For only now, when she sat alone and neglected, did she understand how large a part in her life from day to day, in her anticipations from morrow to morrow, the tutor had played. Only now did she grasp what feelings new and powerful he had awakened in her, how closely he had wound himself about her heart, how strong a spell his handsome face, his gay laugh, his voice, now tender, now teasing, had cast over her fancy!
She was a fool — oh, she was a fool: she told herself so a hundred times. But, alas! she knew now that she was also a woman. She was pale, languid, and heavy-eyed, caring for one thing only, and so low in energy that to attend to Ann was like heaving an immense weight from the ground. She vowed that, were she once sure, once certain that he meant nothing, that he was but playing with her, she could pluck him from her heart. But in the silence and solitude of the schoolroom she was not sure even of that. She shrank before the grey, monotonous, dreary prospect of a life, a long life, spent without him.
Still, when she descended to the drawing-room on this second evening, resentment had made some way with her — for how could she, how could he explain his silence, his avoidance? The wounded dove will peck and the wounded heart will turn — though feebly; and Rachel had, girl as she was, a spirit. She had taken care to descend later than on the previous evening, and she found Lady Ellingham already in the room and to all appearance absorbed in a book. Taking the hint, Rachel, stole softly to a chair, and opened the volume that she had brought with her, and for some minutes silence reigned. But presently, happening to raise her eyes, she saw her companion’s face reflected in a mirror, and with a tremor — for she could fancy on what my lady’s thoughts turned — she perceived that she was being inspected. She dropped her eyes to her book, but the attraction was irresistible — there had been something dark and magnetic in the other’s eyes; presently she had to look again. Her ladyship was still at gaze, but this time she seemed to think it necessary to speak.
“You look pale, Miss South,” she said. “Are you not well?”
“I have a slight headache,” Rachel confessed, though indeed, had she spoken truly, she had said heartache. “It is nothing, thank you.”
“I hope that nothing more has occurred to disturb you?”
“Oh, no,” Rachel answered. “Nothing.” But she coloured, and in her embarrassment she longed for the door across the hall to open, longed to hear the hum of voices, the riotous entry that would release her from scrutiny.
But it was without warning or sound that the door did open a minute later. It opened, and he came in, and in a moment the pride, of which she had begun to despair — so little had it aided her — came to her succour. The heart, that for an instant beat so tumultuously that it threatened to choke her, steadied itself, and she raised her eyes to meet his, marvelling at her self-possession. It helped her a little that the tutor did not at once discover her presence. He took the Countess to be alone, and he moved towards her with a smile — a smile that hardened the girl in her resentment — on his face.
“In season, dear lady, I trust?” he said gaily. “And neither too early nor too late? I fancy the company are only at their second—” There he broke off. He had become aware of Rachel, his eyes had travelled to her, and something in her face or in the silence of the room struck home to him, so that even his aplomb failed him. Then, “Oh, I did not know,” he explained with a laugh a little forced. “I flattered myself that I should be the single swallow. And I see that it is already summer.”
“If Miss South makes a summer?”
He had spoken the first glib words that occurred to him, without thought of their implications. He saw now that he must follow them up, and with an attempt at his usual tone, “I will not be so bold” — he rejoined, with a bow—” as to say who makes the summer.” Lady Ellingham’s eyes were bright with mischief. “No? Really? Then you do not decide between us? I am not sure, Miss South, which of us should feel the more flattered.”
“I think,” Rachel said, and she wondered at her own calmness, “that your ladyship uses the right word.”
The Countess returned the ball. “Dear me,” she replied. “You don’t say so? You really surprise me, Miss South! You speak as if you did not credit Mr. Girardot with meaning all the fine things that he says to us.”
He knew, and he had known from the first, that between the two he was in an awkward position; for who can court two women to their faces? And no doubt he cursed the unlucky impulse that had led him to enter before the diners. But he had to make the best of it, and, “Oh, but,” he protested lightly, though for once he coloured, “Miss South, I am sure, knows me better than that.”
