Peckham had none of the rights of love; she had only its services and
its long suspenses. It was very gratifying, in the face of the entire
dissolving household, to be put in charge of Alington Farm, to have an
assured income, a kitchen maid, and a silk umbrella with her initials on
the handle, presented to her by Miss Kitty as a parting present. But
Peckham saw through these gratifications to the fact of her lamb’s
unprotected disappearance. No umbrella could soften the fact of Miss
Kitty’s going into the country in Europe of which Peckham least
approved.
Peckham disliked all countries that were not her own, but she had a
special horror of France. She thought it an indecent place, abandoned to
a parcel of fly-by-nights and the sinister ministrations of the Roman
Catholic Church. Peckham did not know which she disapproved of most
thoroughly, the grands boulevards or the pope. Now there were the
Germans, and by what she read in the newspapers, they were as bad or
worse.
The French couldn’t get them out of the country, and we had to help
them, that is to say, Miss Kitty had to help them. The European War
became for Peckham an act of reckless charity on the part of Kitty.
And after two years the war stopped. It went on in the newspapers and as
far as the soldiers were concerned, and strange things took place or
ceased to take place in the larder; but Miss Kitty returned.
Alington Hall had been sold. There was only Alington Farm left. It was
the last piece of the old Alington estate. Mr. Costrelle had settled it
upon Kitty as a twenty-first birthday present. It was older than the
hall itself, and stood in an overgrown garden, with an ancient
four-square tower rising out of it, flanked by an old stone chapel that
had for years been the undisputed abode of a family of Berkshire pigs.
Mr. Costrelle hardly ever came near it. He stayed in London, and
sometimes in the summer he came down for a night or two, looked moodily
over the little place, tipped Peckham, and told her that Miss Kitty was
well, there was no occasion for her to starve herself, and the war would
probably go on forever.
“Should you say Miss Kitty was really better, sir—happier, as you might
say?” Peckham would venture as the last moments of Mr. Costrelle’s
occasional visit drew to a close, and Mr. Costrelle always shook hands
with her at the gate, most handsomely (the postman had remarked upon it
with awe; for Mr. Costrelle was not one to demean himself with
inferiors), and replied in the same words:
“There isn’t any news of Master Dick, you know, nurse. I should say Miss
Kitty was about the same.”
And at the end of the two years Miss Kitty came back, but she wasn’t at
all the same.
She was taller and thinner and a very great deal older. But her age was
not a visible portent. She looked as pretty as a peach and as young as a
June day. It was in her mind and in the presentment of her personality
that Kitty had grown old. She had been like a flower in her youth, and
now she was like a piece of very bright, well-polished enamel.
Kitty was very kind to Peckham, but there was something as hard as steel
under her kindness. She was very gay, but there was something
unapproachably bitter under her gaiety. She was a woman of the world,
and she very soon became the talk of Rochett.
England was denuded of men, but Alington Farm was never long without
one. Generals, colonels, lieutenants, engineers, commanders of
men-of-war, each appeared and reappeared on leave, or stationed within
motoring distance, and Kitty entertained them all. There were only a
French cook, Peckham, and the kitchen maid, but there always seemed
money enough for what Kitty wanted. Her room was always full of new
French clothes and of strange French perfumes. There was a litter of
men’s photographs in presentation silver frames that Kitty rarely looked
at, and of endless letters that she barely read, and there was a good
deal of valuable jewelry that she frequently wore. It was perhaps not
surprising that Rochett should talk and that Peckham should suffer.
Peckham knew that Kitty had three hundred a year; so did Rochett.
Rochett drew its own conclusions, and Peckham refused to draw hers.
Mr. Costrelle came down a good deal oftener. He got on remarkably well
with whichever of Kitty’s friends happened to be there—they stayed at
the inn and spent their entire days at Alington—and Mr. Costrelle
seemed not in the least concerned by the regularity of their appearances
or the lateness of their departures.
“Well, you’ve got Miss Kitty back,” he said on the first of these
occasions to Peckham.
Peckham met his eyes in a way that was unusual with her.
“Yes, in a sense I have, sir,” she assented.
“Just the same as ever?” Mr. Costrelle remarked, smiling a little at the
fixity of Peckham’s regard.
