CHAPTER XXIII
"Send in tea if I ring once," said Jane, preparing to face Mr. Rochester's mother in a crumpled blue print, with her hair very untidy and her hands deeply empurpled. Her dress was empurpled too, because amid the bushes she had happened to kneel on a currant or two—but of this she was mercifully unaware. The carnation tint in her cheeks, induced by agitation, was very becoming, and she looked her prettiest. But she did not know this either. "Once for tea, Mrs. Doveton. Twice if I want you to let the lady out. At least, of course, Gladys must do that."
"I'll be handy, miss, you may be sure," said Gladys enthusiastically. "I'll hang round like in the hall."
"No, you won't, my gell," said Mrs. Doveton with some smartness. "I'll find you a job to do while you're waiting."
"P'r'aps I'd better go back to the shop," Gladys tried. "You hear the drawing-room bell quite plainly there, and I dessay Mr. Herbert wouldn't mind staying to take over the shop when I was called away."
"Mr. Herbert," said Mr. Herbert's mother, "will stay where he is, and you'll stay where you are. Don't you be flustered, Miss Jane. I daresay the old lady's quite mild really. Them short-set men with tempers to match often have quite quiet mothers."
"Don't make me laugh," said Jane, beginning to feel some sympathy with the giggles of Gladys. "You'll have tea all ready, won't you?"
She was annoyed to find, as she reached the drawing-room door, that her heart seemed to have left its normal position just above where you tuck the rose into your belt, and to have shifted itself to less suitable quarters immediately under the short string of beads that encircles your throat. And annoyance changed to fury when she found that she was trembling all over.
Had he written to his mother about her? Why should he have written? What could he have said? Why had she come? Why could she have come? To inspect? Why? To interfere? What with? To tell Miss Quested that young men's mothers didn't approve of unchaperoned days on rivers? To say what she thought of unchaperoned girls anyhow, and to take her boy away? Whatever she had come for, her coming would change things so that they could never be the same again, and Jane had to admit to herself that she did not want things changed. This wonder and these admissions all found time to be between her laying her hand on the knob of the door and her turning it. Then she did turn it, and went in.
The room seemed full of a dusky golden twilight; the flowers, she noted with relief, looked quite decent—only the lupins had shed their petals all over the Sheraton card-table in that aggravating way lupins have.
Then she found herself laying her violet-tinted hand in a cool, gloved hand which seemed to expect it, and saying that she was very pleased to see Mrs. Rochester, because this seemed to be the right thing to say.
"Thank you so much," said the visitor in a thin, high voice. "That's very sweet of you. You see, I was in the neighbourhood and I couldn't resist the temptation to call. I have heard so much of you from my son. You must know," she added, with an elegant little simper, "you must know I'm a very devoted mother."
"I'm afraid you're rather affected," said Jane, but not aloud. Aloud she said:
"How nice"—again because that seemed the best thing to say.
"Ah, well, family affection involves great anxieties."
"What are we coming to now?" Jane murmured, but the other did not pursue the theme of the affections, family or otherwise.
"What a delightful old-world spot this is," she said—"so quaint and picturesque. It has all the lure of the bygone, has it not?"
"I'm glad you think so," said Jane politely, but in her heart she was saying, "I wonder whether you always talk like the Woman's Page in the Daily Yell. How awful for him if you do."
"I suppose you live quite an idyllic life here—surrounded by friends and relations . . . no anxieties?"
"Not at all, thank you," said Jane.
"No, of course not. At your age life is a garden of roses, is it not? But what I really wanted to talk to you about was a little private matter between us two," the thin voice went on with a detestable archness. "And I needn't apologise for bringing it up, need I? For I'm sure it's a subject in which you take an interest. . . . Young people, you know—so sympathetic. Now tell me candidly, and don't be afraid of offending me, dear: don't you think he's wasting his time—just the least in the world?"
"Who?" Jane felt obliged to ask.
"Why, my boy. Don't you think he's wasting his time, just a wee bit?"
Jane, heavy with astonishment and impotent rage, could only say she supposed his mother knew best.
"Oh no!" A delicately-gloved but intolerably waggish forefinger was shaken in Jane's face. She would have liked to bite it. "Oh no—you can judge far better than I can. You have so many more opportunities of seeing my dear son."
Jane ventured to suppose that Mr. Rochester knew his own business best.
