Complete Works of Stanley J Weyman

by Stanley J Weyman

  Astonished, Rachel steadied her voice and told her.

  “Who sent you here?” The question came sharp and uncompromising.

  Still more amazed and stammering a little, “Lady Elisabeth Dunstan,” Rachel answered.

  “How did you know her?” There was suspicion as well as hostility in the tone.

  “I was named to her by the Dean of Exeter.”

  For a moment Lady Ellingham seemed in her turn to be a little surprised. “You live near Exeter?”

  “Yes, with my mother.” Rachel was quick-witted, and though she was far from guessing all that was in my lady’s mind — or her face would have burned indeed — she was beginning to understand why she had been summoned in such haste.

  “Have you met any other members of the family — besides Lady Elisabeth?” The Countess’s gaze narrowed as she put the question.

  “Only Captain Dunstan, whom I met by accident at Salisbury.”

  “You have met no others of the family?” my lady persisted. “Not — not Lord Ellingham, or — or — you are sure?”

  “No, no one,” Rachel repeated steadfastly. She was beginning to breathe again, though she knew now that there was trouble before her — dreadful, dreadful trouble.

  “And you say that Lady Elisabeth engaged you?”

  “She did — most clearly.” The girl was determined that there should be no doubt about that. She saw the importance of it.

  A pause. “You have had then, of course — what experience have you had — of teaching?”

  Rachel winced. “None,” she faltered.

  Lady Ellingham’s eyebrows went up. “You should not have undertaken such a position,” she said severely, “without more information. Have you seen Lady Ann? Do you think you can control her or manage her?

  You?” There crept into her ladyship’s tone, and for the first time, a note of the human. “Why, you are a little thing. How old are you?”

  “Nineteen,” Rachel confessed with a tragic face. She already foresaw the end of the interview — saw herself dismissed, disbanded, packed home with ignominy.

  “You don’t look it! You look a mere child! I suppose you have never been out of Devonshire before?”

  “No, ma’am.”

  “And are a clergyman’s daughter, you say?”

  “I am.”

  The Countess stared, but not as she had stared. There was more surprise and less suspicion in her eyes. She looked uncertain and perplexed. That without her leave or knowledge, without a single communication made to her, this girl should have been foisted on her household by that impertinent, interfering old woman — with or without the consent of her husband — was in itself enough to wound her pride to the quick. But if only that were all: if only that darker suspicion that she had for a few humiliating moments entertained — nay, that she had read in the faces about her — were groundless? Certainly the girl did not look the part. Those timid eyes, that appealing mouth, surely, surely they could not deceive to that point. And he, with all his faithlessness, had never yet stooped to that. She knew enough ill of him, God knew; but nothing so vile, so shameful, so unforgivable as that! And, in a sharp revulsion of feeling, the Countess not only put the suspicion from her — for the time — but felt herself degraded by it, and angry, furiously angry with those whose mysterious looks had supported if they had not imparted it. Thank God, in this at least she had wronged him!

  But the girl remained, and what was she to do with her? To dismiss her offhand, as she had intended, Would be to give colour to that hateful thought, if others did entertain it. And the child, ill at ease, though she hid her tremors, appealed to her. After a long silence, “You had better know the truth.” she said, and she still spoke coldly, for it was her habit. “Lady Elisabeth had no authority to engage you. I knew nothing of your coming until I heard that you were in the house. And I do not think that you have either the experience or the qualifications needed for the post. I am quite sure that it will be the wisest course to close the matter at once.”

  The tears rose to Rachel’s eyes. All the difficulties, all the troubles that she had foreseen faded into nothingness beside this — this ignominious termination. “I am to go?” she said, her lips quivering.

  Lady Ellingham hesitated, for under that cold demeanour, behind the armour of pride which she had assumed in self-defence, there beat a heart. It troubled her now. “Have you seen Lady Ann?” she asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Do you think it possible that you can manage her?”

  “I can try — I should like to try,” the girl said, and her eyes pleaded for her.

  “Well, I will consider. It is quite true that I proposed to find a governess for her this autumn. She has run wild long enough. But, frankly, Miss South, you are not of the stamp I should have chosen. However — I will consider whether I shall give you a trial, and I will let you know my decision in the morning. Good evening. You can go now.”