“Better than I do, you mean?” my lady said.
“Well, if not so long—”
“No, not so long,” my lady assented, smiling always. “That is true. And perhaps not so well. But still well enough to put a true value, it seems, on the coinage you mint. Now I wonder, Miss South, whether he ever calls you ‘dear lady’? If so, that, I can assure you, means nothing.”
“Nothing?” he protested, striving stoutly to rally. “Oh, don’t say that! Bather the most respectful, the most sincere homage, dear lady.”
“Nothing but a compliment, Miss South. It cannot,” my lady’s voice hardened slightly, “since he often uses it to me, and so it can mean no more. He uses it as—”
“As he uses painted quills sometimes,” Rachel said, with a coolness that was an immeasurable surprise to herself.
“Painted quills!” Lady Ellingham exclaimed. She was puzzled. For the first time, and not understanding, she turned her bantering eyes from him, and looked at the governess.
“Lady Ann is not yet open to flattery,” Rachel explained. Her courage, her pose, were a continuing amazement to herself.
The Countess laughed. “Oh, I see. Very clever of you, Miss South! Very clever! Of course! I forgot that Ann was also of the sex and open to attack.” Baited by both he tried to fall back on his mock-serious tone. “So this is your gratitude,” he exclaimed, addressing Rachel. “Oh, ma’am, for shame! When I remember how many easy mornings, how much good behaviour, I purchased with those quills, how many days of prunes and prisms I bought for you—”
But my lady broke in. “I see! I see!” she cried. “Then doubtless I too was beside the target! And his compliments to me and his gifts to Ann were alike for your benefit, Miss South?”
“I am infinitely obliged to him,” Rachel said. But her heart was beginning to melt. What a return, oh, what a return she was making to him!
“And no more?” the Countess rejoined in mock surprise. “No more than that?”
“No, no more,” Rachel said steadily, but the effort was almost too much for her. “Though I must admit,” — what devil of ingratitude was speaking in her stead?—” that he also mended a great many pens for us.” The Countess laughed. “Now, Mr. Girardot! Now, it is your turn. Say something about the ingratitude of the fair, will you? It seems to me that it would be appropriate.”
But for once the tutor, who was wont to be so self-possessed, had nothing to say. He could only look foolish. And it was Rachel who with desperate audacity — but the pride that had suffered seemed to take possession of her, and to oust her will — it was Rachel who took the word, and gave the coup de grace. “Oh, but I forgot,” she said. “He has also pressed my hand, Lady Ellingham. I believe that I ought to have been offended, though I knew that it was but a compliment. But you came into the room at the moment and Mr. Girardot—”
“Went out!” Lady Ellingham cried, and she laughed softly. “Oh, Mr. Girardot, you naughty, naughty philanderer! Do, Miss South, look at him! He is positively blushing, and no wonder! Compliments, quills, and hand-pressings — and Ann his only conquest!”
He was indeed utterly out of countenance, for the impudent when abashed are the most abashed; and unable to relieve his feelings by the oath that rose to his lips, the tutor could maintain his easy tone no longer. “Your ladyship is pleased to amuse yourself,” he said with an air
of offence. His vanity was wounded to the quick.
“But haven’t we all been amusing ourselves?” she asked innocently. “Except Ann. Of course, I forgot Ann. And didn’t you come in this evening to amuse me, had I been alone, Mr. Girardot? As it is, and Miss South being with me, you have amused us both, as was right.”
There was bitter meaning in his next words. “Certainly, it is long since I have heard your ladyship laugh as much,” he said. “And Miss South does not laugh now.”
Rachel dropped her eyes to her book. Oh, what had she done and what — what demon of pride had driven her to it? But as she had begun so she must finish, though it pierced her heart to wound him further. And, thus challenged, she looked up, she met his eyes. “No, Mr. Girardot,” she said soberly. “I do not laugh because — the game was new to me. I did not at once comprehend it and I was a little out of my depth. Lady Effingham, however, has been good enough to give me a lesson, and I now understand the rules. But it is a game,” her voice trembled, “I do not care to play, and perhaps” — ah, was she casting away her last hope, her last chance of happiness?—” perhaps for the future you will kindly confine the quiffs, sir, to Ann — who does appreciate them.”
