“I saw the Fawcetts in town,” the old lady said abruptly. “She doesn’t look as young as she did.”
“She can’t be,” Lady Yarde answered. “She is fifteen years older than I am.”
There was a pause, and Lady Yarde turned the conversation.
“Hector,” she said brightly, “we’ve none of us said anything to Mademoiselle … to our new governess. She comes from Paris, you know.”
Lord Yarde pulled himself up and smiled ferociously.
“Really,” he said.
“She’s French. Aren’t you, my dear?” Lady Yarde remarked.
“My mother was French,” Anna answered. “My father is German.”
Lord Yarde was bending graciously forward.
“How extraordinary,” he said.
“I’ve just remembered,” the old lady interjected. “It wasn’t Bath. It was somewhere else.”
The butler began putting out the finger bowls and Lady Yarde turned to Delia.
“What a good girl you’re being,” she said. “I really believe that for once we shall get right through lunch without a single word from you.”
She tried to reach out and pat the child’s hand, but she was too far away.
Anna looked up and caught Captain Webb’s eye. For a moment she thought she caught a flicker there. But, when she looked again, there was nothing. He was simply sitting there, very upright, in the dignified dark suit he wore on Sundays.
“I think I like him better in tweeds,” Anna reflected. “He looks so miserable in black somehow.”
V
She was alone now in her little sitting-room, seated at the round table with the red plush cloth over it. There was a pad of notepaper in front of her and she was writing carefully, printing the letters of the words in big block capitals so that a child could read them.
“I think of you always,” she wrote, “and I pray for you every night. You must pray for me, too, Annette. God is very pleased when he hears little children praying, and He listens specially. I want you most of all to pray at the Angelus because I shall be praying then, and our prayers can go up together. Be good and obey your teachers. Ask them if you can write to me, and remember that you have a mother who loves you more than anything else in the world, even though she can’t be with you. Everyone here is very kind and they would be very excited to think that your mother has a little girl whom they have never seen …”
There was the sound of a footstep outside. The door opened, and Lady Yarde stood there. She was wearing the delightfully surprised expression that was natural to her.
“I didn’t send for you. I came myself,” she announced. “I came to see if you were happy here.”
Anna rose and stood by the table waiting.
“Very happy, thank you, Lady Yarde,” she answered.
“But I’m interrupting you,” Lady Yarde said apologetically. “You’re writing a letter.”
“I was only writing to my little girl,” Anna told her.
“Your little girl,” Lady Yarde repeated slowly. “Yes, yes, of course. I’d almost forgotten that you’d got one.”
She paused and stood there, her foot tapping.
“Oh, dear,” she said. “I do hope you won’t go on missing her. I know she’ll take your mind off your work.”
Chapter XLI
I
The Honourable Gervase Yarde was coming home on five days’ leave and his mother was arranging a little amusement for him.
“There is a shoot on the Tuesday,” she said. “And the Wycke-Handforths and Lord Besterton are coming over on Wednesday. And there’s the meet on Thursday.” She paused. “We still haven’t fixed up anything for Friday.”
She paused and then threw up her hands in delight.
“I know,” she exclaimed. “Of course. A dance.”
In the excitement of the idea she went over to the fireplace and rang violently for the maid. She wanted her address book straight away.
But over by the fireplace she stopped and turned towards Anna.
“You do think it’s a good idea, don’t you?” she asked. “You haven’t said anything.”
“I think it would be lovely,” Anna replied. “I’m sure that Delia would enjoy it.”
Lady Yarde smiled indulgently.
“How nice of you to think of our little Delia,” she said. “But of course she’s far too young. It’s altogether too late for her. She’d only fall asleep. She might come to the first part. But I don’t approve really. I should have to think about it.”
She paused again, considering.
“And you,” she added brightly. “You can help me with the invitations.”
She patted Anna’s hand as she said it, and gave her a little smile of her own.
