VIII.
MISS MOUSE
They were poor, not with the desperate poverty that has to look on both sides of a penny, but with the decent bearable poverty that must look at a shilling with attention, and with respect at half-a-crown. There was money for the necessities of life, the mother said, but no money to waste. This was what she always tried to say when Maisie came in with rainbow representations of the glories of local “sales” piteous pictures of beautiful things going almost for nothing—things not absolutely needed, but which would “come in useful.” Maisie’s dress was never allowed those touches of cheap finery which would have made it characteristic of her. Her clothes were good, and she had to patch and mend and contrive so much that sometimes it seemed to her as though all her life was going by in the effort to achieve, by a distasteful process, a result which she abhorred. For her artistic sense was too weak to show her how the bright, soft freshness of her tints gained by contrast with the dull greys and browns and drabs that were her mother’s choice—good wearing colours, from which the pink and white of her face rose triumphantly, like a beautiful flower out of a rough calyx.
The house was like Maisie, in that it never seemed to have anything new—none of those bright, picturesque cushions and screens and Japaneseries which she adored through the plate-glass windows of the big local draper. The curtains were of old damask, faded but rich; the furniture was mahogany, old and solid; the carpets were Turkey and Aubusson—patched and darned this last, but still beautiful. Maisie knew all about old oak—she had read her Home Hints and her Gentlewoman’s Guide—but she had no idea that mahogany could be fashionable. None of the photographs of the drawing-rooms of celebrities in her favourite papers were anything like the little sitting-room where her mother sat knitting by the hearth, surrounded by the relics of a house that had been handsome in the ’sixties, when it was her girlhood’s home. Maisie hated it all: the chairs covered in Berlin-wool needlework, the dark, polished surfaces of the tables and bureaux, the tinkling lustres of Bohemian glass, the shining brass trivet on which the toast kept itself warm, the crude colours of the tea-service, the smell of eau-de-Cologne mingling with the faint scent of beeswax and cedar-wood. She would have liked to change the old water-colours in their rubbed gilt frames for dark-mounted autotypes. How should she know that those hideous pigs were Morlands, and that the cow picture was a David Cox. She would have liked Japanese blue transfers instead of the gold-and-white china—old Bristol, by the way, but Maisie knew nothing of Bristol. The regular, sober orderliness of the house chafed and fretted her; the recurrent duties, all dull; the few guests who came to tea. Decent poverty cannot give dinner parties or dances. She visited her school friends, and when she came home again it seemed to her sometimes as though the atmosphere of the place would choke her.
“I want to go out and earn my own living,” she said to her cousin Edward one Sunday afternoon when her mother was resting and he and she were roasting chestnuts on the bars of the dining-room fire. “I’m simply useless here.”
Edward was a second cousin. To him the little house was the ideal home, just as Maisie was—well, not, perhaps, the ideal girl, but the only girl in the world, which comes to much the same thing. But he never told her so: he dared not risk losing the cousin’s place and missing for ever the lover’s.
So, in his anxiety lest she should know how much he cared, he scolded her a good deal. But he took her to picture galleries and to matinées, and softened her life in a hundred ways that she never noticed. He was only “Poor old Edward,” and he knew it.
“How can you?” he said. “Why, what on earth would Aunt do without you? Here, have this one—it’s a beauty.”
“I ought to have been taught a trade, like other poor girls,” she went on, waving away the roasted chestnut. “Lots of the girls I was at school with are earning as much as a pound a week now—typewriting or painting birthday cards, and some of them are in the Post Office—and I do nothing but drudge away at home. It’s too bad.”
Edward would have given a decent sum at that moment to be inspired with exactly the right thing to say. As it was he looked at her helplessly.
“I don’t understand, I’m afraid,” said he.
“You never do,” she answered crossly. There was a silence in which she felt the growth of a need to justify herself—to herself as well as to him. “Why, don’t you see,” she urged, “it’s my plain duty to go out and earn something. Why, we’re as poor as ever we can be—I haven’t any pocket-money hardly—I can’t even buy presents for people. I have to make presents out of odds and ends of old things, instead of buying them, like other girls.”
“I think you make awfully pretty things,” he said; “much prettier than any one can buy.”
