Chapter IV: Part I: I (3)

"Why not, my dear? She's either very foolish or has more delicacy than I give her credit for if she doesn't. Why, she could have her house full of rich vulgar Americans all the year round. Are we at Lady Dunsmuir's already? Thank heavens, Leslie, we're not calling on the servants' hall this time."

* * * * *

Meanwhile, at the house they had left, an aggrieved small person sat on a cushion and comforted the ache at her heart very much after the fashion of older and presumably wiser people, with mother's rejected dainties. Stretched on a wolf-skin rug, in an attitude that had been a common one with her in days when, the Cornish sun dappling her back and making illuminating splashes on the novelettes that were her mental food, she had dreamed away whole summer afternoons thus in her father's orchard, the farmer's daughter watched the busy, sticky mouth at work, her face wholly given up to the animal affection that Lady Lulford was at that very moment reprehending.

"Why didn't you want to kiss your Aunty Hortense?" she asked presently.

No answer, but much sucking, as the sugary bottom of the cup was reached. The mother loosened the little fingers and put it aside.

"Come, Nelly," she urged; "answer mother!" Who has not coveted a child's thought at times?

This one seemed to consider.

"_Be-tos_," she said at last, cryptically, like some little Chinese oracle.

"_Be-tos_, of what? That's not any answer. And, oh, law! child, how backward you do speak for a great girl of four!"

Hard pressed, Nelly struggled to her feet. She clenched her little hands, puckered her forehead. The mother held her breath as she waited.

"Be-tos----Oh! be-tos she didn't _smell_ nice!"

And, as the woman rolled back, shaking unrestrainedly with laughter.

"----like you do, mummy; like you do, mummy," the child cried, flinging her arms round her mother's neck and burying her flushed face in the soft shoulder.

VII

MOSTLY LADY ANNE

So the baby hands threw their dice, and as the dice fell the game was played out. Life unfolded itself amid the fog or rain or thwarted sunlight of the staid Tyburnian square, which should have had for tutelary deity some sleepy god, yawning and stretching himself in the centre of its smoky grass plot. Before the opening consciousness, like figures in an enchanted frieze, such phenomena passed as are likely to haunt area railings: The muffin man, tinkling his bell down murky streets and terraces at the uplifting hour of tea-time; the policeman with his bull's-eye lantern, waking the rails to a good-night dance along blank stuccoed walls and shuttered windows; broad hipped Welsh milkwomen in plaid shawls, with shining pails clanking from their wooden yokes; the old blind Dalmatian dog that panted at the corner of the mews and drummed the hot pavement with his tail. Once a year for one blissful month the town baby became a sand baby, building castles, scooping moats with her wooden spade for the tide to crumble (oh, Nelly! there's a tide that knows all our castles are sand); racing with bare-legged chance companions along the purring lips of the treacherous sea. Child of suppressed love and of absolute surrender, she grew up straight, strong and ardent; fair of face, light of foot, and with a pitiful, generous heart that could not wait its time to love, but before the dimpled hands could reach or turn the stiff handle of the hall door, had made to itself friends of the world's wretchedness. The old Garibaldian accordion player, with the twisted leg, learned to look for the little _signorina_, beautiful as the sun of Naples, which he dreamed of at night in his cellar at Saffron Hill; the ancient mariner with snow-white hair and beard (a terrible case! says the Charity Organization Society) kept a bow of quite especial condescension for Missie's penny at Number Eleven; while it was fine to see with what a sweep of his great red hand to his battered hat old Paddy Crimmin, the drunken Delhi hero, would straighten his racked body of a cold Sunday morning as the little creature, her dark face aglow with newly discovered color against the white road and snow-burdened trees, stopped at his crossing to grope with mittened fingers for the penny, nestling in her pocket next a sixpence which I am sure she begrudged the cold impersonal offertory plate later on.

She possessed her mother's life as a single flame possesses a dark room, creating its light, its color, and its motion. The slave does not always make the tyrant, and to the homely woman who tended her, kissed her limbs fragrant from the bath, twisted her curls round fingers that thrilled with love and worship--who coaxed her from forbidden ways with toys and sweets, and whose voice was never once pitched in even the gentlest accent of authority, Fenella gave her heart in return. All the fairies, it seemed, were at her christening, even to the fairy Gratitude, who, I hear, is not often asked out nowadays.

For her child's sake, and spurred on by love, Mrs. Barbour toiled and schemed incessantly. Far less mercenary of soul than the aristocratic patrons who haggled over extras, inspected cold joints with a questioning eye and wanted their rooms "kept over" while they disported themselves at Homburg or Cannes--naturally credulous in fact, and inclined to believe the best of every one, the woman effected an actual change in her nature and under all her suave manner became distrustful, peremptory, and mercenary. The terms she wrung from the butcher, baker, and grocer before mentioned, with the bait of prompt payment in one hand and the threat of the big stores at Brompton and Bayswater in the other, were, perhaps, as unprecedented as those easy-going family purveyors one and all declared them to be. In bed at night while she should have been sleeping, in church on Sunday when she should have been harkening the sermon, her brain was busy with an endless double entry sum of receipts and outgoings, the profit of which she wrote off, variously, but always under the one heading, something after this fashion: "Fenella Account. To an amber satin eiderdown quilt, same as I saw at Hampton's on Friday; to plum-colored silk stockings such as the lady at the end of No. 6 just now is making no attempt to conceal; item, to a black fox stole and toque--the silver pointed ones are cheaper, but they say the hairs come out; item, to a silver manicure set like Miss Rigby's." And the poor woman, absorbed in her fond calculations, would scribble an imaginary total with one wrinkled, black-gloved finger across the gilt cross of her Book of Common Prayer, to the scandal of her left-hand pew-neighbor, and the no small mystification of Fenella on her right, wondering what mummy was "up to now."

