"We've found a treasure," Mark Easter enthusiastically told Sir Julian.
"Miss Marchrose is the best worker I've ever struck. And she'll do
anything--doesn't mind what she turns her hand to. You'll have to see
her, Sir Julian--dashed good-looking girl into the bargain."
Sir Julian was not insensible to the attraction of the last
qualification, but he felt no security of endorsing Mark Easter's
ready acclamation of a pretty face. His own taste was eclectic and the
witless pink and white, the unsubtle contours that constitute the ideal
feminine to the average Englishman, held no appeal for him.
He soon saw Miss Marchrose at the College, in the room adjoining
Fuller's office that had been designed for the personal use of the Lady
Superintendent.
She was talking to Mark Easter, standing beside him in the window,
and the afternoon sun struck full upon her, revealing every little
finely-drawn line of fatigue round her eyes and mouth.
Sir Julian's first sensation was of involuntary, surprised satisfaction
at the slim, tall distinction of her whole bearing; the next, one of
surprise at Mark Easter's verdict on her looks.
"Ten years ago, perhaps," he reflected. "Now she probably varies
according to her state of health. But she'll never be called pretty."
Nevertheless, it seemed to him easy enough to trace a softer, rounder
contour to the oval face, and to erase in imagination the shadows
underlying black brows and hazel eyes, and the tiny, indelible
marks that some past bitterness had left at either corner of the
closely-curved mouth that was Miss Marchrose's most undeniably
beautiful feature.
Her hair was brown, a soft dead-leaf colour that held no gleams of
light and framed her square forehead loosely. Julian, looking at her,
received the impression that her face held possibilities full of colour
and animation, and yet was more often only faintly coloured, and
shadowed with weariness.
"Charming at eighteen--and probably not admired, except by an
occasional connoisseur--and now absolutely dependent for looks on the
state of her vitality," he summarised her to himself.
But he ceased to entertain any doubts as to the vitality of Miss
Marchrose when he heard her speak.
At the first sound of her voice he recognised that therein lay the
charm which had made Mark Easter declare her to be good-looking. The
soft beauty of a woman's speaking voice such as that of Miss Marchrose
might well prove responsible for greater delusions.
The contrast between the extraordinarily musical inflexions of her
tones and their rather curt, businesslike utterances almost amused
Julian.
He remembered Fuller's complacent recommendation, "Hard as nails, I
should think," and surmised that Miss Marchrose had addressed him with
the same abrupt, impersonal manner.
Unlike the majority of women, she seldom smiled. When she did so--and
presently Julian noticed that Mark Easter could elicit that quick,
soft change of expression more often than anyone else--it altered the
character of her face very much, and made her look much younger, and
rather appealing.
Her powers of organisation were admirable and, as Mark had said, she
was ready to concentrate her whole energies upon her work, indifferent,
apparently, to the after-office hours which constituted the whole
reality of life for those who only lived through the day's business in
order to attain their freedom at the end of it.
"I hope you have found comfortable accommodation in Culmouth," Sir
Julian said to her.
"Yes, thank you."
Miss Marchrose appeared so little expectant of any further interest
in her welfare that Julian almost wondered whether her definition of
officiousness might not prove to coincide with his own.
A month after her arrival, however, Mark Easter told the Rossiters that
Miss Marchrose was lodging at a farm outside Culmouth, nearly half an
hour's walk from the College.
"It wouldn't be far for her to come over here, if you thought of asking
her, Lady Rossiter," said Mark. "I'm afraid she must be rather lonely,
for she knows no one down here."
"I wonder why she came here," Edna remarked.
"For love of the country, I think," Mark answered, with sufficient
assurance in the assertion to make Julian wonder if he had received a
confidence.
"I want to know this Miss Marchrose," said Lady Rossiter with decision.
"I think I must go to the College to-morrow--I have been quite a long
time without seeing any of my friends there. Dear Mr. Fuller! I love
Mr. Fuller--he and I have such long talks over the welfare of the
staff."
"I shall be in there all day to-morrow. Won't you look in and let Miss
Marchrose give you a cup of tea?" said Mark.
"Of course I will. They love dispensing a little hospitality, don't
they, and I'm always _most_ ceremonious about returning their calls
here. Not that Miss Marchrose has come over yet with the others."
Mark looked a little perplexed, and Julian, unexpectedly even to
himself, said rather curtly:
"You won't be able to ask her to make one of your Sunday Band of Hope
expeditions, Edna."
"No?" said his wife, still smiling. "I know there are wheels within
wheels, and one reason, I think, why they trust me is that I respect
all the little prejudices and etiquettes that mean so much to them.
