MRS. JENNINGS AND HER DAUGHTER HESTER.
Rose Millar had made up her mind to like everything, if possible, in her
new surroundings, and when she came up to town it was not only by a
piece of good fortune, it was to the girl's credit, that she found so
much she could appreciate, and so little, comparatively, that it was
difficult to put up with.
In the first place, and as of primary consequence to Rose's well-being,
Mrs. Jennings, the lady with whom Rose was boarded, turned out an
excellently-disposed gentlewoman. She had a well-ordered house, pervaded
with the spirit of a gentlewoman. The whole establishment was full of
the self-respect which showed itself in a scrupulous consideration for
the rights and claims, the doings and feelings, of others.
Rose did not complain because Mrs. Jennings and her house alike were
also antiquated and formal. But the lady was not merely formal; it was a
point of honour and an inveterate weakness with her to refuse to own
that she had anything to do with such small but welcome boons to her as
boarders. There she sat, serenely disclaiming the slightest knowledge of
what had taken place, and attributing every attention to her old servant
Susan, who had been with Mrs. Jennings since her marriage
five-and-thirty years before. Or, if it was not Susan, it was her
coadjutor, Marianne, in her housemaid's neat dress, whom Susan, in her
working housekeeper's black cap and gold-rimmed spectacles, had trained
to all fit and proper service in a gentlewoman's house.
In person Mrs. Jennings was tall and thin, sallow, and slightly
hook-nosed, but still handsome. Her upright, broad-shouldered, and, by
comparison, slender waisted figure was conventionally good; but it was
hard to say how far it was her own, or how much it was made up. For she
was one of those women who consider that it is a duty which they owe to
the world not only to show themselves to the best advantage in bodily
presence to the last, but so to conceal and atone for the ravages of
time as to preserve a semblance of their maturity after it is long past.
The performance is not altogether successful. For one thing, it is apt
to call forth a spirit of contemptuous pity in the youthful spectator
who is still a long way from needing to employ such laborious,
self-denying arts.
Mrs. Jennings added to her natural air of dignity by a filmy shawl of
black lace in summer, and of white Shetland wool in winter, draped round
her without so much as a fold out of order, and by a somewhat elaborate
modification of a widow's cap which added half an inch to her height. As
Rose wrote in an early letter home, Mrs. Jennings's cap looked as if she
had been born with it on her coal black hair, or as if it were glued and
gummed there beyond any possibility of being displaced. Mother ought to
see it, take an example, and abandon her flighty, waggling head-gear.
No, on second thoughts, Rose would not like to see mother with a cap
fitted on her head like the bowl of a helmet, and giving the idea of
such stony stability that it might have been fastened with invisible
nails hammered into her skull.
Hester Jennings, Mrs. Jennings's daughter, was the young art student
like Rose's self, to whom she and her friends had naturally looked for
congenial companionship where the girl was concerned; and if she did not
find it with Hester, she was not likely to discover it in any of the
other residents at No. 12 Welby Square. Naturally Rose did not greatly
affect the remaining members of that elderly society, on which Mrs.
Jennings professed to set store. She could not help liking Mrs.
Jennings, though, alas! Rose scarcely believed in her so much as she
would have been justified in doing.
In Mrs. Jennings's daughter, who had been from the first thought of as
a friend for Rose, she believed entirely. Yet Rose had been in the
beginning both startled by Hester Jennings and disappointed in her.
Hester Jennings looked considerably older than she was, which was about
Annie Millar's age; in fact, she was prematurely worn with study and
work. She was like her mother on a larger scale, with advantages of a
fair paleness and remarkable violet-blue eyes, which Mrs. Jennings had
never possessed. Hester might have passed for a lovely young woman if
she had cared in the least to do it. But never was girl more indifferent
to such claims or more capable of doing her worst to qualify them and
render them the next thing to null and void. When Annie Millar made
Hester Jennings's acquaintance, Annie maintained that there was
something left out in Hester's composition, the part which makes a woman
desire to look well in the eyes of her neighbours, and win admiration,
though the admiration be as skin deep as the beauty which creates it.
To think that a daughter of Mrs. Jennings, an artist in her own right,
could dress so badly, with such a careless contempt for patterns and
colours, in such ill-fitting frocks and dowdy or grotesque hats! Her
preference for strident aniline dyes and gigantic stripes and checks in
the different articles of her costume looked very like perversity;
especially when it was shown that with reference to other persons, in
arranging to paint a portrait, for instance, no one, not Mrs. Jennings,
displayed such a fine sense of fitness and harmony as Hester exhibited.
Dress was to her, in her private character, mere necessary clothing,
warm or cool as the season required. It was not worth the waste of
thought implied by turning it over in her mind. Her mother dressed for
the family; or, if she did not, Hester understood that her married
sisters and sisters-in-law devoted, with success, a great deal of time
which they did not value in other respects, to the subject in question.
Speak of Rose Millar's professional notions as to the human figure being
left easy and untrammelled! Rose was a pattern of decorous neatness and
trimness compared to Hester; indeed, Rose was appalled by the total
absence of order and ceremony, not to say of embellishment, in her
friend's toilet. Hester abandoned herself permanently to deshabilles.
She appeared in a jacket indoors as well as out. She dispensed with
collars in morning and lace in evening wear. She did her hair once when
she got up, and regarded passing her hand over her head when she took
off her hat as all that was incumbent upon her afterwards. Without
intending it, and without dreaming of copying the bushes of hair in
Rossetti's pictures, Hester Jennings's sandy-coloured locks, not a good
point in her personal appearance, were, as her great-grandmother would
have cried in horror, more like a dish-mop than anything else. She
stopped short of dirt in her slovenliness because of her purity of soul,
her deep respect for the laws of health, and because of the traditions
of her class, from which she could not altogether escape. But between
her bondage to work, and her scornful neglect of other claims which she
had known over-exalted and exaggerated, she had accomplished marvels.
Hester Jennings had attained such eminence in her recklessness of
consequences, that, in place of being a nearly lovely woman, in
accordance with her profile, complexion, and glorious eyes, she was
barely good-looking because of them, in a style which repulsed many more
people than it attracted others. The sight of Hester was one of the
numerous lessons which she was destined to give to Rose Millar. It
frightened Rose into becoming tamely conventional and elaborately tidy
in dress, to the surprise and edification of her sister Annie, for it
was just at the time when Annie was most spent by her new life and
labours, and least inclined to put off her hospital gown and cap.