“THAT is just what I was thinking,” Lady Randolph said, “we can do two things, Lucy, two benefits at once. I know just the place for little Jock! since he wants to go to school—with a poor lady whom you will like to help—and,” she added, with a little softening of compassion, “where you could go to see him often; and he could come—” this addition was less cordial. Lady Randolph was a woman too easily led away by her feelings. She thought of her committee, and restrained herself. “Katie Russell must have told you about her mother. She has taken a house at Hampstead, or one of those places, and is trying to set up a little school. We are all on the outlook for Indian children, or, indeed, pupils of any kind. Jock will be quite happy there. She will take an interest in him as your brother, I have got her address somewhere. Shall we go and look her up to-day?”
Lucy’s eyes, before she replied, traveled anxiously to Jock’s face to read that little chart of varying sentiment, and take her guidance from it. But Jock’s face said nothing. He could not any longer lie on the hearth-rug, but he was doubled up in a corner by the fire, reading, as usual, one of the books with which Lady Randolph had thought it proper to supply him—a proper little story about little boys, supposed to be adapted to the caliber of eight years old. Perhaps it was more fit for him than the “History of the Plague,” but he did not like it so well.
“I think that would be very nice, Lady Randolph,” said Lucy, doubtfully.
“Well, my dear, we can but go and see. Jock is too young to judge for himself; but he can come, too, and tell you how he likes it. Mrs. Russell is very kind, I believe. She is, also, rather feeble, and does not know quite so well what she would be at as one could wish. She is always changing her plans. It may help to fix her if we take her a pupil. It is a great blessing,” Lady Randolph said, with a sigh, “when people know their own mind—especially poor people who have to be helped by their friends.”
“I wonder,” said Lucy, “if it is more difficult to be poor than to be rich.”
“Oh, there can be little doubt about that—for women, at least. I am not in the least sorry for the butchers and bakers—they have their trade—or for our house-maids, which is the same thing; but you and I, Lucy. If anything were to happen, if we were to lose all our money, what should we do?”
“I should not be afraid,” said Lucy, quietly, “for you know I was born poor, but to have a great deal of money, and not know how to employ it—that was always what papa said. He gave me a great many directions; but I don’t know if I understood them, and sometimes I do not feel sure whether he understood. Life is different here and at the Terrace, Lady Randolph.”
“Very different, my dear; but you need not bewilder your poor little head just yet. You will be older, you will have more experience before you have any occasion to trouble yourself about the employment of your money. I have no doubt all the investments are excellent—your father had a good business head.”
“It was not about investments I was thinking,” Lucy said. “I have no power over them.”
“Nor over anything else, fortunately, at your present age,” Lady Randolph said, with a smile. “We may all be very thankful for that; for I fear, unless you are very unlike other girls, that you would throw a good deal of it away.” Lucy did not smile, or take any notice of this pleasantry. Her next remark was very serious. “Don’t you think,” she said, “that it is very wrong for me to be so rich, when others are so poor?”
“A little Radical,” cried Lady Randolph, with a laugh. “Why, Lucy, I never thought a proper little woman like you would entertain such revolutionary sentiments.”
“You see,” said Lucy, very gravely, “it is upon me the burden falls; every one feels most what is most hard upon themselves.”
Lady Randolph laughed again, but this time with a puzzled air.
“Hard upon you!” she said. “My dear, half the girls in England—and the men, too—would give their heads to have half so much reason to complain.”
“Men, perhaps, might understand better, Lady Randolph; but it is altogether very strange. Papa must have known a great deal better; but he did nothing himself. All that he wanted, so far as I can make out, was to make more and more money; and then left the use of it—the spending of it—to a girl that knows nothing. I never took much thought of this while he was living, but I feel very bewildered now.”
