CHAPTER XIX.

‘I DEME THAT HIRE HERTE WAS FUL OF WO.’

All the servants at South Hill were old servants. Sir Vernon was a stern and an exacting master, but he only asked fair change for his shilling. He did not expect to reap where he had not sown, nor to gather where he had not strewed. His household was carried on upon a large and liberal scale, and the servants had privileges which they would hardly have enjoyed elsewhere. Therefore, with the disinterested fidelity of their profession, and of the human race generally, they stayed with him, growing old and gray in his service.

Among these faithful followers was one who made a stronger point of her fidelity than any of the others, and affected a certain superiority to all the rest. This was Mowser, Madoline’s own maid, who had been maid to Lady Lawford until her death, and who, on that melancholy event, had taken upon herself the office of nurse to the orphan girl. That she was faithful to Madoline, and strongly attached to Madoline, there could be no doubt; but it was rather hard upon the outstanding balance of humanity that she could consider herself privileged by reason of this attachment to be as disagreeable as she pleased to everyone else.

In those early days of Madoline’s infancy Mowser had taken possession of the nurseries as her own domain—belonging to her by some sovereign right of custodianship, as entirely hers as if they had been her freehold. Strong in her convictions on this point, she had resented all intrusion from the outer world; she had looked daggers at innocent visitors who were brought to see the baby; she had carried on war to the knife—a war of impertinences and uncivil looks—with Aunt Rhoda, firmly possessed by the idea that an aunt was an outsider as compared with a nurse.

‘Didn’t I sit up night after night with her when she had the scarlet-fever, and go without my sleep and rest for a fortnight?’ said the faithful one, expatiating vindictively upon her wrongs, in the conversational freedom of the servants’-hall. ‘Will any of your fine ladies of fashion do that?’

Mrs. Spicer was of opinion that some might, but not Miss Rhoda Lawford. She was a great deal too fond of her own comfort.

Mowser was not a woman of high culture. She had begun the battle of life early, and was too old to have been subject to the exactions of the School Board. She had been born and bred in a Warwickshire village, and educated five-and-thirty years ago at a Warwickshire dame school. Gerald told Daphne that he had no doubt Mowser had every whit as much book-learning as Shakespeare’s mother, Mary Arden. She was not averse from the use of fine words, but pronounced them after her own fancy. All unauthorised visitors to the nursery she denounced as antelopes, meaning, it was supposed, not the graceful animal of the stag species usually known by that name, but the more obnoxious human individual commonly called an interloper. Even Daphne, when she took the liberty to be born, and was brought by her own particular nurse to Mowser’s nursery, was looked upon as belonging in some wise to the antelope family; while the strange nurse was, of course, a thoroughbred specimen of that race. While Daphne was an infant, and the second nurse remained, there were fearful wars and rumours of wars in Mowser’s apartments, and exultantly did that injured female lift up her voice when Daphne went to her first school—at an age when few children of the landed gentry are sent to school—and the unsanctified nurse departed. She came a Pariah, and she went a Pariah—a creature under a ban.

‘Now I can breathe free,’ exclaimed Mowser, after she had ostentatiously opened the windows and aired the nurseries, as in a Jewish household windows and doors are flung wide when the spirit has departed. ‘I felt almost stuffocated while she was here.’

Sir Vernon, seeing very little of Mowser, and knowing that she was a devoted nurse to his beloved elder daughter, had troubled himself very little about such complaints of her ‘tempers’ as from time to time reached his ears. He discouraged all fault-finding in his sister upon principle. So long as everything in the house, which concerned himself and his own comfort, went on velvet, he was unaffected by the fact that the servants made themselves disagreeable to other people. It was no matter to him that Spicer had been abominably impertinent to Aunt Rhoda in the morning, provided his dinner were well cooked in the evening. Nor did Rhoda’s raven croakings about the profligate wastefulness of his household distress him. He knew what he was spending, and that his expenses were so nearly on a level with his income that he always seemed poor: but though he liked to growl and grumble after every inspection of his banker’s book, he hated to be worried about pounds of butter, and quarts of milk, and dozens of eggs, by his sister.

