CHAPTER V.

AN IMPRISONED PRINCESS.

The family did not meet at dinner, the only meal at which they professed to gather, the day after Lady Bell came to St. Bevis’s. But on the following day she had again an opportunity of seeing her uncle. She was summoned into the dining-room, where she had seen him on the evening of her arrival, in order to sit down to table with the rest.

The Squire, standing near the foot of the table, made her a little mocking bow. “May I flatter myself country air does not——” he left the sentence unfinished, as if he had forgotten her existence before he could conclude his speech. He began carving the meat in the middle of Mr. Greenwood’s saying grace. “The odds are upon Skyflyer,” he observed presently in a low tone to the chaplain, and a little later in the meal he made an investigation of the same authority with regard to a certain horse-ball. He spoke to no one else, neither did Mrs. Die directly address her brother, though she kept growling audibly at him from her end of the table, like a dog that will give tongue and show its teeth, though it knows that the protest will pass unheeded, nay, that perhaps the protester will have punishment dealt to it for its pains.

“Nothing but mutton and fowls, Kitty,” exclaimed Mrs. Die; “we’ll be at the boards themselves soon. No, I know that you can’t help it. Burgundy? Don’t we wash our hands in Burgundy, it goes so fast, Sneyd? Short of wet and dry fruits for kickshaws, and no more to be had from Cleveburgh till we’ve cleared our scores; that will be long enough, not till after our tricks with stable-boys and gambling-house keepers beat cleverer knaves’ tricks.”

That dinner was a fair sample of following dinners.

Lady Bell lived on at St. Bevis’s. She had no other resource, and found that her fate, piteous as it was, did not prove so unbearable as she had feared. It is the experience of most of us, particularly at the plastic age of fourteen.

The Squire, who had spent the greater part of his youth in London, though he had deserted the town or found it too hot for him, was hardly ever at home: Newmarket, Epsom, Ascot, races of local celebrity, local gaming clubs, and card matches, pretty much divided his time. On the occasions when he was at home, his treatment of Lady Bell was to ignore her presence.

If a sister of Mr. Godwin’s had happened to marry a spendthrift nobleman, and husband and wife had died, leaving a puny, vapid girl, it was no fault of his, and he was not called upon to cumber himself with considerations regarding her welfare.

Squire Godwin succeeded in impressing Lady Bell more deeply than all the fine gentlemen whom she had seen at her grand-aunt’s, and in striking her with awe; but she could not complain greatly of his overlooking her, since she, poor child, felt tempted to shrink out of his sight.

Mrs. Die was a woman half crazy with wrongs, utterly wanting in principle and self-restraint, and using strong stimulants; but, as she had said of her hate, she had too much to do brooding over her fate and fighting with her enemies, to trouble herself by tormenting Lady Bell.

Mrs. Die let the girl alone for the most part, unless when her youth and opening prospects, unblighted, however slender, pierced her aunt with the sting of recollection. Even then Mrs. Die would content herself with a passing taunt at the girl’s girlishness, untold fortunes, and imagined inspirations, and forget all about her the next moment.

Mrs. Kitty’s smaller nature and comparative leisure from introspection and desperate schemes, left her more at liberty to cherish a grudge and a jealousy, and to visit them continually, like the dropping of water, on the head of a hapless, defenceless victim.

But Mrs. Kitty, too, had an engrossing interest and occupation, which was not snubbing Lady Bell. Mrs. Kitty had room in her narrow heart for a slavish devotion, the more ardent that it flowed in a single confined channel, and that devotion was at once lavished and concentrated on Mrs. Die.

In the old days, when Mrs. Die had been a brilliant, ill-regulated, reckless girl, she had taken by storm the heart of the ungifted, branded dependant—reared and retained at St. Bevis’s in the spirit of a coarse tolerance—by the heedless generosity which had overleaped the gulf between the girls, and had raised Mrs. Kitty to a convenient place in Mrs. Die’s confidence and regard.

Mrs. Kitty’s hands were full not only with grasping tightly such reins of domestic government as were left at St. Bevis’s, but with protecting Mrs. Die from herself and her neighbours, and cherishing the lost woman so far as she would suffer herself to be cherished.

Notwithstanding, there were pullings down in her airs for Lady Bell, which, as she grew accustomed to the process, did not hurt the girl much, only put her on her mettle and provoked her to undesirable pertness.

There were little deprivations in what comforts and luxuries of soft pillows, hot water, apples, nuts, prunes, were going at St. Bevis’s—a piece of petty malice which might cause Lady Bell’s young bones, blood, and appetite to crave and cry out, and her sense of fairness and honour to smart, but which did not press hardly on a healthy girl already trained to some measure of self-denial, as such girls were commonly trained. What was worse, there was the sedulous, suspicious guarding of Lady Bell from ever coming near Mrs. Die in any moment of weakness or kindred kindness on Mrs. Die’s part. Mrs. Kitty took care that there should not be the most distant danger of Lady Bell’s stepping between them, and ousting Mrs. Kitty from the place which she prized so highly, that she fancied the whole world must prize it too, as the recipient of Mrs. Die’s unhappy secrets. But Lady Bell did not covet the post which was thus denied her.

