The Misses Mallett (The Bridge Dividing) Part 10

Henrietta continued steadily up the stairs and across the landing to her father's room, and before the long mirror on the wall she halted to survey her reflected feet. Aunt Caroline had but exaggerated the truth; they were square, but they were small, and she controlled her trembling lips.

She pushed back from her forehead the black, curling hair. She was tired; the luncheon had been a strain, and the carelessly loud words of Caroline reminded her that she was undergoing an examination which, veiled by courtesy, would be severe. Already they were blaming her mother for her feet; and all three of them, the blunt Caroline, the tender Sophia, the mysteriously silent Rose, were on the watch for the maternal traits.

Well, she was not ashamed of them. Her mother had been good, brave, honest, loving, patient, and her father had been none of these things; but no doubt these aunts of hers put manners before morals, as he had done; and she remembered how, when she was quite a little girl, and the witness of one of the unpleasant domestic scenes which happened often in those days, before Reginald Mallett's wife had learnt forbearance, she had noticed her father's face twitch as though in pain. Glad of a diversion, she had asked him with eager sympathy, 'Is it toothache?' and he had answered acidly, 'No, child, only the mutilation of our language.' She remembered the words, and later she understood their meaning and the flus.h.i.+ng of her mother's face, the compression of her lips, and she was indignant for her sake.

Yet she could feel for her father, in spite of the fact that whatever her accent or grammatical mistakes, her mother's conduct was always right and her father, with his charming air, a little blurred by what he called misfortune, his clear speech to which Henrietta loved to listen, was fundamentally unsound. He could not be trusted. That was understood between the mother and daughter: it was one of the facts on which their existence rested, it entered into all their calculations, it was the text of all her mother's little homilies. Henrietta must always pay her debts, she must tell the truth, she must do nothing of which she was ashamed, and so far Henrietta had succeeded in obeying these commands.

When Reginald Mallett died in the shabby boarding-house kept by Mrs.

Banks, he left his family without a penny but with a feeling of extraordinary peace. They were dest.i.tute, but they were no longer overshadowed by the fear of disgrace, the misery of subterfuge, the bewildering oscillations between pity for the man who could not have what he wanted and shame for his ceaseless striving after pleasure, his s.h.i.+fts to get it, his reproaches and complaints.

In the gloomy back bedroom on the third story of the boarding-house he lay on a bed hung with dingy curtains, but in the dignity which was one of his inheritances. Under the dark, close-cut moustache, his lips seemed to smile faintly, perhaps in amus.e.m.e.nt at the folly of his life, perhaps in surprise at finding himself so still; the narrow beard of a foreign cut was slightly tilted towards the dirty ceiling, his beautiful hands were folded as though in a mockery of prayer. He was, as Mrs. Banks remarked when she was allowed to see him, a lovely corpse. But to Henrietta and her mother, standing on either side of the bed, guarding him now, as they had always tried to do, he had subtly become the husband and father he should have been.

'We must remember him like this,' Mrs. Mallett said, raising her soft blue eyes, and Henrietta saw that the small sharp lines which Reginald Mallett had helped to carve in her face seemed to have disappeared. It was extraordinary how placid her face became after his death, but as the days pa.s.sed it was also noticeable that much of her vitality had gone too. She left herself in Henrietta's young hands and she, casting about for a way of earning her living, found good fortune in the terrible bas.e.m.e.nt kitchen where Mrs. Banks moved mournfully and had her disconsolate being. The gas was always lighted in that cavernous kitchen, but it remained dark, mercifully leaving the dirt half unseen. A joint of mutton, cold and mangled, was discernible, however, when Henrietta descended to put her impecunious case before the landlady and, gazing at it, the girl saw also her opportunity. Mrs.

Banks had no culinary imagination, but Henrietta found it rising in herself to an inspired degree and there and then she offered herself as cook in return for board and lodging for her mother and herself.

'I'm sure I'll be glad to keep you,' Mrs. Banks said: 'you give the place a tone, you do really, you and your dear Ma sitting in the drawing-room sewing of an evening; but it isn't only the cooking, though I do get to hate the sight of food. I get a regular grudge against it. But it's that butcher! Ready money or no meat's his motto, and how to make this mutton last--' She picked it up by the bone and cast it down again.

'Oh, I can manage butchers,' Henrietta said. 'Besides, we'll pay our way. You'll see. Leave the cooking to me.'

'I will, gladly,' Mrs. Banks said, wiping away a tear. 'Ever since Banks took it into his head to jump into the river, it seems like as if I hadn't any spirit, and that Jenkins turns up his ugly nose every time I put the mutton on the table--when he doesn't begin talking to it like an old friend. I can't bear Jenkins, but he does pay regular, and that's something. Well, I'll get on with the upstairs and leave you to it.'