‘If you pretend to keep my house, Rhoda, you must keep it quietly, and not plague me about these disgusting details,’ he said savagely; whereat Rhoda shrugged her elegant shoulders, and protested that if her brother liked to be cheated it was of course no business of hers to step in between him and the depredators.

‘I don’t like to be cheated, but I like still less to be worried,’ said Sir Vernon decisively; and Rhoda was wise enough to carry on the struggle no longer.

She had her own comfort and her own advantage to consider, and she troubled her brother no further about domestic difficulties: but she carried on her war with the enemy vigorously notwithstanding—fiercest of all with Mowser, who looked upon Miss Lawford as the very head and front of the antelope tribe.

Mowser was a servant of the old school. She prided herself upon the manners and habits of a past generation. She wore corkscrew ringlets, and a cap trimmed with real Buckinghamshire lace—none of your Nottingham machine-made stuff for Mowser. Her petticoats were short and scanty, and her side-laced cashmere boots were a relic of the past. She wore an ostentatious gold chain round her neck, and a portly silver watch at her side. She was rarely seen without a black-silk apron, which rustled exceedingly. She was of a bony figure, her face sharp and angular, her eyes a cold hard-looking gray.

When Madoline left the nursery Mowser resumed her original function of lady’s-maid. She had no particular gifts for the office. She had no taste for millinery; she had no skill in hair-dressing. She had been chosen by Madoline’s mother—a young lady of very simple habits—on account of her respectability and local status. She was the daughter of Old Mrs. Somebody, who had been thirty years a servant in the first Lady Lawford’s family. The houses of the menial and the mistress had been allied for a century or so; and for this reason, rather than for any other, Jane Mowser had been considered eligible for the office of maid.

She was active and industrious, kept her mistress’s wardrobe and her mistress’s dressing-room in exquisite order. She could wash and mend laces to perfection. She could pack, and unpack, and was a devoted attendant in illness. But here her powers found their limit. The milliner and the dressmaker had to do all the rest. Mowser had no more taste than any villager in her native hamlet; no capacity for advising or assisting her mistress in any of the details of the toilet. She looked upon all modern fashions as iniquities which were perpetually inviting from heaven a re-issue of that fiery rain which buried Sodom and Gomorrah. To Mowser’s mind, jersey jackets and eel-skin dresses, idiot fringes and Toby frills, were the fulfilment of the prophet Isaiah’s prophecy. These were the ‘changeable suits of apparel, the mantles, and the tires, and the crisping pins, the mufflers, and round-tires like the moon;’ and all these things were the forecast of some awful doom. It might be earthquakes, or floods, or a hideous concatenation of railway accidents, or the exhaustion of our coal mines, or the total failure of butcher’s meat by reason of the foot-and-mouth disease. Mowser did not know what form the scourge would take; but she felt that retribution, prompt and dire, must follow the reign of painted faces, jersey bodies, and tight-fitting skirts. Young women could not be allowed so to display their figures with impunity. Providence had an eye on their sham complexions and borrowed locks.

All picturesqueness of attire Mowser resented as a play-actress style of dress, altogether degrading to a respectable mind. She objected to Daphne’s neatly-fitting, tailor-made gowns, her soft creamy muslins, relieved by dashes of vivid colour, and thought they would end badly. Not so did young ladies dress in Mowser’s youth. Small-patterned striped or checked silks, with neat laced berthas fitting close to modestly-covered shoulders, were then the mode. There was none of that artistic coquetry which gives to every woman’s dress a distinctive character, marking her out from the throng.

Vainly did Mowser sigh for those vanished days, the simplicity, the high thinking and plain living, of her girlhood. Here was Mrs. Ferrers wasting the Rector’s substance upon gowns which five-and-twenty years ago would have been considered extravagant for a duchess; here was Daphne dressing herself up—with Madoline’s approval—to look as much as possible like a play-actress or an old picture.

Mowser was no fonder of Daphne now than she had been in the days when the unwelcome addition to the nursery was stigmatised as an ‘antelope.’ There was still a good deal of the antelope about Daphne, in Mowser’s opinion. ‘It would have been better for all parties if Miss Daphne had stayed a year or two longer at her finishing school,’ Mowser remarked sententiously in the housekeeper’s room, where she was regarded, or at any rate was known to regard herself, as an oracle. ‘First and foremost, she hasn’t half finished her education.’

