It was all very English, very spick and span, and apparently very well to do. That the youth of the village was steadily leaving it for the Colonies, that the constant marrying in and in which had gone on for generations had produced an ugly crop of mental deficiency, and physical deformity among the inhabitants--that the standard of morals was too low, and the standard of drink too high--were matters well known to the Rector and the Doctor. But there were no insanitary cottages, and no obvious scandals of any sort. The Maumsey estate had always been well managed; there were a good many small gentlefolk who lived in the Georgian houses, and owing to the compet.i.tion of the railways, agricultural wages were rather better than elsewhere.
About a mile from the eastern end of the village was the small modernised manor-house of Bridge End, which belonged to Mark Winnington, and where his sister Alice, Mrs. Matheson, kept him company for the greater part of the year. The gates leading to Maumsey lay a little west of the village, while on the hill to the north rose, conspicuous against its background of wood, the famous old house of Monk Lawrence. It looked down upon Maumsey on the one hand and Bridge End on the other. It was generally believed that the owner of it, Sir Wilfrid Lang, had exhausted his resources in restoring it, and that it was the pressure of debt rather than his wife"s health which had led to its being shut up so long.
The dwellers in the village regarded it as the jewel in their landscape, their common heritage and pride. Lady Tonbridge, whose little drawing-room and garden to the back looked out on the hill and the old house, was specially envied because she possessed so good a view of it. She herself inhabited one of the very smallest of the Georgian houses, in the main street of Maumsey. She paid a rent of no more than 40 a year for it, and Maumsey people who liked her, felt affectionately concerned that a duke"s grand-daughter should be reduced to a rent and quarters so insignificant.
Lady Tonbridge however was not at all concerned for the smallness of her house. She regarded it as the outward and visible sign of the most creditable action of her life--the action which would--or should--bring her most marks when the recording angel came to make up her account.
Every time she surveyed its modest proportions the spirit of freedom danced within her, and she envied none of the n.o.ble halls in which she had formerly lived, and to some of which she still paid occasional Visits.
At tea-time, on the day following Winnington"s first interview with his ward, Madeleine Tonbridge came into her little drawing-room, in her outdoor things, and carrying a bundle of books under the arm.
As far as such words could ever apply to her she was tired and dusty.
But her little figure was so alert and trim, her grey linen dress and its appointments so dainty, and the apple-red in her small cheeks so bright, that one might have conceived her as just fresh from a maid"s hands, and stepping out to amuse herself, instead of as just returning from a tedious afternoon"s work, by which she had earned the large sum of five shillings. A woman of forty-five, she looked her age, and she had never possessed any positive beauty, unless it were the beauty of delicate and harmonious proportion. Yet she had been pestered with suitors as a girl, and unfortunately had married the least desirable of them all. And now in middle life, no one had more devoted men-friends; and that without exciting a breath of scandal, even in a situation where one might have thought it inevitable.
She looked round her as she entered.
"Nora!--where are you?"
A girl, apparently about seventeen, put her head in through the French window that opened to the garden.
"Ready for tea, Mummy?"
"Rather!"--said Lady Tonbridge, with energy, as she put a match to the little spirit kettle on the tea-table where everything stood ready.
"Come in, darling."
And throwing off her hat and jacket, she sank into a comfortable arm-chair with a sigh of fatigue. Her daughter quietly loosened her mother"s walking-shoes and took them away. Then they kissed each other, and Nora went to look after the tea. She was a slim, pale-faced school-girl, with yellow-brown eyes, and yellow-brown hair, not as yet very attractive in looks, but her mother was convinced that it was only the plainness of the cygnet, and that the swan was only a few years off. Nora, who at seventeen had no illusions, was grateful to her mother for the belief but did not share it in the least.
"I"m sure you gave that girl half an hour over time," she said reprovingly, as she handed Lady Tonbridge her cup of tea--"I can"t think why you do it." She referred to the solicitor"s daughter whom Lady Tonbridge had been that afternoon instructing in the uses of the French participle.
"Nor can I. A kind of ridiculous _esprit de metier_ I suppose. I undertook to teach her French, and when after all these weeks she don"t seem to know a thing more than when she began, I feel as if I were picking her dear papa"s pockets."
"Which is absurd," said Nora, b.u.t.tering her mother"s toast, "and I can"t let you do it. Half a crown an hour is silly enough already, and for you to throw in half an hour extra for nothing, can"t be stood."
"I wish I could get it up to four hours a day," sighed the mother, munching happily at her toast, while she held out her small stockinged feet to the fire which Nora had just lit. "Just think. Ten shillings a day--six days a week--ten months in the year. Why it would pay the rent, we could have another servant, and I could give you twenty pounds a year more for your clothes."