  Her manner belied her words, for it held out less hope than she intended, and Rachel went back to the schoolroom in the lowest spirits; and, shocked by the sudden discovery of her false position, and faced by alternatives neither of which was of a kind to soothe, she slept, we may be sure, little that night. At one moment — but that was in the cold grey of the dawn when her courage ran low — she inclined to think dismissal the lesser evil. But for the most part she leaned to, she clung to the hope of remaining. The worst ordeal, even that which awaited her in the schoolroom, seemed preferable to a termination so premature and so humiliating, to a collapse of all her plans and prospects. She pictured her mother’s disappointment, she recalled the comfortable letter that she had written home. And bravely she determined to make a fight for it, were the chance given her.

  She judged that if she was to go, if my lady’s thumb turned downwards, she would be sent for early in the day; and from the moment that she sat down to her hasty breakfast she was in a flutter of spirits, expecting the summons and rising at every sound that reached her. She rehearsed with passion the appeal that she would make to Lady Ellingham; again she saw herself telling the tale to her mother. So time wore on — slowly, it need not be said. It struck eleven, and her hopes rose with the delay. But, as nothing here is perfect, with her hopes her fears rose also. Lady Ann, now that it seemed to be possible that she would be entrusted with her, grew more terrible; the schoolroom took on the aspect of an arena in which she foresaw a shameful defeat, and — and then she heard a step approaching.

  She expected a servant bearing a message, but it was Mr. Girardot who entered. He paused on the threshold, and his looks, at once solicitous and subdued, seemed to deprecate her anger. “If I thought, ma’am,” he said gravely, “that my news was welcome I should bear a lighter heart. But I do not know how your wishes run.”

  “I cannot say,” Rachel replied, trembling, “until I know what Lady Ellingham’s decision is.”

  “She — and, believe me, it is no small victory — desires that you will remain — on trial.”

  The blood rushed to Rachel’s face. “Oh!” she exclaimed. The die was cast, then.

  He let himself go. “I see,” he said, “that I was not mistaken in you. I was not wrong. You have more courage than caution — more spirit than prudence. If you were a man you would not count heads. You are not to be lightly browbeaten!”

  For the moment Rachel felt only relief, and she smiled. “Courage may be rashness,” she said. “I know only too well now” — her face growing grave again—” that the task was not meant for me and how ill-equipped I am for it. But you would not have me withdraw, sir? You would not have me,” she asked anxiously, “refuse to stay?”

  “I would not advise you,” he cried earnestly, “to any course that your own good sense and your will do not dictate to you. Heaven forbid! I know no better censors of any situation. I can fancy you equal to any decision!”

  She sighed and stood a moment reflecting, while he, watching her with growing interest, decided that no face that he
had ever seen was so transparent a taleteller. She really was, in her mingled weakness and strength, a dear little person.

  “But I must see Lady Ellingham,” she said at last, rousing herself, “before I can decide.”

  He put the suggestion aside. “There is no need,” he said. “I have full authority. Surely you do not doubt me?”

  She coloured. “No, of course not, sir. Still, I must see her.”

  “Ah!” In a moment his tone changed to one of injury, and his eyes sparkled. “I see how it is, ma’am. You are above dealing through me. You think I am not a fitting intermediary. You must see — oh yes, of course you must see Lady Ellingham herself! Nothing else will serve you. And yet,” he went on in a softer tone, “I have been an intermediary. I may have ventured to advise, to suggest, even to entreat. I may have pointed out things not to your disadvantage. But I see,” and his nostrils quivered, “I am not trusted, ma’am. I am to be nothing in this!”

  “But indeed, indeed,” Rachel cried in great distress, “I did not mean that. I am sure that you have been my friend, sir — that you have spoken for me. And doubtless—”

  “But I am not trusted!” He seemed to be on the point of leaving her in anger.

  “Please, please listen to me,” she said, clasping her hands. “It is not, indeed, it is not what you think. I am grateful, most grateful to you. Nevertheless, I must see Lady Ellingham. I must have — you must see that I must have — her support with Lady Ann. It is essential, it is necessary. Without that I should not be justified in staying.”