“Wait a little,” Lady Randolph said, “you will find it very easy after awhile; and, when you marry, your husband will give you a great deal of assistance. In England you can never be at a loss in spending the largest income; and the more you have, the more satisfactorily you can spend it, the better return you have for your money. It is among us poor people that money is most unsatisfactory. It never brings so much as it ought,” she said, with that air of playfulness which, on such subjects, is the usual disguise for the most serious feeling. Lucy looked up at her with a gravity that disdained all disguise.
“But you do not mean to say, Lady Randolph, that you are poor?”
This question brought the color to Lady Randolph’s face. “You are very downright, my dear,” she said, “but I will be honest, too. Yes, Lucy, I am poor. The allowance that is made for you is a great matter for me. Without that I should not have dreamed— My dear, you must not think I mean anything unkind—”
“Oh, no; you could not have cared for me even had I been nicer than I am,” said Lucy, “for you had never seen me. Then I am rather glad it is so, Lady Randolph; but you should not give me so many things.”
Lady Randolph laughed, but the moisture came into her eyes. “Lucy, I begin to think you are a darling,” she said.
“Do you?” cried Lucy, with a warm flush which gave her face a certain beauty for a moment. “But I am afraid not,” she said, shaking her head. “Nobody ever said that. I am glad, very glad that you think you will not mind having me; and it is very, very kind of you to do so much for me. But I should be quite as happy if you liked me, and did not buy so many things for me. Is it vulgar to say it? I am almost afraid it is. I never had anything half—not a tenth part so nice at the Terrace as you give me here.”
“You were a little school-girl then, and now you are a young lady—a great heiress, and must begin to live as such people do.”
Lucy shook her head again. “I am only me,” she said, with a smile, “all the same.”
“Not quite the same; but to leave these perplexing subjects, what is to be done about your own studies, Lucy?”
“Must I have studies?” she asked, with a tone of melancholy; then added, submissively, “Whatever you think best, Lady Randolph.”
“My dear, you are far too good. I should like you to have a little will of your own.”
“Oh, yes, I have a will of my own. If you please, I do not wish to have any more lessons. I will read books; but they all said I never would play very well, and I can not draw at all. I can speak French a little, but it is very bad, and I have done about twenty German exercises,” Lucy said, with a shudder.
“Poor child! but I fear you must go on with these dreadful experiences. Perhaps a good German governess for a year—”
Lucy shuddered again. She thought of the Fraulein at the White House, with an inward prayer for deliverance. The Fraulein knew everything, all her own business, and other people’s special branches, even better than her own. Her very spectacles shone with knowledge.
“They can not be all like each other,” Lucy said, “and I will do whatever you like, Lady Randolph.”
There was never a girl so docile and obedient. Lady Randolph almost regretted the absence of all struggle, till her eyes fell upon little Jock in the corner, holding his book somewhat languidly. Jock did not care for this correct literature; the last thing in the world that he had any acquaintance with was the doings of children at school.
“Do you like your story-book, Jock?”
“No,” said Jock, concisely.
He let it drop from his hand; he did not even feel very deeply desirous of knowing what was the end.
“I am sorry for that; I hunted it up for you out of my old nursery. Nobody had touched the things for thirty years.”
“It is very pretty—outside,” Jock said, eying the gilding, “but I don’t care much about little boys,” he added, with dignity, “I don’t know what it means.”
“That is because you are so little, my dear.”
“Oh, no, because I—don’t understand it. I have read much nicer books; the ‘History of the Plague,’ that was what I liked best, better than ‘Robinson Crusoe,’ as good as the ‘Pilgrim’s Progress.’”
“How old-fashioned the child is!” Lady Randolph said. “Will you come with us to see the school where Lucy wishes you to go?”
“Lucy did not wish it,” said the boy, “it was me, I told her. I will go, because I suppose it is the right thing. You can’t grow up to be a giant, or even a common man, without going to school. I do not like it at all, but it is the right thing to do.”
“You are a wise little man,” said Lady Randolph, “and do you think you may perhaps grow up a giant, Jock?”