She kept the girl from school until she was twelve years old, making shift with whatever deposit of a church school education stayed in her own head, eked out with the ministrations of various depressing and untrained governesses, and last but not least with lessons from Lady Anne Caslon, whose only fault was that they were necessarily irregular. Lady Anne was the first of two permanent lodgers who, about Fenella's sixth year, made their home at Number Eleven, and, for a number of years, almost lifted Mrs. Barbour's precarious venture to the dignified level of a settled income. The rooms had only just been given up, by "parties" with whom money seemed to be no object, amid indignant tears on the one side and a glow of respectable resolve on the other; but Mrs. Barbour had not yet signified the vacancy through the columns of the _Morning Post_, while we need hardly add that no window-card ever shocked the susceptibilities of Suffolk Square. I suspect myself that the Lulford connection were anxious to confine the collateral skeleton within limits that could be controlled by them, and kept a furtively watchful eye on the room-letting branch of the family.

Lady Anne appeared on a blustering March morning: a short, middle-aged woman, none the less active because she limped from an old hunting accident, with a long, white, bony face--the face of some great mystic abbess of old days--a distinct prognathous of the lower jaw, and a high, narrow forehead, from which her colorless fair hair was tightly drawn and twisted into an absurd little knob at the nape of the neck. On every feature, movement, and accent was stamped the indefinable _cachet_ of the governing caste. She was wearing a frieze coat and skirt, a man's collar and tie, and a green Alpine hat, carried an ash stick, and was pulling against, rather than leading, a hideous and powerful white bull-terrier, bristlingly intent upon the feline possibilities of successive areas.

She stumped through the vacant floors on her low-heeled shoes, rapped the wainscot as though she rather suspected secret passages, gave a derogatory poke of her ashplant to the feather mattresses, turned on both taps in the bathroom, and concluded her tour with a sudden descent upon the kitchen, where three maids, busy upon a noontide lunch, rose and curtsied awkwardly.

"I'll take 'em," she said abruptly, turning suddenly in the hall upon the aggrieved proprietress. "The rooms will have to be repapered of course--and a hard mattress, and I have my own pictures; oh! and you'll turn those tufty, musty armchair things with ball fringes into some other room, won't you?--like a good soul. Any children? I thought I heard----Down, Rock! _Down_, sir!"

The bull-terrier, tied to the hall-stand, had lain, whining unhappily, sweating, and wrinkling his pink muzzle, while his mistress roamed up and down stairs. Now he was standing, tense and rigid, growling ominously, at a tiny hand that pushed a biscuit hospitably against his clenched, bared teeth. Lady Anne struck the threatening head aside and lifted the child in her strong arms.

"So this is your little girl? This is Fenella?"

"Yes, m' lady," said Mrs. Barbour, hasty and apologetic in manner for all her secret resentment. "But she's a good, quiet little thing, and I'll see she gives no trouble."

Lady Anne did not answer. She had pushed back those rebellious curls and was brooding the flower-like face.

"Dear heart!" was all she said aloud, and the rest was murmured under her breath.

She set the child on the floor and held out the little nerveless hand, still clenched on the biscuit, toward the bull-terrier.

"You must be careful with strange dogs, baby, particularly this breed. They aren't like any other sort of dog. Take it, Rock!"

Rock crunched the biscuit wastefully between his powerful jaws.

"No crumbs, sir!"

He sniffed up about a third of the biscuit, which he had let fall on the tiled floor.

"Say 'Thank you.'"

The animal gave the small fist that was tendered him three enormous licks, and glanced at his mistress out of his savage pink eyes.

"That's right! Mustn't ever bite this one, Rock! She isn't a cat, and never going to be one either, I know."

"I hope the child will be no obstacle, m' lady," put in Mrs. Barbour, stiffly.

"Obstacle!" Lady Anne repeated. "God bless me, no. Why should she be? You must have your baby, I suppose, same as I have my dog. What's her name?"

"Fenella, m' lady."

"Very well. You be good to Rock--I'll be good to Fenella. I'll send a postcard when I've arranged things," she said. "Come on, Rock!"

* * * * *

"Why was the lady c'yin', mummy?" asked Fenella, whose accent still left much to be desired.

Mrs. Barbour could not enlighten her. She was wondering herself why the woman had first called her child Fenella and then asked her name. A conversation in the corner of the dining-room at the Palmyra Club half an hour later might have carried her mystification a little further.

"I don't think I'll do a _matinée_ with you this afternoon, Brenda," Lady Anne was saying to her dearest friend. "Seeing Nigel's baby has rather upset me. I think I'll go to my room and howl for a bit."

"What's _she_ like, Nanno?" asked the dearest, narrowing her eyes through the smoke of her cigarette.

"Nice, comfy, child-bearing sort of person. She has no airs. That was a lie of the Lulford woman."

"I believe," said Brenda Newcombe slowly, as if the opinion were the fruit of some thought and a little disillusion, "that's the sort most men like Nigel like in their hearts."

"Men like Nigel----!"

"Philosophers--I mean. Over-educated, ultra-refined. They divorce their intellect and their instincts so thoroughly that the result is----"

Lady Anne raised her shapely white hand deprecatingly.

"I know what you're going to say quite well, Brenda. You needn't finish it."

