COMPANION TO MISS KINGSCOTE.
“Will you be so good as to tell me the arrangements which you have made
for me?” requested Lady Bell, remembering that as her money was lost, it
was out of her power to undo these arrangements.
“With all my heart, my dear,” replied Mrs. Siddons cordially. She was
thankful to have discharged an ungracious task, though she had not for a
moment been uncertain of her obligation, so that her serenity had only
been slightly ruffled. “The lady who wishes a companion at so vastly
opportune a moment, that we ought to be grateful for the chance, and I
see that you have the sense to regard it in that light, is Miss
Kingscote, of Nutfield, three miles from here. She had come in to see
the play on Friday night, and spoke of the opening to Mrs. Bunbury, who
mentioned it to me.”
“Do you know anything more?” asked Lady Bell, feigning curiosity to hide
how dispirited she was.
“Yes, sure; I have made every inquiry on your account,” said Mrs.
Siddons readily. “I took the opportunity to ride out to Nutfield when
you were engaged with the trimming of the pink train, yesterday. It is a
nice sort of country place, though I must explain that the family were
thrown back in the world by the villany of an uncle, and are only
working their way forward again, which is greatly to their credit. I
thought it better that you should not know of the proposal till it was
all settled, which it is, with your consent.”
“I should like to hear what my duties will be.”
“Ay, and what your salary will be; don’t forget that, and don’t begin
blushing at the name, child, not though it were ‘wages.’ It is easy to
see that you have not been so hardened as I. But ‘what’s in a name?’
especially when the price of our hire is for the benefit of the helpless
creatures dearest to us! Oh, I forget, Miss Barlowe, you are not
sixteen, and still a spinster; indeed I don’t recommend early marriages,
and you will have plenty opportunities yet to change your name. But a
married woman is apt to measure her neighbour’s obligations by her own.”
“Is there only one Miss Kingscote?” interposed Lady Bell.
“Yes, sure, and I should say she is a good round dozen of years your
senior. She stays out at Nutfield with a bachelor brother, who is half a
dozen years younger than she is; in short, who stands between her and
you in point of age. I wish the difference had been the other way.”
“Why, madam?” demanded Lady Bell, like a little Turk.
“You need not look affronted.” Mrs. Siddons did not mind much having
given the affront. “Try for your own sake, Miss Barlowe, and not be so
thin-skinned; however, neither that defect, nor Mr. Charles Kingscote’s
twenty-two years can be mended in a day. I told you that the villany of
an uncle had nearly undone this generation at Nutfield, just as it
happens in the plays; however, this man’s waste and fraud were
discovered before it was too late. The Kingscotes have just been able to
keep their place, which their friends have been nursing back to
prosperity till the young man grew up. He is only waiting at home for a
pair of colours, which he is certain to get in these war times, so that
you may not be long troubled with him. An idle young man is a great
trouble and snare. You see I think it right to warn you, Miss
Barlowe”—Mrs. Siddons cleared her conscience—“before sending you to this
situation.”
“Mr. Charles Kingscote will not keep me back,” asserted Lady Bell,
crossing her hands with an almost comical, youthful arrogance in her
attitude, which expressed, “I shall put the young bumpkin in his proper
place and keep him there, trust me for that.” What she said in words
was, “But you have not told me my duties.”
“Nor your salary; I am coming to them. However, I must state to you in
fairness, Miss Barlowe, I also warned Miss Kingscote that her proposed
companion was a very genteel, pretty young girl.”
“I am much obliged to you, madam,” acknowledged Lady Bell in an accent
of anything save obligation.
“But she would not be warned any more than yourself,” protested Mrs.
Siddons bluntly, “for the woman is a born idiot, though I don’t mean
that you are similarly afflicted,” she broke off, laughing; “at the same
time she is very good-natured, is this Miss Kingscote, as I hear. It
need not be a harder task than another for you to have a little patience
with her, and behave with reserve and prudence, as I do not doubt you
will, to the brother.”