“You’re thinking of that handkerchief-case I gave Aunt Emma at Christmas. Why, you silly, it was only a bit of one of mother’s old dresses. I do wish you’d talk to mother about it. I might go out as companion or something.”
The word came before the thought, but the thought was brought by the word and the thought stayed.
That very evening Maisie began to lay siege to her mother’s desired consent.
She put her arguments very neatly, so neatly that it was hard for the mother to oppose them without being betrayed into an attitude that would seem grossly selfish.
She sat looking into the fire, thinking of all the little, unceasing sacrifices that had been her life ever since Maisie had been hers—even the giving up of that treasured silk, her wedding dress, last Christmas, because Maisie wanted something pretty to make Christmas presents out of. She remembered it all; and now this new great sacrifice was called for. She had given up to Maisie everything but her taste in dress, and now it seemed that she was desired to give up even Maisie herself. But the other sacrifices had been for Maisie’s good or for her pleasure. Would this one be for either?
She saw her little girl alone among strangers, snubbed, looked down upon, a sort of upper servant with none of a servant’s privileges; she nerved herself to what was always to her an almost unbearable effort. Her heart was beating and her hands trembling as she said: “My dear, it’s quite impossible; I couldn’t possibly allow it.”
“I must say I don’t see why,” said Maisie, with tears in her voice.
Her mother dropped the mass of fleecy white wool and the clinking knitting needles and grasped the arms of her chair intensely. Her eyes behind the spectacles clouded with tears. It seemed to her that her child should surely understand the agony it was to her mother to refuse her anything.
“I could earn money for you—it’s not myself I’m thinking about,” the girl went on; the half-lie came out quite without her conscious volition. “I wish you didn’t always think I do everything for selfish reasons.”
“I don’t, my dear,” said the mother feebly.
“I’m sure it’s my duty,” Maisie went on, with more tears than ever in her voice. “I’m eighteen, and I ought to be earning something, instead of being a burden to you.”
The mother looked hopelessly into the fire. She had always tried to explain things to Maisie; how was it that Maisie never understood?
“I’m sure,” said Maisie, echoing her mother’s thought, “I always try to tell you how I think about things, and you never seem to understand. Of course, I won’t go if you wish it, but I do think”
She left the room in tears, and the mother remained to torment herself with the eternal questions, What had she done wrong? Why was Maisie not contented? What could she do to please her? Would nothing please her but the things that were not for her good—smart clothes, change, novelty? How could she bear her life if Maisie was not pleased?
She went down to supper shivering with misery and apprehension. What a meal it would be with Maisie cold and aloof, polite and indifferent! But Maisie was cheerful, gay almost, and her mother felt a passion of gratitude to her daughter for not being sulky or unapproachable. Maisie, however, was only stepping back to jump the better.
The same scene, with intenser variations, was played about twice a week till the girl got her way, as she always did in the end, except in the matter of cheap finery. Taste in dress was as vital to the mother as her religion. Then, through the influence of an old governess of her mother’s, Maisie got her wish. She was to go as companion to an old lady, the mother of Lady Yalding, and she was to live at Yalding Towers. Here was splendour—here would be life, incident, opportunity! For her reading had sometimes strayed from Home Hints to the Family Herald, and she knew exactly what are the chances of romance to a humble companion in the family of a lady of title.
And now Maisie’s mother gave way to her, finally and completely, even on the question of dress. The old wardrobe was ransacked to find materials to fit her out with clothes for her new venture. It was a beautiful time for Maisie. New things, and old things made to look as good as new, or better. It was like having a trousseau. The mother lavished on her child every inch of the old lace, every one of the treasured trinkets—even the little old locket that had been the dead husband’s first love-gift.
And Maisie, in the flutter of her excitement and anticipation, was loving and tender and charming, and the mother had her reward.
Edward opposed a stolid and stony disapproval to all the new enthusiasm. He said little because he feared to say too much.
“Poor little Maisie!” he said. “You’ll soon find out that you didn’t know when you were well off.”
“Edward, I hate you,” said Maisie, and she thought she did.
But when all the beautiful new clothes were packed and her cab was at the door, some sense of what she was leaving did come to the girl, and she flung her arms round her mother in an embrace such as she had never given in her life.
