The object of these sentimental and persistent excursions—circular tours, in fact, since, however far they wandered, whether to the Parthenon or to the shrouded Hestia of the Hearth, they always returned to their starting place—by no means filled the scene at Misperton Brand, which, when she crossed it at all, approved or disapproved according to taste and opportunity. Lady Cantacute had no doubt but she was a good little soul, and young Perivale would confidently wager her a girl with whom you could have fun. Her pupils adored her, Miss de Speyne had not yet realized her existence. Tristram Duplessis believed her waiting for him. The Rector had once called her a sun child, it appears; and that sounds like a compliment, but her good looks were denied. Yet “sun child” is apt, from a friendly tongue. Her colour was quick to come and go; no doubt she was burnt becomingly by the weather. She had—he might have said—a dewy freshness upon her, rather the appearance of having been newly kissed. No doubt, she had a figure, no doubt, the hot, full eyes of the South. Here her soul, if she had one, spoke to those who could hear. Excitement made her eyes to shine like large stars, apprehension opened them like a hare’s. Reproach made them loom upon you all black. If you interested her, they peered. They filled readily with tears, and could laugh like wavelets in the sun. But you can’t build a beauty upon eyes alone, and a beauty she had no claim to be. And yet she was well finished off—with small hands and feet, pointed fingers, small ears, quick nostrils, a smooth throat, running from dusk to ivory as the sun held or fainted in his chase. Then she had “pretty ways”—admitted—and there’s enough title for your sun child. But the Rector, you see, liked her, while his wife disapproved of her fundamentally. Pretty ways, forsooth! “She’s a flirt, James, and I have no patience with Mr. Soames. The Eastward position is perfectly harmless, of course. Many clergymen adopt it—Lord Victor for one. But it was never done here, as you know very well, until Mr. Soames discovered that he could see the Sunday-school benches that way.”
The Rector shrugged with his eyebrows. “Scandalum magnatum, my dear, and dire nonsense at that. Soames is a good fellow with a conscience, and may say his creed in my church to whatever wall he finds helpful.”
Mrs. James retorted that a magnet was quite out of place in a church, and set him gently chuckling. That, as she knew, was final for the day; but she kept her eye steadily upon Miss Middleham, and had her small rewards. What was not discoverable could be guessed at by what was. She lighted by chance upon one crowning episode when, on a Sunday afternoon, she found her cousin Tristram declaiming Shelley’s Prometheus under the apple tree in the garden of Mary’s lodging—not to the apples and birds of the bough, but to the young person herself, snug in an easy chair, her Sunday pleats neatly disposed, no ankle showing, to speak of, but—and this did stamp a fatal air of domesticity upon the whole exhibition—but without a hat. This, if you come to think of it, means the worst kind of behaviour, a perverted mind. Shelley was an atheist, and his Prometheus was probably subversive of every kind of decency—but that is nothing beside the point of the hat, which might be missed by any man, but by no woman. For consider. If a little nursery governess were to be read to by the cousin of a person of good family—a young man who might be engaged to a peer’s daughter by a nod of the head—one might think little of it, had there been evidence of its being an event. But there had been none—far from that. Mrs. James knew her Misperton Brand very well; events there were hailed by young persons in their best hats. Here, nothing of the kind. On the contrary, there was an every-day air about it which showed that the girl was at home with Tristram, Tristram much at home with the girl. That Tristram should be at ease was nothing; it would have been ridiculous had he not been—a nursery governess! But was it not disastrous flippancy—to say no harsher thing—in Mary that she, too, could be at ease; hatless, in a rocking chair; not rocking herself—no, not that! but able to rock at any moment! The enormity was reported, and the Rector said that so long as young women wore their hats in his church he cared nothing what they did with them elsewhere. He threatened to chuckle, so no more could be said; but to Mrs. James, what had been dark surmise before was now garishly plain. The girl was——
But all this takes us far from the schoolroom where Miss Middleham was blamelessly expounding the Plantagenet Kings of England, or from the shady lime-tree walk where Mr. Germain was rhapsodizing upon yokes, submissiveness, and young necks resilient.