‘Haven’t she, Mowser?’ asked Jinman, Sir Vernon’s own man, with a malicious twinkle in his eye. ‘How did you find out that? Have you been putting her through her paces?’

‘No, Mr. Jinman; but I hope I know whether a young lady’s education is finished, without the help of book-learning. My mother was left a lone widow before I was three years old, and I hadn’t the opportunities some people have had, and might have made better use of. But I know what a young lady ought to be, and what she oughtn’t to be; and I say Miss Daphne leans most to the last. Why, her manners are not half formed. She goes rushing about the house like a whirlwind; always in high spirits, or in the dumps—no mejum.’

‘She’s dev’lish pretty,’ said Jinman, who, on the strength of having spent a good deal of time with his master at Limmer’s Hotel, put on a metropolitan and somewhat rakish air.

‘She’s not fit to hold a candle to my mistress,’ retorted Mowser.

‘Not such a reg’lar style of beauty, perhaps, but more taking, more “chick,”’ said the valet.

‘I don’t know what you mean by “chick.” She’s a born flirt. Perhaps that’s what you mean. She’s her mother all over, worse luck for her! the same ways, the same looks, the same tones of voice. I wish she was out of the house. I never feel safe or comfortable about her. She’s like a dagger hanging over my head; and I don’t know when she may drop.’

‘It’s a pity she refused young Turchill,’ said Jinman. ‘He’s the right sort. But as he still hangs on, I suppose she means to have him sooner or later.’

‘No, she don’t. _That’s_ not her meaning,’ answered Mowser with significance.

‘What does she mean, then?’

‘I know what she means. I know her; much better than her poor innocent sister does. Masks and artifexes ain’t no use with me. I can read her. Mr. Turchill ain’t good enough for her. She wants someone better than him. But she won’t succeed in her mackinventions, while Mowser is by to file her—double-faced as she is.’

There was a subtlety about Mowser this evening which her fellow-servants were hardly able to follow. They all liked Daphne, for her pretty looks and bright girlish ways, yet, with that love of slander and mystery which is common to humanity in all circles, they rather inclined to hear Mowser hint darkly at the girl’s unworthiness. They all preferred the slandered to the slanderer; but they listened all the same.

* * * * *

And now Christmas was over, and the night of the Hunt Ball at Stratford was approaching. It was to be Daphne’s first public appearance; first dance; first grown-up party of any kind. She was to see the county people assembled in a multitude for the first time in her life. A few of them she had seen by instalments at South Hill—callers and diners. She had been invited by these to various lawn parties: but her sister had refused all invitations of this kind, wishing that the occasion of Daphne’s _début_ should be something more brilliant than a mere garden party, a fool’s paradise of curates and young ladies.

Daphne looked forward to the night with excitement, but excitement of that fitful kind which was common to her—now on the tiptoe of expectation, anon not caring a straw for the entertainment. There had been the usual talk about gowns; and Aunt Rhoda had insisted upon coming over to South Hill to give her opinion.

‘White, of course, for the _débutante_,’ said Madoline. ‘There can be no question about that.’

Mrs. Ferrers screwed up her lips in a severe manner, and looked at Daphne with a coldly critical stare.

‘White is so very trying,’ she said, as if Daphne’s were not a beauty that could afford to be tried; ‘and then it has such a bridal air. I daresay there will be half-a-dozen brides at the ball. I know of two—Mrs. Toddlington, and Mrs. Frank Lothrop.’

‘I don’t think Daphne need fear comparison with either of those,’ answered Madoline, looking fondly at her sister, who was sitting on a cushion at her feet, turning over a book of fashion plates. ‘Well, darling, do you see anything there you would like?’

‘Nothing. Every one of the dresses is utterly hideous; stiff, elaborate; fantastical, without being artistic; gaged and puffed and pleated, and festooned and fringed and gimped. Please dress me for the ball as you have always dressed me, out of your own head, Lina, without any help from Miss Piper’s fashion plates.’

‘Shall I, dear? Would you really prefer that to choosing something in the very last fashion?’

