AN IMPRISONED PRINCESS.
The family did not meet at dinner, the only meal at which they professed
to gather, the day after Lady Bell came to St. Bevis’s. But on the
following day she had again an opportunity of seeing her uncle. She was
summoned into the dining-room, where she had seen him on the evening of
her arrival, in order to sit down to table with the rest.
The Squire, standing near the foot of the table, made her a little
mocking bow. “May I flatter myself country air does not——” he left the
sentence unfinished, as if he had forgotten her existence before he
could conclude his speech. He began carving the meat in the middle of
Mr. Greenwood’s saying grace. “The odds are upon Skyflyer,” he observed
presently in a low tone to the chaplain, and a little later in the meal
he made an investigation of the same authority with regard to a certain
horse-ball. He spoke to no one else, neither did Mrs. Die directly
address her brother, though she kept growling audibly at him from her
end of the table, like a dog that will give tongue and show its teeth,
though it knows that the protest will pass unheeded, nay, that perhaps
the protester will have punishment dealt to it for its pains.
“Nothing but mutton and fowls, Kitty,” exclaimed Mrs. Die; “we’ll be at
the boards themselves soon. No, I know that you can’t help it. Burgundy?
Don’t we wash our hands in Burgundy, it goes so fast, Sneyd? Short of
wet and dry fruits for kickshaws, and no more to be had from Cleveburgh
till we’ve cleared our scores; that will be long enough, not till after
our tricks with stable-boys and gambling-house keepers beat cleverer
knaves’ tricks.”
That dinner was a fair sample of following dinners.
Lady Bell lived on at St. Bevis’s. She had no other resource, and found
that her fate, piteous as it was, did not prove so unbearable as she had
feared. It is the experience of most of us, particularly at the plastic
age of fourteen.
The Squire, who had spent the greater part of his youth in London,
though he had deserted the town or found it too hot for him, was hardly
ever at home: Newmarket, Epsom, Ascot, races of local celebrity, local
gaming clubs, and card matches, pretty much divided his time. On the
occasions when he was at home, his treatment of Lady Bell was to ignore
her presence.
If a sister of Mr. Godwin’s had happened to marry a spendthrift
nobleman, and husband and wife had died, leaving a puny, vapid girl, it
was no fault of his, and he was not called upon to cumber himself with
considerations regarding her welfare.
Squire Godwin succeeded in impressing Lady Bell more deeply than all the
fine gentlemen whom she had seen at her grand-aunt’s, and in striking
her with awe; but she could not complain greatly of his overlooking her,
since she, poor child, felt tempted to shrink out of his sight.
Mrs. Die was a woman half crazy with wrongs, utterly wanting in
principle and self-restraint, and using strong stimulants; but, as she
had said of her hate, she had too much to do brooding over her fate and
fighting with her enemies, to trouble herself by tormenting Lady Bell.
Mrs. Die let the girl alone for the most part, unless when her youth and
opening prospects, unblighted, however slender, pierced her aunt with
the sting of recollection. Even then Mrs. Die would content herself with
a passing taunt at the girl’s girlishness, untold fortunes, and imagined
inspirations, and forget all about her the next moment.
Mrs. Kitty’s smaller nature and comparative leisure from introspection
and desperate schemes, left her more at liberty to cherish a grudge and
a jealousy, and to visit them continually, like the dropping of water,
on the head of a hapless, defenceless victim.
But Mrs. Kitty, too, had an engrossing interest and occupation, which
was not snubbing Lady Bell. Mrs. Kitty had room in her narrow heart for
a slavish devotion, the more ardent that it flowed in a single confined
channel, and that devotion was at once lavished and concentrated on Mrs.
Die.
In the old days, when Mrs. Die had been a brilliant, ill-regulated,
reckless girl, she had taken by storm the heart of the ungifted, branded
dependant—reared and retained at St. Bevis’s in the spirit of a coarse
tolerance—by the heedless generosity which had overleaped the gulf
between the girls, and had raised Mrs. Kitty to a convenient place in
Mrs. Die’s confidence and regard.
Mrs. Kitty’s hands were full not only with grasping tightly such reins
of domestic government as were left at St. Bevis’s, but with protecting
Mrs. Die from herself and her neighbours, and cherishing the lost woman
so far as she would suffer herself to be cherished.
Notwithstanding, there were pullings down in her airs for Lady Bell,
which, as she grew accustomed to the process, did not hurt the girl
much, only put her on her mettle and provoked her to undesirable
pertness.
There were little deprivations in what comforts and luxuries of soft
pillows, hot water, apples, nuts, prunes, were going at St. Bevis’s—a
piece of petty malice which might cause Lady Bell’s young bones, blood,
and appetite to crave and cry out, and her sense of fairness and honour
to smart, but which did not press hardly on a healthy girl already
trained to some measure of self-denial, as such girls were commonly
trained. What was worse, there was the sedulous, suspicious guarding of
Lady Bell from ever coming near Mrs. Die in any moment of weakness or
kindred kindness on Mrs. Die’s part. Mrs. Kitty took care that there
should not be the most distant danger of Lady Bell’s stepping between
them, and ousting Mrs. Kitty from the place which she prized so highly,
that she fancied the whole world must prize it too, as the recipient of
Mrs. Die’s unhappy secrets. But Lady Bell did not covet the post which
was thus denied her.