He met her, as had now become his habit, on the next morning, and the next. The same bewildering, gentle monologues were delivered—or he paced by her side without speaking, without constraint or any sign that betrayed he was not doing an every-day thing. He was doing a thing which held her spellbound; but shortly afterwards he did another which made her brain spin. He proposed “a little walk” in the course of that afternoon—“Let us say, at six o’clock, if that would be perfectly agreeable to you.” An appointment! It must needs be agreeable; perhaps it was. He called for her at her woodbine-covered lodging, asked for her by name, and stood uncovered in the porch until she appeared; and then they walked by field-ways some couple of miles in the direction of Stockfield Peverel.
Upon this occasion she was invited, if not directed, to talk. It was a little catechism. Mr. Germain asked her of her family and prospects, and she replied readily enough. There was neither disguise, nor pretence about what she had to tell him. She was what Mrs. James would have thought—and did think—frankly canaille. Her father was cashier in the London and Suburban Bank at Blackheath, and her mother was alive. This Mary was the second child of a family of six—all girls. Jane—“We call her Jinny”—was the eldest, and a typewriter in a City office: “We shall never be anything more than we are now, because we aren’t clever, and are quite poor.” Jinny was seven-and-twenty; then came herself, Mary Susan, twenty-four years ago. A hiatus represented two boys who had died in infancy—“they mean more than all of us to Mother”—and then in succession four more girls, the eldest sixteen and “finishing.” “Ready to go out in the world, just as I did.” She knew nothing of her father’s father; but had heard that he had come from the West Country, Gloucestershire, she thought. Her mother’s maiden name had been Unthank. Really, that was all—except that she had been much what she was now—a nursery governess—since she was seventeen. “Seven years—yes, a long time; but one gets accustomed to it.” He tried, but could get no more out of her concerning herself; and he remarked upon it that, so surely as she began to talk of her own affairs, she compared them with Jinny’s and allowed them to fade out in Jinny’s favour. He judged that, as a child, she had been overshadowed. Jinny’s beauty, accomplishments, audacity were much upon Mary’s tongue. Jinny knew French, and could sing French songs. She was tall—“a head taller than me”—not engaged to be married, but able to be so whenever she chose. Not easy to please, however. “Father thinks a great deal of Jinny. We are all proud of her. Perhaps you might not admire her style. Everybody looks at her in Blackheath.” Mr. Germain thought to himself that in that case, he should not admire her style.
It is not to be denied that these details had to be digested under protest. They were perfectly innocent, but they did not help the ideal. She was much more attractive when she was fluttered and whirled off her feet, rather breathless, with a good deal of colour, rather scared—as she had been at first. Now, however, she was at ease, tripping by his side, full of the charms of a dashing Jinny at Blackheath—and it came into his mind with a pang that, at this rate, she—the ideal, first-seen She—might disappear altogether behind that young lady’s whisking skirts. This he could not afford: his inquiries became more personal, and she immediately more coy. There came almost naturally into his attitude towards her an air of patronage—tender, diffident, very respectful patronage, under which she soon showed him that his interest in her was moving her pleasantly. A man of more experience than he—who had none—would have seen in a moment that the attention of the other sex was indeed her supreme interest, the mainspring of her being; would have noticed that every filament in her young frame was sensitive to that. A man of gallantry and expertise could have played upon her as on a harp. Mr. Germain could not do this, but his feelings were strongly attracted. So young, so simple, so ardent a creature! he said to himself, and—“God be good to all of us!—living, breathing delicately, exquisitely, daintily indeed before my eyes upon sixty-five pounds a year!”