"To give one instance," went on the irrepressible Brenda; "did you never hear that Don Hinchey's wife has to wear print dresses and, oh! everything very plain when they're alone in Northumberland."

"Pshaw! Brenda; _quel conte!_"

"Nanno, it's gospel. She told Lady Carphilly, and Lady Carphilly told me. She wore them once to a fancy dress, and looked so well that now when Donny's bored he makes her put them on. She hates it, but he says it's the only way she can keep his love."

* * * * *

Lady Anne moved in as soon as the alterations that her austere soul demanded had been made; the walls hung with a paper that Mrs. Barbour compared scornfully but exactly to a dry mustard plaster, and various ebullient studies of still life removed to make way for old-wood engraved portraits and Alken sporting prints. She began the morning, violently, with a cold bath at seven; breakfasted--continentally--on dry bread and coffee at eight, and wrote nearly all the morning at a roll-topped Sheraton desk, whose drawers slid in and out on brass rails as smoothly as the oiled pistons of a machine. It was at this desk that Fenella stammered through her letters. Seated upon the highest chair the room afforded, made higher still by an Italian gilt leather cushion, the little girl spelled out the adventures of Tom and Dick, Nat and Ned, and other monosyllabic heroes of childhood. Nelly's attention wandered very easily. Her voice would die away to a murmur--her head fall lower and lower until the dark curls quite covered the heavy type and wood cuts, along which a very neatly pointed cedar pencil, held in a firm white hand, moved with such exasperating deliberation. Then she would begin to suck her thumb, and, finding no encouragement to relaxation of effort in the lowered lids and compressed mouth above her shoulder, would let her eyes wander round the room. Under the high white mantelpiece the fire burned cheerily, with little bubbles of gas and spurts of flame: above it, a silver clock set in a horseshoe ticked so quickly that the slow passage of the hands across its face was one mystery the more for the child brain to puzzle out. The room smelt like a man's, of morocco leather and boot cream, and the vague but piercing scent of naked steel in between. Under a curtain to the right of the fireplace, which did not quite reach the stained floor, Lady Anne's long boots, on high wooden trees, stood, an orderly row of eight polished toes, like booted eavesdroppers behind an arras. Over the "Melton Hunt Breakfast," between crossed hunting crops, a fox's mask still wore the grin with which it was twitching one December afternoon years and years ago when the mangled pelt smoked upon the raw Leinster air and little, ugly, hard-riding Lady Anne, in long bottle-green habit and flaxen pig-tail, was held up amid the yelping red muzzled pack and blooded to the hunt; while--most interesting and distracting of all--close to the fire, with his nose between his paws, deliciously unemployed, lay Roquelaure, blinking friendly eyes which seemed to say, in the secret language that children and animals share for a few short years--

"Oh! I say, baby, ain't lessons over yet?"

Three times a week, when her correspondence was done, and a wire basket full of square, rough envelopes with scarlet seals awaited the afternoon post, Lady Anne would go riding in the Park. She stumped through the hall in a short habit and wide-brimmed billycock hat, under whose elastic band the uses of the yellow-white knot of hair became suddenly obvious, looking more than ever like an abbess: a hunting, not a praying, abbess this time. Outside a stable lad from the mews held a tall, nervous horse by the head. Lady Anne would hold the child up to pat the hairy, quivering nose, bid her have no fear of the sliding eyes; would run her fingers down the horse's flanks and legs, maybe pick up and inspect a hoof cunningly; at last, jumping into her saddle out of the groom's hand, would straighten the sidling beast with one blow of her riding crop on his buttock, and be off, her right knee almost in line with the maned neck, and holding in the caitiff head with hands that were a proverb in the shires. Fenella always watched her out of sight, her eyes shining--the palms of her hands pressed hard together.

VIII

THE SECOND FLOOR

By this time Miss Rigby might possibly have arisen and be watching the horse and its rider through her curtains. Emilie Rigby was the second of the permanent paying guests. She was tall, languid, graceful and disorderly, of uncertain age, but with a growing opacity of skin and with darkening shadows under her short-sighted eyes to tell of the ebbing life forces within: much younger in the afternoon than in the morning, and recovering her youth hour by hour as the day aged. In her rooms on the second floor she led the spoiled, sensuous life of an odalisque or a Persian cat. She breakfasted in bed, lunched in a wrapper and with her hair coiled carelessly upon her neck, had a hot bath, with elaborations, at three, and left the house an hour later, in a cab whose destinations, despite all efforts of Druce and Kendal, remain conjectural to this day. She dined from home almost nightly, but had few correspondents, and her visitors gave Mrs. Barbour no anxiety. She had a telephone installed in her room, whose sharp summons soon became one of the habitual sounds of the dark, still house. The baffled Druce, carrying up an unascetic luncheon at one, frequently found the door locked in her face and was forced to wait until a conversation, punctuated with bursts of laughter and far too disjointed to be worth listening to through the keyhole, wore itself away. Lady Anne answered for her.

"Respectable?" she exclaimed abruptly, in response to a guarded query. "Of course Jasmine Rigby's respectable. We dined at the same house last month. Only, if I were you----" she hesitated, unwilling to spoil the perfect relief in her landlady's face, "if I were you, I wouldn't have Nelly in and out there too much, once she begins to grow up. Her clothes alone are enough to unsettle the girl."