“Not in tallness,” Jock said.
He looked at her with something like contempt, and she was cowed in spite of herself. His very reticence impressed her, for he relapsed into silence, and gave no further explanation, not caring even to describe in what, if not in tallness, he expected to be a giant; and the two sat and looked at each other for a minute in silence. They looked very unlikely antagonists, but it was not the least important of the two who was most nervous. Lady Randolph felt as if it was she who was the inexperienced, the uninstructed one. She did not like to venture out of her depth again.
“Will you go and get your hat and come with us? You must be very kind to Lucy, and not worry her. You know she does not want you to leave her; but also, you know, little Jock—”
Lady Randolph looked at him with a little alarm, feeling that his big eyes saw through and through her, and not knowing what weird insight might be in them, or what strange thing he might say.
But Jock’s answer was to get up, and put away his book.
“I am going,” he said.
It was the old lady who was afraid of him. She sat and watched him, and was glad when he was gone. Lucy was comprehensible and manageable, but the child dismayed and troubled her. Poor little forlorn boy! There was no home for him anywhere, no one to care for him but Lucy, who no doubt would form, as people say, “other ties.”
It was a bright morning in March, the skies full of the beauty of spring, the air fresh with showers, the sun shining; the buds were beginning to swell on the trees, and primroses coming out in the suburban gardens. Jock looked somewhat forlorn, all by himself, in the front seat of the carriage, buttoned closely into his great-coat, and looking smaller than ever as his delicate little face looked out from the thick collar; opposite to Lady Randolph’s portly person, in her great furred mantle, he looked like a little waxen image; and he sat very stiffly, trying to draw up his thin little legs beneath him, but now and then receiving a warning glance from Lucy, who was extremely nervous about his manners. They were both amused, however, by the long drive across London, and up the hill toward the northern suburbs. Lady Randolph did not know the way. She took almost as much interest as they did in the animated streets.
“Jock, little Jock, there is the heath. Do you see the big furze bushes?” she said. “How strange to see a place so wild, yet so near town!”
“It is not so good as our common,” Jock said. Yet school took a more smiling aspect after he had got a glimpse of the broken ground and wild vegetation.
They drew up at last after a troublesome search (for Lady Randolph’s coachman would not have betrayed any knowledge of that out-of-the-way locality for worlds, it was as much as his reputation was worth) before a little new house with a bay-window and a small square patch of green called a garden. Through the bay-window there was a dim appearance visible of some one seated at a table writing; but when the carriage stopped there was evidently a great commotion in the house, and the dim figure disappeared. Some one hastily opening an upper window, a sound of bells rung, and of noisy footsteps running up and down the stairs, were all audible to the little party seated in the carriage, who were amused by all this pantomime.
“She will have a headache,” Lady Randolph said, “as soon as she sees us.”
Lucy, for her part, felt that to sit at her ease, and witness the flutter in the house, of excitement and expectation, was scarcely generous. She was relieved when the door opened. It wounded her to see the disdain of the footman, the scorn with which he contemplated the house, and the maid who came to the door; all this penetrated her mind with a curious sense of familiarity. Mrs. Ford, too, would have been greatly excited had a pair of prancing horses drawn up before her door, and a great lady in furs and velvet been seen about to enter; and Lucy knew that she herself would have rushed out of the parlor, had she been sitting there, and would have been apt to fly to an upstairs window and peep out upon the unwonted visitor. She felt all this in the person of the others, to whom she was coming in the capacity of a great lady. She had never felt so humble or so insignificant as when she stepped out of the carriage, following Lady Randolph. Jock grasped at her hand as he jumped down. He clung to it with both his without saying a word. He did not feel at all sure that he was not now, this very moment, to be consigned to separation and banishment, and the new life of school for which he had offered himself as a victim. He contemplated that approaching fate with courage, with wide-open, unwinking eyes, but all the same at the descent of Avernus, at the mouth of the pit, so to speak, clung to his only protector, his sole comforter. She stooped down and kissed him hurriedly as they crossed the little green.
