to her in a
fit of irony. It became her well; which is simply to say, I suppose,
that, clad in a rich stuff, the whole texture of her seemed immediately
to have changed. Her skin, I saw, was fine; one imagined a supple
sleekness of body beneath those sea-green folds. I remembered Cinderella
and the ball.
I had time for this impression before she spoke--bending very close to
me and almost whispering the first words:
“May I ask you a question? Will you excuse my intruding?”
The tone and words did not go with the vision. She spoke as humbly as if
Mrs. Fenby had sent her.
“Surely, surely--” I stammered out. “Won’t you sit down?”
She shook her head, and we remained standing.
“It is only that--I don’t quite know how to explain.” Miss Susan twisted
one lustrous braid of hair in her hand nervously.
“Why not?” I smiled a little to put her at her ease.
“It is only this.” She tossed her head, shaking her braids back. Her
voice grew stronger. She was now speaking in almost a normal tone. “I am
very ignorant. I have never had the chance to learn as much as I wanted.
Could you sometimes let me have one of Carol’s old lesson-books?
History, geography, arithmetic, Latin--anything. I have a good deal of
time to myself.”
“Do you, indeed, Miss Susan? I should not have thought it.”
“Oh yes.” Her affirmation had a sharp edge--whether of bitterness or
boredom I could not say; but certainly of some very un-Cinderella-like
emotion. “Evenings, for example. I go to sleep very late, and I really
am anxious to learn. Of course I want only the books that Carol has
finished with.”
“You don’t use the library, then?”
“Mr. Fenby would not like that. But how could he object to my using old
school-books? And I thought you would know which ones Carol did not
need.”
“He needs very few.”
“Is he clever?” Again there was an edge--was it of hostility?--in her
tone.
“Rather!”
“Then he will be through with his books all the sooner. May I have
them?”
“Of course, there is no conceivable objection on my part,” I began.
“They aren’t my books, even, you know.”
“No, they’re theirs. Or Carol’s, perhaps. I don’t know about those
things.” She paused a moment, then looked up at me sharply from under
the thick brown ridge of her eyebrows. “Are you afraid to give them to
me for fear Mr. and Mrs. Fenby will mind?”
“No. Why should I be? I suppose I thought it odd that you didn’t speak
to them instead of to me.” My honest thought came out thus. Then I
wondered.... “If there is anything in the world that I can do, I shall
be glad to--if you really want to begin Latin, for example. I am just
starting Carol.”
She appeared to consider. “But he would be using the book himself,
wouldn’t he?”
“Not at any hour when you would be using it.” I laughed. “Especially not
in the evening.”
“I wouldn’t ask you many questions, and I could always return the books
here in the early morning.”
“Done, then. What do you most want? I will get them for you to-morrow.”
“Oh, almost anything. What Carol has had will do for me to begin on.”
She smiled gratefully, but not at me. She looked away as she smiled.
Apparently her errand was quite finished, for she moved towards the
door.
“Miss Susan!” I could not help it. I felt I must ask her. “Why should
the Fenbys mind your teaching yourself out of the boy’s books? Why do
you think they would? Do you fancy they would be afraid--”
“That I might better myself if I had more education?” She took the words
out of my mouth--though I may say I shouldn’t have uttered just those.
“Yes, I think they would be afraid of that. That’s why I don’t like to
ask them.”
“But why haven’t you bought text-books long since?”
“Oh, if I had had money to buy text-books with--” She shrugged her
shoulders and turned her back on me, moving again towards the door. But
I had seen the sudden crimson in her cheeks before she turned; and I did
not pursue her with more words. She opened the library door and shut it
again behind her, as quietly as she had done it before.
In a few moments I blew out the lamp; and I sat loyally in the dark for
five minutes, keeping my promise to Mrs. Fenby. The elegant Harriet
Byron no longer intrigued me, whereas poor Miss Susan did. I was forced
to infer that she served my employers for food and shelter rather than
for wages. It seemed rather niggardly of them, for there was evidently
plenty of money. I wondered a little why she had never married. For
under the lamplight the truth had come out--Miss Susan, give her half a
chance, was handsome. Not only that: she was handsome in no forbidding
way. There was, in her presence, a potential--mind, I don’t say
actual--invitation to woo. She wasn’t a bit like the Grææ. There was
enough reticence there to banish the thought of intrigue; but that she
shouldn’t have married in her lustrous youth seemed odd--a pretty little
problem in fatalities. After all, though (it came to me as I mounted the
dark stairs), any suitor would have had to walk many miles to reach her
in that mansion; and an anomalous position like hers is not the
predestined setting for a bride. She had ambition, evidently, still; but
a worn and warped ambition that asked only for Carol’s old school-books.
Hang the Fenbys! She should have them. I would teach her the Greek verb
at midnight if she thought it would please her. Her hair had been
magnificent against that sea-green stuff.