But it is hard, with four servants and three households to control, to keep an efficient eye upon inquiring youth, whose fingers are already beginning to pluck restlessly at the many hued skirt of life; and the hardship becomes greater when you are filled with pity for a loneliness that is part of your own contriving. As long as Fenella was a very little girl, beyond coaxing her in now and then to pet as one would pet a pretty kitten, Miss Rigby took scant notice of the child. But as she grew in years and stature, and a beauty that was becoming more of the earth and less of the angels was confirmed in her, I am afraid the scented, sophisticated atmosphere of the second floor began to exercise its delayed but inevitable charm. One of those foolish intimacies began which almost every pretty young girl can remember, often with shame and impatience. There was a year when the woman, nearly forty, and the girl, not yet fourteen, were "Jasmine" and "Nelly" to each other; when little cocked-hat notes (oh, how deftly folded!) were apt to lurk under the doily mats on Fenella's dressing-table, to be answered by ignorant, misspelt letters from the blindly adoring child. The jaded woman of fashion and pleasure (no; I don't know what place she filled in her world, nor is speculation worth while) took an early opportunity of showing the little parson's daughter the beauty of her arms and shoulders--talked unreservedly before her, dressed her up in her gowns and _lingerie_, let her lie upon the bed and prattle while she herself sat before the mirror, waging her unwearied warfare with time--refreshed herself with the girl's homage, laughed away as much as she dared of her innocence, and finally, in a last spasm of confidence, unlocked a drawer, hesitated, and put into the girl's hands a bundle of letters, bidding her, with a flushed cheek and the ghost of a giggle, to read them over and to let her know how their literary beauties affected her. "When you've read them," said she, "maybe I'll tell you who they came from."

Fenella left the room puzzled, a little frightened, but with no instinct to tell her that possibly she was holding her damnation in her hand.

What happened next? One of those happy accidents, perhaps, that good angels know how to arrange. The packet was returned, unopened, next morning, by Lady Anne, in the course of an interview which left her fellow-lodger considerable repairs to effect before she faced the world anew. An hour later the good genius, habited for her ride, knocked timidly at the door of Mrs. Barbour's sanctum in the hitherto unvisited nether regions.

Mrs. Barbour rose to her feet when she saw who her caller was, but Lady Anne signed for her to remain seated. She seemed nervous and awkward, and put her hands to her side. They say her horse kicked her there the day she broke her ankle; oh! only a touch; no notice was taken of it at the time.

"I've come to speak about our little girl," she said, sitting down and crossing her booted legs.

Mrs. Barbour bridled a little; but youthful habits are strong. She resumed her deferential manner.

"I trust she has been giving no trouble, m'lady."

"She has perhaps exposed a meddling old woman to the worst snub of her life. I'm going to be crude, Mrs. Barbour. What on earth are you going to make of that child?"

Mrs. Barbour plaited the table cover, but seemed to have no answer ready.

"She's growing lovelier every day" (the foolish mother's eyes glistened); "she dresses like a little fashion plate; she has more silver stuff and finery in her room than any of us girls had at Castle Cullen; she hasn't a friend in the world nor an idea in her head; and we've an instance," with a glance up at the ceiling, "near enough at hand, where beauty with nothing else can bring a woman."

Mrs. Barbour's eyes began to fill. Not a single harsh truth but voiced a reproach that had been nibbling her own heart for years.

"Why don't you send her to school? Do you know that if you were a poor woman you could be fined or sent to prison?"

"Schools are so dear."

"Stuff! They're cheaper and better than they ever were. There's nothing young folk can't do now. You can go from a boarding school to the 'varsity on a string. Let's send her to school, Mrs. B.," she persisted. "You've no time to look after her, and neither have I."

"Not boarding school," the mother pleaded. "I couldn't be parted from her now."

"Who said anything about boarding schools? There are plenty of day schools. None of them are perfect, I know. But it can't be put off. All the danger isn't out of doors. Let her go and get a little honest mud on the bottom of her skirts, and come home every evening to have it brushed off."

The poor woman struggled with her trouble. "It isn't that," she said brokenly, "but--but, I can't explain it. There are things that don't brush off--ever. She is so ignorant of what the world thinks of--of people like me. They'll teach her it all at school; they'll teach her to despise her m-m-mother...."

She broke down and, burying her face in her hands, wept the unrestrained tears of her class.

"Oh, dear! oh, dear!" she moaned. "I knew it must come. She's so pretty--so pretty; such a little aristocrat. I'm only her mother by accident, really. And she'll make fine friends and be asked out, and wonder why she can't ask 'em back, and I'll have to tell her: 'Nelly, dear, it's because your mother is only a poor woman that father married to save her name, that lets lodgings to her betters for a living, and wouldn't let you go to your own people when they asked for you; and you can never have a friend of your own class as long as you live with her.'"

Lady Anne kept her arm across the broad, bowed shoulders.

"Let's try it," she said cheerily. "I'll answer for Nelly, and I think I can answer for the others. You have no conception how the world is changing. I have the very school in my eye, too. I know the principal. Sunlight and science, and knowledge that's innocent because it's thorough, and open windows upon life that blow away all the whispers in the corners, and a proper reverence for the body that, after all, is all we're sure of. As for the money--well, I'm a meddlesome old body, and you can heap coals of fire on my head by letting me be responsible. I don't blame you for spending money on her clothes: besides--Sharland College is dressy."

She wrote to her friend that night:

"DEAR LOUISA:

"I'm sending you a little girl who is the daughter of a dear, dead
chum of mine. She's extravagantly pretty, very dull, quite poor--is
being brought up as though she were an heiress and has a heart that
I believe will prove a greater danger to her than her face or her
poverty. For God's sake, Louisa, find out if she has any special
talent that will help her to a living, and ground her and grind
her until she's taken hold. I'm fond of the child, and shouldn't
die happy if I thought there was any risk of her joining the one
profession for which previous experience isn't essential.