“I don’t find Miss Kitty the same, sir,” Peckham ventured breathlessly.
“Ah, well,” Mr. Costrelle said, turning away to end the conversation,
“you must put up with what you have, Peckham. It’s a changing universe,
and wise people change with it. I don’t say they improve—that’s a
matter of opinion—but they change.”
Peckham did not expostulate directly with Kitty. She did not dare. The
vicar’s wife expostulated, and she left the drawing-room with flaming
cheeks and an air of having got the worst of it.
“Don’t let that woman in again if she calls,” Kitty remarked afterward
to Peckham. “She’s been impertinent. I don’t like impertinent women.”
But the vicar’s wife didn’t call again.
Gradually every one in the neighborhood—the women, that is to
say—ceased to call, every one except Daphne Wynne. Daphne came often,
and Peckham learned to love the sound of laughter which ensued—the old
easy laughter that reminded her of the times before Miss Kitty went away
and when she did not have that little cold ring in her voice, which made
her laughter now have a formidable and dangerous sound.
Kitty never laughed like that with Daphne Wynne; and now even Daphne
Wynne had stopped coming.
Peckham went slowly up-stairs to brush Miss Kitty’s hair. She was a
splendid brusher, and it was the hour of the day she liked most. When
Miss Kitty sat still in front of her long Italian mirror, with her
thick, black hair sweeping to her knees, she looked like a little child
again, and sometimes, when she was in the mood for it, she talked like a
little child to Peckham. But this afternoon Peckham was afraid. She knew
she must say something at last, she must risk the rebuff which would
cost her more than it cost the vicar’s wife. She could not go on any
longer saying nothing to Miss Kitty, when all the rest of the world had
turned against her and was saying everything it could.
While Mrs. Wynne continued to call, Peckham had said to herself that
Rochett was old-fashioned and stupid and didn’t know what went on in
good society among young people without any harm in it. But Mrs. Wynne
knew. Mrs. Wynne, with her kind, laughing eyes, would never stop seeing
her friends for any but reasons which Peckham would have to consider
grave.
Captain Arden was a grave reason. Miss Kitty wasn’t being fair with
Captain Arden. If she liked him, why didn’t she marry him? And if she
didn’t marry him, why didn’t she let him alone?
“Is that you, Peckham?” Kitty called out a little impatiently. “I’m
going out this afternoon, so you must be quick. I sha’n’t be in till
late.”
“Yes, Miss Kitty,” said Peckham. She took out the large ivory brush and
began with her steady hand a rhythmic movement of the brush over Kitty’s
thick, glossy hair.
Kitty’s hair shone as a well-bred horse’s coat shines under the hand of
the most careful of grooms; she smiled at Peckham in the glass.
“You’re grave to-day, Peckham,” she said. “You look rather like Lot’s
wife going to seed when she looked back on Sodom. I suppose I’m Sodom,
aren’t I? What have I been doing now? Anything worth your turning into
salt for? Do you think I’m a very wicked woman, Nannie?”
“Well, Miss, I’m sure I never think of you as a woman at all,” said
Peckham, evasively, “having brought you up, as it were, from a baby. Nor
would any one, the length you wear your skirts, and all that stocking
showing! I do wish you’d let me let down a tuck or two. The way people
can’t take their eyes off your legs is more than I can bear, Miss
Kitty.”
“But I like to have everybody’s eyes on my legs,” said Kitty, calmly.
“If you had as pretty ones as I have, Nannie, you’d wear your skirts up
to your knees, and thank God for them.”
“You let your tongue run away with you, Miss Kitty,” said Peckham,
severely. “Respectable people in my class of life don’t think anything
about their legs, and if I’d been given pink silk stockings by a young
man when I was a girl, and he not even a blood relation, I should have
died of shame.”
Kitty laughed.
“I made Captain Arden buy me those silk stockings, Nannie,” she
explained. “He’s very like you. He wanted to die of shame, but people
don’t die of shame as easily as you think. Papa says shame was invented
to keep modest people from boring amusing ones; only it hasn’t
succeeded.”
“Don’t you go quoting your papa to me, Miss Kitty,” said Peckham,
stiffly. “You know I never could bear to hear the things he said, before
an innocent child, too. I wonder Captain Arden’s sister don’t come in
with him sometimes like she used to. There isn’t a nicer lady anywhere
than Mrs. Wynne. Have you done anything to vex her, Miss?”