  “And my influence with Lady Ann,” he said gloomily, “is for nothing?”

  She plucked up a spirit. “You know that it is not,” she said. Surely, surely, he was unreasonable. “But I know,” she continued, with an appealing look which was what he had been playing for, “that I can count upon it. I know that I have a friend in you.”

  His face cleared as by magic. “That is all I ask,” he said. “But,” he went on with a charming smile, “I know now what a proud, what an independent, what a prickly little spirit it is! I know you. Yes, ma’am, I know you.”

  “And I may see Lady Ellingham?”

  “She is in the garden.” And without another word he turned away, leaving her, puzzled and disturbed, to review what had passed, to recall his looks, to smile at his unreasonableness, to be grateful for his aid.

  The main fact that she was to stay was decided, then. For the interview in the garden, it may be very briefly described as it was seen by the eyes of Mr. Crosstrees, the head gardener. He told his story sitting on the edge of a chair in Mrs. Jemmett’s room, and drinking a tankard of old ale, tapped and drawn under Bowles’s own eye.

  “Well, ma’am, ’twas a chance,” he said. “’Twasn’t my place to be there, and how I come to see them, I was showing the new lad to use a spade, which he works with his hand instead of his foot, and being unaccustomed I’d straightened my back. But there! What I saw was not worth seeing — just my lady and a poor little piece, standing before her as meek as a toad, and all the say my lady’s till just at the end.”

  Mrs. Jemmett gazed at the blindworm. If only she had been there!— “Was her ladyship pleasant like?”

  “Oh ay, oh ay, pleasant enough with a frost on it! Sort o’ March sun and wind, if you understand, Mr. Bowles. As it might be the north side of a fence. Talking kind of slow, and her chin tilted.”

  “Not scolding?”

  “Oh, nothing so low. Not demeanin’ herself. And by-’n’-by the little thing plucked up courage and said her bit, brave like for such as her, and my lady seemed to consider, and presently she called the young ladyship, and up her comes, black and sulky-like and kicking up behind. And my lady puts a hand on her shoulder and speaks a bit, her fidgeting and fermenting. Then, “You need not begin work till Monday,” says her ladyship, and nods her head, as much as to say ‘You may go,’ and the young person curtsies — very pretty, I will say. And — and that’s all there was to it, ma’am.”

  Crosstrees drank up his ale, and, when he was gone, Bowles pronounced his opinion. “’Twas the tutor did it,” he said.

  “Ay, to be sure. Now I wonder why, Bowles?”

  “Well, if you ask me, it’s a dull place, ma’am. And Mr. G.’s one to amuse himself.”

  “I should have thought he’d enough of that to his hand,” Mrs. Jemmett said darkly. “I sometimes think if I were his lordship I should have a word to say to it.”

  Bowles looked at the door. These were great lengths, singular indiscretions. But the dumbness of Crosstrees provoked to candour, and the butler was too gallant a man to leave Mrs. Jemmett at a disadvantage. “There you’d be wrong, Mrs. J.,” he said. “My lord’s touched too much pitch not to know it when he sees it — and likewise not to know where no pitch there is. And gentlemen amuse themselves, ma’am, in more ways than one. There’s a way tickles their vanity, and no harm done.”

  “Well, that’s not my lord’s way,” the housekeeper said with decision.

  Bowles chuckled. “I’d be very sorry to say it was. And then again there’s another way—”

  But Mrs. Jemmett’s modesty took fright. “You know too much, my man,” she said. “Not in this room, if you please!”

  CHAPTER VII

  GAINING A FOOTING

  RACHEL had won the cause, but she had still to pay the costs, she had still to make good her footing in the schoolroom. She had Ann on her mind, and heavy on her mind, and a Black Monday in prospect; and she had less faith in Lady Ellingham’s support than she could wish. She longed for the trial of strength to be over, and much would it have surprised her had she been told that within forty-eight hours she would be feeling, if not reconciled to her lot, at any rate in a mood to snatch a passing enjoyment and to think it possible that she might find pleasure in her new life.