"The old pain in the side has come back; the Swedish massage did it
no permanent good. But I can still ride, so I don't squeal."

IX

SHARLAND COLLEGE

Fenella was nearly fourteen when she went to school. After Mrs. Barbour had seen her into the green horse-omnibus which at that date still rolled sedately westward along the Park paling the poor woman went home and, regarding with a stricken eye the untidy relics of a hurried breakfast, sat down and had a good cry. She would see her daughter again in a few hours, but her instinct told her that the parting was not one to be measured by time or distance.

At school Fenella achieved an instant success. At her lessons she remained a sad dunce, but Sharland College had the modern conception of bodily beauty as a supreme merit, and for its sake and also a little for the amiability that accompanied it, Nelly's shortcomings in algebra and geometry were forgiven and so mitigated by the assistance of plainer and cleverer girls anxious for her friendship as to be scarcely noticeable. She had become a fashion in the school before the end of her second term, and a host of extravagant, flattering nicknames attested this heady popularity. She was "Astarte" and "Principessa" in the higher forms; "Flash" in the gymnasium and swimming bath--a tribute to her bodily agility; "Zenobia" for one winter term, shortened into "Nobs" during a frenzied hockey rally and forthwith abandoned; "Greuzy" in artistic circles; while, oftenest of all and most eloquent of all--for it voiced the sense of a common possession--she was "Our Nelly." I do not know whether it is to her credit or discredit that the intimacy with Miss Rigby came to a sudden and unforced end in her first term. Poor Jasmine was forgotten or remembered only as a rather unhealthy dream. Fenella began even to refer to her flippantly as her "past"; "Ma, has my 'past' got up yet?" she would ask at midday on half-holidays when she came home to change for hockey or tennis and wanted to use the telephone.

It was upon wintry half-holidays that poor Mrs. Barbour felt her desolation most keenly. It did not seem to matter so much when she knew Nelly was working at school. There was a hungry and noisy return at half-past four to be looked forward to, and a whole golden evening during which she might knit and watch the dark head bent above the irksome home task. And in the summer she would not have had the child otherwise employed than in winning roses on lawn or river for the colorless cheeks that she was uneducated enough to think indicated a latent delicacy. But on rainy autumn afternoons, so brief and dark, with the fire burning cosily in the shabby parlor and only a prospect of forty feet of smoky grass, a leprous plaster cupid and the black wall of the mews to entertain herself with, it seemed unjust, even vaguely ominous to her peace, that her nestling preferred to beat her new-fledged wings out in the dark and cold. She never complained, but tried for a while to tempt her child to stay at home with her "favorite" books, her "favorite" armchair, a box of chocolates--poor ineffectual wiles that the short-sighted eyes of youth, set upon the quest of high-spiced pleasure abroad, passed over without seeing. There would be a hasty gobbled luncheon, taken standing, like the last meal in Egypt; a frenzied search behind old magazines that were never read and old music that was never played, for shoes and shin-guards--"Must have my new shin-guards to-day, mummy. Kilburn hack simply rotten--" a kiss, for the chocolates, given on the wing, and Fenella in red tam o' shanter and belted jacket of scarlet pilot cloth was off--through the area and up the steps.

"Expect me when you see me, mummy. I may chew with one of the girls."

She was not a religious woman, but she used to pray about this time, miserably and humbly, for her child's heart to be left to her. And, in the morning, between two mouthfuls of porridge, it was just possible that Fenella might look at her sharply, and say--

"What've you been doing to yourself, mummy? You look like a boiled owl this morning."

Who else was to notice that an old woman's eyes were red?

But there were times, also, which the mother came to look for, as sex stole inexorably upon the slangy, boyish woman-child, when the princess wearied of her kingdom, the tireless wings began to droop, and the fledgling crept under the old sheltering wing for comfort. She would come down after lunch, dressed in her house frock, sit down unexpectedly on her mother's knee, grip the broad shoulders, and held thus at arms' length, gaze at her for minutes together as though with some new knowledge in the steadfast eyes. She would cover her with tender names of disrespect--with cooing infractions of the fifth commandment. "Dear old fathead!" "Dear old stoopid!" "Silly old motherbird!" But she was strangely averse to the caresses with which her mother, always expansive, would have repaid the endearing insults.

"Don't kiss me, donkey," she would cry, breaking away. "Can't you see this is one of my touch-me-notish days? Hook me up the back and send Drucie out for some chocolates. I'm going to stop with you all the afternoon."

"Dearie," said the mother, timidly, one day, "won't the girls miss you and come looking for you?"

Fenella knit her brows, but did not look up from her book.

"Of course they know where you live, don't they, dear?"

"No--yes. Oh! I don't know. Mother, can't you see I'm reading?"

Next Saturday Fenella was "playing away." The mother, still pursuing a train of thought that had not really been interrupted during the week, was wondering whether it would not be possible, by sending Miss Rigby away (she had never cared for the woman), and by moving Lady Anne up one story, to take the whole of the first floor for herself and her child. The girl _must_ have somewhere to bring her friends. She stuck her needles into her wool and sought pencil and paper. But the figures that foot it merrily enough when it is a matter of addition, limp wearily and stubbornly when subtraction is in question. She caught her breath at the result of her calculations. And yet--the situation was intolerable.

