CHAPTER VIII.
t was not at all a bad thing to do, Florence thought, as she sat and considered the arrangement Mr. Fisher had so suddenly made in regard to the house in town and the cottage at Witley. The country would do the children good, and Aunt Anne would probably enjoy it. Of course the latter would consent to go with them. Indeed, she had clearly no other resource. Florence wondered if she would like it.
But Mrs. Baines was so full of news herself when she returned that she had no time to listen to any one else.
“My love,” she said, “I have passed a most important day.”
“Relate your adventures, Aunt Anne.” But at this request Mrs. Baines winked and spoke slowly.
“I had an engagement in the morning,” she began, and hesitated. “When I had fulfilled it,” she went on, “I thought it right, Florence, to go and call on Sir William Rammage. He has been ill, and I wanted to assure him of my sympathy. Besides, I felt that it was due to you—that it was an imperative duty on my part to ask him for an allowance, and that it was his duty to give it to me.”
“But, Aunt Anne——”
“Yes, my love. I am living now on your generous kindness; don’t think that I am insensible to it. But for your tenderness, my darling, I should have been alone in a little lodging now, as I was when—when I was first left a widow.”
“I should not like to think of you in a little lodging, Aunt Anne,” Florence said gently; and then she added gaily, “but continue your adventures.”
Mrs. Baines gave a long sigh, and was silent for a moment. She sat down on the easy-chair and, as if she had not heard Florence’s interruption, went on with a strange tragic note in her voice—
“I never told you about that time, Florence. I had three pounds in the world when I came to London; just three pounds to maintain my position until I could find something to do. I had a little room at Kilburn—a little room at the top of the house; and I used to sit day after day, week after week, waiting. I had no coals, only a little spirit-lamp by which I made some water hot, then poured it into a jug and covered it over and warmed my hands by it; it was often an hour before it grew cold, my love.”
“But why did you not come to us?”
“I couldn’t,” the old lady answered in an obstinate tone. “I felt that it would not be treating you properly to present myself before you while I was so poor and miserable”—she paused and looked into the fire for a moment, then suddenly went on: “The woman at the corner where I went every morning to buy a newspaper, saw that I was poor, and presumed upon it. Once she said I looked nipped up, and asked me to sit down and get warm. I reproved her for familiarity, and never went to the shop again.”
“But perhaps she meant it for kindness?”
“She should have remembered her position, my love, and asked me in a different manner. There is nothing more painful to bear than the remembrance of one’s own rank in life when one has to encounter the hardships that belong by right to a lower class.” Aunt Anne paused again for a moment, and gave a long sigh before she went on: “We won’t go over it, my dear. If Mrs. North had shown less levity in her conduct and more consideration to me, I should have been there still instead of living on your charity.”
“Oh no, Aunt Anne.”
“Yes, my love, it is so; even though you love me and I love you, it is charity; and I felt it keenly when you resented my little offering of cream this morning—you, to whom I would give everything I possess.”
“Oh no, Aunt Anne——” interrupted Florence.
“And so—and so,” continued the old lady with a little gasp, “I went to Sir William Rammage once more. I told him—I told him”—she stopped—“I told him how our mothers had stood over us together, years and years ago.”
“Yes, I know,” Florence said soothingly. She had heard this so often before. “I hope he was good to you?”
“My dear, he listened with compunction, but he saw the force of what I said. He will write and tell me how much he will allow me,” she added simply.
“I am very glad, Aunt Anne; I hope he will write soon, and be generous. I know it will make you happier.”
“It will, indeed,” and Mrs. Baines gave another long sigh. “I shall not be dependent on any one much longer.”
“Except upon him,” Florence said unwittingly.
