“DO you know,” said Katie Russell, “there is a gentleman in the house? None of us have seen him; but he came yesterday. He is young, and tall, and nice-looking. He is their nephew. Mademoiselle says it is quite improper. Of course she oughtn’t to say so; and the girls don’t know what to think; for you know it is queer.”
“Why is it queer?” said Lucy. “If he is their nephew, he may surely come to see them. If they had a son, he would live here.”
“I don’t think so,” said Katie promptly. “Oh, no! if they had a dozen sons, not while the girls are here. It would never do. I have been at other schools, and I know. I have spent my life at schools, I think,” the girl said, with an impatient shrug of her shoulders, “and I know mademoiselle is quite right, though she oughtn’t to say so. I wonder, Lucy, if I will be as governessy when I am old? They almost always are.”
Lucy could not follow this quick digression. She gazed at her friend with wondering eyes. “You always jump so,” she said. “Which am I to answer—about the gentleman, or about—”
“Oh, never mind the gentleman. I only told you—it can’t matter very much to me,” said Katie. “It is for Maud and Lily, and girls of that set, that it is not right, or you— Is it true that you are to have a great fortune, Lucy? I always wanted to ask you, but I did not like—”
“Yes, I believe so,” said Lucy quietly; “why shouldn’t you like? Papa takes a great deal of trouble about it: but it does not matter so much to me. One is just the same one’s self, whether one is rich or poor; it will give a great deal of trouble. So I don’t care for it for my part.”
“Oh, I should care for it,” cried Katie. “I should not mind the trouble. How delightful it must be to be really, really rich! I should give— I should do—oh, I don’t know what I shouldn’t do! The use of being rich,” Katie added sententiously, “is that you can do as you please—go where you please, be as kind to everybody as you please; help people, enjoy yourself, buy everything you like, and yet always have something. Oh,” she said, clasping her hands, “to have to think and think whether you can buy yourself a pair of gloves—not to be able to get a cab when your mother is tired; and to grow old, and to grow governessy, like mademoiselle—”
“Mademoiselle is very nice, Katie. Don’t say anything against her.”
“I say anything against her! I adore her! but she is governessy, how can she help it, poor old darling? Her mind is full of the girls’ little ways, and what they mean by this and by that, Lucy,” said the girl, stopping short to give greater emphasis to her words. “If we ever see each other when I am an old governess like mademoiselle—be sure you remember to tell me when you see me worrying, that the girls mean nothing by it—nothing! This is the 21st of February. It is my birthday— I am nineteen. Tell me to recollect that I said they meant nothing—and that it’s true.”
“Are you really nineteen to-day?” said Lucy. “Older than I—”
“More than a year older. I wonder,” said Katie, with that patronage and superiority which the poor often show to the rich, “whether, when you are fifty, you will know as much of the world as I do now?”
Lucy’s companion was the governess-pupil, the one among the band of girls whose society her father had counseled her not to seek. Perhaps there was something of the perversity of youth in the preference which, notwithstanding this advice, Lucy felt for the girl whose friendship old Mr. Trevor had decided could be of no use whatever to her. Lucy was not nearly so clever as Katie Russell, who was already a great help in the school, and earning the lessons which she shared with the more advanced pupils. But Lucy was by no means so sure of her inferiority in point of experience as her companion was. She knew, if not the expedients of poverty, yet of economy through Mrs. Ford’s example, and she knew many details of a lower level of existence, lower than anything Katie was acquainted with; and even the shadow of her own future power which had lain upon her from her childhood had stood in the stead of knowledge to Lucy, teaching her many things; but she was a quiet person, thinking much more than she spoke; and she made no reply to this imputation of ignorance, though she thought it a mistake. She replied, with a little closer pressure of her friend’s arm, “Why are you so sure of being an old governess? You will marry—most likely the first of all of us.”
“Oh, no, no; don’t you know there are a million more women in England than men? It is in all the papers. Some of us will marry—you, for instance; but there must be a proportion—say five out of twenty, that’s not much,” said Katie, knitting her soft brows, “who never will, and I shall be one of them. For fun,” she said, throwing gravity to the winds, “let us guess who the other four will be.”
“Me,” said Lucy, with a gentle composure and indifference alike to matrimony and to grammar. “I think that is what papa would like best—”
“That is absurd,” said Katie; “you! You will have a hundred proposals before you are out a year. You will be the very first.”
“Put me down, however,” Lucy repeated. “It will be rather a good thing to be kept from getting married, if it is as you say. It will help to set the balance straight. There will be my gentleman for one of you.”
