Man and Maid Part 23

"Oh, very well. We'll have her down, and go the whole hog. Only don't make a fool of the child, Jim; she's a good little thing."

And that was how the dream-dressed Lady Yalding came to sweep into the old lady's sitting-room--it was as full of mahogany, by the way, as Maisie's home in Lewisham--and spoke so kindly of Maisie's loneliness, that the girl could have fallen down and wors.h.i.+pped at her Paris shoes.

When Maisie, in the figured lavender satin that had been her mother's, swept across the great hall on the arm of the Honourable James, she felt that this indeed was life. Here was the great world with its infinite possibilities.

"How did you get on?" his sister-in-law asked him later.

"Oh, it's quite a decent sort of little mouse," he said. "Wants to make sure you see how cultivated it is, quotes poetry--what?--and talks about art. It's a little touching and all that to see how busy it is putting all its poor little stock in the tiny shop-window."

Maisie, alone in her room, was walking up and down, trailing the lavender satin, recalling with kindled eyes and red-rose cheeks every word, every look of her cavalier. How kindly he had spoken, yet how deferentially; how he had looked, how he had smiled! At dinner she supposed it was his business to talk to her. But afterwards, when she was sitting, a little forlornly and apart from the noisy chatter of the bright-plumaged house-party, how he had come straight over to her directly the gentlemen came into the drawing-room! And she felt that she had not been wanting to herself on so great an occasion.

"I _know_ I talked well. I'm certain he saw directly that I wasn't a silly idiot."

She lay long awake, and, as the men trooped up the stairs, she tried to fancy that she could already distinguish his footsteps.

The letter she wrote to her mother next day was, compared to those other lying letters, as a lit chandelier to a stable-lantern. And the mother knew the difference.

"Poor darling!" she thought. "She must have been very miserable all this time. But she's happy now, G.o.d bless her!"

By the week's end, every thought, every dream, every hope of Maisie's life was centred in the Honourable James; her tenderness, her ambition turned towards him as flowers to the sun.

And her happiness lighted a thousand little candles all around her. No one could see the candles, of course, but every one saw the radiant illumination of her beauty. And the other men of the house-party saw it too. Even Lord Yalding distinguished her by asking whether she had read some horrid book about earthworms.

"You're making a fool of that girl, Jim," said Lady Yalding. "I really think it's too bad."

"My good f.a.n.n.y, don't be an adorable idiot! I'm only trying to give the poor little duffer a good time. There's nothing else to do. The other girls really are--now, you know they are, f.a.n.n.y--between ourselves----"

"They're all duty people, of course," she said. "Well, only do be careful."

He was careful. He subdued his impulses to tenderness and gentle raillery. He talked seriously to little Miss Mouse, and presently he found that she was seriously talking to him--telling him, for instance, how she wrote poetry, and how she longed to show it to some one and ask whether it really was so bad as she sometimes feared.

What could he do but beg her to show it to him? But there he pulled himself up short.

"There's skating to-morrow. We're going to drive over to Dansent. Would you like to come?"

Her grey eyes looked up quickly, and the long lashes drooped over them.

She had read of that trick in a book, and for the life of him he could not help knowing it. Her answer to his question came from a book, too, though it also came from her heart.

"Ah," she said, "you know!"

Then the Honourable James was honestly frightened. Next day he had a telegram, and departed abruptly. And as abruptly the old lady returned.

And now Maisie had a secret joy to feed on--a manna to sustain her in the wilderness of her tiresome life. She thought of _him_. He loved her; she was certain of it. Miss Mouse could imagine no reason but love for the kindness he had shown her. He had gone away without a word, but that was for some good reason. Probably he had gone to confess to his mother how he had given his whole heart to a penniless orphan--well, she was half an orphan, anyway. But the days slipped by and he did not come back. All that bright time at Christmas had faded like a picture from a magic-lantern when the slide is covered. Lady Yalding was quite nice and kind, but she left Maisie to the work Maisie was paid for.