The encounter which I have just related was the first of three. I saw
Miss Susan daily, as I saw the Gray Sisters; but my casual meetings with
her about the house--when, as of old, she slipped by me, eyes lowered,
in her black dress--were empty of personal savor. I did not even, for
many days, have a chance to hand over the school-books I had sifted out
for her. Mrs. Fenby’s régime for her was iron. Sometimes I even wondered
if Miss Susan had really visited me--if, rather, she had done anything
save “appear” as a ghost does. Was it perhaps some eidolon of her, some
unconscious projection of a stifled desire, that had met me face to face
in the library? Had she walked in her sleep? Or, more precisely, had
some aspect, some fragment, of her personality visited me while the
familiar part of her lay sleeping? In such reflections--when Carol left
me time for reflection--I spent the next ten days. Most of all in the
library at night, alone with my eighteenth-century books, did I wonder;
and more than once I lifted my eyes to see if the door would open on a
sea-green shape.
They were to be three, my genuine encounters with Miss Susan under that
roof--each one violently and strangely different from the others. They
deepened--those three scenes--to the climax, as cunningly as if they had
been staged. I do not think she ever knew that, or thought for one
instant what must be the dramatic history of my attitude to her. The
first _chute de rideau_ she might have planned; the others, in essence,
she was innocent of. I do not believe she ever once calculated her
effect on me.
Ten days after her request for school-books--a request that, as I
explained, she had never given me the chance to fulfil (for, after all,
she had to seek me out; I could not mount to her attic), I sat again
late in the library. July was heavy upon us, and there was no cool west
wind. For very heat, I could not go to bed, and I marvelled that others
could. Mrs. Fenby had the immunity to heat of her fragility. She was one
of those thin old creatures who wear a shawl in the hottest weather, as
if their veins stored ice that was in perpetual need of thawing. Her
husband, however, was of a sanguine constitution, full-fleshed and
flushing easily. I should have expected him to share my vigils, though I
was always grateful to hear his heavy footsteps following his wife’s
up-stairs. Night by night they ascended together, like an aging mastiff
and a decrepit parrot. Hannah, Martha, and Rachel would follow
presently, dogging each other closely, the three making a single
indistinguishable smudge on the twilit staircase. Miss Susan usually
preceded them all.
The night was hotter than any other even in that hot July. I could not
read with comfort, and while I got over a good many pages, it was by
dint of changing my position constantly and drinking ice-water in great
gulps. Some time after eleven I went out through the French window to
the porch. The covered porch was as hot as the room; I stepped down on
the lawn. At least the ceiling of the lawn was high! I strolled up and
down, wondering if I shouldn’t simply fling myself down on cool turf to
spend the night under the stars. Of course, though, if I did, I should
have to go in first and put out that wretched lamp. Instinctively, with
the thought, I looked toward the house. Framed in the French window of
the library was a sea-green figure.
“Oh!” That ejaculation was wrenched from me. Why, on such a hot night?
Well, I would give her the books and then come out and throw myself on
the grass. I walked across to the long window. She stepped aside for me
to enter.
I found the books for her and handed them over with a few curt words. It
was, for some reason, annoying to have waited vainly all those days, and
now, at this torrid moment, to be called to account. My enthusiasm for
this spinster’s schooling had ebbed. Yet, as she stood beside me, asking
eager questions, the second self of Miss Susan--call it what you
will--wrought upon me again. My second impression was more vivid than my
first had been, probably because it had the first, for past, to go upon.
Suspicions resolved themselves into conclusions. I did not need to note
again details I had already noted. The whiteness of her skin, the sheen
of her hair, the suppleness of her form beneath its rich shroud, I took
for granted now; and I proceeded to take in other details: a vague scent
about her sea-green draperies, a small foot pushed out in its slipper
beneath the swirling hem of her gown, the excellent shape of her
slightly roughened hands. But most of all, as we faced each other across
the marble chimney-piece (having withdrawn by common impulse from the
tropic radius of the lamp-ray), were her eyes revealed to me. I met
them, glowing in the dimness, with a kind of shock. In point of fact, as
I realized, I had never seen Miss Susan’s eyes before. She seemed quite
unconscious of the kind of figure she cut: I dare say she was. No
intention was revealed to me, at all events; only an unsuspected
capacity--for what? Well, for being like other women; that was all.
Imagine how little like other women she must have seemed, day by day,
going about the Fenbys’ business! And a sea-green gown, of no fashion
and unquestioned age, had done it. The only malice you could record
against Miss Susan was her wearing it at all--her thinking it worth
while, for the sake of some starved sense in her, to masquerade to
herself in a bit of cast-off finery. I did not even then believe that
she had “dressed up” for me. If it had occurred to me, I could have felt
only pity for an instinct that had to satisfy itself with a
dressing-gown that came from Mrs. Fenby’s grandmother.
So we stood, exchanging a few words about the Latin grammar. “You are
very kind,” was the most personal thing said between us, and she said it
as humbly as if I had tipped her.
“If you have any questions, I should be glad to answer them. And surely
you don’t need to sit up to all hours to ask them. Almost any time in
the day when I see you--”
“I don’t dare in the day-time. Really, it is better not.” Her
acknowledged fear sat oddly on her magnificence. So, too, did her desire
for book-learning. You could have imagined her--in sea-green--wanting a
personal success; I couldn’t readily imagine her--in sea-green--caring
to spell correctly. That creature ought to have despised the technique
of respectability--though she looked, too, as innocent as gunpowder that
has never heard of a gun. I felt all this a little thickly and
incoherently. I can’t give you her effect so logically as I should like.
I was very young when I encountered Miss Susan.