‘Dear, if you knew what tears they shed
Who live apart from home and friend,
To pass my house, by pity led,
Your steps would tend.’
It is the face that had peeped out of the branches of the sycamore-tree
a little while ago. A charming face! The eyes glance down the little
lane, and then, suddenly seeing Susan, rest with a frightened expression
on her. As this is the first time in all Susan’s experience that anyone
has ever betrayed the smallest fear of her, she naturally gives herself
up to the contemplation of her new-born slave. Her eyes and those of the
mysterious stranger meet.
‘Oh, how pretty!’ thinks Susan to herself, but she says nothing, being
lost in wonder and admiration; and the girl, peeping out of the doorway,
as if disheartened, draws back again, and will in another minute
disappear altogether, but for Carew.
He makes a sharp gesture.
‘Wait!’ cries he, in a low tone, though hardly conscious that he is
speaking at all. And again the pretty frightened head comes into sight
between the leaves of the luxuriant ivy that frames the gate.
‘Susan!’ says Carew, in a voice of low and hurried entreaty; and Susan,
responding to it, speeds quickly up the road and into the little
gateway.
‘Oh, come in—come in!’ breathes the stranger in a whisper, putting out
her hands and catching Susan’s in a soft grasp. ‘I have seen you so
often; I’—flushing and smiling timidly—‘have watched you from the
sycamore many a day. And it’s very lonely here. You will come in for a
moment, won’t you?’
Susan smiles back at her, and passes through the small green gate. Ella,
pleased and palpitating, glances back, to see Carew looking after them
like a young culprit at the door of a forbidden paradise.
‘Won’t you come too?’ cries she, beneath her breath, in that soft,
curiously frightened sort of a way that seems to belong to her. ‘Hurry!
hurry!’ She looks anxious, and it is only, indeed, when Carew has come
inside the gate, and she has with her own fingers fastened and secured
it, that the brightness returns to her face.
‘It’s very good of you,’ says she, smiling rather shyly at Susan.
‘Oh no!’ cries Susan, with a charming courtesy that belongs to her; ‘it
is very good of you to let us come and see you. You know’—softly—‘we had
heard—understood—that you did not wish to be intruded on. That
is’—stammering faintly—‘that you didn’t wish to see people, and so—’
‘It is all quite true,’ says the girl distinctly. ‘I don’t want to see
people—not everyone, you know. But sometimes when I hear your voices
over there’—pointing towards the Rectory garden—‘laughing and talking, I
have felt a little lonely.’ She is looking at Susan, and Susan can see
that her eyes now are a little misty. ‘To-day’—wistfully—‘you were
laughing a great deal.’
‘Yes, yes; I wish we hadn’t been,’ says Susan, who is beginning to feel
distinctly contrite, until she remembers that, after all, some tears
were mingled with her mirth. ‘But now that we have met, you will come
and join us sometimes, won’t you?—and, indeed, to-day? I wish you had
come to-day. We should all have been glad to see you—shouldn’t we,
Carew?’
‘I am sure you know that,’ says Carew to Ella. A warm colour is dyeing
his handsome young face, and there is the tenderest, most reverential
expression in his voice. Carew is of that age when ‘the light that lies
in a lady’s eyes’ can mean heaven to him.
‘I shall never leave this place,’ says Ella quickly. ‘All I want is to
stay here, in this lovely garden, by myself.’
‘Yet you said you felt lonely,’ says Susan anxiously.
‘Yes—I know.’ She looks down, as if puzzled, uncertain how to go on.
‘Still, I would rather be lonely than go out into the world again.’
‘Poor thing!’ thinks Susan. ‘I was right; no doubt she has just lost
everyone that was dear to her.’ She glances at Ella, as if in search of
crape, but Ella’s navy-blue skirt and pretty pale-blue linen blouse seem
miles away from woe; and, yes, Betty had seen that blue bow near her
neck.
‘I know this garden so well,’ says Susan, with a view to changing the
sad subject. ‘We used to come here often before you came. Mr. Wyndham
sometimes stayed here for weeks at a time, but now, of course, that is
all changed. Oh, I see you have planted out some asters in the round
bed. They will be lovely later on. I suppose’—thoughtfully—‘you like
gardening?’