“No, I shall not feel that I am dependent even upon him,” and she looked up quickly. “He will give it and I shall take it for the honour of the family. I told him how impossible it was that I could go on living upon you and Walter, that it would be a disgrace. I could not live upon him either. He has shown me so little sympathy, my love, that I could not endure it. I shall take the allowance from him as I should take an inheritance, knowing that it is not given to me for my own sake. I could not take it in any other spirit; but it would be as wrong in him to forget what is due to us, as it would be in me to let him do so. It would shed dishonour on his name.”
And again she was silent; she seemed to be living over the past, to be groping her way back among days that were over before Florence was even born, to be seeing people whose very names had not been heard for years.
“They would rise in their graves if I were left to starve,” she continued; “I have always felt it; and it was but right towards them that I should go to William; it was due to them even that I should live on you and Walter, my darling, till I received an adequate income.”
Suddenly her voice changed again, the wonderful smile came back—the happy look that always seemed as if it had travelled from the youth she had left long years behind.
“You understand, my love?” she asked. “Bless you for all your kindness, but I am not going to intrude upon you much longer. I have already seen an apartment that will, I think, suit my requirements.”
“Oh no.”
“Yes, my love, it will be much better. You cut me to the quick this morning, Florence,” and her voice grew sad; “you said that you would have to send away your dear children because my influence would spoil them.”
“Aunt Anne!”—Florence began in consternation.
“Yes, dear, yes,” the old lady said solemnly; “it gave me the deepest pain, as I sat and thought it over in the privacy of my own chamber. But when I came downstairs and you shared your dear mother’s gift with me, I knew that you loved me sincerely.”
“I do,” said Florence, soothingly.
“I am sure of it, my darling,” with even more solemnity, “but it will be better that I should take an apartment. It will rejoice your tender heart to know that by your gift you have helped me to secure one, and when I receive my allowance from Sir William I shall feel that I am independent once more. You must forgive me, my love; it is not that I do not appreciate your hospitality—yours and Walter’s—I do. But I feel that it would sadden all my dear ones who are gone, if they knew that I was alone in the world, without a home of my own. That is why I went to Sir William Rammage, Florence; and though he said little, I feel sure that he saw the matter in a proper light, and felt as I do about it.”
“What did he say?”
“He said he would think it over, and when he had made up his mind he would write to me. My love, would you permit me to ring the bell?”
“Yes, of course. Why do you always ask me? Don’t you feel at home here, dear Aunt Anne?” Florence asked, thinking that Sir William’s answer had, after all, committed him to little.
“I hope I shall never so far forget myself as not to treat you with the courtesy that you have a right to expect, my darling. I will never take advantage of our relationship.—Jane,” she said, with quite another manner, and in a cold and slightly haughty tone, to the servant who had entered, “would you have the goodness to divest me of my cloak? and if your mistress gives you permission, perhaps you would carry it up to my room?”
“Yes, ma’am,” said Jane, respectfully, but without much willingness in her manner. The servants had learnt to resent the tone in which Mrs. Baines usually spoke to them. “She treats us like dirt,” the housemaid explained to the cook; “and if were made of dirt, I should like to know what she’s made of? She give me a shilling the other day, and another time a new apron done up in a box from the draper’s; but I don’t care about her for all her presents. I know she always sees every speck of dust that others would be blind to; it’s in her wink that she does.”
“And now that you have told me all your news, I want you to listen to mine,” Florence said.
Then she gave an account of Mr. Fisher’s visit, and of the letting of the house for a couple of months.
“So, Aunt Anne,” she continued triumphantly, “I want you to be very, very good, and to go with the children and two of the servants to the cottage at Witley to-morrow, and to be the mistress of the great establishment, if you will, and mother to the children till I come; that proves how bad I think your influence is for them, doesn’t it, you unkind old dear?”—and she stooped and kissed Mrs. Baines.
Aunt Anne was delighted, and consented at once.
“I shall never forget your putting this confidence in me. You have proved your affection for me most truly,” she said. “My dear Florence, your children shall have the most loving care that it is in my power to give them. I will look after everything till you come; more zealously than you yourself could. Tell me, love, where do you say the cottage is situated?”