And so Henrietta began the work which kept her amazingly happy, fed and sheltered her mother, who sat all day slowly making beautiful baby linen for one of the big shops, and cemented Henrietta's friends.h.i.+p with the lachrymose Mrs. Banks. To be faced with a mutton bone and a few vegetables, to have to wrest from these poor materials an appetizing meal, was like an exciting game, and she played it with zest and with success. She had the dubious pleasure of hearing Mr.

Jenkins smack his lips and seeing him distend his nostrils with antic.i.p.ation; the unalloyed one of watching the pale face of little Miss Stubb, the typist, grow delicately pink and less dangerously thin, under the stimulus of good food; the amus.e.m.e.nt of congratulating Mrs. Banks, in public, on her new cook, and seeing Mrs. Banks, at the head of the supper table, nod her head with important secrecy.

'I've made out,' she told Henrietta, 'that I've a daily girl, without a character, that's how I can afford her, in the bas.e.m.e.nt, but I must say it's made that Jenkins mighty keen on fetching his own boots of a morning, but no lodgers below-stairs is my rule. You look out for Jenkins, my dear. He's no good. I know his sort.'

'Oh, I can manage Mr. Jenkins, too,' Henrietta said, and indeed she made a point of bringing him to the hardly manageable state for the amus.e.m.e.nt of proving her capacity. She despised him, but not for nothing was she Reginald Mallett's daughter; and Mr. Jenkins and the butcher and a gloomy old gentleman who emerged from his bedroom to eat, and locked himself up between meals, were the only men she knew.

No doubt Mrs. Mallett, placidly sewing, was alive to the attentions and frustrations of Mr. Jenkins and had planned her letter to her sisters-in-law some time before she wrote it, but the idea of parting from her mother never occurred to Henrietta until Miss Stubb alarmed her.

'Your mother,' she said poetically, 'makes me think of snow melting before the sun. In fact, I can't look at her without thinking of snow and snowdrops and--and graves. Last spring I said to Mrs. Banks, "She won't see the leaves fall," I said, and Mrs. Banks agreed. She has been spared, but take care of her in these cold winds, Miss Henrietta, dear.'

'She has a cold, only a cold,' Henrietta said in a dead voice, and she went upstairs. Her mother was in bed, and Henrietta looked down at the thin, pretty face. 'How ill are you?' she asked in a threatening manner. 'Tell me how ill you are.'

'I've only got a cold, Henry dear. I shall be up to-morrow.'

'Promise you won't be really ill.'

'Why should I be?'

'It's Miss Stubb--saying things.'

'Women chatter,' Mrs. Mallett said. 'If it's not scandal, it's an illness. You ought to know that.'

'They might leave you alone, anyway.'

'Yes, I wish they would,' Mrs. Mallett said faintly, and dropped back on her pillow.

Now, sitting in her father's room, with her mother only a few weeks dead, she reproached herself for her readiness to be deceived, for her preoccupation with her own affairs and the odious Mr. Jenkins, for the exuberance of life which hid from her the dwindling of her mother's, and the fact, now so plain, that when Reginald Mallett died his wife's capacity for struggling was at an end. She had suffered bitterly from the sight of his deterioration and from her failure to prevent it. In his sulky, torturing presence she had desired his absence, but this permanent absence was more than she could bear. And all Henrietta could do was to obey her mother's injunction to accept help from her aunts, but she had refused the offer of an escort to Radstowe and Nelson Lodge; she would have no highly respectable servant sniffing at the boarding-house--and she would have been bound to sniff in that permanently scented atmosphere--which was, after all, her home. She left with genuine regret, with tears.

'You mustn't cry, dearie,' Mrs. Banks said, holding Henrietta to the bosom of her greasy dress. 'It's a lucky thing for you.'

'Perhaps,' Henrietta said, 'but I'd rather be with you, and I can't bear to think of the cooking going to pieces. I'll send you some recipes for nice dishes.'

'Too many eggs,' Mrs. Banks said prophetically.

'I dare say, but you can manage if you think about it. And remember, if Miss Stubb has too much cold mutton, she'll lose her job, and then you'll lose her money. It will pay you to feed her. You haven't had a debt since I began to help you.'

'I know, I know; but I'll have them now, for certain. I've told you before that Banks took all my ideas with him when he dropped into the river,' Mrs. Banks said hopelessly, and on Henrietta's journey to Radstowe it was of Mrs. Banks that she chiefly thought. It seemed as though she were deserting a friend.

She was surprised by the smallness of Nelson Lodge as she walked up the garden path; she had pictured something more imposing than this low white building, walled off from the wide street; but within she discovered an inconsistent s.p.a.ciousness. The hall was panelled in white wood, the drawing-room, spa.r.s.ely but beautifully furnished, was white too, and she immediately felt, as indeed she looked, thoroughly out of harmony with her surroundings. She waited there, in her cheap black clothes, like some little servant seeking a situation; but her welcome, when it came, after a rustling of silken skirts on the stairs, a.s.sured her that she was acknowledged as a member of the family. Sophia took her tenderly to her heart and murmured, 'Oh, my dear, how like your father!' Caroline patted her cheek and said, 'Yes, yes, Reginald's daughter, so she is!' And a moment later, Rose entered, faintly smiling, extending a cool hand.