This fact had truly taken his breath away. Sixty-five pounds a year—mere wages—for the hire of a girl like a flower. “It was a great rise for me,” she had said. “I had never expected to earn more than ￡45—Jinny herself only gets a pound a week, and French is required in her office. But Mr. Nunn said that he would pay me ￡15 more than his usual allowance for governesses because it would not be convenient to have me in the house, and I must therefore pay for a lodging in the village. So I must think myself a very fortunate girl, to have my evenings to myself, and ￡15 a year into the bargain.”
Mr. Germain, reflecting upon the wages of his butler, valet, cook, head-housemaid, head-gardener, head-keeper, head-coachman, felt himself—though he did not know it—knocked off his feet. This comes of mingling interests under glamour. The beglamoured would wiselier postpone practical inquiries.
But as it was, his interest in the young girl was quickened by admiration and pity to a dangerous height. He more than admired, he respected her. To make so gallant, so enchanting a figure on sixty-five pounds a year! And oh, the scheming and shifts that the effort must involve. His fine lips twitched, his fine, benevolent eyes grew dim; he blinked and raised his brows. Summer lightning seemed to play incessantly over his pale face. “My poor child, my poor, brave child!” he murmured to himself: but aloud he said,
“You interest me extremely—I am greatly touched, somewhat moved. Believe me, I value the confidence you have shown me. I do believe I shall not be unworthy of it. I must think—I must take time to consider—a little time, to see whether I cannot—whether I might presume—Sixty-five pounds a year—God bless me, it is astounding!”
Then, to complete the enchantment, she looked quickly up at him, gave him a full quiver from those deep homes of wonder, her unsearchable eyes. “It’s wonderful to me,” she said, simply, without any pretence, “that you should interest yourself in me. I cannot understand it.”
He schooled himself to smile, to be the patron again. “What do you find so wonderful in that, my dear?”
“That you should find time—that you should care—take notice—oh, I don’t know how to say it. I’m only a poor girl, you know, a nursery governess and a dunce. I was so terrified when you came into lessons that morning—I couldn’t tell you, really. My knees knocked.”
He felt more at his ease. “That was very foolish of your knees, my dear. I was greatly interested. And pray do not think me inquisitive: that is not one of my vices. It is far from my wish to—to patronize one for whom I have so high a respect. Your poverty is as it may be—at any rate, you earn your bread; and in that you are a head and shoulders above myself. And if you are a dunce, which I cannot admit—well, that can be mended, you know. Are we not all dunces? I remember a very wise man saying once that we know nothing until we know that we know nothing. Do you understand that?”
“Yes, I think so. But even then—Oh, no! It is very wonderful, I think.” And then, as he looked down at her smiling, he received again her full-orbed attack, and she said in a low voice, “Thank you for being so kind to me.” He had to turn away his head lest he should betray himself, and wreck what was to him a moment of ridiculous happiness. He could not trust himself to speak.
At the turnstile between the smithy and the Rising Sun beershop their ways should have diverged; but, although he had fallen entirely silent, he accompanied her to Orient Cottage, where she lodged. At the gate he held her hand for a minute while he somewhat breathlessly committed himself. “Let us, if you will be so good, repeat our little walk the day after to-morrow—that is, on Saturday. I leave this place on Monday, and should value another conversation with you. On Saturday you will be free, I think? Shall we then say the morning, at eleven?”
She would not allow him to see her eyes now. She murmured her “Yes—thank you,” and he went on.
“It is very kind of you. I may have something to say—but, be that as it may, to an old fogy of my sort the companionship of a young lady is flattering. I hope I may believe that I have not wearied you, since you are willing to indulge me again.”
“No, indeed, Mr. Germain. I shall be proud to come.” And then he let her hand go, and she slipped through the gate. As she entered her door she looked over her shoulder a shy good-night; he saluted her and paced slowly back to the Rectory. Combustible matter had been handled; had she been less simple or he more sure, there’s no saying what might not have been ablaze. As it was he betrayed by no outward sign at all how stirred he was, though he was not very talkative at the dinner-table. The Rectory people dined at the Park. Tristram, it was told, was off again. He had gone to Pau, at a moment’s notice, with young Lord Branleigh.