  Yet so it was, and the change came about very simply. Towards three on the next afternoon the boy blundered in on her solitude. “I’m to ask,” he blurted out, bashfully kicking one foot against the other, “if you’d care to come with us to the Stag’s Hole? We’re to boil the kettle there. Mr. Girardot is coming.” Rachel guessed to whom she owed the attention. But she saw that here was a chance, more gracious than the schoolroom afforded, of coming to terms with her pupil, and she gladly embraced the invitation.

  “Then in twenty minutes!” the boy cried, and whooped himself away.

  So half an hour later she found herself marching into the forest with the tutor and the two children, the latter riding a pony by turns and squabbling much over it. The treat was unexpected, the scene was new to her, the sun shone, the woodland depths invited; and presently she was surprised to find herself at her ease. “In the season,” the tutor explained, “we do this once a week. Sometimes Lady Ellingham comes. She loves a fete-champetre, and the simpler it is the more it is to her taste. Oh, you are not so much to be pitied, ma’am, as you think! In twelve months I predict—”

  “If I am here,” she said.

  “No, no! No Jeremiads to-day, if you please!” he cried gaily. “I repeat that twelve months hence you will know every turn of this path and love it. You will be tied to the forest by every tendril of a heart that I am sure is open to the influence of beauty and solitude! You will mark with a white stone many a bank and resting-place now strange to you, and harbour memories and tender memories of more than one. I see it! I know it! You will be a forest lover, ma’am!” He flourished the basket that he carried.

  Rachel shook her head. “I am not so sanguine,” she said, and she would fain have been insensible to the thrill that his words and his tone awoke in her. But how could she resist the charm of the woodland that took her to its bosom, of the stately oaks, their feet clothed in bracken, or the dark beech-wood, so silent that the fall of the mast surprised the ear and the flight of a wood-dove startled the nerves? Of the green feathery bottom where a runlet tinkled unseen, and again sparkled in the sunshine? Or, if she were proof against these and against the holiday spirit that won
insensibly upon her, how was she to resist the tones that caressed her, that hinted interest, that avowed goodwill, that claimed to share alike her confidence and her fears? Rachel had been more than woman if she had not in some degree succumbed to the charm, even though Ann’s black brows and repellent glances cried a warning.

  “You are not so sanguine?” he said, after a pause given, it seemed, to reflection. “Why? But it is idle to ask. I know. You do not deceive me. Lady Ellingham’s manner has chilled you. But what of it? She is Lady Ellingham, we are we, we bear the badge of servitude that Swift bore. Then let it unite us. We are of a kind, we owe one another what sympathy, what aid, what comfort is in our power. Yesterday, I am proud to avow it, I did and said what lay in my way. And you are here, and are not — do not say that you are — unhappy to be here? Good! Then tomorrow it may lie with you to do the same kind office for me, and I know you too well — oh, I know you, I understand you. I have measured your loyal soul too exactly not to be sure that you in your turn—”

  But here the children broke in, claiming an arbiter, protesting, appealing, wrangling. They fell to beating one another, and the fray was only closed by Girardot’s seizing the girl, mastering her and dragging her on, half reluctant, half willing, her arm prisoned in his. Possibly he was not sorry to give the governess a proof of his power, where she felt herself so impotent; for he proceeded to tease Ann, to provoke and subdue the child by turns. And Rachel, who had shrunk from interposing, feeling herself unequal to the task, was not critical enough to discern that his authority was limited by the child’s humour, and went no farther than flattered her. Ann, too, was showing off.

  In a dingle with steep wooded sides and on a grassy plat, half encircled by a brook rippling clear and sharp over brown pebbles, they piled their wood beside a fallen trunk, lit it delicately with flint and steel and dry tinder, and set their kettle to boil. The children helped or hindered or strayed down the rivulet, turning stones for loaches. To Rachel the scene brought a sense of relief, of peace unexpected and unlooked for. The ease and freedom of the meal beside the stream pleased, and the boy made shy advances to her. But her main difficulty remained, for she perceived that but for the tutor’s watchful attentions, and his care to include her, she would have had but cold entertainment; and that Ann at any rate would have sent her to Coventry. Was it wonderful if she felt, and if now and again a shy glance betrayed, her gratitude? If, as they loitered homewards through an evening stillness inviting to reverie, or if, once more alone in her schoolroom, life seemed to take on a warmer hue?