“I know you’ll make a great success of it,” she said. “You’ve got such nice formal-looking handwriting.”
The maid came in, and Lady Yarde turned towards her impulsively.
“My address book,” she said. “The big red one. And my spectacles. They’re somewhere. I had them just now.”
As soon as the maid had gone, Lady Yarde began thinking aloud again.
“I’m so glad I thought of it,” she went on. “I’m sure it’s a good idea. He finds it terribly dull coming here, I’m afraid. And I do so want him to enjoy himself. I’ll get the house really full for him.”
She paused, and smiled indulgently at Anna once more.
“And it’ll be very interesting for you,” she said, “addressing all those envelopes. You’ll find you will get to know the names of everybody in the county.”
II
The home-coming of the Honourable Gervase Yarde was dashing and in style. He had driven over tandem and, once inside the gates, he came sweeping up the drive, his long whip cracking constantly.
Up in the schoolroom there was a lesson in progress.
“Sur le pont d’Avignon tout-le-monde y danse,” Anna was saying. “It’s a song that they sing a great deal in France. It’s a children’s song and they’re very fond of it. I’ll play it to you afterwards if you like. And because it’s a song you mustn’t say it as though it were prose. Sur le pont d’Avignon tout-le-monde y danse …”
“Why not play it to me now?” Delia asked.
Anna shrugged her shoulders.
“The child is not serious,” she told herself. “She would rather do anything than learn.”
She opened the piano and began to play. But it was only for an instant that the playing lasted. There was the sound of hoofs and the jingle of harness outside. Delia got up and rushed over to the window.
“It’s Gervase,” she screamed. “He’s come.”
And without another word she ran out of the room.
When she had gone, Anna went slowly over to the window herself. The Honourable Gervase Yarde was just getting down from the high, perilous-looking driving seat. He had thrown the reins to one of the footmen and, holding his bent arms shoulder high to his chest, he was preparing to jump. Anna had a glimpse of a plump red face with the formidable Yarde nose projecting from it, and a head of close fair curls. His scarlet jacket looked dangerously tight across the shoulders as he stood there and Anna noticed that he was really a rather fat young man.
But he jumped like an athlete and landed perfectly.
Then the edge of a buttress cut him off from sight and Anna was left staring at the empty gig.
“So he’s the one that all the excitement is about,” Anna told herself.
And then she turned abruptly away and went back to her place at the schoolroom table.
“How like a housemaid I’m getting,” she thought. “Peeping out from the curtains to see the son of the house arriving.”
Lady Yarde had changed her mind again and decided that Delia should come to the dance. In the result a French dressmaker from Chislehurst had come over to try a new frock on her. At first Lady Yarde had resolved that Delia should go very simply in the frock she had worn at the last children’s party. But she was grow
ing so rapidly, she was almost a woman by now, Lady Yarde reminded herself. She needed something more suitable. Anna had been asked to help to choose it for her.
“It’s a pity I’m so fat,” Delia said at the last fitting. “I make it bulge so.”
“But you look charming,” the dressmaker assured her. “It is a perfect young figure. I would not have it the least different.”
“I would,” Delia replied. “And the more riding I do, the wider I get. Some people are like that.”
The French dressmaker did not attempt to reply: she merely smiled politely in Anna’s direction. She was not anxious to be drawn into any further conversation. She was a good hard-working woman, this dressmaker, and she had discovered from long experience that a French accent allowed her to charge just that little extra that really made her business pay. It was therefore disturbing after nearly eleven years in Chislehurst as a Frenchwoman to be brought face to face with a woman who tried to talk to her in a language which she could not understand. What made it so embarrassing was that the French accent had by now become natural to her; the accent, and the little excited gestures of a Parisienne.
When she had left Delia turned to Anna.
“What are you going to wear?” she asked.
Anna smiled.
“I shan’t be going to the dance,” she said. “There will be plenty of people there without me.”