"Much obliged--but I prefer a live Mummy--and no clothes--to a dead one. More tea?"
"Thanks. No chance, of course. Where could one find four persons a day, in Maumsey, or near Maumsey, who want to learn French? The notion"s absurd. I shouldn"t get the lessons I do, if it weren"t for the "Honourable.""
"Sn.o.bs!"
"Not at all! Not a single family out of the people I go to deserve to be called sn.o.bs. It"s the natural dramatic instinct in us all. You don"t expect an "Honourable" to be giving French lessons at half a crown an hour, and when she does, you say--"Hullo! Some screw loose, somewhere!"--and you at once feel a new interest in the French tongue, and ask her to come along. I don"t mind it a bit. I sit and spin yarns about Drawing-rooms and Court b.a.l.l.s, and it all helps.--When did you get home?"
For Nora attended a High School in a neighbouring town, some five miles away, journeying there and back by train.
"Half-past four. I met Mr. Winnington in his car, and he said he"d be here about six."
"Good. I"m dying to talk to him. I have written to the Abbey to say we will call to-morrow. Of course, I ought to be her nursing mother in these parts"--said Lady Tonbridge reflectively--"I knew Sir Robert in frocks, and we were always pals. But my dear, it was I who hatched the c.o.c.katrice!"
Nora nodded gravely.
"It was I," pursued Lady Tonbridge, penitentially,--"who saddled him with that woman--and I know he never forgave me. He as good as told me so when we last met--for those few hours--at Basle. But how could I tell? How could anybody tell--she would turn out such a creature? I only knew that she had taken all kinds of honours. I thought I was sending him a treasure."
"All the same you did it, Mummy. And it won"t do to give yourself airs now! That"s what Mr. Winnington says. You"ve got to help him out."
"I say, don"t talk secrets!" said a voice just outside the room. "For I can"t help hearing "em. May I come in?"
And, pushing the half-open door, Mark Winnington stood smiling on the threshold.
"I apologise. But your little maid let me in--and then vanished somewhere, like greased lightning--after a dog."
"Oh, come in," said Lady Tonbridge, with resignation, extending at the same time a hand of welcome--"the little maid, as you call her, only came from your workhouse yesterday, and I haven"t yet discovered a grain of sense in her. But she gets plenty of exercise. If she isn"t chasing dogs, it"s cats."
"Don"t you attack my schools," said Winnington seating himself at the tea-table. "They"re A1, and you"re very lucky to get one of my girls."
Madeleine Tonbridge replied tartly, that if he was a poor-law guardian, and responsible for a barrack school it was no cause for boasting. She had not long parted with another of his girls, who had tried on her blouses, and gone out in her boots. She thought of offering the new girl a free and open choice of her wardrobe to begin with, so as to avoid unpleasantness.
"We all know that every mistress has the maid she deserves," said Winnington, deep in gingerbread cake. "I leave it there--"
"Yes, jolly well do!" cried Nora, who had come to sit on a stool in front of her mother and Winnington, her eager eyes glancing from one to the other--"Don"t start Mummy on servants, Mr. Winnington. If you do, I shall go to bed. There"s only one thing worth talking about--and that"s--"
"Maumsey!" he said, laughing at her.
"Have you accomplished anything?" asked Lady Tonbridge. "Don"t tell me you"ve dislodged the Fury?"
Winnington shook his head.
"_J"y suis--j"y reste_!"
"I thought so. There is no civilised way by which men can eject a woman. Tell me all about it."
Winnington, however, instead of expatiating on the Maumsey household, turned the conversation to something else--especially to Nora"s first attempts at golf, in which he had been her teacher. Nora, whose reasonableness was abnormal, very soon took the hint, and after five minutes" "chaff" with Winnington, to whom she was devoted, she took up her work and went back to the garden.
"n.o.body ever snubs me so efficiently as Nora," said Madeleine Tonbridge, with resignation, "though you come a good second. Discreet I shall never be. Don"t tell me anything if you don"t want to."
"But of course I want to! And there is n.o.body in the world so absolutely bound to help me as you."
"I knew you"d say that. Don"t pile it on. Give me the kitten--and describe your proceedings."
Winnington handed her the grey Persian kitten reposing on a distant chair, and Lady Tonbridge, who always found the process conducive to clear thinking, stroked and combed the creature"s beautiful fur, while the man talked,--with entire freedom now that they were _tete-a-tete._
She was his good friend indeed, and she had also been the good friend of Sir Robert Blanchflower. It was natural that to her he should lay his perplexities bare.
But after she had heard his story and given her best mind to his position, she could not refrain from expressing the wonder she had felt from the beginning that he should ever have accepted it at all.
"What on earth made you do it? Bobby Blanchflower had no more real claim on you than this kitten!"