“You shan’t go if you do not like it, Jock.”
“But I am going,” said the child, with courage that was heroic; though he clung to her hand as if he never would let it go, all the same.
Mrs. Russell was a pretty, faded woman, with hair like Katie’s, and the same blue eyes; but the mirth was out of them, and puckers of anxiety had come instead. She had put up her handkerchief to her forehead when Lucy entered the room. She had a headache, as Lady Randolph divined. There was a little flush of excitement upon her cheeks. When Lucy was introduced to her she gave the girl a wistful look first, then made an anxious inspection of her, returning again and again, Lucy felt, to her face. Was not there in that look the inevitable contrast which it was so impossible to help making?
“Is this,” she said, “the young lady Katie has written to me about?” She added, faltering, after a moment, “the dear young friend who has been so kind to her?” and again she turned a questioning, wistful look upon Lucy, whose fate was so different.
“Indeed,” said Lucy, “I could not be kind, I wish I could; but I like Katie very dearly, Mrs. Russell.”
“Ah, my dear, if I may call you so,” cried the poor woman with the headache, “that is the very sweetest thing you could say,” but all the same her eyes kept questioning. What had the heiress come for? What had Lady Randolph come for? When visitors like these enter a very poor house, should not some pearls and diamonds fall from their lips, some little wells of comforting wealth spring up beneath their feet?
“How does the school go on?” said Lady Randolph; “that is the cause of our visit, really. I heard of a little boy—but how does it go on? Did you settle about those Indian children?”
“Ah,” said Mrs. Russell, “there is nothing so hard to get as Indian children; they are the prizes; if one can but get a good connection in that way, one’s fortune is made; but there are so many that want them. It seems to me that there is nothing in all the world but a crowd of poor ladies fighting for pupils. It will be strange to you, Miss Trevor, to hear any one talk like that,” she added.
She could not help, it would seem, this reference to Lucy; a girl who was made of money, who could support dozens of families and never feel it. It was not that the poor lady wanted her money, but she could not help feeling a wistful wonder about her, a young creature whose fate was so different! When one is very poor it is so natural to admire wealth, and so curious to see it, and watch its happy owners, if only to note in what way they differ. Lucy did not differ in any way, at which poor Mrs. Russell admired and wondered all the more.
“But you have some pupils?” Lady Randolph said.
“Yes, three in the house, and six who are day-scholars. Bertie tells me it is not such a bad beginning. I tried for little boys, because there are so few, in comparison, that take little boys; and Bertie teaches them Latin.”
“I thought your son was to get a situation.”
“Yes, indeed, but some one else got it instead; one can hardly grudge it, when one knows how many poor young fellows there are with nothing. He is writing,” Mrs. Russell said, with some pride.
“Writing!” Lady Randolph echoed with dismay, mingled with contempt. Their points of view were very different. To the mother, fortune seemed to be hovering, doubtful, yet very possible, over the feather of her boy’s pen; to the woman of the world, a little clerkship in an office would have been much more satisfactory. “You should not encourage him in that; I fear it is not much better than idleness,” Lady Randolph said, shaking her head.
“Idleness! look at Mr. Trollope, and all those gentlemen; it is a fine profession! a noble profession!” said the poor lady fervently; but she added, with a sigh, “if he could only get an opening, that is the hard thing. If he only knew somebody! Bertie takes the Latin, and Mary the English, and I superintend, and give the music lessons.”
“And you are getting on?”
The poor woman looked the rich woman (as she thought) in the face, with eyes that filled with tears. She could not answer in words before the strangers. She mutely and faintly shook her head, with a pathetic attempt at a smile.