“Brava!” said her ladyship — but she too spoke more gravely. “Now as to Miss South you have fair warning, sir. I, on the contrary, am an old player, and you may call me ‘dear lady’ as often as you think proper and always with the proviso that it means respectful homage — that I think was the term you used! But for the rest — Oh dear, here they come and we must be serious again.”
But it was only the Captain, whose approach she had heard, and he entered, looking a little flushed and shamefaced. He cast a sharp glance at the three and nodded to Lady Ellingham. “Better pipe below, Kitty!” he said. “And go to bed. They are fairly settled down to it, and when they come out—” He shrugged his shoulders, and left the rest to be understood.
The Countess raised her eyebrows. “Thank you,” she said. “It is like you, no one else would have thought of us. Miss South, you are released. Good night. Mr. Girardot, I think my fan is on that table. Will you look? No, it must be on the other. Is it not there? One moment, if you please.” She searched. “Oh, yes, I have it. Good night.”
When the two had retired — severally and not together, she had seen to that—” What was afoot?” the Captain asked. “I thought that Master Girardot looked a little queer. What was it, eh?”
“Oh, not much,” my lady said wearily. “Nothing of importance. We have been holding a court and convicting an offender. But I wish — I wish I understood that girl. She has a command of herself that — that’s not natural, if she is as young and innocent as she seems. I can’t make her out. Sometimes I like her, and sometimes I doubt her.”
“Well, I don’t think she is a common kind of craft.”
“No, I agree. She is clever; so clever and so demure with it, that who is to say, George, what she is? She may be deceiving us all the time.”
“Oh, tell that to the Marines!” he answered. “I thought you had got that notion out of your head, Kitty.”
“But last night I noticed that he—”
“Pooh, pooh! A pretty face and a new one!”
“But,” she asked with simplicity, “has she a pretty face?”
“If you ask me,” he replied bluntly, “no! Stand beside her and look in the glass, my dear, if you want to know.”
“But Lord Robert seemed to be taken with her!”
“Bobbie? Bobbie would flirt with a petticoat hung on the anchor-fluke, if it was new to him! As for that little baggage, well, she is but a child after all. The real point is — Fred! You are wronging him, my lady, and I tell you so! You are wronging him, Kitty. He is bad enough God knows, but not bad enough for what you suspect, and for heaven’s sake get it out of your head! And wear a smooth face to-morrow. This shall not occur again if I can help it, and it is not altogether Fred’s fault. He can’t stop the bottle in the company he’s in.”
She shrugged her shoulders. “It’s a company of his own choosing,” she said, her face sombre.
CHAPTER XIV
ANNA FURENS
THE morning found Rachel listless and heart-weary. She had played out the game that pride had dictated to her, and she had won back her self-respect if, she thought bitterly, it were worth winning back. She had punished her lover — if he were indeed her lover! But twice in the course of dressing she gave way to passionate fits of weeping, and, as she remembered the return that she had made to him, and what he must now be thinking of her, she writhed in torment. But since there is to all feeling a limit, a gloomy apathy presently supervened and gradually took the place of the fever that had consumed her.
And certainly it was on a world in sympathy with her dark thoughts, that having set out the books and marked the place in Telemaque — hateful work — she gazed from the window as she awaited Ann’s coming. The sky was leaden, the sward beneath it brown and frost-bitten. The stately oaks that in the summer had raised majestic heads of foliage and ruled each its space of verdure, now stood naked and far apart, swept by the cutting wind that rustled through the beds of dead fern. Gnarled thorns that had seen generations of hunters pass beneath them, preached from a hundred bristling points the lesson of stark endurance in a hard world. And Rachel shivered as she gazed. It was so that she saw life this morning; grey, cheerless, stretching far and lonely, its bourne lost in mist. She longed to be alone to weep her fill, to wash away with bitter tears the remembrance of her cruelty and ingratitude.
