Chapter V
IN WHICH LOVEDAY ESSAYS THE WHITE GOWN
With morning came thoughts of the practical side of the business and, the worst of her daily duties performed, Loveday ascended to her chamber to examine the scanty contents of her small oaken chest. It was a sea-chest, legacy from her roving father, who had given it to her mother, and often enough had Aunt Senath expressed scruples about allowing her to keep a gift obtained so godlessly. Perhaps the fact that it was a good chest and better than anything she could have bought had something to do with Aunt Senath's complaisance in permitting it to remain. Perhaps Loveday's fierce look in defence of it was not without influence also. The chest stayed in the little attic room, and made of it, to Loveday's eyes, a place peculiarly her own, and rich because of its associations. There was something about the chest, its dark polish and coarse carving, that even led her to think hopefully of its poor contents.
She crouched beside it now, upon her heels, and lifting the lid, gazed expectantly at what was revealed.
After all, it did not look so bad, just a level surface of white linen...
But, when she lifted it out, and all the yellow of age was revealed in the full gathers of the skirt, a shade passed over Loveday's spirit. How small and tight the bodice looked, how skimpy even the plaits of the skirt for the present modes ... yet it had been a good linen in its day, there was no doubt of that, this frock that had been stitched for her mother's wedding gown.
For perhaps he had always been coming back to marry her, perhaps only their young blood and eager hearts beating so strongly within them had made the beat of wedding bells seem at first too slight a sound to catch their absorbed attention.... So Loveday the elder had always known, in spite of the sneers of the neighbours. So Loveday the younger had maintained to carping girl-critics, though in her inmost heart she had never been able to feel it mattered so vastly, for half the girls she knew would have been in her predicament had their fathers been cut off untimely. She knew it was not that she was born out of wedlock, a misfortune that might happen to anyone, which oppressed her youth, but the fact of her father having been a foreigner, and of that she was fiercely resolved to be proud. Neither mother nor father had she ever known, but the instinct of generous youth is ever to defend the oppressed, and with her defence had love sprung in Loveday's heart. Therefore, even with her sensation of disappointment at the sight of the yellowed linen, there was reverence and tenderness in her touch as she laid the gown across her narrow bed.
She ripped off the coarse blue wrapper that enfolded her, and stood revealed in her little flannel under-bodice and linsey-woolsey petticoat of striped red and black, her thin girlish arms and young bosom making her look more childish than she did when fully clothed. She held the gown above her head and struggled into it. Her pale little face was red when she poked it triumphantly through the narrow opening and finally settled the neck, with its ruffled cambric frilling, round her throat, and pulled the puff sleeves as far as they would go down her arms in a vain attempt to make them conceal her red young girl's elbows. She could only see a small portion of herself at a time in the little mirror, yet that small portion, in spite of the skimpiness and yellowness of the gown, pleased her eye.
For her dark tints were set off by the creamy folds, her slight shape revealed by the tight bodice, even her bare feet, which some fine prompting had made her wash carefully lest they should shame this essay, looked small and graceful beneath the full folds.
But she could not dance in the Flora unshod, and so once again she bent to the sea-chest, and withdrew her only pair of shoes, bought for her in a generous moment last Michaelmas by Aunt Senath. She pulled on her Sunday pair of white cotton stockings, and then the stout shoes. They still fitted, and to her country eye looked well enough. She examined herself bit by bit in the mirror, from her smooth black head to her smooth black feet, and all the faintly yellowed linen that curved in and swelled out between.
She was fair to look upon, not so much the mirror as her own awakened consciousness told her that. She was meet to dance with Miss Le Pettit at the Flora, could she but obtain one thing more—the white satin sash.
CHAPTER VI: IN WHICH LOVEDAY ESSAYS TO OBTAIN THE WHITE SATIN RIBAND