Give Miss Marchrose due warning, Mark, will you, that I shall call at
tea-time to-morrow and see if she is not too busy to let me have some
tea. I want to get into touch with all of them, you know."
Julian, in rather grim anticipation of the process as regarded Miss
Marchrose, announced his intention next day of accompanying his wife to
the College.
"My dear, I am not often honoured, but shall we not rather overwhelm
the young woman?"
"I don't think she is easily overwhelmed."
Edna laughed musically--that is to say, Sir Julian felt convinced that
she herself so designated the low, controlled sound of amusement that
she so seldom enough judged it _à propos_ to emit.
But her voice was very serious the next instant, and had even dropped a
semitone, as she made enquiry:
"Julian, can you tell me yet whether she is really connected with poor
Clarence's tragedy?"
"No, certainly not--I haven't tried to find out."
"I wonder why, when you knew that the whole question touched me very
nearly. Nothing has much sacredness to you, Julian, has it?"
"I see nothing sacred in the amorous extravagances of your cousin
Clarence, certainly."
"And you care very little whether the woman who is charged with the
welfare of all those young men and women--sharers, after all, of our
common humanity--can give them true, pure-hearted love and service and
fellowship," mused Edna. "And yet to me those ideals which you dismiss
so lightly seem the most important things in all the world. You see,
Julian, love seems to me to matter more than anything in the whole
world."
"In the case of a Lady Superintendent for the College, a knowledge of
shorthand is more important," said Julian indifferently.
He had long since fallen into the habit of uttering the cheap jeers
that had once inadequately served to protect him from blatant
references that now had almost lost effect.
"God forbid that I should condemn anyone--who am I, to judge of
another?--but I can't pretend to you, Julian, that it won't become
a question of conscience with me, if I find that a position of such
responsibility towards my boys and girls is held by a woman who could
throw a man over heartlessly, break her given pledge, just at the
moment when he was more in need of her than ever before."
"If she was heartless, he may have been well rid of her, as I said
before."
"At what a cost! His first faith shattered, poor boy. You remember what
that nurse told me about him."
"I remember perfectly, but I should think both Clarence Isbister and
the girl he married would very much rather have it forgotten."
"I don't forget easily, Julian."
"Then in kindness to Clarence, I should advise you to keep your
recollections to yourself. I doubt if he would thank you or anyone else
for reminding the world that he ever saw fit to beat a tattoo with his
head on the walls of his nursing-home for the sake of a young woman
whom he afterwards forgot all about."
"We can never tell that. Certain wounds do not heal, although they may
be hidden from sight."
"Then I'm sorry for Mrs. Clarence."
"I wonder if Miss Marchrose knows that he has married," said Edna,
rather viciously.
"I wish you would not take it for granted that this is the same woman,"
said Julian irritably.
Edna laid two fingers upon his sleeve in a manner designed to emphasise
her words.
"I shall take nothing for granted. But you see, Julian, I can't take
life quite as you do--quite as callously, as cynically. There is a big
responsibility for those of us who see a little--ah, such a very little
way it is--further into the heart of things. We can only hope, and
give, and spend ourselves--and judge no man."
Julian, who disliked being touched, moved his arm out of reach, and
replied to these humanitarian sentiments unsympathetically.
"Your remarks have not the slightest bearing upon the case, Edna."
He thought to himself bitterly, not for the first time, that a stronger
man would reject the weapons of obvious, meaningless satire, but
nervous irritability again and again drove him to seek an outlet in
words that he despised.
In silence, he entered the College with Edna, and let her proceed
to the Supervisor's room, aware that he had purposely timed their
arrival for an hour when Fairfax Fuller would be engaged in one of the
classrooms. Few things discomposed Mr. Fuller more than a feminine
intrusion which could not be accounted for by a question of business.
"He will be disappointed," seriously said Edna, turning away from the
empty room. "But we shall have other talks. I don't despair yet of
getting Fuller to Culmhayes, for all his misogyny." It was a principle
with Lady Rossiter, her husband knew, never to allow their differences
to degenerate into an offended silence when they were alone.
He sometimes thought that he could have borne it all better had she
been a woman to make scenes, and to oppose him with tears or temper,
instead of with that considered, brightly-unconscious, eternal
loving-kindness.
They found Miss Marchrose in her own room, at work on the typewriter.
She wore a long blue pinafore, and Julian noticed with an odd
satisfaction that this was one of the days when her variable face
showed colour and unmistakable beauty.
"Good afternoon," said Julian. "I hope we are not too early. My
wife--Miss Marchrose."
Lady Rossiter, shaking hands, revealed her rather large white teeth in
a smile, but Miss Marchrose, after her fashion, remained calmly serious.
