CHAPTER XVI.

COMPANION TO MISS KINGSCOTE.

“Will you be so good as to tell me the arrangements which you have made for me?” requested Lady Bell, remembering that as her money was lost, it was out of her power to undo these arrangements.

“With all my heart, my dear,” replied Mrs. Siddons cordially. She was thankful to have discharged an ungracious task, though she had not for a moment been uncertain of her obligation, so that her serenity had only been slightly ruffled. “The lady who wishes a companion at so vastly opportune a moment, that we ought to be grateful for the chance, and I see that you have the sense to regard it in that light, is Miss Kingscote, of Nutfield, three miles from here. She had come in to see the play on Friday night, and spoke of the opening to Mrs. Bunbury, who mentioned it to me.”

“Do you know anything more?” asked Lady Bell, feigning curiosity to hide how dispirited she was.

“Yes, sure; I have made every inquiry on your account,” said Mrs. Siddons readily. “I took the opportunity to ride out to Nutfield when you were engaged with the trimming of the pink train, yesterday. It is a nice sort of country place, though I must explain that the family were thrown back in the world by the villany of an uncle, and are only working their way forward again, which is greatly to their credit. I thought it better that you should not know of the proposal till it was all settled, which it is, with your consent.”

“I should like to hear what my duties will be.”

“Ay, and what your salary will be; don’t forget that, and don’t begin blushing at the name, child, not though it were ‘wages.’ It is easy to see that you have not been so hardened as I. But ‘what’s in a name?’ especially when the price of our hire is for the benefit of the helpless creatures dearest to us! Oh, I forget, Miss Barlowe, you are not sixteen, and still a spinster; indeed I don’t recommend early marriages, and you will have plenty opportunities yet to change your name. But a married woman is apt to measure her neighbour’s obligations by her own.”

“Is there only one Miss Kingscote?” interposed Lady Bell.

“Yes, sure, and I should say she is a good round dozen of years your senior. She stays out at Nutfield with a bachelor brother, who is half a dozen years younger than she is; in short, who stands between her and you in point of age. I wish the difference had been the other way.”

“Why, madam?” demanded Lady Bell, like a little Turk.

“You need not look affronted.” Mrs. Siddons did not mind much having given the affront. “Try for your own sake, Miss Barlowe, and not be so thin-skinned; however, neither that defect, nor Mr. Charles Kingscote’s twenty-two years can be mended in a day. I told you that the villany of an uncle had nearly undone this generation at Nutfield, just as it happens in the plays; however, this man’s waste and fraud were discovered before it was too late. The Kingscotes have just been able to keep their place, which their friends have been nursing back to prosperity till the young man grew up. He is only waiting at home for a pair of colours, which he is certain to get in these war times, so that you may not be long troubled with him. An idle young man is a great trouble and snare. You see I think it right to warn you, Miss Barlowe”—Mrs. Siddons cleared her conscience—“before sending you to this situation.”

“Mr. Charles Kingscote will not keep me back,” asserted Lady Bell, crossing her hands with an almost comical, youthful arrogance in her attitude, which expressed, “I shall put the young bumpkin in his proper place and keep him there, trust me for that.” What she said in words was, “But you have not told me my duties.”

“Nor your salary; I am coming to them. However, I must state to you in fairness, Miss Barlowe, I also warned Miss Kingscote that her proposed companion was a very genteel, pretty young girl.”

“I am much obliged to you, madam,” acknowledged Lady Bell in an accent of anything save obligation.

“But she would not be warned any more than yourself,” protested Mrs. Siddons bluntly, “for the woman is a born idiot, though I don’t mean that you are similarly afflicted,” she broke off, laughing; “at the same time she is very good-natured, is this Miss Kingscote, as I hear. It need not be a harder task than another for you to have a little patience with her, and behave with reserve and prudence, as I do not doubt you will, to the brother.”

“Madam, I am not going to be a companion to the brother,” objected Lady Bell, with solemn impatience; “what am I to do for the lady?”

“You are to teach her all your tambour and knotting stitches, work up her mess of ‘pretty work,’ as she calls it, help her with her plain work and housekeeping, walk with her, and be company for her in the evening, since she is lonesome when her brother is abroad. She does not feel dull in the country during the summer, because since the family fell in the world, they have been in the habit of giving quarters to friends and letting the spare rooms in their house; but these are only wanted for the long days and the fine weather, and Miss Kingscote cannot ‘a-bear’ the thought of a winter all alone with Master Charles, out at Nutfield. The salary is a guinea a month, with board and washing provided. I can tell you many a duchess does not give her children’s governess a third more, but I would not take a shilling less for you. Will you engage, Miss Barlowe?”

“I will, madam, till I can make a better of it,” answered Lady Bell, not very meekly.

Mrs. Siddons did not censure her young friend’s peevishness and ambition; on the contrary, she told Lady Bell seriously that it was the first duty of every well-disposed, sensible young woman, to do what she could to better her condition in the world, and even to prove a prop and ladder by which those belonging to her might stay themselves, and climb to a higher estate.

Lady Bell was passed on to Nutfield without delay. Her dignity was put perforce in her pocket, since she travelled neither by berlin, nor landau, not even by a yellow post-chaise, but by a convenient waggon.

The short ride carried Lady Bell through an undulating country, the abounding wood and water of which must have rendered it, in the season, an Arcadia to the lovers of nature of the period, who were neither more nor less than landscape gardeners.

In spite of Miss Kingscote’s dislike to being out at Nutfield without the solace and sympathy of another “female” of her rank, to share her dearth of activity, and her “nerves and twitters” in winter, the neighbourhood was not lonely or thinly peopled. There was even evidence of the rising appreciation of its Arcadian character.