‘Infinitely.’

‘Then I’ll tell you what it shall be. I will dress you like a portrait by Sir Joshua. The richest white satin that money can buy, made as simply as Miss Piper can possibly be persuaded to make it. A little thin lace, cloudlike, about your neck and arms, and my small pearl necklace for your only ornament.’

‘Madoline, do you think it is wise of you to let Daphne appear in borrowed plumes?’ asked Mrs. Ferrers severely. ‘It may be giving her wrong ideas.’

‘They shall not be borrowed plumes. The necklace shall be my New Year’s gift to you, Daphne, darling.’

‘No, no, Lina. I am not going to despoil you of your jewels. I have always thought it was dreadfully bad of the Jewesses to swindle the Egyptians before they crossed the Red Sea, even though they were told to do it.’

‘Daphne!’ screamed Aunt Rhoda; ‘your profanity is something too shocking.’

‘My pet, I am not going to be contradicted,’ said Lina, not remarking upon this reproof. ‘The little necklace is yours henceforward. I have more jewellery than I can ever wear.’

‘It was your mother’s, Madoline, and you ought to respect it.’

‘It was my mother’s nature to give, and not to hoard, Aunt Rhoda. She would have been ashamed of a selfish daughter. Will that do, Daphne? The white satin and old Mechlin lace, and just one spray of stephanotis in your hair?’

‘Nothing could be prettier, Lina.’

‘What are you going to wear yourself, Madoline?’ asked Mrs. Ferrers with a dissatisfied air. ‘I suppose you are going to indulge in a new gown.’

‘I have hardly made up my mind to be so extravagant. There is the gold-coloured satin I had for the dinner at Warwick Castle.’

‘Much too heavy for a ball. No, you must have something new, Lina, if it be only to keep me in countenance. I had quite made up my mind to wear that pearl-gray sicilienne which you all so much admired; but the Rector insisted upon my getting a new gown from Paris.’

‘From Worth?’

‘Can you suppose I could be so extravagant? No, Lina; when I venture upon a French gown I get it from a little woman on a third floor in the Rue Vivienne. She was Worth’s right hand some years ago, and she has quite his style. I tell her what colours I should like, and how much money I am prepared to spend, and she does all the rest without giving me any trouble.’

It was decided that Madoline should have a new gown of the palest salmon, or blush-rose colour; something which would look well with a profusion of those exquisite tea-roses which MacCloskie produced grudgingly in the winter-tide, burning as much coal in the process as if he were steaming home from China with the first of the tea-gatherings, and wanted to be beforehand with the rest of the trade. Mrs. Ferrers made a good many objections to Daphne’s white satin, and was convinced it would be unbecoming to her; also that it would be wanting in style; yet it would be conspicuous, if not positively _outré_. But Lina had made up her mind, and was a person of considerable decision on occasions. Whatever the colour or material chosen, Aunt Rhoda would have objected to it, as she had not been called upon to advise in the matter.

‘Well, Lina, my dear, I must go home and give the Rector his afternoon tea,’ she said, rising and putting on her fur-lined mantle. ‘I might have spared myself the trouble of walking over to discuss the ball dresses. You haven’t wanted my advice.’

‘It was very sweet of you to come all the same, auntie,’ said Lina, kissing her, ‘and we might have wanted you badly. Besides, your advice is going to be taken. It is to please you that I am going to have a new gown—which I really don’t want.’

‘Be sure Miss Piper makes your waist longer. The last was too short. She is not a patch upon my little Frenchwoman. But you are so bent upon employing the people about you.’

‘I like to spend my money near home, auntie.’

‘Even if you are rewarded by being made a guy. Well, at your age, and with your advantages, you can afford to be careless. I can’t.’

New Year’s Day passed very quietly. There was much less fuss about the new year at South Hill than there had been at Madame Tolmache’s twelve months ago; where the young ladies had prepared a stupendous surprise—of which she was perfectly aware a month beforehand—for that lady, in the shape of an embroidered sofa-cushion; and where the pupils presented each other with boxes of sweetmeats, and gushed exceedingly, in sentiments appropriate to the occasion.