Maisie's mother perceived, through Maisie's studied accounts of her happiness, more than a glimpse of the reality.

Then, at last, when the days grew unbearable, Maisie wrote to him, a prim little letter with agitated heart-beats between the lines, where he, being no fool, did not fail to find them. Yet he had to answer the letter. He did it briefly.

"DEAR MISS ROLLESTON," he wrote, "I have received your letter and the little poem, which is very nice. Poems about Spring are the pleasantest kind, I think.--With kind regards, I am yours sincerely."

It was not, as you may see, worth the heartache with which Maisie watched for it.

It was when she wrote again, and sent more verses, that he decided he must not mince matters.

"DEAR MISS ROLLESTON," was his second letter, "it is good of you to write again. Now I do hope you won't be offended with me for what I am going to say. I am so much older than you, you know, and I know you are alone at Yalding, with no one to advise you, so it must be my duty to do it, though, for my own sake, I should, of course, like to advise you quite differently. It was a great pleasure to me to hear from you, but I must not allow myself that pleasure again, even if you were willing to give it to me. It would not be fair to you to let you write any more to a man who is not related to you. Try to forgive me for being unselfish and acting in your interests and not my own."

And again, with kind regards, he was hers sincerely.

"Poor, pretty little duffer!" he said, as he closed the envelope. "But it's not real. Don't I know the sort of thing? She's simply bored to death down there. And it's all my fault, anyhow. By Jove! I'll never try to do any one a good turn again as long as I live. f.a.n.n.y was perfectly right."

The letter came by the second post, when Maisie was engaged in drearily reading her employer to sleep after lunch.

It lay on her lap, but she kept her eyes from it and read on intelligibly if not with expression.

The old lady dozed.

Maisie opened her letter. And before she could even have had time to put up a hand to save herself, her Spanish castle was tumbling about her ears. A curious giddy feeling seemed to catch at the back of her neck, the room gave a sickening half-turn. She caught at her self-control.

"Not here. I mustn't faint here. Not with his letter in my hand."

She got out of the room somehow, and somehow she got into hat and jacket and boots, put her quarter's salary in her purse, and walked out of the front door and straight down the great drive that she had come up four months ago with such bright hopes. She went to the station, and she took a train, and she never stopped nor stayed till she was at home again.

She pushed past the frightened maid, and, pale and shabby, with black-ringed eyes and dusty black gown, she burst into her mother's room. The scent of eau-de-Cologne and bees'-wax and b.u.t.tered toast met her, and it was as the perfume of Paradise. Edward was there--but she was in no mood to bother about Edward. She threw herself on her knees and buried her face in the knitting on her mother's lap, and felt thin arms go round her.

"It's nothing. I'm tired of it all. I've come home," was all she said.

But presently she reached out a hand to Edward, and he took it and held it, as it were, absently, and the three sat by the fire and spoke little and were content.

To her dying day Maisie will never forget the sense of peace, of enfolding care, and love unchanging and unchangeable that came to her as she woke next morning to find her mother standing by her bed with a cup of tea in her hands.

"Oh, Mummy darling," she cried, throwing her arms round her mother and nearly upsetting the tea, "I haven't had a single drop of in-bed tea all the time I've been away!"

That was all she found words to tell her mother. Later there was Edward, and she told him most things, but, I imagine, not all. But the mother was content without spoken confidences. She knew that Maisie had suffered, and that now she had her little girl again, to wrap warm in her love as before. This was happiness enough.

This story, I know, is instructive enough for a Sunday School prize. It ought to be tagged at the end with a Moral. I can't help it: it is true.

Of course, it is not what usually happens. Many companions, no doubt, marry Honourable James's, or even Dukes, and are never at all glad to get home to their mothers and their Edwards. But Maisie was different.

She feels now a sort of grateful tenderness for Yalding Towers, because, but for the dream she dreamed there she might never have really awakened--never have known fully and without mistake what it was in life that she truly cared for. And such knowledge is half the secret of happiness. That, by the way, is really the moral of this story.

IX

THE OLD WIFE