“But you must come,” Delia answered. “I don’t want to go if you don’t.”
Anna shook her head.
“This is a dance for your friends,” she said. “Your friends and your brother’s. I shouldn’t know anyone.”
“You’d know me,” Delia declared. “Besides you are one of my friends. I shall ask Mama.”
“No, don’t,” Anna begged her. “Please don’t. You mustn’t do it.”
Later that afternoon Lady Yarde sent for Anna. She was obviously upset. At first she said nothing. She simply sat where she was, her mouth working. Then she took out her handkerchief and pressed it into the corner of each eye.
“Why didn’t you come to me direct?” she blurted out suddenly. “Why did you have to ask Delia instead? You’ve upset both of us now. A child can never understand reasons.”
“But, your Ladyship,” Anna answered, “I hadn’t thought of coming. It was all Miss Delia’s idea. I specially asked her not to speak to you.”
“Asked her not to speak to me,” Lady Yarde repeated. “Didn’t you want to come?”
She had picked up her bottle of smelling-salts and was applying it first to one nostril and then to the other.
“It was simply that I felt I would be out of place there,” Anna said quietly. “It is not my house in which the dance is taking place and I should know no one. You have been so kind to me that I did not want you to think that you had to invite me out of pity.”
Lady Yarde put down the smelling-bottle sharply.
“Then of course you must come,” she said. “I never heard of anything so ridiculous as staying away. The only reason we didn’t invite the other governesses was that they didn’t dance; I remember quite clearly now. You dance, so it’s only right you should be there. You can join in the Paul Jones at the end. It doesn’t matter how many are on the floor for that.”
III
There was almost no dance at all. The Honourable Gervase Yarde was thrown when hunting and nearly broke his ankle. He had to be lifted back into the saddle and sat there swearing because his foot hurt him and because only two fields away he could hear the happy excited sound of a perfectly beautiful fox being broken up by the hounds.
He was brought back home and had to sit with his leg up on a stool while his ankle swelled up under its cold compress. Lady Yarde burst into tears when she heard.
“Now there can’t be any dance,” she said. “It’s spoilt everything. Gervase had better go to bed and we shall have to find some way of putting the people off. It’s such a disappointment after all the trouble I’ve taken.”
Lord Yarde, however, took a different view of the affair.
“No need for it to have happened,” he kept saying. “Gervase was forcing the pace too much. Must have known there were rabbit holes there. Piece of damn’ tom-fool riding. Deserved all he got.”
“But the dance,” Lady Yarde said feebly. “What are we to do about the dance.”
“Have it,” Lord Yarde answered briefly. “There isn’t time to put anybody off. Do Gervase a lot of good to have to sit by and see other people enjoying themselves. Teach him to take more care of his horse in future.”
In front of the short mirror at the dressing-table, Anna was trying on her dress. It was black and very simple. It couldn’t help being simple because it had cost so little. She had gone to the dressmaker who had made the frock for Delia and had asked for the cheapest, the very cheapest, dress that could be made. The request had secretly relieved the dressmaker: she told herself that no woman who had asked for such a thing would be in any position to expose her. And she hurriedly stitched up something in inferior velvet which she hoped would do for this one occasion, this solitary dance to which the little French governess had been so surprisingly invited. She had to admit, however, that the dress suited Anna remarkably well: she had the sort of figure which could carry any clothes.
“And now for my hair,” Anna was saying. “Whatever shall I do about my hair?”
It was still almost as fair as when she had been a girl, the pale golden sheen caught the light and reflected it. At first in Paris she had worn it in the many curls which the tongs of the little Greek hairdresser had left; then in Monte Carlo there had been a coiffeur who had invented new styles every time she had visited him. After that, the convent: she had worn it straight there, straight and cut short. And at Tilliards she had sought somehow to conceal its strange, rather disgraceful shortness, by pinning on a black bow at the back and drawing it up high over her temples.