Except that Daphne found the pearl necklace in a little old-fashioned red morocco case under her pillow when she awoke on that first dawn of the year, the day might have been the same as other days. She sat up in her little curtainless bed, with the necklace in her hand, looking straight before her, into the wintry landscape, into the new year.

‘What is it going to be like for me? What is it going to bring me?’ she asked herself, her eyes slowly filling with tears, her face and attitude, even to the listless hand which loosely held the string of pearls, expressive of a dejection that was akin to despair. ‘What will this new-born year bring me? Not happiness. No, that could not be—that can never be. I lost the hope of that a year and a half ago—on one foolish, never-to-be-forgotten summer day. If I had died before that day—if I had taken the fever like those other girls, and had it badly, and died of it, would it not have been a better fate than to be always fluttering on the edge of happiness; wickedly, wildly happy sometimes when I am with him—wretched when he is away; guilty always—guilty to her, my best and my dearest; shameful to myself; lost to honour; conscience-stricken, miserable?’

Her tears fell thick and fast now, and for some moments she wept passionately, greeting the new year with tears. Then, growing calmer, she lifted the pearls to her lips, and kissed them tenderly.

‘It shall be a talisman,’ she said to herself. ‘White gift from a white soul, pure and perfect as the giver. Yes, it shall be a charm. I will sin no more. I will think of him no more of whom to think is sin. I will shut him out of my heart. My love, I will forget you! My love, who held my hand that summer day, and read my fate there—an evil fate—yes, for is it not evil to love you? my love, who stole my heart with sweet low words and magical looks—looks and words that meant nothing to you, but all the world—more than the world—to me. Oh, I must find some way of forgetting you. I must teach myself to be proud. It is so mean, so degrading, to go on loving where I have never been loved. If he knew it, how he would despise me! I would die rather than he should know!’

Hard to face a new-born year in such a temper as this, with a heart heavily burdened by a fatal secret; all the world, to outward seeming, smiles and sunshine. For what care could such a girl as Daphne have, a girl who had no more need for the serious consideration of life than the lilies have? All without sunshine and turtle-doves; all within, darkness and scorpions.

When she was dressed, save for the putting on of her warm winter gown, Daphne clasped the necklace round her throat. The pearls were not whiter or more perfectly shaped than the neck they clasped.

‘I must wear my talisman always,’ she thought, as she fastened the snap. ‘Let me be like the prince in the fairy tale, whose ring used to remind him by a sharp little stab when he was drifting into sin.’

She went downstairs in a somewhat more cheerful mood than that of her first awaking. There was comfort in the pearls. She kissed her sister lovingly, kneeling by her side as she thanked her for the New Year’s gift. There was an open jewel-case on the breakfast-table, and beside it a basket of summer flowers—a basket that had come straight from the sunny south, from the winterless flower-gardens on the shores of the Mediterranean.

Daphne looked at the jewels first—a low thing in human nature, but inevitable. The case contained a sapphire cross, the stones large and lustrous, perfect in their deep azure, and set in the lightest, most delicate mounting—a cross which a princess might hold choicest amongst all her jewels. The flowers were roses, camellias, violets, and a curious thorny-stemmed orange-blossom.

‘Oh, Lina,’ cried Daphne; ‘orange-blossom with thorns! Isn’t that an evil omen?’

‘I hope not, dear, but I like the other kind best. This is almost too spiky to put in a flower-glass. But wasn’t it good of Gerald to get these flowers sent over from Nice for a New Year’s greeting?’

‘Oh, it was he who sent them?’

‘Who else? There was a little note at the bottom of the basket; and see, this lovely camellia bud is labelled “For Daphne.”’

‘“There’s rue for you,”’ quoted Daphne, with her half bitter smile. ‘Yes, it was very polite of him to remember my existence.’

‘There is something else for you, darling—a locket, which Gerald asks me to give you from him. He hopes you will wear it at your first ball.’

She opened a small blue velvet case, and Daphne beheld an oval locket of dead dull gold with a diagonal band of sapphires. It had a kind of moonlight effect which was very fascinating.

‘No,’ said Daphne gently, but with unmistakable resolve; ‘I will accept jewels from no one but you. You can afford to give me all I shall ever want, and it is a pleasure to you to give—I know that, dearest—and to me to receive. I cannot accept Mr. Goring’s gift, although I appreciate his kindness in offering it.’