"Won't you sit down?"
Lady Rossiter glanced slowly round the room.
It was a large light office, the window thrown open and looking on to
the square paved court at the back of the house; the furniture scanty
and of the most utilitarian description.
Miss Marchrose's writing-table was orderly, although papers were
stacked upon it in wicker trays. A telephone with a glass mouthpiece
stood at one corner and an electric reading-lamp at the other.
The typewriter had a very small table to itself, and a high chair with
a small cushion placed in front of it. Except for three or four chairs
and a strip of carpet, there was no other furniture in the room.
"I've not seen this room furnished before," Edna Rossiter observed.
"You've hardly had time for the finishing touches yet, though, have
you?"
Her tone was that of assertion, not of enquiry, but Miss Marchrose
replied as though to a question.
"I'm afraid there isn't anything more to come. Mr. Fuller has kindly
let me have everything I want."
"Even to a glass mouthpiece for the telephone?" enquired Edna smoothly.
A similar adornment distinguished her own telephone in the boudoir at
Culmhayes, and Julian knew that his wife frequently drew attention to
it by apologies for her own fastidiousness.
"That was brought by Mr. Easter. I used to dislike the old one so much,
and he found it out, and very kindly gave me that."
"I shall talk to Mr. Easter about infringing my patent," laughed Edna.
She turned to her husband.
"Mark must have seen the glass one in my boudoir, of course."
Julian was perfectly aware of the instinct which had prompted his wife
to make use, in addressing herself to him, of Mark Easter's first name.
He smiled rather grimly.
"I think you must have some flowers in here," Edna said to Miss
Marchrose. "It does make all the difference, doesn't it, when one is
chained to a desk all day?"
"But I'm not chained to a desk," said Miss Marchrose tranquilly. "I
take two or three classes, and I'm very often in Mr. Fuller's room.
Besides, I don't like flowers in an office; do you?"
"Ah, well," said Edna, in a voice the measured graciousness of which
contrasted with the Superintendent's matter-of-fact utterance, "flowers
mean rather a lot to me. I'm not happy unless I have a great many all
round me.... But I know many people simply look on flowers as flowers,
of course. Tell me, do you care for out-of-doors?"
Miss Marchrose looked unintelligent.
"Because I have some little nature-classes, as we call them, for
looking into the heart of our West Country rather more closely. One
week I take my little band down to the sea, another time up to the
woods, sometimes just to study the wonderful colour in a Devonshire
lane. I can't help thinking you might find a great deal to admire round
Duckpool Farm. Isn't that where you're staying?"
"Yes. I hope you're going to let me give you some tea, Lady Rossiter."
"Presently, but you mustn't let us put you out. Don't alter anything--I
love taking things just as I find them.... But tell me why you went to
the farm; I thought it rather wonderful of you to strike out such a new
line, instead of going to rooms in Church Street or St. Mary-Welcome's,
as they all do."
"There are no rooms vacant in Church Street, I believe," said Miss
Marchrose, very curtly indeed.
Julian felt convinced that she wished the implication made that had
rooms been available she would have selected them, and equally certain
that the implication would have been untrue.
"Is Easter here to-day?" he enquired abruptly.
"Yes; I'll let him know you've come. He generally has tea in here, and
so does Mr. Fuller."
She went to the telephone.
"You mustn't let us interrupt your work if there's anything you want to
finish before tea," Edna told her. "I know what it means to all of you
to get through by six o'clock sharp, especially in these late summer
evenings when it's already getting dark early. It must be too cruel to
be robbed of even a few moments of fresh air and liberty."
Julian remembered Mark's eulogies.
"What time do you leave the College, I wonder?" he asked her, smiling
slightly.
"It depends on the work. There's been a good deal of correspondence
lately and I've stayed late to finish it up. If I may, there is just
something I want to finish here."
She laid her hand on the typewriter.
"Please do."
Without further apology, Miss Marchrose sat down to her machine and
completed the sheet upon which she had been engaged. As she drew it off
the roller, Mark Easter came in.
She looked up with a sort of pleasure in her glance, and handed him a
thin pile of foolscap sheets.
"Five copies," she said.
Mark glanced at the papers.
"I'm so grateful!" he exclaimed. "That's exactly what I wanted. Do you
know what that is, Sir Julian?"
"What?"
"Estate business," laughed Mark. "Miss Marchrose is good enough to help
me through with some of it, as she _only_ works ten hours a day here."
"You ought to be ashamed of yourself for letting her do it."
"Well," said Miss Marchrose gaily, "he boils my kettle for me."
Mark had placed the big kettle on the gas-ring and cleared the table of
the heavy typewriter.