Not only was the adjacent country town decidedly aristocratic in its buildings, there were one or two attempts in its suburbs at fancy cottages and lodges—gothic and sylvan,—with grounds in keeping, modest modifications of renowned Strawberry Hill. To these the townspeople and denizens of greater towns, sometimes even of London itself, retired, and came, on occasions, to enjoy rural felicity and life in _villigiatura_, when they recorded innocently, to their poetic and philosophic credit, that they were, of their own free will, burying themselves for months at a time in the depth of the country, and the romantic solitude of the wilds.

But Nutfield was a house of a different description. It was an old grey manor house, limited in extent, though its space was yet too great for either the needs or the means of its well-descended owners. They were glad to turn its vacant rooms to profit, by converting them into country lodgings, without abating a jot of their claims to gentility.

Nutfield had never been a place of the same extent as Trevor Court and St. Bevis’s, and it had shared to some degree the fate of its proprietors in being reduced very nearly to the rough, uncared-for plight of a farmhouse. But the solidity of the walls and a certain tenacity as well as stoutness in the human constitution, had served Nutfield and the Kingscotes alike in good stead.

Nutfield was marked by a quaint massiveness in its original mullioned windows, which caused the light to dwindle to darkness visible within doors, and in its heavy cross-beams that looked as if they were about to fall and crush the occupants. Mullions and cross-beams were not altogether without their pleasantness, and suited the primitive situation of the house in the middle of an orchard, where the mossy arms of the old fruit-trees stretched so close to the house, that they farther darkened it, and flung their shifting shadows on the floors.

Within doors, the old ebony-black furniture, frayed drugget and matting, with some remnants of faded woollen tapestry, and a smoked black picture or two framed in the panels, promised at least peaceful stability, friendly familiarity, and simple ease and comfort. The aspect of the place contrasted on the whole favourably with the ghastly bareness of St. Bevis’s, and the painful pretence at home, which was no home, of Trevor Court.

Miss Kingscote had not the charm which, but for its being the Kingscotes’ ancestral house, she herself could never have found in Nutfield.

Miss Kingscote was a round dumpy woman, with a large flat face, like a flat surface of any kind catching gleams and reflections from surrounding objects, but incapable of individual lights and shadows. Her sprigged linen gown and round cap of her own knitting, made her figure look still more unshapely, and her face more like a shallow saucer. She was awkward to uncouthness, as she nodded to refined Lady Bell.

It was clear before Miss Kingscote opened her mouth, that the woman whom the loyalty or the caprice of the county gentry chose to retain, nay, to reinstate in their ranks, was simply hopeless in the extreme rusticity which had been her early heritage from neglect and dishonesty.

“I’m glad to see you, miss,” she said to Lady Bell, proceeding in grossly illiterate language, which first shocked, then tickled the delicate ears that listened to it. “You’re a coming to a dull part, I would have you to know that, and no mistake; you see ‘I never was known to lie,’ no more than the man as told the funny story of the Ram of Derbyshire. But to be content and hearty, them are the ways to make Nutfield and life cheerier. I mean to try ’em, miss, I do, if so be you’ll be good enough to lend me a hand.”

Withal there was a foolish importance and a simpering affectation about Miss Kingscote which bore out Mrs. Siddons’s verdict on the country lady’s understanding. But no doubt she was good-natured, only her good-nature took, at first, a vexatious form.

Lady Bell was labouring to preserve her incognito, to shape her own bearing and tones to the calling which she had adopted. But what was she to do when Miss Kingscote began by loading her hired companion with all the honour and attention which she could pay Lady Bell, and by insisting on waiting upon Lady Bell instead of consenting to be waited upon by her?

This unexpected and dangerous intuition of Miss Kingscote’s, thoroughly disconcerted Lady Bell, and might have brought the deceiver to the brink of detection, had not the sense of awe with which she had inadvertently impressed her employer speedily worn off the smooth plane. Miss Kingscote quickly drifted back, to Lady Bell’s relief, into her normal condition of an easy-going, communicative simpleton.

Within an hour, Lady Bell heard that the Kingscotes had been no small drink in England a mort of years before, as early as King Arthur’s time or thereabouts—when they would have thought neither Clifford nor Talbot of their brewst. What a proper young man Master Charles was, and how all the girls were pulling caps for him. How well Miss Kingscote had looked when she walked into Lumley at Assize time, in her pea-green tabinet petticoat and cherry-coloured gown.

There were no shady hollows, not to say dark gulfs, in Miss Kingscote’s nature and history, notwithstanding that the latter had not been without its romantic reverses. Lady Bell was bidden inspect them from end to end, the very first day. She was made the recipient in full of the narrative of Uncle Mat’s worst iniquities. She heard how the Kingscotes had been reduced within Miss Kingscote’s recollection to the plainest of clothing and coarsest of fare.

“And I was not dead beat, or as heavy as a Dutchwoman in those days neither, miss,” laughed Miss Kingscote with her horse laugh. “Lud! no, it is the man or woman as is the jewel. I was called a spirity strapping lass by them as saw me then, and never knew I was a lady.”

Lady Bell had stared, had repressed an inclination to titter, had taken another view of the case, and given way, in spite of every effort, to a dreary girlish sense of self-abandonment, and of being inevitably swamped in this overflow of homely folly. What a companion after the great actress!

Lady Bell was fain to prick her ears at the sound of an approaching light firm footstep, and decently cultivated ringing voice.

“Are you there, Deb?” called the voice unceremoniously. “I suppose you han’t got your serving and talking commodity yet, as I don’t sight any traces of her. Deb, come out this minute, and look at my partridges.”

“Lawk-a-daisy, there’s brother from his shooting, and I’ve forgot to have a toast and tankard ready for him,” exclaimed Miss Kingscote, ambling out of the parlour.