“You do not mean that you are to be kept from marrying,” Katie cried, aghast. This made a still greater impression on her mind than it had done on Miss Southwood’s, and it suggested to her a sudden chivalrous idea of rescue. Katie too had a Frank, a cousin, between whom and herself there had existed from the earliest tiny a baby tenderness. If ever she was married, Katie had tacitly concluded that he would be “the gentleman.” They might set up a school together; they might work together in various ways. It was a vague probability, yet one in which most of the light of Katie’s future lay. But suddenly it flashed upon her, all in a moment, what a chance, what an opening was this for any man. Frank was poor; they were all poor; but if he could be persuaded to step in and save Lucy from the celibacy to which she seemed to think herself condemned, Frank’s fortune would be made. It was the basest calculation in the world; and yet nothing could have been more innocent—nay, generous. It blanched Katie’s cheeks for the moment, but filled her mind with a whirl of thoughts. What a thing it would be for him and all the family! If the dream should come to pass, Katie felt that she herself might give in at once, and make up her mind to grow old and governessy like mademoiselle; but what did that matter, she asked herself heroically. For a second, indeed, she paused to think whether her brother Bertie might not answer the purpose without costing herself so much; but anticipated sacrifice is the purest delight of misery at nineteen, and she rather preferred to think that this great advantage to her cousin and her friend would be purchased at the cost of her happiness. And Frank himself might not like the idea at first; her great consolation was that it was almost certain Frank would not like it. But he must learn to subdue his inclinations, she thought, proudly; would not she do so for his sake? If other people were content to make that sacrifice, why should not he? And what a difference it would make, if a stream of comfort—of money and all that money can buy, ease of mind and freedom from debt, and power to do what one would—came suddenly pouring into the family, setting everything right that was wrong, and smoothing away all difficulties! To despise money is a fine thing; but how few can do it! Katie did not despise it at all. She forgot her companion while she walked on dreamily by her side, thinking of her fortune. Mercenary little wretch, the moralist would say; and yet she was not mercenary at all.
The girls were walking across the common by themselves. It was part of Mrs. Stone’s enlightened system that she allowed them to do so, in cases where the parents did not interfere. And so far as these two were concerned, even the consent of the parents was unnecessary; for was not Katie Russell, though only eighteen, a governess in the bud? and, accordingly, quite capable of acting as chaperon when necessary. Poor little Katie! this was one of the mild indignities of her lot that she felt most. Her lot was not at all a bad one at Mrs. Stone’s, where the head of the establishment backed her up quietly as indeed the one of her inmates with whom she was most in sympathy—and when the girls were “nice.” Girls are not all “nice,” any more than any other class of the community, and Katie had known what it was to be snubbed and scorned, and even insulted. But happily this was not the fashion at the White House. Still one mark of her inferior position remained in the fact that Katie, though so young, and one of the prettiest, of the band, was, being half a governess, qualified to accompany her peers in the character of chaperon. It was not quite clear that she might not be at that moment taking care of Lucy, who was less than a year her junior; but happily this idea had not crossed her mind. It was Sunday, which was a day of great freedom at the White House—a day given over (after due attention to all religious duties, need it be said? for Mrs. Stone knew what was expected of her, and you may be sure took all her doves to church with the most undeviating regularity) to confidences, to talks, to letter-writings. Some of the girls were covering sheets of note-paper with the most intimate revelations, some were chattering in corners, some reading story-books. Story-books are not necessarily novels— Mrs. Stone made a clever distinction. There was nothing in three volumes upon her purified and dignified shelves; but a book in one volume had a very good chance of coming within her tolerant reading of the word story. And some were out, perambulating about the garden, where the first crocuses were beginning to bloom, or crossing the common by those devious little paths half hidden in heather and all kinds of wild plants which were bad for boots and dresses, but very pleasant otherwise. It was along one of these that Lucy Trevor and her companion were wandering. The mossy turf was very green, betraying the moisture beneath; and the great bushes of heather, with all the withered bloom stiffened upon them, stood up like mimic forests from the treacherous grass. Wild bushes of gorse, with here and there a solitary speck of yellow, a premature bud upon them, interspersed their larger growth here and there. The frost had all melted away. In the little marshy pools, the water was clear and caught glimpses of a sky faintly blue. One willow on the very verge of the common had hung out its tassels, those prophecies of coming life.
There was a scent of spring in the air. “In the spring a young man’s fancy lightly turns to—” love, the poet says; and so, perhaps, does a girl’s. But before either is warmly awakened to that interest, spring touches them thrilling with a profusion of thought and planning and anticipation, not so distinct as love. The young creatures feel the sap of life mounting within them. Oft-times they know nothing more, and have formed no definite idea either of what they want, or why; but their minds are running over with the flood of living. Their plans go lightly skimming through the air, now poising on a branch, and again flashing widely on devious wings to all the points of the compass like so many birds. There was no immediate change necessary in the placid course of their school-girl existence; but they leaped forward to meet the future with all the force of their energies. Yet, perhaps, it was only one of them who did this. Lucy was too calm in the certainty of the changes that sooner or later would happen to her—changes already mapped out and arranged for her, as she was well aware—to be able to give herself up to these indefinite pleasures of imagination. But Katie leaped at her future with the fervor of a fresh imagination. She made up her mind to sacrifice herself, and give Lucy her cousin in less time than many would take to decide whether they should give up a ribbon. She sunk into silence for a little time while she was pondering it, but never from any indecision; only because, in her rapid foresight of all that was necessary, she did not quite see how the first step, the introduction of these two to each other, was to be brought about.