He was in his usual excellent spirits, and made indifferent jokes at
which Miss Marchrose laughed with an absence of constraint such as
Julian had not seen in her before. It was evident that Mark's gift for
making friends had not failed him, any more than his magical capacity
for diffusing contentment throughout his surroundings.
Contentment, however, stopped short at Lady Rossiter, as it was always
apt to do when the focus of general attention was diverted to an object
which she considered unworthy.
"Isn't Mr. Fuller coming in to tea?" She quietly interrupted Mark's
exchange of chaffing allusions with Miss Marchrose.
"He generally comes. I'll go and dig him out," Mark volunteered.
"Your presence has frightened him away, Edna," said her husband, not
without malice. "Fuller is a shy bird."
Edna smiled serenely.
"Poor Mr. Fuller, he and I are great friends."
It might be doubted whether Lady Rossiter found cause for thankfulness
in the presence of her great friend when he eventually joined the
tea-party, his face black with scowls at the interruption to his work
and suffused with shyness at her complacent greeting.
Miss Marchrose poured out tea and talked to Julian, who sat next her,
and Mark, to whom self-consciousness was unknown, handed plates of
bread-and-butter and cut up a small plum-cake and endeavoured to win
smiles from the recalcitrant Fuller. Edna, her voice modulated to
careful sweetness, manufactured kindly conversation.
But Mr. Fuller, his elbows very much squared and his bullet head
thrust well forward, devoted his energies to the rapid demolition of
his meal, and replied monosyllabically to Mark's kindly derision and
Lady Rossiter's benevolences alike. His shyness, however, appeared to
place him under a mysterious compulsion to recite aloud, in an inward
voice, any scrap of printed matter upon which his eye chanced to fall,
regardless of relevance. This necessity, though common enough in any
assembly of not too congenial strangers, did not add to continuity of
discourse.
As thus, when Lady Rossiter moved a pot of plum jam towards him, saying
that she was so sorry that the injunction to make _no_ difference had
not been attended to, Mr. Fuller was constrained to reply in a very
severe way, No; he never ate jam--Three gold medals at the Paris and
Vienna Exhibitions--but it was there every day, he believed.
"It is there, because _I_ like it," said Miss Marchrose. "They never
had anything but bread-and-butter till I came."
Edna's ever-ready eyebrows went up, but she still addressed herself
exclusively to Fairfax Fuller.
"Plum jam is quite my favourite. I never really care for the expensive
varieties, or think them a _bit_ better than the others."
"Inspection invited at the manufactories." Fuller pursued his way,
almost turning the jam-pot upside down in an apparently agonised search
for further literature.
"Jam on bread-and-butter is quite a luxury. Julian and I never get it
at home," Lady Rossiter persevered.
"London, Edinburgh, _and_ at Sharplington in Essex," said Fuller,
without looking at her.
"Have you ever been over one of those big factories? It would be rather
interesting," Mark said, in a charitable endeavour to introduce some
element of continuity into the conversation. Lady Rossiter at once
seconded the attempt.
"I've always so wished to have an opportunity of that sort. I should
like to know just how the poor factory hands live, and what the
conditions of work really are in those great places."
"I don't suppose that Sharplington in Essex is on the same scale as
London or Edinburgh," Mark suggested.
At which interesting initial stage of an interchange of views, Mr.
Fuller suddenly disconcerted everybody by looking straight across the
table at the almanack which hung upon the wall, and declaring with a
sort of suppressed violence:
"Five thousand souls gained last year alone--The Church Mission
Society."
Edna's pale skin absolutely flushed and she set her lips. Mark hastily
bent down to pick up an imaginary handkerchief, and Miss Marchrose
laughed.
"That's settled it," thought Julian. "Edna will never forgive her that
laugh."
He saw no reason to reverse the judgment while his wife took her cool,
kindly farewell of the Lady Superintendent.
"You must come out to Culmhayes one day. Of course, I know Saturday
afternoons and Sundays are your only free times, so I never issue
workday invitations. But I'm always so glad to see any of you, and you
can just rest and do anything you please, and not feel obliged to make
conversation."
Julian watched the recipient of these attentions rather curiously.
She withdrew her hand from Lady Rossiter's kind, enveloping clasp and
put it into the pocket of her pinafore very deliberately.
"On Saturdays I'm going to the estate office with you, I hope. Didn't
we arrange that?" she asked Mark Easter.
"If you have nothing better to do, I should be most grateful.
Everything is in confusion there, since my clerk had to leave on
account of sudden illness."
"I shall like it very much," said Miss Marchrose, with a very charming
smile, and still addressing herself exclusively to Mark. "And I've
nothing better to do at all, thank you."