“Madam, I am not going to be a companion to the brother,” objected Lady
Bell, with solemn impatience; “what am I to do for the lady?”
“You are to teach her all your tambour and knotting stitches, work up
her mess of ‘pretty work,’ as she calls it, help her with her plain work
and housekeeping, walk with her, and be company for her in the evening,
since she is lonesome when her brother is abroad. She does not feel dull
in the country during the summer, because since the family fell in the
world, they have been in the habit of giving quarters to friends and
letting the spare rooms in their house; but these are only wanted for
the long days and the fine weather, and Miss Kingscote cannot ‘a-bear’
the thought of a winter all alone with Master Charles, out at Nutfield.
The salary is a guinea a month, with board and washing provided. I can
tell you many a duchess does not give her children’s governess a third
more, but I would not take a shilling less for you. Will you engage,
Miss Barlowe?”
“I will, madam, till I can make a better of it,” answered Lady Bell, not
very meekly.
Mrs. Siddons did not censure her young friend’s peevishness and
ambition; on the contrary, she told Lady Bell seriously that it was the
first duty of every well-disposed, sensible young woman, to do what she
could to better her condition in the world, and even to prove a prop and
ladder by which those belonging to her might stay themselves, and climb
to a higher estate.
Lady Bell was passed on to Nutfield without delay. Her dignity was put
perforce in her pocket, since she travelled neither by berlin, nor
landau, not even by a yellow post-chaise, but by a convenient waggon.
The short ride carried Lady Bell through an undulating country, the
abounding wood and water of which must have rendered it, in the season,
an Arcadia to the lovers of nature of the period, who were neither more
nor less than landscape gardeners.
In spite of Miss Kingscote’s dislike to being out at Nutfield without
the solace and sympathy of another “female” of her rank, to share her
dearth of activity, and her “nerves and twitters” in winter, the
neighbourhood was not lonely or thinly peopled. There was even evidence
of the rising appreciation of its Arcadian character.
Not only was the adjacent country town decidedly aristocratic in its
buildings, there were one or two attempts in its suburbs at fancy
cottages and lodges—gothic and sylvan,—with grounds in keeping, modest
modifications of renowned Strawberry Hill. To these the townspeople and
denizens of greater towns, sometimes even of London itself, retired, and
came, on occasions, to enjoy rural felicity and life in _villigiatura_,
when they recorded innocently, to their poetic and philosophic credit,
that they were, of their own free will, burying themselves for months at
a time in the depth of the country, and the romantic solitude of the
wilds.
But Nutfield was a house of a different description. It was an old grey
manor house, limited in extent, though its space was yet too great for
either the needs or the means of its well-descended owners. They were
glad to turn its vacant rooms to profit, by converting them into country
lodgings, without abating a jot of their claims to gentility.
Nutfield had never been a place of the same extent as Trevor Court and
St. Bevis’s, and it had shared to some degree the fate of its
proprietors in being reduced very nearly to the rough, uncared-for
plight of a farmhouse. But the solidity of the walls and a certain
tenacity as well as stoutness in the human constitution, had served
Nutfield and the Kingscotes alike in good stead.
Nutfield was marked by a quaint massiveness in its original mullioned
windows, which caused the light to dwindle to darkness visible within
doors, and in its heavy cross-beams that looked as if they were about to
fall and crush the occupants. Mullions and cross-beams were not
altogether without their pleasantness, and suited the primitive
situation of the house in the middle of an orchard, where the mossy arms
of the old fruit-trees stretched so close to the house, that they
farther darkened it, and flung their shifting shadows on the floors.
Within doors, the old ebony-black furniture, frayed drugget and matting,
with some remnants of faded woollen tapestry, and a smoked black picture
or two framed in the panels, promised at least peaceful stability,
friendly familiarity, and simple ease and comfort. The aspect of the
place contrasted on the whole favourably with the ghastly bareness of
St. Bevis’s, and the painful pretence at home, which was no home, of
Trevor Court.