That could not be. For here, noisy, tumultuous, racing along the passage, came the children; not Ann only, but her brother. They burst in, the boy leading and capering in triumph. “I’m to shoot!” he shouted. “Hurrah! I’m to shoot! I’m to shoot with the party.”
“Then I’m going too!” the girl retorted jealously, and fell upon him, beating him with her hood. Evidently the battle had been joined below, and she was in her most truculent mood. “You don’t go without me!”
“You! You are a Jenny!” he taunted, putting the table between them and still dancing up and down. “Girls don’t shoot. What would you do with a gun? You are only a Jenny! She is not going with us, is she, Miss South?”
Before Rachel could speak Ann rushed at him and he fled round the table, throwing down a chair. Rachel tried in vain to part them and only succeeded when Ann stopped out of breath. “Miss South!” she gasped, “say that I am to go. I am to go too, ain’t I?”
“If your mother wishes you to go, certainly.”
“But she doesn’t!” the boy retorted. “She says you’d be in the way, silly, and of course you would. You are only a girl!”
“Lord Bodmin, you are very rude!” Rachel said severely. “But that is enough, Ann. If your mother does not wish you to go, of course you cannot. Come, it is ten o’clock.” She picked up the fallen chair and set it at the table. “Let us be sensible and get to work.”
But Ann thrust the chair away. “I shan’t! I shan’t!” she declared passionately. “I shan’t do a word of work!”
“Ann! For shame!”
“It’s not fair! It’s not fair!” Ann cried, her voice quivering. “If he’s to go—”
“There, cry-baby!” the boy retorted. He was not ill-natured and he was fond of his sister, but he was uplifted by his promotion; while the girl discerned perhaps, if only dimly, that here was the parting of the ways, that here began the elevation of the boy above the girl. At any rate, the taunt was barely uttered before Ann snatched up a book. “Oh, you toad!” she cried, and would have flung it in his face.
Fortunately Rachel seized her hand and wrested the book from her. “Enough!” she said angrily — she, too, heaven help her, had not much patience to spare this morning. “I will not have this! You cannot always do what your brother does, Ann. He is a boy and you are a girl. Be silent! And you,” to the boy, “go at once! When you are gone—”
Bodmin with a defiant whoop turned to the door. But the pros
pect of defeat was too much for Ann. She also made a dart towards the door, and if Rachel had not shut it and set her back to it, both would have escaped. “Ann!” she said, beside herself. “You must not be disobedient. You shall not go,” as the girl tugged furiously at the handle. “If you behave like this I must go to your mother! And you are only keeping your brother—”
“I want to keep him!” Ann panted vengefully. “I want to keep him! Oh, you beast!” And she tried to strike him across Rachel.
“Lady Ann!”
“You beast! You beast!”
“You naughty wicked girl!” Rachel cried, appalled by the passion that turned the child, with her black brows and inky mane, into a fury. “For shame, you wicked child! Do you hear me? Leave the door this instant and go to your place!”
Ann went before the word was out of Rachel’s mouth, but it was only to seize a book from the table and hurl it recklessly at her brother’s face. A second followed, and she had the inkstand in her hand and was in the act of flinging it when Rachel, beside herself at the scene, seized her wrist and wrested the missile from her. Even that was at the cost of half the ink which flew out not only over the table but over her frock.
“There!” said the boy dispassionately. “Now you have done it, you silly! That’s what comes of your rages!”
The taunt was too much. The child turned on Rachel, who still held her by the wrist, and with her free hand and all her strength she struck her in the face.
Rachel thought afterwards of several things that she might have done and ought to have done. To go straight to the Countess with the mark on her cheek was one of them. But what she did, overwrought as she was, was none of these things. She turned away, covered her face with her hands, and burst into a passion of tears.
Complete Works of Stanley J Weyman Page 721