“I don’t want to go,” she cried. “Mummy darling, I’ve been a little beast about it. I won’t go if you say you’d rather not. Shall I send the cab away? I will if you say so, my own dear old Mummy!”
Maisie’s mother was not a very wise woman, but she was not fool enough to trust this new softness.
“No, no, dearest,” she said; “go and try your own way. God bless you, my darling! You’ll miss the train if you stay. God bless you, my darling!”
And Maisie went away crying hard through the new veil with the black velvet spots on it; as for the mother—but she was elderly, and plain, and foolishly fond, and her emotions can have but little interest for the readers of romances.
And now Maisie, for the first time, knew the meaning of home. And before she had been at Yalding a week she had learned to analyse home and to give names to its constituents: love, interest, sympathy, liberty—these were some.
At Yalding Towers Maisie was nothing to any one. No one knew or cared one single little bit of a straw whether she was unhappy or no. Her time was filled, and overfilled, by the attentions exacted by an old, eccentric, and very disagreeable lady. When she put on, for the first evening, the least pretty of the pretty dresses she had brought with her, the old lady looked at her with a disapproval almost rising to repulsion, and said: “I expect you to wear black; and a linen collar and cuffs.”
So another black dress had to be ordered from home, and all the pretty, dainty things lay creasing themselves with disuse in the ample drawers and cupboards of her vast, dreary bedroom.
Her employer was exacting and irritable. When on the third day Maisie broke into tears under the constant flood of nagging, the old lady told her to go away and not to come back till she could control her temper.
“I’ll come back when you send for me, and not before, you hateful old thing!” said Maisie to herself.
And she sat down in her fireless bedroom and wrote a long letter to her mother, saying how happy she felt, and how kind every one was, and what a lovely and altogether desirable place was Yalding Towers. Who shall say whether pride or love, or both, dictated that letter?
When her employer did send for her, it was to tell her, very sharply, that one more such exhibition of sullenness would cost her her situation. So she had to learn to school herself. And she did it. But the learning was hard, very hard, and in the learning she grew thinner, and some of the pretty pink in her cheeks faded away.
Lady Yalding, when she swept in, in beautiful dream-dresses, always spoke to the companion quite kindly and nicely and pleasantly, but there were none of those invitations to come into the drawing-room after dinner which the Family Herald had led her to expect. Lady Yalding was always charming to every one, and Maisie tortured herself with the thought that it was only because she had no opportunity to explain herself that Lady Yalding failed to see how very much out of the common she was. She read Ruskin industriously, and once she left her own book of Browning selections that Edward had given her in the conservatory. She imagined Lady Yalding returning it to her with, “So, are you fond of poetry?” or, “It’s delightful to find that you are a lover of Browning!” But the book was brought back to her by a footman, and the old lady lectured her for leaving her rubbish littering about.
But towards Christmas a change came. Maisie had hoped—more intensely than she had ever in her life hoped for anything—for a few days’ grace, for a sight of her mother, and the mahogany, and the damask curtains, and—yes—of Edward. But the old lady, who really was exceptionally horrid, wondered how she could ask for a holiday when she had only been in her situation six weeks.
Then the old lady went off at half an hour’s notice to spend Christmas with her other daughter—Maisie would have suspected a “row” if Lady Yalding had been a shade less charming—and the girl was left. Thus it happened that Lord Yalding’s brother lounged into Lady Yalding’s room one day, and said: “Who’s the piteous black mouse you’ve tamed?”
“I beg your pardon, Jim?” said Lady Yalding.
“The crushed apple-blossom in a black frock—one meets her about the corridors. Gloomy sight. Chestnut hair. Princess-in-exile sort of look.”
“Oh, that! It’s mother’s companion.”
“Poor little devil!” said the Honourable James. “What does she do now the cat’s away? I beg your pardon—my mind was running on mice.”
“Do? I don’t know,” said Lady Yalding a little guiltily. “She’s a good, quiet little thing—literary tastes, reads Browning, and all that sort of rot. She’s all right.”
“Why don’t you give her a show? She’d take the shine out of some of the girls here if you had her dressed.”
“My dear Jim,” Lady Yalding said, “she’s all right as she is. What’s the good of turning the child’s head and giving her notions out of her proper station?”