In the middle of her reverie a gate creaked and slammed. There was a clatter of feet on the steps--a rattle of sticks along the railings--Babel let loose in the area, and, before the woman could give a shape to the panic at her heart, into the big, shabby room, like an ill-trained chorus at a theatre, tumbled a rout of girls--short and tall--dark and fair--all dressed alike in red jackets and caps.

They were of all ages from twelve to sixteen. Some had the promise of beauty in a few years to come--some were only comely with the freshness of youth and health, but from one and all, in spite of strident voice, awkwardness of gesture, and self-consciousness of regard, there radiated that evanescent and mournful charm which is possessed by any bevy of girl comrades that touches childhood at its one extreme and womanhood at the other. With a comprehensive sweep of her arm Fenella introduced her rabble court.

"Ma--these are the girls! Girls--this is ma! Hurry up and get us something to eat. We've been playing at Blackheath, and they only gave us one biscuit each with tea. And, look here, girls," turning from her mother's dazed face upon the brawling team, "if you make a row and upset our lodgers, you'll" (impressively) "_never--come--here--again_!"

Fenella's popularity not only survived this shameful exposure, but followed her into the Christmas holidays. The most delightful of all missives began to lie, three and four at a time, on the breakfast table by her plate, "begging the pleasure." Mrs. Barbour, who did a considerable amount of good by stealth, had arrested a thirsty genius on a downward course from the Bond Street ateliers to Marylebone Workhouse, and, with this strange being, who wore a palpable transformation, smelt of brandy, and called her "Modder-moselle," Nelly spent many a fruitful morning, pinning, fitting, and cutting, while the machine whirred and bumped on a table near by. She tasted for the first time the delights of the waxed floor, the heavy golden air, the cadenced wind--all the witchery of dance-land. Sleek "freshers" with lacquered heads, "down for the short--" pink, alert subalterns on Christmas furlough from Chatham and Aldershot, with funny cropped moustaches like a toothbrush--delightful middies in uniform, with cracking voices, wrote her name stiffly and illegibly on their programmes or, if they were very smart, on an immaculate shirt cuff. She danced with the verve of one exercising a fine natural gift, but hated "sitting out," and acquired a distracting habit of wandering on her partner's arm, along corridors and up stairs, through palms and around screens, in search of friends similarly coupled. She called this the "visiting figure," but, oh! the despair of inflammable youth, its head full of incoherent adoration, to which darkness and solitude would have given such burning words. This little unchaperoned girl, with her perilously attractive beauty, discovered endless address and resource in keeping male fervor at a distance. The following conversation is on record, heard from palm-filled obscurity:

"Look here, Bobby! I'm sitting with you in the dark, 'cos you said the light hurt your bad eye; but if you _paw_ you'll have two bad eyes to look after 'stead of one."

Toward the end of her third year at Sharland College Lady Anne received a letter from Miss Garrett, of which the following was part:

"... About Fenella Barbour. No. I haven't forgotten the promise
I made you to let you know if the girl showed marked ability in
any one direction. Strangely enough, Madame de Rudder, of Hanover
Street, our dancing and calisthenic mistress, called upon me about
her only yesterday. She tells me the child shows a talent for
bodily movement (she calls it 'genius': poor abused word!) such as
she never marked in a girl before. She is revising some old dances,
_Pavanes_ and _Corantos_, for private house parties, and
wants Fenella to join a quartette she is making up. Remembering
what you told me, I mentioned (guardedly) the expense of dresses,
etc., but she would not hear of the girl's incurring any outlay.
Not only this. She says that if Fenella could come, even two days
a week, as assistant at Hanover Street, she could have her tuition
free and, in time, be employed regularly, at very good pay: much
better than we can afford our own under-mistresses, who are all
graduates, as you know.

"It seems to me, dear Anne, that a _métier_ offers here: not
a very exalted one, it is true, but in the only line for which the
girl has shown any talent at all. Will you, if you think fit, speak
to the mother before I do anything further and ascertain her views.
I have met Mrs. Barbour. She is a puzzling and, I should say,
rather foolish woman, who evidently married far above her class.

"The idea, if followed out, will of course abridge Fenella's school
career, or even terminate it; but, to tell you the truth, dear
Anne, although I am fond of the child, I am only half sorry for
this. Don't misunderstand me. The girl is as good as gold, and I
know (who should judge better) has a soul like crystal. But her
influence among us has been an unsettling one.

"... I picked out the much beloved 'Collywobble' in the
Country-house Supplement from among the Sea grave, with dear Lady
Anne 'up.' What a pretty beast it is!"

Fenella was seventeen when she left school. She thought life a great joke, she had not said a prayer for two years, and the saddest sight she had seen was a fallen sparrow (counted, but number unrecorded) on the path in Holland Walk.

X

THE WAY OF A MAID

Planche's "History of British Costume," 2 vols. 2500_b_, in the Library of the British Museum, is a helpful work of reference. It is replete with information, and the wood-cuts are spirited. Its size and cumbersomeness, however, are disadvantages. It is emphatically a book you would not care to read in bed. Add to this, that it is forming the summit of an unsteady pile of books with which your arms are filled--that you are handicapped further with a big black fur muff, and that your nerves are already on edge with the strangeness of the place....

_Crash!!!..._

One heavy morocco-bound volume lay, open and face downward, on the floor; the other was following it fast, ringleader in a tragic glissade over the smooth black fur. Fenella bit her lip and did not quite suppress a word whose most obvious rhyme is "lamb." In a terror-struck flash she saw all the results of her carelessness: attendants bearing down upon her--expostulation--disgrace and final ejectment beyond those heavy swing doors that she never, never should have passed. She was really very frightened.