Julian, while inwardly applauding her, wondered whether she had herself
been entirely aware of the full efficiency of the oblique retaliation.
On the whole, he thought that she had.
V
As Julian pursued his acquaintance with Miss Marchrose--and he was by
no means minded to let it drop--he came more and more to the conclusion
that she had been quite as conscious as himself of the mutual
antagonism which Edna and she had roused in one another on the rather
disastrous occasion of their meeting.
She neither came over to Culmhayes nor showed any disposition to join
Lady Rossiter's cherished nature-classes, the final sessions of which
were drawing near with the approach of the colder weather.
Julian saw her at the College, where she worked hard and successfully,
and once or twice at his own estate office, where she frequently
replaced Mark Easter's absent clerk.
"I don't know that we ought to let you spend so much time here, though
it is quite invaluable to the business," he once said to her.
To which Miss Marchrose returned very candidly that it was always the
greatest possible pleasure to her to do anything for Mr. Easter.
Julian quite believed it.
The friendship established between her and Mark was founded on
excellent good comradeship, a mutual respect for one another's power of
work, and the very admirable sense of humour possessed by each.
Julian, watching the frank gaiety of her manner as she came to accept
him in the light of Mark's friend instead of merely as a director
of the College, found himself wondering from time to time if Miss
Marchrose, sharp-tongued and quick-witted, apt at satire even at her
gentlest, could by any possibility ever have been the heroine where
Captain Clarence Isbister, youthful, sporting, and essentially British,
had once been the hero. His wife appeared inclined to let the question
rest, and Julian had no desire to remind her of it; but for the
satisfaction of his own curiosity, he told himself, he would have liked
to establish the proof or otherwise of Fuller's verdict to which he was
only half inclined to subscribe--"hard as nails."
It was Edna, however, who returned to the charge of Miss Marchrose's
identity.
"I might have known it," her husband reflected.
He heard with his accustomed phlegm of manner, that Edna, conducting
the nature-class through a certain small wood just off the Rossiter
estate, in order to introduce it to a sunset effect visible through the
beech-trees, had met with an interruption before anyone had had time to
do more than ejaculate a preliminary "Wonderful!"
"They are apt to be a shade blatant, poor dears! and talk about the sun
looking like a ball of fire in the sky and that sort of thing."
"You could scarcely ask for a more accurate description, after all,"
murmured Julian.
"But what one's there for, of course, is to get them to see a little
deeper, a little more into the heart of Nature's beauty and wonderful,
wonderful tenderness. I wanted to show them the glint of red on the
stems of those trees, and the miracle of _hush_ that comes over the
world just as the sun goes down...."
Lady Rossiter paused, absorbed in the regretful retrospect of the
showman whose curtain has accidentally come down with a run in the
midst of his star performer's best turn.
"Well, what happened? Did the sun refuse to go down after all?" was
Julian's rather ribald interruption to her thoughts.
"The sun was in the most exquisite blaze of red and gold, and one
could only hold one's breath in awe at the most wonderful pageant the
world can show, when that Marchrose woman from Culmouth College came
crashing through the undergrowth, ringing a bicycle-bell, and with her
back--actually, _her back_--to that sunset!"
"What did you do?" asked Julian, with considerable interest.
Lady Rossiter made the strangely contradictory statement that her
sex, when describing the character of a crisis, so frequently appears
compelled to proffer.
"I didn't say one word, Julian. I felt that I simply couldn't have
spoken. I couldn't help holding up my hand and saying very quietly
indeed: 'Ah, hush! Can't you feel that it _hurts_, somehow, to disturb
such a moment as this?' It was such hideous profanity, Julian!"
"Did you tell her so?"
"I could never say anything that would deliberately hurt another,"
Lady Rossiter made grave reply. "But I laid my hand on that terrible
bicycle, and the girl had to keep still for a minute or two."
"Was she angry?"
"I hope I sent out some calming, loving thoughts, for the whole evening
was terribly jarred, one could feel it. Poor foolish, defiant creature!
I could see her hands shaking, as she tried to take her machine from
me. I couldn't let her go like that, of course, and I tried to say a
little something, very quietly, about the glory of God's own evening
light all round us. But she kept her back to the sunset all the time.
"And, Julian, to my dismay and astonishment, she was not alone. Mark
was with her."
"Why shouldn't he be?"
"Have you forgotten my poor Clarence so soon?" reproachfully enquired
Lady Rossiter, whose cousinly affection for her poor Clarence appeared
to increase by leaps and bounds in proportion to the growth of her
disesteem for Miss Marchrose.