“If I were that child I’d like to have a little bit of a fling just for once. The poor little rat looks starved, as though it hadn’t laughed for a year. Then it’s Christmas—peace and goodwill, and all that, don’t you know. If I were you I’d ask her down a bit”
Lady Yalding thought—a thing she rarely did.
“Well,” she said, “it is pretty slow for her, I suppose. I’ll send her home to her people.”
“On Christmas Eve? Fog and frost, and the trains all anyhow? Fanny, Fanny!”
“Oh, very well. We’ll have her down, and go the whole hog. Only don’t make a fool of the child, Jim; she’s a good little thing.”
And that was how the dream-dressed Lady Yalding came to sweep into the old lady’s sitting-room—it was as full of mahogany, by the way, as Maisie’s home in Lewisham—and spoke so kindly of Maisie’s loneliness, that the girl could have fallen down and worshipped at her Paris shoes.
When Maisie, in the figured lavender satin that had been her mother’s, swept across the great hall on the arm of the Honourable James, she felt that this indeed was life. Here was the great world with its infinite possibilities.
“How did you get on?” his sister-in-law asked him later.
“Oh, it’s quite a decent sort of little mouse,” he said. “Wants to make sure you see how cultivated it is, quotes poetry—what?—and talks about art. It’s a little touching and all that to see how busy it is putting all its poor little stock in the tiny shop-window.”
Maisie, alone in her room, was walking up and down, trailing the lavender satin, recalling with kindled eyes and red-rose cheeks every word, every look of her cavalier. How kindly he had spoken, yet how deferentially; how he had looked, how he had smiled! At dinner she supposed it was his business to talk to her. But afterwards, when she was sitting, a little forlornly and apart from the noisy chatter of the bright-plumaged house-party, how he had come straight over to her directly the gentlemen came into the drawing-room! And she felt that she had not been wanting to herself on so great an occasion.
“I know I talked well. I’m certain he saw directly that I wasn’t a silly idiot.”
She lay long awake, and, as the men trooped up the stairs, she tried to fancy that she could already distinguish his footsteps.
The letter she wrote to her mother next day was, compared to those other lying letters, as a lit chandelier to a stable-lantern. And the mother knew the difference.
“Poor darling!” she thought. “She must have been very miserable all this time. But she’s happy now, God bless her!”
By the week’s end, every thought, every dream, every hope of Maisie’s life was centred in the Honourable James; her tenderness, her ambition turned towards him as flowers to the sun.
And her happiness lighted a thousand little candles all around her. No one could see the candles, of course, but every one saw the radiant illumination of her beauty. And the other men of the house-party saw it too. Even Lord Yalding distinguished her by asking whether she had read some horrid book about earthworms.
“You’re making a fool of that girl, Jim,” said Lady Yalding. “I really think it’s too bad.”
“My good Fanny, don’t be an adorable idiot! I’m only trying to give the poor little duffer a good time. There’s nothing else to do. The other girls really are—now, you know they are, Fanny—between ourselves”
“They’re all duty people, of course,” she said. “Well, only do be careful.”
He was careful. He subdued his impulses to tenderness and gentle raillery. He talked seriously to little Miss Mouse, and presently he found that she was seriously talking to him—telling him, for instance, how she wrote poetry, and how she longed to show it to some one and ask whether it really was so bad as she sometimes feared.
What could he do but beg her to show it to him? But there he pulled himself up short.
“There’s skating to-morrow. We’re going to drive over to Dansent. Would you like to come?”
Her grey eyes looked up quickly, and the long lashes drooped over them. She had read of that trick in a book, and for the life of him he could not help knowing it. Her answer to his question came from a book, too, though it also came from her heart.
“Ah,” she said, “you know!”
Then the Honourable James was honestly frightened. Next day he had a telegram, and departed abruptly. And as abruptly the old lady returned.
And now Maisie had a secret joy to feed on—a manna to sustain her in the wilderness of her tiresome life. She thought of him. He loved her; she was certain of it. Miss Mouse could imagine no reason but love for the kindness he had shown her. He had gone away without a word, but that was for some good reason. Probably he had gone to confess to his mother how he had given his whole heart to a penniless orphan—well, she was half an orphan, anyway. But the days slipped by and he did not come back. All that bright time at Christmas had faded like a picture from a magic-lantern when the slide is covered. Lady Yalding was quite nice and kind, but she left Maisie to the work Maisie was paid for.