“It is near Witley, it is on the direct Portsmouth road; a sweet little cottage with a garden, and fir woods stretching on either side.”
“And how far is it from Portsmouth, my love?” Mrs. Baines asked eagerly.
Florence divined the meaning of the question instantly.
“Oh, I don’t know, Aunt Anne; after Witley comes Hindhead, and then Liphook, and then Petersfield, and then—then I don’t know. Liphook is the place where Mr. Wimple”—the old lady winked to herself—“has friends, and sometimes goes to stay.”
“And how far is that?”
“About six miles, I think—six or seven.”
“Thank you, my love; and now, if you will allow me, I will retire. I must make preparations for my journey, which is indeed a delightful anticipation.”
Florence never forgot the October morning on which she took Aunt Anne and the children to Witley. They went from Waterloo. She thought of Walter and the day they had spent at Windsor, and of that last one on which they had gone together to Southampton, and she had returned alone. “Oh, my darling,” she said to herself, “may you grow well and strong, and come back to us soon again.”
Mrs. Baines, too, seemed full of memories. She looked up and down the platform; she stood for a moment dreamily by the bookstall before it occurred to her to buy a cheap illustrated paper to amuse Catty and Monty on the journey.
“My love,” she said to Florence, with a little sigh, “a railway station is fraught with many recollections of meeting and parting——”
“And meeting again,” said Florence, longingly thinking of Walter.
“Yes, my love,” the old lady answered tenderly; “and may yours with your dear one be soon.”
There were three miles to drive from Witley to the cottage. A long white road, with fir woods on either side. Gaps in the firs, and glimpses of the Surrey hills, distant and blue, of hanging woods and deep valleys. The firs came to an end; and there were cliffs of gravel full of the holes of sand-martins. More woods, then hedges of blackberry-bushes, bare enough now; gorse full of late bloom, heather faded and turning from russet to black. Here and there a solitary house, masses of oak and larch and fir, patches of sunshine, long wastes of shade; and the road going on and on.
“Here we are at last,” Florence said, as they stopped before a red-brick cottage that stood only a few yards back from the road. On either side of it was a fir plantation. There was a gravel pathway round the house, but the other paths were covered with tan. Behind stretched a wilderness of garden almost entirely uncultivated. There was a little footway that wound through it in and out among beeches and larches and firs and oaks, and stopped at last on the ridge of a dip that could hardly be called a valley.
“Sometimes,” said Florence, as they walked about, half an hour later, while the servants were busy within, “we go down the dip and up the other side, and so get over to Hindhead. It is nearer than going there by the road.”
“Our house is over there,” the children said.
“Their house,” explained Florence, “is a little, lonely, thatched shed, half a mile away. We don’t know who made it. It is in a lovely part on the other side of the dip, among the straggling trees. Perhaps some one tethered a cow in it once. The children call it their house now, because one day they had tea there. After I return next week we must try and walk across to it.”
But the old lady’s eyes were turned towards the distance.
“And the road in front of the house,” she asked, “where does that go to?”
“It winds round the Devil’s Punch Bowl, and over Hindhead, and on through Liphook and Petersfield to Portsmouth.”
Aunt Anne did not answer, she looked still more intently into the distance, and gave a long sigh.
“It is most exhilarating to be out of London again, my dear Florence,” she said. “I sincerely trust it will prove beneficial to your dear ones. I was born in the country, and I hope that some day I shall die in it. London is most oppressive after a time.”
“I like London,” Florence answered; “still it does now and then feel like a prison.”
“And the rows and rows of houses are the prison bars, my love. May we enter the cottage?” she asked suddenly. She was evidently tired; she stooped, and looked older and more worn than usual.
“Poor old dear,” Florence thought. “I hope she is not worrying about Madame Celestine’s bill, and that she will soon hear from Sir William Rammage. Then she will be happier.”