"Oh no!" The voice was too thin for cooing, but it tried to coo. "Young men never know best—never. We have to think for them, we poor, weak women. He has his way to make in the world, and"
"Well, let him make it!" said Jane, suddenly aware that her temper was going and feeling that it was almost time it did go,
"Ah!—but the white hands on the bridle-rein. Two charming girls—quite charming, I'm sure. From a child my son John was so susceptible—almost painfully susceptible."
"What?" cried Jane, in quite a new voice.
"Er—susceptible," said the other, quailing a little.
"Nonsense!" said Jane loudly, and she leapt from her chair and with one purposeful jerk she pulled up a blind. Then, with the intent ferocity of a well-bred bulldog in a good way of business, she approached the visitor, who retreated with some activity. But in vain. Jane pursued her, caught her by the console table, took her by the shoulders and shook her.
"You beast," she said vehemently, "you absolute beast!"
It was a strange scene—a scene such as that sober drawing-room had perhaps never witnessed: the shrinking figure of an elderly lady being thoroughly and systematically shaken by a small, slim girl with flame on her cheeks and daggers in her eyes. It was almost a pity that such a scene should have had no spectators. So, evidently, it appeared to the Fates, for they remedied the oversight by permitting Gladys to escape from Mrs. Doveton and enjoy the spectacle to the full through the crack of the library door.
"You beast—you little beast!" Jane repeated, and then Mrs. Rochester's bonnet fell off and Mrs. Rochester's hair came down, and it was Lucilla that Jane was shaking—Lucilla, half-laughing through the little wrinkles that were now so plainly only grease-paint, and begging for mercy in the voice that was her own.
"Don't, Jane, don't, you're choking me!"
"I should hope so," said Jane, and went on shaking.
"Didn't she do it lovely!" Gladys permitted herself to say, opening the door widely enough for that purpose.
Jane stopped shaking Lucilla.
"Have you been listening at the door?" she asked, turning like a whirlwind. "Because if you have . . ."
"Of course not, miss," said Gladys, deeply injured. "But when I heard the blind click—Mrs. Doveton heard it too, we was both in the kitchen—I knew it was all up, and I come to help Miss Lucy off with her things. It was as good as a play when she went outside and rang the bell, and me inside, ready to open. And she says:
"'Miss Quested at home?' and says she'd seen the advertisement and she wished to recommend a cook. Nobody couldn't have known her."
Jane's face cleared a little at this evidence that at least Lucilla had retained some vestiges of tact. She caught at her self-possession.
"Well, you needn't wait, Gladys," she said. "The fun's over now. Yes, it was very amusing." She made herself laugh, and reflected that she would have to laugh sooner or later, and might as well begin now and laugh generously. She laughed again with more sincerity.
"I'll help Miss Lucy to undress," she said. "Yes, it was jolly good. It quite took me in. It was a right-down regular do. And a thorough lark."
"Yes, wasn't it?" said Gladys. "Miss Lucy ought to be on the halls. All right, miss—all right, I'm off. . . ."
••••••
"It was a fair score," said Jane, folding up the silk dress that the false Mrs. Rochester had worn. "You were absolutely IT. You took me in completely. Your voice was splendid—about an octave above your natural voice, wasn't it? And that affected little laugh—like a neigh! You're a born actress, Lucilla—Gladys is quite right. There was something about the voice that seemed familiar, but I thought our Mr. Rochester's voice perhaps was like his mother's."
"It isn't a bit like that voice," said Lucilla, spluttering among warm soapsuds; "it was a nice voice, wasn't it?"
"Whatever made you think of doing it?"
"The rubbish you were talking about chaperones, I expect. I thought I'd call and offer myself as one. Then I thought I'd pretend to be a potential Pig, and when Gladys said, 'What name?'—she acted all right too, except for giggling—I could think of nothing but Rochester. I thought you'd see through me directly. It was Gladys who thought of pulling down the blinds. I never expected to say more than, 'How do you do?' before you recognised me. I couldn't have kept it up much longer. I couldn't think of anything to say."
"You thought of a good deal."
"Oh, that wash!" said Lucilla, throwing back her hair. And Jane felt somehow solaced.
"But what was it that gave me away?" Lucilla asked.
"'My son John,'" Jane told her. "He told me one day that his mother always calls him Jack. I gather that she thinks John rather—what's the word—roturier. So then I knew something was up, and in a flash I saw that you weren't real. Do you know, that was a horrid moment, when you began to come to pieces in my hands. I almost expected you to be nothing but clothes, like that ghastly nun in 'Villette.'"
