“Purely and simply! I know, because she used to boast of it to me, and advise me to do the same. Boast of it! How she’d taken him in and hoodwinked him from beginning to end. She got a tremendous marriage settlement out of him, too. All the money she left me. Ten thousand pounds settled on her absolutely. Of course she hadn’t a penny of her own. She often used to tell me how well she’d done for herself. Oh, Elsie was a true daughter of her grandfather—our grandfather, I should say!”
“I see,” said Roger thoughtfully. “Yes, that does shed a somewhat different light on the lady. And she took you to live with her so that you could have the chance of meeting another wealthy man and hoodwinking him similarly?”
“Indeed she didn’t! That’s what she used to tell me, but nothing could be further from the truth. The fact is that there were several reasons why she wanted me with her. In the first place, she wanted someone whom she could order about in a way that no servant would stand for a minute, someone who would do things for her that she would never have dared to ask any servant to do. Oh, Roger, you can’t imagine the things I’ve had to do since I came here! Menial things that she couldn’t have made anybody else in the world do for her. And yet nothing outrageous, if you understand—nothing that I could flare up at and flounce out of the house over. Oh, it’s extraordinarily difficult to explain. You see, you probably haven’t any idea what a beast one woman can be to another in a subordinate position without ever doing anything that you could actually call beastly.”
“I think I have, though, for all that,” Roger murmured sympathetically.
Margaret knitted her brows. “Well, suppose we’d been out for a walk together in the rain and come in rather tired and rather wet and rather muddy. The first thing she’d do would be to send me upstairs with her wet coat and hat and tell me to bring down a pair of dry shoes. I should go down and find her sprawling in a chair in the drawing-room in front of the fire, but otherwise just as I’d left her. She’d want me to change her shoes for her, probably even pull her gloves off for her as well. Then she’d find out that her stockings were wet too, and I should be sent to get a dry pair—and probably change those for her as well. Then she’d decide she didn’t like those shoes with those stockings, and off I’d have to go to get another pair. As soon as I’d done that, I’d be sent up again for something else that she’d pretend to have forgotten all about, and then for something more after that. In other words, she kept me on the go the whole time: I was hardly ever allowed to have a single second to myself.”
Roger nodded understandingly. “I know the type.”
“Well, that was one thing she wanted me for. Another was that she was a horrid little bully, and she must have someone to bully. You can’t bully servants; they give notice. There’s nobody like a poor relation for bullying. And all with a sweet smile you know, that seemed to make it even more unbearable if anything.”
“But why did you stick it?” Anthony asked indignantly.
Margaret flushed slightly. “Because I was a coward, I suppose. I’d had about enough of roughing it by then, and I was comfortable at any rate. Besides, there was that ten thousand pounds she was dangling over me. If you’d ever known what it’s like not to be able to afford a penny bun or a cup of tea, you might realise what a tempting bait ten thousand pounds can be and what a lot you’ll put up with to qualify for it. Very mercenary, isn’t it? But Elsie knew all right. She’d been through it herself.”
“I’m sorry, Margaret,” Anthony said in some confusion. “I was an ass to say a thing like that. Of course I understand.”