"Clarence has nothing to do with it. The circumstances are entirely
dissimilar."
"We can't tell that in the case of a woman whom I _must_, much as I
dislike uttering any shadow of condemnation, call utterly heartless.
Shall I ever forget what that hospital nurse told me of poor Clarence's
state of mind after that heartless betrayal----"
"In any circumstances, Edna, Mark isn't in the least likely to knock
his head against the walls of the cottage, and if he does, they will
very probably fall about his ears. I wish he would attend to his own
house, before doing up the tenants'! Those children have nearly broken
down the whole of the garden palings. But go on--did you achieve any
_rapprochement_ between Mark and the sunset, or was he also ringing
bicycle-bells and turning his back on it?"
"Mark made some foolish explanation about seeing the girl back to
Duckpool Farm, but they were evidently walking, and pushing the bicycle
between them."
"I don't see how they could do anything else, if there was only one
bicycle," said Julian, idly desirous of making more obvious a want of
sympathy that was already perfectly well _en evidence_.
"You may not understand it, Julian, but Mark is very dear to me. To
you he may be merely a good fellow, and an excellent estate agent,
but to me he has been something more ever since that ghastly tragedy
of his wife. I gave him all the help that a woman could give, then,
and I can't ever forget it. I can't let Mark break his heart a second
time. Not that she's attractive, or even pretty," said Edna, distinctly
divided between her determination to exploit Mark Easter's peril and
her reluctance to allow to Miss Marchrose any of the usual advantages
attributed to a charmer of men....
"I know no one less likely than Mark Easter to make a fool of himself
in that particular way," said Julian emphatically.
"It's not Mark that I'm afraid of," inconsistently said Lady Rossiter.
"A friendship with a good, true woman is often a man's best safeguard."
Julian wondered whether it would be worth while to simulate a belief
that the good, true woman in question was Miss Marchrose, but Edna left
him no time to adopt this amiable pose.
"I am going to find out once and for all whether that girl--I suppose
she calls herself a girl--is really poor Clarence's evil genius or not.
Personally, I believe she is."
Julian left it at that, not desirous of sparing his wife the trouble
of her proposed investigation by telling her Miss Marchrose's identity
without more ado.
Making his own observations, he thought Mark in no danger of falling
a victim to the _beaux yeux_ which, if their smile was chiefly kept
for answering his, were far more often bent upon a typewriter or an
account-book than diverted towards him. Fuller continued to extol the
Lady Superintendent, and Sir Julian went oftener to the College than
usual, not concealing from himself that he found the enigma of her
personality of interest.
She continued gaily impersonal towards him until one evening in
October, when he overtook her at the door of the College, and on an
impulse born of unacknowledged, overwhelming loneliness, suddenly asked
her if she would care to drive down to the shore with him and go on to
the farm afterwards.
He had long ago decided that Miss Marchrose, although her manner was
often abrupt, was devoid of shyness as of conventional politeness. If
his suggestion displeased her, she would undoubtedly decline it.
But she exclaimed with undisguised pleasure, and took her place in the
car beside him.
Julian was more than usually dissatisfied with life, and made no
attempt at conversation. It struck upon him with relief that Miss
Marchrose was equally silent, and presently he glanced at her.
She was leaning back, her hair blown from her temples by the soft,
salt-laden breeze, and she looked neither young nor pretty in the
waning light, but exceedingly weary.
"Do you like your work?" Julian enquired with extreme abruptness, and a
sudden, genuine desire for information.
"At the College? Very much indeed."
Her tone was guarded, he felt.
"I mean the whole thing. What made you take up this sort of thing? Tell
me about it."
He almost heard her hesitate before she answered with careful lightness:
"Oh, I had to do something, and I should dislike teaching children--and
do it very badly. I trained as a shorthand-typist, and am really
qualified for a secretary. I rather like doing shorthand."
The acuteness of his disappointment actually surprised Sir Julian. He
realised that he had made the most tentative of efforts to get into
touch with one whom he vaguely thought of as a kindred spirit, and that
he had been lightly and unmistakably rebuffed. He kept silence, making
a pretence of absorption in his driving.
Unexpectedly, Miss Marchrose made a sort of inarticulate sound of
interrogation.
"Sir Julian?"
He turned his head.
"I'm sorry," she said gently. "You really wanted to know, didn't you?"
"Yes."
"After I'd said that, I--I thought you were disappointed."
"You are very quick to detect an atmosphere."
"I'm sorry," she said again. "Sometimes I don't realise when
the platitudes that one keeps as stock answers to enquiries are
unnecessary."
"Thank you," said Julian.