"I rather expected to be torn to bits myself," said Lucilla. "You were violent, Jane."
"What did you expect?"
"'Though she is little, she is very fierce.' Well, it was a good rag," said Lucilla contentedly; "only my head doesn't feel quite safe on my shoulders yet."
"I think I was very moderate," said Jane.
Next day the cooks came, but none of them suited Mrs. Doveton.
"I shouldn't care to trust e'er a one of them to do for you," she said, and a wonderful tremulous hope sprang up in the breasts of the girls that perhaps Mrs. Doveton herself, always so averse from responsibility, and now so delicately placed as the arbiter of their domestic destiny, might find herself unable to take upon herself the burden of decision; that she might, in fact, rather than risk the selection of an Unsuitable, continue to "do for" them herself.
The paying guests whose letters had been approved, and who had been asked to call, did call. Lucilla interviewed them.
"It's the least you can do," said Jane. "I couldn't face a caller now; I should be afraid it would turn out to be you."
"But I shall be there with you, you know."
"So you say," said Jane darkly. "I'm not going to risk it. You're capable of being yourself and someone else at the same time. You're quite equivalent, as Gladys would say. I shall sit in our boudoir and boud—or read. And I shall wash my hair. So that it won't be any use your sending Forbes up to say that, 'Please 'm, Miss Craye would like to speak to you a moment in the drawing-room.' My hair will be wringing wet the whole time they're here."
When it came to the point, Jane did not wash her hair, because a four at tennis had been arranged to take place directly after tea; but she sat with the hair thoroughly down over a kimono with storks on it, and, thus defended, heard three times the resonant ringing voice of the front-door bell, announcing, "There are strangers on your doorstep, who don't know how I reverberate and clang, and how I keep it up unless you ring me very, very gently." But only twice did she hear the tinkle of the drawing-room bell—a mincing tinkle, reminding one of the voice of the false Mrs. Rochester, and saying, "There are visitors being shown out of your high-class family mansion by your irreproachable, white-aproned, long-streamer-capped parlourmaid."
By a simple arithmetical process she was being led to conjecture that one of the callers might have had to ring twice—though Forbes was so very irreproachable that this was not likely—when she heard Lucilla's voice in the hall, the voice of one pleasantly elated in the company of congenial spirits.
"No trouble at all," she was saying; "of course I'll go with you to the gate." And then, "And wouldn't you like to go round the garden?"
A woman's pleasant voice answered her, and men's voices joined it. Jane ran through to the window of one of the unoccupied rooms that looked over the cedar lawn. Lucilla was crossing it in the company of a very elegant looking young woman and two young men, who, if not exactly elegant, were certainly presentable. They disappeared beyond the lawn, and Jane hurried back to her room to do her hair and go down to meet the strangers.
"Why," she told herself, "they look quite nice—not like P.G.'s—like real people!"
And she hastened to exchange the kimono for a frock and her gold-embroidered slippers for sedate suède shoes. But before she had come to the shoes Lucilla burst in upon her.
"Oh, my dear!" she said. "Such luck! They've taken the rooms—the three best bedrooms and a sitting-room; we can easily turn one of the bedrooms into a sitting-room, and that attic where the cistern is for a dark-room. They go in for photography. They're going to have a tap and sink put in. They pay for it! They're musicians too: they play at concerts. They're going to pay three guineas a week each, and three for the sitting-room, and two for the dark-room—that's fourteen guineas a week, my girl!"
"We'll have to be a bit more careful about their references,—a bit more careful than last,time, I mean."
"They've given me three—a clergyman, and their last landlord, and their bank."
"We must call on these references. Where have they been living?"
"In Carlisle."
"That's convenient."
"Ah, but their bank's in Lombard Street, and we'll go and call on that. No writing. We'll see with our own eyes whether Barclay's Bank is a real bank. Oh, Jane, what luck!"
"They're nice, then?"
"I should jolly well think so. Why, Jane, they're not a bit like P.G.'s. They're just like people you know."
"And Mr. Tombs—what about him?"
"Oh, he came; and he's taken the top tower bedroom. He b not bad either—tall, thin, middle-aged. Nice face, and a nice voice if he'd use it. Blue glasses. He's got references too. Upper Tooting. We can go there, you know."
"And what's he paying?"
"Oh, three guineas, the same as the others."
"For that horrid, poky little room!"
"Oh, well, we can't make these distinctions. He seemed quite satisfied. And if he's no other good, he'll do for a chaperone."
"Drop it," said Jane.