This was the trifling amount of vengeance—even more trifling in sound
than in reality—which, so far as it appeared, was all Mrs. Kitty chose
to inflict on Lady Bell for coming to St. Bevis’s at all, and after
coming for taking it upon her to give orders to Mrs. Kitty as if she
were a common servant—the servant of a minx like Lady Bell, poorer than
Mrs. Kitty herself, and doomed to hang as another burden on the Godwins,
making up the dead weight under which the house was tottering to its
fall.
Mr. Sneyd and Mr. Greenwood, the remaining authorities, with the
exception of the bailiffs who were billeted at St. Bevis’s every month
or two, were good-natured scamps and vagabonds each according to his
cloth, who not uncharacteristically experienced a lingering sentiment of
shame, pity, and tenderness, of which their master was destitute, where
the young girl, Lady Bell, was concerned. The butler and the chaplain
did not resent, like Mrs. Kitty, Lady Bell’s obstinately refusing to
consent to any freedom of speech and bearing on their part. They even
applauded her for it, crying. Curse them, Lady Bell was game. She was a
proud, delicate-minded young lady, who deserved another fate, which they
would have procured for her, if it had been in their power, and had not
cost them too much. They did what they could.
Mr. Greenwood and Mr. Sneyd conformed themselves, where Lady Bell was in
question, to her notion of propriety, and flattered and won her to some
friendly feeling towards them in their debasement, by the respect which
they showed her and the trouble which they took to be of use to her.
Mr. Greenwood offered Lady Bell humbly his valuable assistance in the
practice of penmanship and the study of French fables, to which she set
herself in accordance with a promise to her dead friend, with a sort of
dull childish fidelity to the letter, and with a hopeless doggedness of
spirit.
Mr. Sneyd exerted himself to ride out with Lady Bell. Nobody interfered
with the men’s performance of these good offices, which formed an
agreeable, and a reclaiming element in the worthless tenor of their
lives.
At first St. Bevis’s was horribly, heavily dull to Lady Bell; for there
were no visitors and no visits. The Squire did not bring company to St.
Bevis’s; Mrs. Die had long retired from her world. The appeal to the
quarter sessions remained for months the solitary episode which broke
the dreary monotony of Lady Bell’s life.
But the oppression of dulness grew lightened by custom and in time,
though not from Lady Bell’s acquiring rapidly country tastes, not even
after sloppy mid-winter had given place to the rosy-tipped buds of
spring.
Nature, though for the most part accessible to all, requires an
introduction to her court, and a suit paid to her after the fashion of
sovereigns, before she will bestow her rewards.
In Lady Bell’s day, rude nature was at a discount; such nature as was
sought after, praised, and worshipped, was tricked out, transformed,
artificial nature. This was not the nature of the neglected, sodden
fields, the waste lands, the hovels of cottages, with their sometimes
savagely ignorant and always uncared-for occupants, and the stony,
rutted roads, like water-courses, all about St. Bevis’s.
Besides, youth when it has been town-bred, and if it have not the
instinctive passion for nature, does not, in the order of things—in the
fantastic extravagance of its emotions and the lethargy of its
weariness—have recourse to the last earthly refuge of well-balanced,
wise old age.
Lady Bell, as her past life faded like a dream—so that London
drawing-rooms, public gardens, royal birthdays, Lord Mayors’ shows,
satin and spangles, hautboys and French horns, became the merest
far-away visions and echoes—adopted ingenious devices, not unlike those
of a prisoner, to employ her energies and help her to spend her days.
She not only wrote copies, conned French and read history for Mr.
Greenwood, she executed intricate feats of stitching and embroidery,
with such materials as she could command, entirely for her own
gratification. She had learned a little drawing, principally to enable
her to trace patterns for her work, and she now accumulated patterns
which would serve her for the “flowering” of ruffles and aprons till she
was ninety-nine, if her eyes stood out.
The closet where she slept, which was all that she could claim as a
privileged place of resort and retirement, was not only the haunt
peopled by innumerable girlish fancies, but she exercised her skill
within its bounds, preserving her health of body and mind in finding
there never-ending objects of interest and amusement.
With a little childish make-believe, the closet was curiously and
elaborately adorned for no other eyes than her own. The walls were
covered with her patterns, the curtains were draped and looped according
to her device. On the chimney-piece were tinted fan-sticks,
thread-papers, cock’s feathers, imitation flowers.
Her little bird which a farm-boy had caught for her, and her kitten
which had strayed into the habitable part of the house from a colony
among the ruins, were trained by her to form a happy family.
Thus the solitary girl occupied and entertained herself as an imprisoned
princess might have sought to improve and beguile the hours, not
altogether unhappily, for Lady Bell was clever, her temper was naturally
cheerful, and in youth the spirit is elastic, fit to rise again
buoyantly after a blow, to build new castles in the air, and to remain
uncrushed by mere neglect.
Lady Bell had not long time given her to pursue her own course and the
even tenor of her way at St. Bevis’s. In the first spring of her stay,
about six months after her arrival, the great man of the neighbourhood,
Lord Thorold, came down to his place of Brooklands, on the eve of his
marriage, accompanied by a large party, including his intended bride and
her family, and feasted the public in his house and grounds, thrown open
in honour of the occasion.
Squire Godwin chose to accept the invitation not only for himself, but
for his household. Either he was unwilling to give way to the evil odour
in which he was held, or he felt inclined to test it, or he desired to
propitiate the magnate.
Whatever the motive, the result was the same; an order was issued which
even Mrs. Die did not dispute, though she had not been in public save at
the quarter sessions, not even so far as to hear Mr. Greenwood preach in
the little church close at hand, of which Squire Godwin was the patron,
for these dozen years and more. The whole family at St. Bevis’s were to
grace Lord Thorold’s wedding rejoicings.