‘I love it!’ says Ella, with enthusiasm. ‘Only I don’t know anything
about it. Mrs. Denis gives me hints.’
‘I love it, too,’ says Susan, ‘but for all that’—as if a little ashamed
of herself—‘I like to see people sometimes. I couldn’t live on gardening
alone, and you’ll find you can’t, either. In fact’—gaily—‘you have found
it out already. That’s why you called us in. Oh, you’ll have to come
over to our place. Do you like tennis?’
‘I have never played it.’
‘Golf, then?’
‘No.’ Her tone is very sad, and Carew turns sharply upon poor Susan, who
had only meant to do her best.
‘There are other things in the world besides golf and tennis,’ says he.
‘Oh, of course—of course,’ says Susan hastily. ‘It is only people who
live in the country who ever really care about things like that, and no
doubt you—’
‘I don’t believe I know anything at all,’ says Ella, very gently.
‘Well, you know us now, at all events,’ says Carew very happily, with
the light and ready manner that belongs to all large families. His tone
is a little shy, perhaps—the tone of the boy to the lovely girl, when
first love’s young dream dawns upon him; but Susan and Ella take the
joke very kindly, and the laughter that follows on it clears the
atmosphere.
‘You are Mr. Wyndham’s tenant, aren’t you?’ says Susan.
‘Yes, now’—in a glad and eager voice—‘though at first I wasn’t.’ She
pauses here, drawing back, as it were. Has she said too much? Susan,
however, has evidently seen nothing in the small admission.
‘I like Mr. Wyndham,’ says she. ‘We all do, indeed. What we are afraid
of now is that, as you have the Cottage, we shan’t see so much of him.
But perhaps’—gaily—‘you will put him up sometimes, and then we can renew
our acquaintance with him.’
Here Carew turns an awful crimson, and casts a glance, meant to
annihilate, upon the innocent Susan.
‘I don’t know; I’m not sure,’ says Ella dejectedly. Evidently she has
seen as little in Susan’s suggestion as Susan herself. ‘He has only been
here once since I came, and Mrs. Denis seems to think he won’t come very
often. I wish he would come, and I’m glad you like him, because I like
him too.’
Carew here begins to wonder if he ever had liked Wyndham, and on the
whole thinks not.
Ella has taken a step towards Susan.
‘What is your name?’ asks she timidly, but very sweetly.
‘Susan Barry.’
‘That sounds like the beginning of the Catechism,’ says Carew, who is,
as we know, a clergyman’s son, and therefore up to little points like
this.
‘I knew it,’ says Ella, still very shyly, to Susan—‘I knew it in a way.
Mrs. Denis told me. But I wanted to be quite sure. You are Miss Barry?’
‘Oh no; only Susan,’ says the pretty proprietor of that name. ‘My aunt
is Miss Barry. But I hope you will call me Susan. It is’—mournfully—‘a
dreadfully ugly name, isn’t it?’
‘No, no; indeed, I like it.’
‘I hope you will like mine,’ says Carew, breaking into the conversation.
‘It is Carew. Susan and the others call it Crew, but that’s an
abbreviation of me to which I object. But your name,’ says he. ‘We
should like to know that.’
Has he thrown a bomb into the assembly? Something, at all events, has
stricken the stranger dumb. She shrinks backwards, playing with a branch
of the Wigelia rosea near her, as if to hide her embarrassment. What is
her name? She tells herself that she does not know, that she disbelieves
in the name forced upon her by those dreadful people she had lived with
after—After what? Even that is vague to her. Was it after her mother’s
death? Hints and innuendoes from the Moores had given her to believe
that Moore, at all events, was not her real name. But beyond that she
knows nothing.
‘My name is Ella,’ says she, in a miserable tone. ‘Call me that if—you
will.’
‘Such a pretty name!’ says Susan. ‘Why did you think we shouldn’t like
it? So much nicer than Susan. Isn’t mine horrid? But what is your other
name?’
Here they all start. A loud ring at the big gate over there has taken
them from their own immediate concerns—to another. Ella turns deadly
white, and shows a distinct desire to get behind Susan. Mrs. Denis is to
be seen in the distance, flying towards the entrance-gate.
Presently it is opened by her, and Wyndham walks in.