Of course, they had to pay taxes, but they were rent free, and it was better to incur no expense of moving till they were obliged to go.
Christina had written a very guarded letter to her mother, offering assistance, but Polly had sent a curt refusal.
She was hotly angry with Lady Wentworth, who made no suggestion of paying her mother a visit, and she felt she would like to have taken Christina and shaken her violently.
How much the girl was spared at this moment she little knew, for could she but have imagined that for the sake of spite and revenge Christina was actually pretending a generosity toward herself and her mother, Polly’s weight of care would have been made much heavier than it was. As it was, she felt she had said farewell to both her sisters, and that her mother would have, in truth, in future only one daughter upon whom she could rely.
“We are going to live together, all our lives,” she said every day to her mother; “and some day, oh! yes, some day, lovee, we shall be so happy! We shall let this big old house and go and live in the country, and we will find a sweet little cottage covered with roses—and—and things,” though Polly was now quite grown up and important, she was still the old Polly in the matter of phraseology—“and Harold shall come home there for his holidays, and we will play cricket, and you shall grow fat. You promise me you will grow fat in the country, won’t you, sweetheart? And I shall milk the cows and do a lot of farm work.” And the flood of nonsense would flow on till Polly had succeeded in winning a smile from her mother’s wan, sad face, and then the girl was content.
“I must make her happy again. I must—I must!” Polly would say, to herself at night, when she lay awake in the small room adjoining her mother’s. “How I wish I were big and strong, like Mr. Ambleton. One can command so much when one is big, but when one is small, and a girl, too—well, there is not much one can do but hope and pray, and pray and hope!”
CHAPTER IX.
BEYOND RECONCILIATION.
It had been all Polly’s work that she and her mother were remaining on in their old home indefinitely.
When the moment for final settlement had arrived, the girl had overruled her mother.
“We can, of course, find a small house somewhere, but by the time we have moved and the rent and the rates and taxes paid, you see if we are not more out of pocket than if we remained on here. The lease is ours for another fifteen years, isn’t it, mother, darling? And though the taxes are heavy, we can be very economical in other ways, and then there is space for you to move about in, and air for you to breathe, and a place for Harold to racket in when he comes home. I could not endure you to be shut up in one of those poky houses, at least so long as you are able to stay here, and it seems to me the most sensible thing to do to live on till we sell or let the house.”