Abington Abbey: A Novel

by Archibald Marshall

VISITORS

Mrs. Walter and Mollie were at their mid-day Sunday dinner. Stone Cottage, where they lived, stood at the top of the village street. It had a fair-sized drawing-room and a little bandbox of a dining-room, with three bedrooms and an attic, and a garden of about half an acre. Its rent was under thirty pounds a year, and it was as nice a little country home as a widow lady with a very small income and her daughter could wish for.

Mrs. Walter's husband had been a schoolmaster. He was a brilliant scholar and would certainly have risen high in his profession. But he had died within two years of their marriage, leaving her almost unprovided for. She had the income from an insurance policy of a thousand pounds and he had left the manuscript of a schoolbook, which was to have been the first of many such. One of his colleagues had arranged for its publication on terms not as favourable as they should have been, but it had brought her in something every year, and its sales had increased until now they produced a respectable yearly sum. For twenty years she had acted as matron in one of the boarding-houses of the school at which her husband had been assistant master. It had been a hard life, and she was a delicate woman, always with the fear before her of losing her post before she could save enough to live on and keep Mollie with her. The work, for which she was not well suited, had tried her, and it was with a feeling of immense relief and thankfulness that she at last reached the point at which she could give it up, and live her own quiet life with her daughter. She could not, in fact, have gone on with it much longer, and kept what indifferent health she had; and looking back she was inclined to wonder how she had stood it for so long. Every morning that she woke up in her quiet little cottage brought a blissful sense of relief at being free from all the stress and worry of that uncongenial life, and no place she could have found to live in would have been too quiet and retired for her.

She was a thin colourless woman, with whatever good looks she may have had in her youth washed out of her by ill-health and an anxious life. But Mollie was a pretty girl, soft and round and dimpled, and wanting only encouragement to break into merriment and chatter. She needed a good deal of encouragement, though. She was shy, and diffident about herself. Her mother had kept her as retired as possible from the busy noisy boys' life by which they had been surrounded. The housemaster and his wife had not been sympathetic to either of them. They were snobs, and had daughters of their own, not so pretty as Mollie, nor so nice. There had been slights, which had extended themselves to the day school at which she had been educated. During the two years before they had settled down at Abington she had been at a school in Paris, first as a pupil, then as a teacher. She had gained her French, but not much in the way of self-confidence. She too was pleased enough to live quietly in the country; she had had quite enough of living in a crowd. And Abington had been delightful to them, not only from the pleasure they had from the pretty cottage, all their own, but from the beauty of the country, and from the kindness with which they had been received by the Vicar and Mrs. Mercer, who had given them an intimacy which had not come into their lives before. For Mrs. Walter had dropped out from among her husband's friends, and had made no new ones as long as she had remained at the school.

"You know, dear," Mollie was saying, "I rather dreaded going to the Abbey. I thought they might be sniffy and stuck up. But they're not a bit. I do think they are three of the nicest girls I've ever met, Mother. Don't you?"

"Yes, I think they are very nice," said Mrs. Walter. "But you must be a little careful. I think that is what the Vicar's warning meant."

"What, Mother?"

"Well, you know he said that you should be careful about going there too much—never without a special invitation. He is so kind and thoughtful for us that I think he must have feared that they might perhaps take you up at first, as you are the only girl in the place besides themselves, and then drop you. In many ways their life is so different from what ours can be that there might be a danger of that, though I don't think they would do it consciously."

"Oh, no; they're much too nice for that. Still, of course, I should hate to feel that I was poking myself in. Don't you think I might go to tea this afternoon, Mother? Caroline did ask me, you know, and I'm sure she meant it."

Mollie had been to church alone that morning, and the Grafton girls had taken her round the garden of the Abbey afterwards.