“My word!” said Mrs. Cupp, “you are in luck, Jane, being as you’d rather be a lady’s maid than live private in Chichester. You needn’t go out to service, you know. Your uncle’s always ready to provide for you.”
“I know he is,” answered Jane, a little nervous lest obstacles might be put in the way of her achieving her long-cherished ambition. “And it’s kind of him, and I’m sure I’m grateful. But—though I wouldn’t hurt his feelings by mentioning it—it is more independent to be earning your own living, and there’s more life, you see, in waiting on a titled lady and dressing her for drawing-rooms and parties and races and things, and travelling about with her to the grand places she lives in and visits. Why, mother, I’ve heard tell that the society in the servants’ halls is almost like high life. Butlers and footmen and maids to high people has seen so much of the world and get such manners. Do you remember how quiet and elegant Susan Hill was that was maid to Lady Cosbourne? And she’d been to Greece and to India. If Miss Fox-Seton likes travel and his lordship likes it, I may be taken to all sorts of wonderful places. Just think!”
She gave Mrs. Cupp a little clutch in her excitement. She had always lived in the basement kitchen of a house in Mortimer Street and had never had reason to hope she might leave it. And now!
“You’re right, Jane!” her mother said, shaking her head. “There’s a great deal in it, particular when you’re young. There’s a great deal in it.”
When the engagement of the Marquis of Walderhurst had been announced, to the consternation of many, Lady Maria had been in her element. She was really fine at times in her attitude towards the indiscreetly or tactlessly inquiring. Her management of Lady Malfry in particular had been a delightful thing. On hearing of her niece’s engagement, Lady Malfry had naturally awakened to a proper and well-behaved if belated interest in her. She did not fling herself upon her breast after the manner of worldly aunts in ancient comedies in which Cinderella attains fortune. She wrote a letter of congratulation, after which she called at South Audley Street, and with not too great obviousness placed herself and her house at the disposal of such female relatives as required protection during the period of their preparation for becoming marchionesses. She herself could not have explained exactly how it was that, without being put through any particular process, she understood, before her call was half over, that Emily’s intention was to remain with Lady Maria Bayne and that Lady Maria’s intention was to keep her. The scene between the three was far too subtle to be of the least use upon the stage, but it was a good scene, nevertheless. Its expression was chiefly, perhaps, a matter of inclusion and exclusion, and may also have been largely telepathic; but after it was over, Lady Maria chuckled several times softly to herself, like an elderly bird of much humour, and Lady Malfry went home feeling exceedingly cross.
She was in so perturbed a humour that she dropped her eyelids and looked rather coldly down the bridge of her nose when her stupidly cheery little elderly husband said to her,—
“Well, Geraldine?”
“I beg pardon,” she replied. “I don’t quite understand.”
“Of course you do. How about Emily Fox-Seton?”
“She seems very well, and of course she is well satisfied. It would not be possible for her to be otherwise. Lady Maria Bayne has taken her up.”
“She is Walderhurst’s cousin. Well, well! It will be an immense position for the girl.”
“Immense,” granted Lady Malfry, with a little flush. A certain tone in her voice conveyed that discussion was terminated. Sir George knew that her niece was not coming to them and that the immense position would include themselves but slightly.
Emily was established temporarily at South Audley Street with Jane Cupp as her maid. She was to be married from Lady Maria’s lean old arms, so to speak. Her ladyship derived her usual epicurean enjoyment from the whole thing,—from too obviously thwarted mothers and daughters; from Walderhurst, who received congratulations with a civilly inexpressive countenance which usually baffled the observer; from Emily, who was overwhelmed by her emotions, and who was of a candour in action such as might have appealed to any heart not adapted by the flintiness of its nature to the macadamising of roads.
If she had not been of the most unpretentious nice breeding and unaffected taste, Emily might have been ingenuously funny in her process of transformation.
“I keep forgetting that I can afford things,” she said to Lady Maria. “Yesterday I walked such a long way to match a piece of silk, and when I was tired I got into a penny bus. I did not remember until it was too late that I ought to have called a hansom. Do you think,” a shade anxiously, “that Lord Walderhurst would mind?”
“Just for the present, perhaps, it would be as well that I should see that you shop in the carriage,” her ladyship answered with a small grin. “When you are a marchioness you may make penny buses a feature of the distinguished insouciance of your character if you like. I shouldn’t myself, because they jolt and stop to pick up people, but you can, with originality and distinction, if it amuses you.”
“It doesn’t,” said Emily. “I hate them. I have longed to be able to take hansoms. Oh! how I have longed—when I was tired.”
The legacy left her by old Mrs. Maytham had been realised and deposited as a solid sum in a bank. Since she need no longer hoard the income of twenty pounds a year, it was safe to draw upon her capital for her present needs. The fact made her feel comfortable. She could make her preparations for the change in her life with a decent independence. She would have been definitely unhappy if she had been obliged to accept favours at this juncture. She felt as if she could scarcely have borne it. It seemed as if everything conspired to make her comfortable as well as blissfully happy in these days.
Lord Walderhurst found an interest in watching her and her methods. He was a man who, in certain respects, knew himself very well and had few illusions respecting his own character. He had always been rather given to matter-of-fact analysis of his own emotions; and at Mallowe he had once or twice asked himself if it was not disagreeably possible that the first moderate glow of his St. Martin’s summer might die away and leave him feeling slightly fatigued and embarrassed by the new aspect of his previously regular and entirely self-absorbed existence. You might think that you would like to marry a woman and then you might realise that there were objections—that even the woman herself, with all her desirable qualities, might be an objection in the end, that any woman might be an objection; in fact, that it required an effort to reconcile oneself to the fact of a woman’s being continually about. Of course the arriving at such a conclusion, after one had committed oneself, would be annoying. Walderhurst had, in fact, only reflected upon this possible aspect of affairs before he had driven over the heath to pick Emily up. Afterwards he had, in some remote portion of his mentality, vaguely awaited developments.
When he saw Emily day by day at South Audley Street, he found he continued to like her. He was not clever enough to analyse her; he could only watch her, and he always looked on at her with curiosity and a novel sensation rather like pleasure. She wakened up at sight of him, when he called, in a way that was attractive even to an unimaginative man. Her eyes seemed to warm, and she often looked flushed and softly appealing. He began to note vaguely that her dresses were better, and oftener changed, than they had been at Mallowe. A more observant man might have been touched by the suggestion that she was unfolding petal by petal like a flower, and that each carefully chosen costume was a new petal. He did not in the least suspect the reverent eagerness of her care of herself as an object hoping to render itself worthy of his qualities and tastes.
His qualities and tastes were of no exalted importance in themselves, but they