This was the trifling amount of vengeance—even more trifling in sound than in reality—which, so far as it appeared, was all Mrs. Kitty chose to inflict on Lady Bell for coming to St. Bevis’s at all, and after coming for taking it upon her to give orders to Mrs. Kitty as if she were a common servant—the servant of a minx like Lady Bell, poorer than Mrs. Kitty herself, and doomed to hang as another burden on the Godwins, making up the dead weight under which the house was tottering to its fall.

Mr. Sneyd and Mr. Greenwood, the remaining authorities, with the exception of the bailiffs who were billeted at St. Bevis’s every month or two, were good-natured scamps and vagabonds each according to his cloth, who not uncharacteristically experienced a lingering sentiment of shame, pity, and tenderness, of which their master was destitute, where the young girl, Lady Bell, was concerned. The butler and the chaplain did not resent, like Mrs. Kitty, Lady Bell’s obstinately refusing to consent to any freedom of speech and bearing on their part. They even applauded her for it, crying. Curse them, Lady Bell was game. She was a proud, delicate-minded young lady, who deserved another fate, which they would have procured for her, if it had been in their power, and had not cost them too much. They did what they could.

Mr. Greenwood and Mr. Sneyd conformed themselves, where Lady Bell was in question, to her notion of propriety, and flattered and won her to some friendly feeling towards them in their debasement, by the respect which they showed her and the trouble which they took to be of use to her.

Mr. Greenwood offered Lady Bell humbly his valuable assistance in the practice of penmanship and the study of French fables, to which she set herself in accordance with a promise to her dead friend, with a sort of dull childish fidelity to the letter, and with a hopeless doggedness of spirit.

Mr. Sneyd exerted himself to ride out with Lady Bell. Nobody interfered with the men’s performance of these good offices, which formed an agreeable, and a reclaiming element in the worthless tenor of their lives.

At first St. Bevis’s was horribly, heavily dull to Lady Bell; for there were no visitors and no visits. The Squire did not bring company to St. Bevis’s; Mrs. Die had long retired from her world. The appeal to the quarter sessions remained for months the solitary episode which broke the dreary monotony of Lady Bell’s life.

But the oppression of dulness grew lightened by custom and in time, though not from Lady Bell’s acquiring rapidly country tastes, not even after sloppy mid-winter had given place to the rosy-tipped buds of spring.

Nature, though for the most part accessible to all, requires an introduction to her court, and a suit paid to her after the fashion of sovereigns, before she will bestow her rewards.

In Lady Bell’s day, rude nature was at a discount; such nature as was sought after, praised, and worshipped, was tricked out, transformed, artificial nature. This was not the nature of the neglected, sodden fields, the waste lands, the hovels of cottages, with their sometimes savagely ignorant and always uncared-for occupants, and the stony, rutted roads, like water-courses, all about St. Bevis’s.

Besides, youth when it has been town-bred, and if it have not the instinctive passion for nature, does not, in the order of things—in the fantastic extravagance of its emotions and the lethargy of its weariness—have recourse to the last earthly refuge of well-balanced, wise old age.

Lady Bell, as her past life faded like a dream—so that London drawing-rooms, public gardens, royal birthdays, Lord Mayors’ shows, satin and spangles, hautboys and French horns, became the merest far-away visions and echoes—adopted ingenious devices, not unlike those of a prisoner, to employ her energies and help her to spend her days.

She not only wrote copies, conned French and read history for Mr. Greenwood, she executed intricate feats of stitching and embroidery, with such materials as she could command, entirely for her own gratification. She had learned a little drawing, principally to enable her to trace patterns for her work, and she now accumulated patterns which would serve her for the “flowering” of ruffles and aprons till she was ninety-nine, if her eyes stood out.

The closet where she slept, which was all that she could claim as a privileged place of resort and retirement, was not only the haunt peopled by innumerable girlish fancies, but she exercised her skill within its bounds, preserving her health of body and mind in finding there never-ending objects of interest and amusement.

With a little childish make-believe, the closet was curiously and elaborately adorned for no other eyes than her own. The walls were covered with her patterns, the curtains were draped and looped according to her device. On the chimney-piece were tinted fan-sticks, thread-papers, cock’s feathers, imitation flowers.

Her little bird which a farm-boy had caught for her, and her kitten which had strayed into the habitable part of the house from a colony among the ruins, were trained by her to form a happy family.

Thus the solitary girl occupied and entertained herself as an imprisoned princess might have sought to improve and beguile the hours, not altogether unhappily, for Lady Bell was clever, her temper was naturally cheerful, and in youth the spirit is elastic, fit to rise again buoyantly after a blow, to build new castles in the air, and to remain uncrushed by mere neglect.

Lady Bell had not long time given her to pursue her own course and the even tenor of her way at St. Bevis’s. In the first spring of her stay, about six months after her arrival, the great man of the neighbourhood, Lord Thorold, came down to his place of Brooklands, on the eve of his marriage, accompanied by a large party, including his intended bride and her family, and feasted the public in his house and grounds, thrown open in honour of the occasion.

Squire Godwin chose to accept the invitation not only for himself, but for his household. Either he was unwilling to give way to the evil odour in which he was held, or he felt inclined to test it, or he desired to propitiate the magnate.

Whatever the motive, the result was the same; an order was issued which even Mrs. Die did not dispute, though she had not been in public save at the quarter sessions, not even so far as to hear Mr. Greenwood preach in the little church close at hand, of which Squire Godwin was the patron, for these dozen years and more. The whole family at St. Bevis’s were to grace Lord Thorold’s wedding rejoicings.