‘Daphne! He will be dreadfully wounded.’

‘No, he won’t. He will understand that I have a touch of pride. From my sister all the benefits in the world; but from him nothing—except this cold white bud!’

She put it to her lips involuntarily, unconsciously; but the contact of the flower he had touched thrilled her with mysterious passion—as if it were his very soul that touched her soul. She shivered and turned pale.

‘My pet, you are looking so ill this morning, so cold and wretched,’ said Madoline, looking up from fond contemplation of her lover’s gifts just in time to see that white wan look of Daphne’s.

‘I am well enough, but it is a cold wretched morning,’ answered Daphne, as she bent over the fire, spreading out her dimpled hands before the blaze. ‘Don’t you think New Year’s Day is a horrid anniversary?—beginning everything over again from a fresh starting-point; tempting one to think about the future; obliging one to look back at the past and be sorry for having wasted another year. You will go to church, I suppose, and take your dose of remorse in an orthodox form!’

‘Won’t you come with me, Daphne? Everyone ought to go to church on New Year’s Day, even if it were not a sacred anniversary.’

‘Yes, I’ll come, if you like. I may as well be there as anywhere else.’

‘My darling, is that the way to speak or to think about it?’

‘I don’t know. I’m afraid I am desperately irreligious. If I had ever found religion do me any good I might be more seriously-minded, perhaps. But when I pray, my prayers seem to come back to me unheard. I am always asking for bread, and getting a stone.’

‘Dearest, there can be but one reason for that. You do not pray rightly. Constant, fervent prayer never failed yet to bring a blessing: perhaps not the very blessing we have asked for, but something purer, higher—the peace of God which passeth all understanding. That for the most part is God’s answer to faithful prayer.’

‘Perhaps that is it. I pray in a half-hearted way. “My words fly up, my thoughts remain below.” I am anchored too heavily to this wicked world. I stretch out my hands to heaven, but not my heart: that is of the earth earthy.’

‘Come to church, dear, and this solemn day will bring serious thoughts.’

‘I would go if it were only for the sake of going a little way towards heaven with you. Yes, Lina dearest, I will go and kneel by your side, and pray to become more like you.’

‘A poor example,’ answered Madoline, smiling.

And now Sir Vernon entered, pale and drawn after his late illness, but erect and dignified. There were no family prayers at South Hill, and there never had been since the first Lady Lawford’s death. Sir Vernon went to church on Sunday morning, when he considered himself well enough, but all other religious offices he performed in the seclusion of his own rooms. There was therefore no morning muster for prayers, and the servants at South Hill were free to choose their own road to heaven.

Madoline rose to greet her father with loving New Year wishes. Daphne kept her kneeling attitude by the fire, with her face turned towards the blaze, feeling that good wishes from her would be a superfluity.

‘My years must always be happy while I have you, dearest,’ said Sir Vernon, kissing his elder daughter; and then, with some touch of gentlemanly feeling, bethinking himself of the child he did not love, he laid his hand lightly on Daphne’s golden head.

‘Good morning, Daphne. A happy New Year to you!’ he said gently.

She silently turned from the fire, took her father’s hand, and raised it to her lips. It was the first time she had ever done such a thing: a little gush of spontaneous feeling, and the father’s heart was touched—touched, albeit, like all Daphne’s graces, this little bit of girlish graciousness recalled her mother’s fatal charms.

‘“Bless me, even me also, O my father!”’ she exclaimed, recalling one of the most pathetic passages of Holy Writ.

‘God bless and prosper you, my dear.’

‘Thank you, papa. That is a good beginning for the year,’ said Daphne, stifling a sob. ‘I don’t think I shall feel like Esau any more.’

‘My dearest, what comparisons you make,’ cried Madoline. ‘In what have you ever been like Esau? Have I ever cheated you?’

‘Not willingly, darling,’ answered Daphne, nestling close beside Madoline as she began to pour out Sir Vernon’s tea. ‘You are my benefactress, my guardian angel. Is it your fault if I belong by nature and pedigree to the tribe of Ishmael?’