The small, white face between its two dark showers of falling hair
winced suddenly; a sullen expression came into Kitty’s eyes.
“I shall do as I like,” she said shortly, “and behave as I please. It’s
nothing to you, Nannie, if I choose to quarrel with Mrs. Wynne.”
Peckham went on brushing just as smoothly, just as steadily, but her
heart was out of it; it was everything in the world to her what Kitty
did, and Kitty knew it.
Kitty blinked her eyelids rapidly together and repented.
“Sorry, Nannie,” she said. “It was horrid of me to say that. Of course
you care, and I do, too, really. I am very fond of Daphne Wynne. I
expect she thinks I’m not playing the game with Captain Arden, you know,
and that’s put her back up.”
“If you was to marry Captain Arden, now,” said Peckham, persuasively,
“she wouldn’t go for to object to that, would she, Miss Kitty?”
Kitty laughed again, with that note of bitterness in it, as hard as a
stone under clear water.
“She’d have every right to, Nannie,” she said; “but I’m not, as a matter
of fact, thinking of marrying Captain Arden. I don’t happen to be a
marrying woman. I prefer a—single life.”
“If you’ll excuse my saying so, Miss Kitty,” said Peckham, severely,
“that’s a mistake on your part. A man behind you is a man behind you, as
it were. Ladies can be a great deal freer, with a gentleman to look
after them, than they can living alone; and Captain Arden’s such a nice
gentleman, too.”
“I don’t want to be looked after,” said Kitty, impatiently, “and why
should I marry Captain Arden any more than any of my other friends? I’ve
far grander matches under my hand if I wanted them, Nannie.”
“Yes, I know, my dear,” said Peckham, gently; “but you don’t treat them
as you treat Captain Arden. You have a way with him that seems more
comfortable like, more as if you were at home with him; and that’s what
I like to see in any one coming to the house so often.”
“Have I?” said Kitty, consideringly. “Have I a different way with him? I
must stop it if I have, you know, Nannie. That’s what I should call
being unfair. I suppose it’s because he’s had such a bad time; still,
that’s hardly a reason for giving him a worse.”
“If you feel like that about him Miss Kitty,” Peckham urged, “why not do
a little more for him? He’s longing for a home and to settle down with
you and all. I can see it in his eyes. Couldn’t you look at it like
something you could do for him, and he having had such a bad time, as
you say?”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” said Kitty, coldly.
“Besides, he’s come out of his bad time. It’s over for him; he’s come
out all right. I’m not terribly sorry for him.”
She closed her eyes for a moment on the vision of those who had not come
out all right. Peckham went on brushing her hair quietly and holding her
breath for fear of checking what Miss Kitty might say next, but all
Kitty said, after a minute’s pause, was:
“Where’s my scarlet tam-o’-shanter? I think it’s going to rain. And my
Burberry. I’ll put on my chiffon dress to-night; the one you say heathen
savages wouldn’t be seen in. As a matter of fact, Peckham, heathen
savages wouldn’t dream of wearing anything like so much. A feather
behind one ear and a necklace is quite sufficient for a heathen savage,
and if you go on looking as solemn as the last trump at a race meeting,
that’s the way I’ll come down to dinner to-night.”
Peckham whitened visibly under this dire threat.
“Some day, Miss Kitty,” she observed, “there’ll be a judgment upon you,
there will surely.”
“Well, I don’t mind if there is,” said Kitty, defiantly, snatching up
the scarlet cap and cramming it low over her eyes. “I’ve got a grievance
against the judge, if it comes to that, worth any two of his against me.
But don’t you worry, Nannie! It’s Captain Arden I’m going out with this
afternoon; that ought to please you. He’s as quiet as a suet pudding,
and as safe as a cathedral.”
“It don’t matter how particular gentlemen are if you aren’t, Miss
Kitty,” said Peckham, quietly. “What they begin as has nothing to do
with it. A hair turns them.”
“Well, I’m just going to try,” said Kitty, with a mischievous gleam in
her eyes as she left the room, “if a hair _will_ turn Captain Arden.”