Both Lucy and little Jock saw the silent communication, and divined it, perhaps, better than the elder lady. As for Lucy, her heart ached with sympathy, and a flood of sudden resolutions, intentions, took possession of her; but what could she do? She had to keep silent, holding Jock’s little hand fast, who stood by her knee.
“I thought you might perhaps have an opening for the little boy I heard of. He is a delicate child, and peculiar; he would require a great deal of special care. If you think you have time—”
“Oh,” said Mrs. Russell, the pink flush deepening on her cheeks, “plenty of time! And I think I may say for myself that I am very good with delicate children. I take an interest in them. I—you would like to see Bertie, perhaps, about the Latin?” Mrs. Russell rang her bell hastily. She was feverishly anxious to conclude the bargain without loss of time. “Will you tell Mr. Bertie I want him?” she said, going to the door, to anticipate the maid, who was not too anxious to reply. “I am here, mother,” they heard in a youthful bass—at no great distance—evidently the house was all in a stir of expectation. Mrs. Russell came back with a little nervous laugh. “Bertie will be here directly,” she said. “I would ask you to step into the school-room, and see them; but the truth is they are all out for a walk. Mary has taken them to the heath. It is so good for them—and it was such a beautiful day—and my headache was particularly bad. When my headache is very bad, the voices of the children drive me wild.” Poor soul! as soon as she had said this, she perceived that it was a thing inexpedient to say. But by this time the door had opened again, and introduced a new figure. He came in with his hands in his pockets, after the manner of young men. He, too, was like Katie; but his face was cloudy, not so open as hers, and his features handsomer. He stood hesitating, his eyes going from one to another; to Lucy first—was not that natural? Then he straightened himself out, and took a hand from one of his pockets, and presented it to Lady Randolph. He was eager too, but with a suppressed bravado, as if anxious to show that he did not mean it, and was himself personally much at his ease.
“So this is Bertie!” said Lady Randolph. “What a long time it must be since I have seen him! Why, you are a man now; and what a comfort it must be to your mother to have you with her!”
Mrs. Russell clasped her thin hands. “Yes, it is a comfort!” she said. “What should I do if Bertie were away?”
Lucy was in the position of a spectator while all this was going on, and though she was not a great observer, something jarred in this little scene, she could not tell what. She surprised a glance from the mother to the son, which did not chime in with her words, and Bertie himself did not respond with enthusiasm. “I don’t know if I am a comfort,” he said; “but here I am anyhow, and very glad to see an old friend.”
“I hear you are coming out as a literary character, Bertie?”
“I am trying to write a little; it seems the best trade nowadays. I believe there are heaps of money to be made by it,” he said, with that air of careless grandeur which is so delightful to the unsophisticated imagination, “and not much trouble. The only thing is to get one’s hand in.”
“That is what I was telling Lady Randolph,” said his mother, her thin hands clasping and unclasping; “to get an opening—that is all you want.”
“But you require to be very clever, Bertie,” said Lady Randolph, gravely disapproving, “to make anything by writing. I have heard people say in society—”
“No,” said the young man, “not at all, it is only a knack; there is nothing that costs so little trouble. You want training for every other profession, but anybody can write. I think I know what I am about.”
Then there was a momentary silence, Mrs. Russell looked at her son with wistful admiration, not unmingled with a furtive and painful doubt, while Lady Randolph contemplated him with a severity which was resentful, as if poor Bertie’s pretensions did her, or any one else, any harm. This pause, which was somewhat embarrassing, was broken by Jock, whose small voice, suddenly uplifted, startled them all.
“Is it stories he writes, Lucy? I would like to learn to write stories. I think I will stay here,” he said. But Jock was confused by the attention attracted by his utterance, and the faces of all those grown-up people turned toward him. “I can’t write at all yet,” he said, growing very red, planting himself firmly against Lucy, and facing the company, half apologetic, half defiant. Between pot-hooks and novels there is a difference; but why should not the one branch of skill be learned as well as the other? Jock knew no reason why.