Miss Kingscote had not the charm which, but for its being the
Kingscotes’ ancestral house, she herself could never have found in
Nutfield.
Miss Kingscote was a round dumpy woman, with a large flat face, like a
flat surface of any kind catching gleams and reflections from
surrounding objects, but incapable of individual lights and shadows. Her
sprigged linen gown and round cap of her own knitting, made her figure
look still more unshapely, and her face more like a shallow saucer. She
was awkward to uncouthness, as she nodded to refined Lady Bell.
It was clear before Miss Kingscote opened her mouth, that the woman whom
the loyalty or the caprice of the county gentry chose to retain, nay, to
reinstate in their ranks, was simply hopeless in the extreme rusticity
which had been her early heritage from neglect and dishonesty.
“I’m glad to see you, miss,” she said to Lady Bell, proceeding in
grossly illiterate language, which first shocked, then tickled the
delicate ears that listened to it. “You’re a coming to a dull part, I
would have you to know that, and no mistake; you see ‘I never was known
to lie,’ no more than the man as told the funny story of the Ram of
Derbyshire. But to be content and hearty, them are the ways to make
Nutfield and life cheerier. I mean to try ’em, miss, I do, if so be
you’ll be good enough to lend me a hand.”
Withal there was a foolish importance and a simpering affectation about
Miss Kingscote which bore out Mrs. Siddons’s verdict on the country
lady’s understanding. But no doubt she was good-natured, only her
good-nature took, at first, a vexatious form.
Lady Bell was labouring to preserve her incognito, to shape her own
bearing and tones to the calling which she had adopted. But what was she
to do when Miss Kingscote began by loading her hired companion with all
the honour and attention which she could pay Lady Bell, and by insisting
on waiting upon Lady Bell instead of consenting to be waited upon by
her?
This unexpected and dangerous intuition of Miss Kingscote’s, thoroughly
disconcerted Lady Bell, and might have brought the deceiver to the brink
of detection, had not the sense of awe with which she had inadvertently
impressed her employer speedily worn off the smooth plane. Miss
Kingscote quickly drifted back, to Lady Bell’s relief, into her normal
condition of an easy-going, communicative simpleton.
Within an hour, Lady Bell heard that the Kingscotes had been no small
drink in England a mort of years before, as early as King Arthur’s time
or thereabouts—when they would have thought neither Clifford nor Talbot
of their brewst. What a proper young man Master Charles was, and how all
the girls were pulling caps for him. How well Miss Kingscote had looked
when she walked into Lumley at Assize time, in her pea-green tabinet
petticoat and cherry-coloured gown.
There were no shady hollows, not to say dark gulfs, in Miss Kingscote’s
nature and history, notwithstanding that the latter had not been without
its romantic reverses. Lady Bell was bidden inspect them from end to
end, the very first day. She was made the recipient in full of the
narrative of Uncle Mat’s worst iniquities. She heard how the Kingscotes
had been reduced within Miss Kingscote’s recollection to the plainest of
clothing and coarsest of fare.
“And I was not dead beat, or as heavy as a Dutchwoman in those days
neither, miss,” laughed Miss Kingscote with her horse laugh. “Lud! no,
it is the man or woman as is the jewel. I was called a spirity strapping
lass by them as saw me then, and never knew I was a lady.”
Lady Bell had stared, had repressed an inclination to titter, had taken
another view of the case, and given way, in spite of every effort, to a
dreary girlish sense of self-abandonment, and of being inevitably
swamped in this overflow of homely folly. What a companion after the
great actress!
Lady Bell was fain to prick her ears at the sound of an approaching
light firm footstep, and decently cultivated ringing voice.
“Are you there, Deb?” called the voice unceremoniously. “I suppose you
han’t got your serving and talking commodity yet, as I don’t sight any
traces of her. Deb, come out this minute, and look at my partridges.”
“Lawk-a-daisy, there’s brother from his shooting, and I’ve forgot to
have a toast and tankard ready for him,” exclaimed Miss Kingscote,
ambling out of the parlour.