It was a little house, simple inside as well as out, with tiny rooms, plainly furnished. The dining-room had been newly done up, with cretonne curtains and a dado, and a buttery-hatch in which Florence took a certain pride as something rather grand for so small a place. The drawing-room was old-fashioned; a stiff roomy sofa with hard flat cushions at one end; at the other a sweet jangling piano. There were corner cupboards with china bowls of pot-pourri on them; on either side of the fireplace a gaunt, high-backed easy-chair, and on the left of each chair an old-fashioned screen on which was worked a peacock. Aunt Anne stopped on the threshold.
It seemed to Florence as if the room recognized the old lady, as if it had been waiting, knowing that she would come. There was something about it that said more plainly than any words could have said that the hands were still that had first arranged it, and many footsteps had gone out from its doorway that would never come in at it more.
“It always depresses me,” Florence explained; “but it is just as we found it. We refurnished the dining-room, and sit there a good deal. It is more cheerful than this. Come upstairs”—and she led the way.
The bedrooms were all small too, save one in front, that seemed to match the drawing-room. It looked like a room to die in: Florence thought so, as she entered it for the first time with Aunt Anne. A quaint four-post bedstead with dark chintz curtains, a worm-eaten bureau, a sampler worked in Berlin wool and framed in black cherry-wood hanging over the fireplace.
“This is the best room,” she said, “and we keep it for visitors. There is a little one, meant to be a dressing-room, I suppose, leading out of it,” and she went to a bright little nook with a bed in it. “I always feel that the best bedroom and the drawing-room belong to a past world, and the rest of the house to the present one.”
“It is like your life and mine, my darling; mine to the past and yours to the present.”
“I think you ought to sleep in the best room, Aunt Anne.”
“No, my love,” the old lady interrupted, “let me have this little one which is next it. When you require the other, if I am still with you, I can lock the door between. The best one is too grand for me; but sometimes while it is empty I will go in, if you have no objection, and look out at the fir trees and the road that stretches right and left——”
“I like doing that,” Florence interrupted. “It always sets me thinking—the road from the city to the sea.”
“From the city to the sea,” the old lady repeated; “from the voices to the silences.”
“Aunt Anne, we mustn’t grow sentimental,” Florence began. There was the sound of a tinkling bell. It seemed to come at an opportune moment. “Oh, happy sound,” she laughed; “it means that our meal is ready. Catty, darling,” she called, “Monty, my son, roast chicken is waiting downstairs. Auntie and mummy are quite ready; come, dear babes”—and patter, patter, came the sound of the little feet, and together they all went down.
An hour later the fly came to the door; it was time for Florence to start on her way back to town.
“I shall be with you at latest on Tuesday. Perhaps, dear Aunt Anne, if you don’t mind taking care of the bad children so long, I may go on Saturday for a day or two to an old schoolfellow,” she said. “Then I should not be here till the middle of next week.”
“Dear child, you do indeed put confidence in me,” Mrs. Baines answered quaintly.
“And, Aunt Anne, I have ordered most things in, but the tradespeople come every day if there is anything more you want. What you order is, of course, put down, but here is some money for odds and ends. Four pounds, I think, will carry you through; and here is a little book in which to put down your expenses. I always keep a most careful account of what I spend; you don’t mind doing so either, do you?”
“My love, anything you wish will be a pleasure to me.”
“If you please, ma’am,” said Jane, entering, “the driver says you must start at once if you want to catch this train.”
“Then good-bye, dear Aunt Anne; good-bye, dear dickie-birds; be happy together. You shall see me very soon again; send me a letter every other day;” and with many embraces Florence was allowed to get out of the door. But Aunt Anne and the children ran excitedly after her to the gate, and helped her into the little waggonette, and kissed their hands and waved their handkerchiefs as she drove off, and called “Good-bye, good-bye;” and so, watching them, Florence went along the white road towards the station.