Henrietta's acutely feminine eye saw immediately that her Aunt Rose was supremely well-dressed, and all her past ideas of grandeur, of plumed hats and feather boas and ornamental walking shoes, left her for ever. She knew, too, that clothes like these were very costly, beyond her dreams, but she decided, in a moment, to rearrange and subdue the black tr.i.m.m.i.n.g of her hat.

On the other hand, the appearance of the elder aunts almost shocked her. At the first glance they seemed bedizened and indecent in their mixture of rouge and more than middle age; but at the second and the third they became attractive, oddly distinguished. She felt sure of them, of their sympathy, of her ability to please them. It was Aunt Rose who made her feel ill at ease, and it was Aunt Rose of whom she thought as she sat by her bedroom window and looked down at the back garden, bright with the flowers of spring.

Yet it was Aunt Caroline who had been unkind about her feet. They were like that, these grand people; they had beautiful manners but nothing superficial escaped them; they made no allowances, they went in for no deceptions, and though it was Caroline who had actually condemned the small, strong feet which now rested, slipperless, on the soft carpet, Henrietta was sure that Rose had seen them too. She had seen everything, though apparently she saw nothing, and Henrietta had to acknowledge her fear of Rose's criticism. It was formidable, for it would be unflinching in its standards.

'Well,' Henrietta thought, 'I can only be myself, and if I'm common-- but I'm not really common--it's better than pretending; and of course I am rather upset by the house and the servants and all the forks and spoons. I hope there won't be anything funny to eat for dinner. I wish--' To her own amazement, she burst into a brief storm of tears.

'I wish I had stayed with Mrs. Banks.'

She had her place in the boarding-house, she was a power there, and she missed already her subtle, unrecognized belief in her superiority over Mrs. Banks and Miss Stubb and Mr. Jenkins and the rest. She was also honestly troubled about the welfare of the landlady, who was her only friend. It was strange to sit in her father's room and look at a portrait of him as a youth hanging on the wall, and remember that Mrs.

Banks, who made him shudder, was her only friend.

She left her seat by the window to look more closely at that portrait, and after a brief examination she turned to the dressing-table to see in the mirror a feminine replica of the face on the wall. She had never noticed the likeness before. She had only to push back her hair and she saw her father. Where his nose was straight, hers was slightly tilted, but there was the same darkness of hair and eyes, the same modelling of the forehead, the same incipient petulance of the lips.

She was astonished, she was unreasonably pleased, and with the energy of her inspiration she swept back the curls of which her mother had been so proud, and pinned them into obscurity. The resemblance was extraordinary: even the low white collar of her blouse, fastened with a black bow, repeated the somewhat Byronic appearance of the young man; and as there came a knock at the door, she turned, a little shame-faced, but excited in the certainty of her success.

But it was only Susan, who gave no sign of astonishment at the change.

She had come to see if she could help Miss Henrietta to unpack, but Henrietta had already laid away her meagre outfit in the walnut tallboy with the curved legs. Susan, however, would remove the trunk, and if Miss Henrietta would tell her what dress she wished to wear this evening, Susan would be able to lay out her things. The tin trunk clanked noisily though Susan lifted it with tactful care, and Henrietta blushed for it, but the aged portmanteau, bearing the initials _R. M._, became in the discreet presence of Susan a priceless possession.

'It's full of books,' Henrietta said; 'I won't unpack them. I thought my aunts would let me keep them somewhere. They are my father's books.'

'There's an old bookcase belonging to Mr. Reginald in the box-room,'

Susan said; 'I'll speak to Miss Caroline about it.'

'Did you know my father?' Henrietta asked at once.

'Yes, Miss Henrietta,' Susan said.

'Do you think I'm like him?'

'It's a striking likeness, Miss Henrietta,' and warming a little, Susan added, 'I was just saying so to Cook.'

'Did Cook know him, too?'

'Oh, yes, Miss Henrietta. Cook and I have been with the family for years. If you'll tell me which dress you wish to wear--'

'There's only one in the wardrobe,' Henrietta said serenely, for suddenly her shabbiness and poverty mattered no longer. She was stamped with the impress of Reginald Mallett, whom she had despised yet of whom she was proud, and that impress was like a guarantee, a sort of pa.s.sport. She had a great lightness of heart; she was glad she had left Mrs. Banks, glad she was in her father's home, and learning from Susan that the ladies rested in their own rooms after luncheon, she decided to go out and look on the scenes of her father's youth.