Maisie’s mother perceived, through Maisie’s studied accounts of her happiness, more than a glimpse of the reality.
Then, at last, when the days grew unbearable, Maisie wrote to him, a prim little letter with agitated heart-beats between the lines, where he, being no fool, did not fail to find them. Yet he had to answer the letter. He did it briefly.
“Dear Miss Rolleston,” he wrote, “I have received your letter and the little poem, which is very nice. Poems about Spring are the pleasantest kind, I think.—With kind regards, I am yours sincerely.”
It was not, as you may see, worth the heartache with which Maisie watched for it.It was when she wrote again, and sent more verses, that he decided he must not mince matters.
“Dear Miss Rolleston,” was his second letter, “it is good of you to write again. Now I do hope you won’t be offended with me for what I am going to say. I am so much older than you, you know, and I know you are alone at Yalding, with no one to advise you, so it must be my duty to do it, though, for my own sake, I should, of course, like to advise you quite differently. It was a great pleasure to me to hear from you, but I must not allow myself that pleasure again, even if you were willing to give it to me. It would not be fair to you to let you write any more to a man who is not related to you. Try to forgive me for being unselfish and acting in your interests and not my own.”}}
And again, with kind regards, he was hers sincerely.
“Poor, pretty little duffer!” he said, as he closed the envelope. “But it’s not real. Don’t I know the sort of thing? She’s simply bored to death down there. And it’s all my fault, anyhow. By Jove! I’ll never try to do any one a good turn again as long as I live. Fanny was perfectly right.”
The letter came by the second post, when Maisie was engaged in drearily reading her employer to sleep after lunch.
It lay on her lap, but she kept her eyes from it and read on intelligibly if not with expression.
The old lady dozed.
Maisie opened her letter. And before she could even have had time to put up a hand to save herself, her Spanish castle was tumbling about her ears. A curious giddy feeling seemed to catch at the back of her neck, the room gave a sickening half-turn. She caught at her self-control.
“Not here. I mustn’t faint here. Not with his letter in my hand.”
She got out of the room somehow, and somehow she got into hat and jacket and boots, put her quarter’s salary in her purse, and walked out of the front door and straight down the great drive that she had come up four months ago with such bright hopes. She went to the station, and she took a train, and she never stopped nor stayed till she was at home again. She pushed past the frightened maid, and, pale and shabby, with black-ringed eyes and dusty black gown, she burst into her mother’s room. The scent of eau-de-Cologne and bees’-wax and buttered toast met her, and it was as the perfume of Paradise. Edward was there—but she was in no mood to bother about Edward. She threw herself on her knees and buried her face in the knitting on her mother’s lap, and felt thin arms go round her.
“It’s nothing. I’m tired of it all. I’ve come home,” was all she said. But presently she reached out a hand to Edward, and he took it and held it, as it were, absently, and the three sat by the fire and spoke little and were content.
•••••••
To her dying day Maisie will never forget the sense of peace, of enfolding care, and love unchanging and unchangeable that came to her as she woke next morning to find her mother standing by her bed with a cup of tea in her hands.
“Oh, Mummy darling,” she cried, throwing her arms round her mother and nearly upsetting the tea, “I haven’t had a single drop of in-bed tea all the time I’ve been away!”
That was all she found words to tell her mother. Later there was Edward, and she told him most things, but, I imagine, not all. But the mother was content without spoken confidences. She knew that Maisie had suffered, and that now she had her little girl again, to wrap warm in her love as before. This was happiness enough.
•••••••
This story, I know, is instructive enough for a Sunday School prize. It ought to be tagged at the end with a Moral. I can’t help it: it is true. Of course, it is not what usually happens. Many companions, no doubt, marry Honourable James’s, or even Dukes, and are never at all glad to get home to their mothers and their Edwards. But Maisie was different. She feels now a sort of grateful tenderness for Yalding Towers, because, but for the dream she dreamed there she might never have really awakened—never have known fully and without mistake what it was in life that she truly cared for. And such knowledge is half the secret of happiness. That, by the way, is really the moral of this story.