A man who had been ransacking the shelves by her side, with a long arm that reached easily from top to bottom of the bookcase, turned quickly at the smothered exclamation. With a swift movement of one hand, he stayed the avalanche, and with the other picked up the fallen volume from the floor.

"Oh! thank you--thank you!" said Fenella, almost hysterically. She was looking up--a good way up--into the kindest, grayest eyes she had ever seen.... Eyes!--eyes! the little, unprotected girl encountered them everywhere. In train or 'bus, in the street, in the untempered light of the lately constructed tube railway. Hard eyes; preoccupied eyes, full of some sick trouble of their own which passed her over, unseeing; bitter, arrogant eyes that seemed to find her beauty and her pretty clothes an offence; eyes vicious and bold, the worst of all, that would not leave her, that stung her cheeks, as though the heat of the evil passions behind them were being focussed upon her through a lens, and beneath whose level, insulting conjecture her flesh crept and her hands clenched themselves in an agony of shame and helpless anger. But these eyes were different to all the others. She could look at them as steadily as at a cloudy sky: they seemed full of some tender wisdom. And of humor too. Already their twinkle mitigated what she felt to be a tragedy.

The stranger took the books from her one by one and bestowed them compactly in the hollow of his own arm.

"Have you got a seat?" he asked.

"No," said Fenella, in an agitated whisper. "Can I go anywhere I like? Are they all free?"

The man's smile broadened and showed his fine long teeth.

"We'll try and find you a free one," he said. "Come on with me." His accent was strange; not quite English, yet not foreign.

She followed her protector on tip toe, averting her eyes from the indignant glances that she was sure were being levelled at her. One lean old monk _was_ scowling, but he was really thinking of something else. Then there was a dreadful fat negro, like Othello turned scholar, who rolled his eyes. Fenella could not help peeping at the leaves he was turning over, to confirm an unscientific conviction of her own, that the black _did_ really come off sometimes.

Her guide stopped at an empty place, arranged her books neatly upon the flat leather-covered desk, pulled out a cane-seated chair on casters, and, bowing slightly, sat down in the next place and began to read one of a number of manuscript leaves with which it was strewn. She divested herself of gloves and furs, and commenced turning the pages of one of her books gingerly. Occasionally, she put her finger to her mouth, and then, remembering where she was, stopped with a shudder, as at danger escaped.

The man who had helped her was writing busily on a thick paper pad. When he had reached the bottom of each page, he blotted it, numbered it in the top right-hand corner, and added it carelessly to an untidy pile at his left hand. Sometimes, before tearing it off, he read it over, apparently without enthusiasm, erased words, and sometimes whole sentences, with impatient curly "twiddles" of his quill pen, wrote words in between the lines and added various cabalistic signs and letters in the margin. He was very much occupied, and Fenella, whom no book had ever absorbed, saw that she might watch him covertly and safely.

So this was the way books were written! She wondered who he was. Not Bernard Shaw--his hair was too short. Nor Rider Haggard--his face was too narrow. She could not think of any other writer with a beard. She considered him good-looking--in a strange way. She never would have, I will not say looked, but wanted to look after him in the street, still in a way she could not define, it was nice to be sitting next him. She liked his leanness and dryness. She hated fat men whose sleek hair seemed to be soaking up superabundant moisture from their bodies. Then, his beard was trimmed so closely to his cheek it was hard to say where it began, and his moustache was brushed out of the way once and for all. He didn't keep "twiddling" _it_. Yes; it would be quite safe to sit opposite while he ate soup.

There was a man quite like him on the very page before her.... Ah! Yes. That was what he wanted. A big ruff showing the hairy throat, and a little cloak, swung from his shoulders, and big puffy--whatever they called them--nearly to his knees, and a long rapier sticking up in the air--how awkward on staircases though--but not a silly little _toque_ like that, stuck on one side, and not--oh, not earrings in his ears. Who was it? "Duc de Guise." What a pity she had forgotten (forgotten!) all her French. Yes; that was what was the matter with him, she decided. His good looks were simply out of fashion. She looked backward and forward from the book to his face, from his face to the book, two or three times. Suddenly she became aware he was looking straight at her.

"_Oh! help!_"

"Anything I can do?" asked the stranger helpfully, in a low voice that was far less obtrusive than any whisper.

"C-could you translate this little bit for me, please? I'm no good at French," Fenella stammered, pushing her book toward him.

"Which little bit?"

She indicated a paragraph at random and as far from the picture as possible. She caught her breath at her audacity. "Forward minx, I am." She hoped he wouldn't hang over her shoulder to translate, like handsome Mr. Curzon, the drawing master at Sharland, heedless, or perhaps not heedless, of the burning cheek so near his own, and the suppressed titters of "the girls."

M. de Guise drew the open book toward him, and, tearing off a slip of paper, began to write on it in a cranky but rapid hand, with an occasional glance at the foreign text.

"Here you are. I hope you will be able to read my writing."

"Thank you very much indeed," said Fenella, demurely.

"Anything else you want? Paper?"

She had dived into her muff and was splitting open various envelopes with her forefinger.

"If you wouldn't mind. But I'm giving you so much trouble."

"No trouble at all. Here are three sheets. You have a pencil?"

"M--m."

"If it's one you stole from the catalogue desk I wouldn't suck it. Those aren't the sort you suck. See! you've made a blue smudge on your lips."

Fenella dived into her muff again, and, drawing out what I believe is termed a vanity bag, examined her lips on the little mirror. She rubbed them hard.