"I took up work because I was tired of living at home. A good many
girls are like that. However, in our case there was very little money,
and it was just as well that I should do something. I thought I should
like secretarial work; it all sounded interesting, and I had always
cared for books and writing. I didn't know in the least what it was
going to be like. I'd never even been to school. The six months at
the training institute wasn't bad; it was all quite new, and I liked
learning the things, and doing well in the shorthand tests. At the
end of the course, the training institute undertook to find one a
post--and they got me a job with a firm in London. It was supposed to
be a very good one--short hours and decent pay. My mother--my father
was dead--was upset at the thought of my staying on in London alone,
but I wrote and said that I'd been able to manage perfectly while I was
at the institute--one lived 'in' there, as a matter of fact--and that
anyway I'd made up my mind to do it, and to make a success of it. After
all, I was twenty-two--and she could give me a small allowance, and I
thought that with that and my salary it wouldn't be very difficult."
"I should imagine that by yourself, in London, at twenty-two, it might,
on the contrary, be very difficult indeed," said Julian significantly.
"Not in the way you mean," Miss Marchrose remarked candidly. "From
what one reads in novels, girls who work have to be on their guard
from morning till night against--undesirable attentions. It was the
one thing I thought I should have to beware of.... And all I can say
is, that unless one asks for trouble of that sort, it simply doesn't
happen to the average woman."
Julian thought of his own inward verdict on a beauty that had probably
been very much too subtle and unvivid for universal recognition, and
said nothing.
"I was five years working in London," Miss Marchrose told him simply,
"and I have never in my life been spoken to or followed in the street.
And no one has ever tried to make love to me."
Julian noted with a flash of appreciation that she did not add,
"against my will."
"All the difficulties and all the miseries were quite different. Things
I'd never thought of, or realised at all...."
"Tell me about them."
"I was ashamed of minding it so much--but the difference between being
a girl living at home, however poor, and a girl going out every day to
earn her own living. There were such a lot of things I didn't know.
For instance, I had to be told, at that first office I went to, about
calling the manager 'sir' when I spoke to him, and his son was 'Mr.
Percy' to the clerks and typists, always.
"And then I'd never lived in London, and at first I used to go to
Slater's Restaurant for lunch, and think how economical I was, and
all the time the other typists were laughing at me and thinking I was
giving myself airs because, of course, I ought to have gone to Lyons
or an A.B.C. or bought sandwiches and eaten them in the office. And
another thing I hadn't realised beforehand was the deadly monotony
of it--day after day, sitting in the clatter of all those machines,
and typing as hard as one could go. Nothing to look forward to,
except Saturday afternoon and Sunday, and then I was dead tired, and
I hated my rooms, because they were cheap and ugly and uncomfortable.
They weren't really, you know--I had a bedroom and a sitting-room,
that first year, and a fire whenever I wanted it--most people have a
bed-sitting-room and go to bed when they want to keep warm--but I'd
come straight from my home."
She paused.
"How long did you stand it?"
"Eight months. And then I knew I'd been a fool, and I thought that if
my mother would forgive me and let me come home, I'd try again. She
had a small business and I could have helped her--she always wanted me
to. But of course my pride didn't like giving in, and after I'd once
made up my mind that I _was_ going back, it seemed easier to bear it
all, and so I kept on putting off writing the letter, thinking I'd at
least have done a year of it before collapsing. And then my mother
died, quite suddenly, and so I never went home at all, except just to
settle everything up--it wasn't even our own house. And there was not
much more money than before, so when I'd sold the business, which was
luckily quite easy, I took another post."
"Was that the only alternative?" asked Julian, his voice as
matter-of-fact as hers had been throughout.
"There was an aunt, but she had two daughters of her own, and they
seemed to think it extremely providential that I _could_ do something
for myself. They are very kind, and I generally spend my holidays with
them. They live near London."
"You don't like London," Julian affirmed, guided by something in her
tone.
"No, not much. However, the aunt's husband got me the offer of a post
as shorthand teacher at that big place in Southampton Row, and I went
there, and it was a success. I got a lot of private tuition work, and
they raised my salary every year, and I actually saved money. That's
why I'm here now."
Julian remembered Mark Easter: "She comes here for love of the country,
I think."
"But I've never liked any work better than this," said Miss Marchrose
warmly, "and I wanted to be in the country. In some ways, I'm happier
here than I've been anywhere in my life."
"I'm glad. Only I'm afraid perhaps it's lonely, if you don't know
anyone here. Do they make you comfortable at the farm?"
"Very, and I've always wanted to live on a farm."
Julian stopped the car as they came in sight of the shelving declivity
of fine, powdery sand, lying in uneven hillocks, with tufts of stiff
grasses amongst the boulders.