But to-night she brushed out her hair so that it hung about her face; and she turned her head first this way and then that as she gazed into the mirror.
“I will show them,” she decided, “that I do not always have to look like a governess. I will do my hair to-night to please myself.”
When she had finished she went over to her valise and began searching there. At last she found what she was looking for—a pair of cheap paste ornaments that had once been on a dress. She had kept them because they were pretty.
“How is anyone to know that they are not real?” she asked herself. “How is any one to know that I am not the richest daughter of the stupidest Earl in all Kent?”
But when she had studied her face a little longer she turned away from the mirror, dissatisfied.
“It’s too late,” she admitted. “Too late. I’ve changed. I shall never be young again. Why did I bother how I did my hair?”
She looked at herself again in the mirror for a moment and then went along the corridor to the gallery of the hall. She paused there looking down. Below her were some dozen gentlemen of the county standing about, stoutish red-faced men with their hair brushed flat and a flower in their buttonholes. They didn’t speak; they didn’t smile; they simply stood there, avoiding each other and waiting for their wives to emerge from the cloakroom in the vestibule.
“To think,” Anna told herself, “that I bought this evening dress for them.”
The uselessness, the futility of pretending even for a few hours that she belonged to their world, suddenly overwhelmed her.
“I have only one life,” she kept saying. “And that is with Annette. This dance means nothing to me.”
When she was half-way down the last flight of stairs, Lord Yarde turned and caught sight of her.
“Who’s that?” he asked.
“It’s Anna,” Lady Yarde told him hurriedly, as though she were trying to cover something up. “I told her that she could come.”
Lord Yarde looked at Anna again and his gaze dwelt for a moment on the pale flame of her hair, on the high sloping shoulder
s, the slimness of her figure in the close black velvet.
“Good Lord!” he said.
Even Lady Yarde was surprised.
“My dear,” she said to Anna, “Your appearance. You look too … too …”
But the sentence remained unfinished: the arrival of another stoutish red-faced man leading a lady on his arm cut it short for ever.
Anna walked on alone towards the ballroom. As she did so she noticed that the eyes of the gentlemen waiting for their wives followed her curiously. The fact amused her.
“So it was for them that I bought this dress,” she thought. “How romantic they must all suddenly be feeling.”
The string band in the gallery was already playing one of Mr. Strauss’s waltzes and a few couples were rather self-consciously turning on the empty floor. The men were all big-boned and full-blooded, and the girls held politely in their arms had the fascinating and uncertain freshness of youth about them. As Anna looked, it was their extreme youth that impressed her.
“I was like that once,” she told herself, and she remembered Rhinehausen again.
Over by the couch at the far end of the ballroom was another group of young people not dancing. In the centre of the group sat Gervase, his damaged ankle—much bound up—thrust out in front of him, and a stick with a rubber ferrule resting against the cushions. The simple fact that he was hurt seemed to excite something in the breast of every young lady, and they crowded round him in admiration. Gervase, his face very red and shining and his short curls oiled till they glistened, was basking in this orgy of popularity: he liked having people brought up to him as though he were royalty. He kept smiling and guffawing and pulling at the lapels of his scarlet jacket.
Anna glanced at him.
“How like an enormous schoolboy he is,” she thought. “A schoolboy in the holidays with no master to correct him.”
Then Delia came running up to her. She was with a thin tall girl who didn’t know what to do with her hands. Whilst she was talking she kept clasping and unclasping them, sometimes gripping her right elbow behind her back with her left hand, sometimes raising a small lace handkerchief unnecessarily to her nose. Delia introduced Anna hastily and inaudibly, and then went on with their conversation. They were discussing a horse called Gadfly. Both girls spoke of him—of his height, his colour, his strength, his speed, his intelligence, his gentle nature, his courage—as though something had been added to life simply by knowing Gadfly: it was clear that if such a thing had been possible either of these horse-infatuated young women would have been proud to be his bride.
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