Just then the girls became aware of two other figures, bearing down upon them from the other side of the common—two larger personages making their slight youth look what it was, something not much more than childish. There was Mrs. Stone and the unknown gentleman who had arrived at the White House, to the scandal of the old governess, last night. When the girls perceived this they mutually gave each other’s arms a warning pressure. “Oh, look, here he is!” said Katie, and, “Is that the gentleman?” Lucy said. The encounter brought to the former a quick flush of excitement. She wondered a little, on her own account, who the gentleman was; for an apparition of such an unusual description in a girl’s school had naturally excited all the inmates. A man under Mrs. Stone’s roof! Men were common enough, things at home, and aroused no feelings of curiosity or alarm. But here it was quite different. Whence came he, and what had he come for? But besides this, there was another source of interest in Katie’s thoughts. As she conceived her own plot, a glimmering sense of the other came upon her by instinct. Why had this wonderful occurrence, this arrival of a gentleman, happened at Mrs. Stone’s? Mrs. Stone knew all about Lucy’s fortune, and the wicked scheme invented by her father (of which Katie knew nothing except by lively guesses) to keep her unmarried. And straightway the gentleman had come! She watched him anxiously as he approached. He was like Mrs. Stone, and he was not unlike the smiling and gracious face in a hairdresser’s window, complacent in wax-work satisfaction. He was large, tall, with fine black hair, whiskers and mustache, and a good complexion. He had something of that air of self-display—not vanity or conceit, but simply expansion and spreading out of himself which is characteristic of large men used to the company of many women. Katie pressed her friend’s arm more and more closely as they approached.
“What do you think of him?” she said. “I wonder if they will speak to us. Will Mrs. Stone introduce us? If she does I know what I shall think.”
“What shall you think?” said Lucy, across whose mind no glimmering of the cause of this unusual visit had flown. She watched him coming very placidly. “Mrs. Stone will not stop. She never does when she has any stranger with her. Who is it, Katie? I never heard that they had any brother.”
“It is their nephew,” Katie said, with something of that knowledge which is what she herself called governessy; that minute acquaintance with all the details of a family which people in any kind of dependence are so apt to attain. Mademoiselle was her authority—mademoiselle, who, though she was “nice,” had yet the foibles of her position, and a certain jealous interest, not altogether unkind, yet too curious to be entirely benevolent, about all her employers’ works and ways. “He was brought up for the Church, but he has not gone into the Church. Doesn’t he look like a parson? When a man has been brought up in that way he never gets the better of it. He always looks like a spoiled clergyman.”
“I don’t think he looks like a clergyman at all,” said Lucy, “nor spoiled either.”
“Oh, you admire him! I ought to have known you are just the kind of girl to like a barber’s block man. Our Frank,” said Katie, with some vehemence, “is not so big—he has not half such a shirtfront; but I am sure he has more strength. You should see him throwing things. He won two cups for that, and one for running,” she added, with a sigh. She already felt something of the pang with which these cherished cups would be put, with their owner, into another’s possession. In imagination she had sometimes seen them arranged on an humble sideboard in a little house, with which she herself, Katie, had the closest connection. But that was the merest dream, and not to be considered for a moment when the interest of one and the happiness of the other were concerned.
“Frank! who is Frank?” said Lucy; “you never told me of him before.”
“Oh, Frank is my cousin. There never was any occasion,” said Katie, with a slightly querulous tone, which Lucy did not understand. She looked with a little wonder at her friend, then set down her perturbation to the score of Mrs. Stone, who was now very near. The girls withdrew from each other to make room, leaving the narrow path clear between. Mrs. Stone answered this courtesy by stepping forward in front of the gentleman with a gracious smile upon her face.
“Where are you going?” she said. “I think, my dear children, it is going to rain. You must soon turn back; and the common is very wet. After you have got back and changed your boots, come to my room to tea.” And then she passed on with little amical nods and smiles. The gentleman was not introduced to them, but he took off his hat as he followed behind Mrs. Stone, a courtesy which is always agreeable to girls who have only lately ceased to be little girls, and come within the range of dignified salutations. Even Lucy’s tranquil soul owned a faint flutter of pleasure. It was a distinct honor too to be asked to Mrs. Stone’s room to tea, and to know that they were to be introduced into the society of the “gentleman” added a little additional excitement. They walked only a very little way further, mindful at once of the advice and the invitation.
“I wonder if any of the others will be there,” said Katie. She was somewhat elated, although she was suspicious, and in a state of half resistance to Mrs. Stone and the rival Frank, whose rivalry the little schemer felt by instinct. As for Lucy, the object of all this plotting, she suspected nothing. She even felt a little guilty in the pleasure to which she looked forward. To be asked to Mrs. Stone’s room to tea on Sunday evening was a distinction of which all the girls were proud. It was like an invitation from the queen, a command which was not to be disregarded; but yet she had a little uneasiness in her mind, thinking of her little brother, who would be disappointed. Even for Mrs. Stone, the sovereign of this small world, she did not like to break faith with little Jock.