A broken line of white, flecking the darkness, showed the receding tide.
"Would you like to go down to the edge of the sea?" Julian asked her.
"I'd like to very much."
She did not ask whether he meant to accompany her, but after a moment
moved away, and Julian remained in the car, feeling the sting of the
salt on his lips and listening to the faint sound of the water on the
grey expanse of gleaming sand.
No one knew how many nights in the year he came to the edge of Culmouth
sands and paid silent, involuntary tribute there.
He came nearer to making a confidence than perhaps ever before when
Miss Marchrose came back again, and took her place beside him.
"I always wanted to go to sea," said Sir Julian Rossiter slowly. "It
wasn't practicable because I was the only son, and my father wouldn't
hear of it, on account of the place. But that was what I wanted."
"Yes, I see," said Miss Marchrose.
And something underlying the note of beauty which he had before admired
in her voice carried to Sir Julian the conviction that she did see.
He drove her to the gate of the farm, and they talked a little, with
comfortable inconsequence, on the way.
When she got out of the car, Miss Marchrose thanked him cordially, and
her movements, as she crossed the yard and went up the stone steps to
the house door, were no longer eloquent of weariness.
Julian drove back to Culmhayes through the dark lanes.
It was characteristic of him that he should observe, as he took his
place opposite to his wife at the end of the dinner-table that evening:
"I took Miss Marchrose back in the car this evening. She came out of
the College just as I was going past."
He was quite aware, without looking at her, of the exact angle to which
Edna's eyebrows raised themselves.
"I thought she stayed at the College working till all hours, and then
had to be escorted home by unfortunate Mark?"
"Apparently the procedure is not invariable."
Edna waited until the servants were out of the room, and then spoke
again.
"Julian--about that girl--I couldn't leave it at that, you know. God
knows how much I dislike any form of interference, but then it's for
Mark Easter--I can never feel that Mark hasn't a very real claim on me."
"In the name of fortune, Edna, what are you talking about?"
"You mean," said Edna, fixing him with a coldly thoughtful eye, and
perfectly aware that he meant nothing of the sort. "You mean that, with
my ideals, _all_ humanity has a claim on me. I do hold that it is so,
and, as you know, I am always ready to give what I can, though it may
not be silver or gold. I was rather struck by a curious little incident
this morning, Julian, which illustrates my meaning. I think I must tell
you."
Edna placed her white arms upon the table and leant a little forward,
her handsome face full of the absorption that is the expression common
to most faces, handsome or otherwise, of which the owner is talking
freely about him or herself.
"For the last week or two I have been having a poor woman out from
Culmouth in here to do some sewing, because Miss Brown is ill. I went
in to talk to her for a minute or two, the first day she came. I hate
them to feel as though they weren't of the same flesh and blood as
oneself--and I was struck by the sort of hard dreariness in her face,
as though she had never known the meaning of love or gladness. I asked
no questions, of course, but just laid my hand on her shoulder and said
quietly, 'I don't know if you've ever read Browning--perhaps not--but
there is a line of his that I want you to think about while you're
mending those curtains: "God's in His Heaven--all's right with the
world!"' And then I left her.
"Well, she didn't make very much response, poor thing, but every time
I saw her when she came here I've just, in my own thoughts, thrown a
little Cloak of Love round her. It seemed to me all that I could do.
And this morning--after all these weeks, when one just went quietly on
without any visible sign of success--this morning, Julian, when I came
into the sewing-room--she looked up and smiled."
Julian looked as though this consummation struck him as being in the
nature of an anti-climax.
"Day after day, I'd thrown my little Cloak of Love round her--and she'd
come to feel the warmth of it at last. It has made me very happy,
Julian. You will smile at me, very likely, but the winning of that poor
little seamstress to a brighter, truer outlook seems to me--well, just
extraordinarily worth while."
There was silence, while Lady Rossiter's softened expression denoted
that she was devoting her reflections to the recent conquest. But
presently she went back to her original ground of departure.
"About Mark, though--I care for him too much to see him take any risks.
And I find--would to God I hadn't!--that my original instinct was
correct."
Lady Rossiter waited, but her husband showed no disposition to ask for
elucidation, and she was obliged to go on unquestioned.
"It was this very girl--Pauline Marchrose--who threw over Clarence
Isbister because of his accident."
For once, Sir Julian displayed astonishment in the right place.
"Good Lord!" he said, in a startled voice. "I'd forgotten all about
that business."
There was a long pause. Then Julian remarked slowly:
"Yes--I should rather like to hear the rights of that story. Perhaps,
after all, Clarence Isbister wasn't quite such an ass as I always
thought him."