"Is it gone now, please?"

"Quite." How red the child's lips were. He glanced right and left and put his fingers to his own. A few fretful knowledge seekers were looking toward the chatter. Their glances were hostile.

"_A la besogne!_" said he, beneath his breath, and turned to his work again.

Fenella shook her shoulders and settled herself in the most industrious attitude she could think of. At the end of an hour she had drawn three figures and could think of no further excuse for remaining. Most of the wisdom of the world was around her and above her, but she felt no temptation to disturb it. The man at her side had apparently forgotten her existence. She put her books away, one by one, trying to prevent her shoes squeaking, but making a great bustle, really, yet he did not look round. When she came back at last to get her furs and gloves, he was gone. She left the room with a little sinking of the heart, but not more than one feels when, say, an interesting fellow-traveller whom we hoped was coming on all the way to London, gets out at Rugby. It is true that in her preoccupation she forgot to claim her umbrella.

When she reached Oxford Street she was reminded by passing an Express Dairy that it was past five and that she would reach home late for tea. Tea, as a rite, retained all its old significance for Fenella. Some of her old school-fellows had studios or flats within easy reach, and, perhaps, six months ago she would have made for one of them. But, already, she thought she noticed a difference. The girls were growing up--acquiring individuality, and her own path was diverging more and more. They liked her to come in to tea, but preferably on a day when no men were expected. She was already learning the hard truth that life must be played with the lone hand. A good many of her triumphs lay behind her.

She turned to the dairy, and going upstairs as far as she could, took a seat in the smoking-room and ordered weak tea and a teacake. She liked muffins and crumpets and teacakes with "heaps and heaps" of butter. The tea-room, being near the Museum, was full of its _habitués_. She saw three or four she had noticed there, playing chess or talking together in high mincing tones interspersed with cackling laughter. She did not recognize the accent of the "illuminated." Some had lined, seamed faces, with long hair, and would have looked better with a clerical collar. Those that looked strong looked rough. How different to her "courtier." She began to think of him anew, to calculate her chances of ever running across him again. One thing was certain, she would never, never go back to that terrible place again.

The teacake was long in coming, and as she looked up impatiently she saw him standing in the middle of the room. She recognized him at once by the rather rakish felt hat that had lain on his desk. He had a long blue overcoat with a belt and a funny yellow silk handkerchief round his neck. She wanted him very much to look round, but surmised he had a favorite waitress and was looking for her. Perhaps the naïve wish reached him. He turned, and, smiling, came toward her, as straight as a partner about to claim his dance.

"Hullo! Got tired? I missed you when I came back."

"I only came to draw three pictures."

He hung his coat up and sat opposite her in a matter-of-fact way that robbed the action of significance. Still, the lady who had brought the teacake waited for his order with a sub-surface smile. She had seen so many "Museum goings-on."

"You're not often here, are you?... Yes, tea, please. No--nothing with it."

Fenella leaned forward confidently. "It's my very first visit. Don't tell, will you? I _fudged_ a ticket."

"'Fudged'?"

"Came with another girl's--Phyllis Harmans. Do you know her?"

The gray eyes twinkled. "No. You're the only lady I ever speak to in the Museum."

"Would I get into any trouble if I was found out?"

"We'd all get into trouble if we were found out. The best way is not to attract attention. Don't drop your books again."

"Is it hard to get a ticket?"

"It's criminally easy. But I shouldn't advise you to. It's a place for old fogies like me. You look pale. Do you get plenty of outdoor exercise?"

Fenella rubbed her cheek. "That's not paleness. You're fussy, like mummy. I'm a healthy brute. And I shouldn't call you an old fogy. You're--brown. Have you travelled much?"

"Oh!--round the world and back again."

"Coming back's nice, isn't it?"

"Only when it's coming home."

"Isn't your home here? I _thought_ you spoke--funny. Haven't you any one who looks after you? A mother--or a sister?"

"No mother, no sister, no wife." The stranger spoke incisively. "No sweetheart, even," he added, after an appreciable pause.

Fenella blushed. Of course she hadn't meant to ask that; still, it was interesting to know. The child had a strange pertinacity in constructing correct views of new acquaintances that deceived a good many people.

A sudden squall lashed the windows with rain. She looked round in affright.

"Oh!--help!" she said again, softly.

"Now what's the matter?"

"I've forgotten my 'brolly'."

"Your _what_?"

"My brolly: my 'mush'; ma's best gold-handled umbrella."

"I'll lend you mine."

"Oh! it isn't that. I get the 'bus at the door, and only have a step to walk at the other end. But how'm I to get it back?"

"Aren't you coming again soon?"

She shook her head. You would never have guessed the stranger felt disappointed. He felt in his pocket and pushed a card across the table.

"Write an address on that," he said, "and leave me your check. I'll have it sent to-night by a messenger boy."

Fenella considered a moment. The card lay face downward, and it was a great temptation. But her good breeding triumphed. Without turning it over she wrote her name and address, very slowly, in print letters. Meantime she soliloquized thus:

"I hate rain. It's harder on women. Your petties get wet and slop round your ankles. I wish I could always dress as a boy. It's so picture-squeak--picturesque I mean. I do sometimes. Dances, you know: in a quartette, gavottes and things. I'm a boy, 'cos you can't teach men.... There you are. I hope you can read it.... I had a ripping dress at the 'Bechway' in the spring. Blue and silver, and powdered hair, and a little diamondy sword."

"Which you could use upon occasion with great spirit, I'll wager, Monsieur le Marquis."