“Oh, that wouldn’t have mattered,” said Lady Jane. “It was his falling in love with you that I couldn’t stand! Of course I would give you a good character!”
“Thank you. Now I’ll make my confession. I used to be good at theatricals, and when I saw your advertisement I made up for the place.”
“Made up? It was all a sham?”
Lady Jane started in surprise.
“The limp was a sham, the hump was a little pillow, the blotches were liquid rouge, my eyes never wander unless I choose to make them do it, and I had never worn my hair like that in my life! Can you forgive me for having cheated you all, when I read your advertisement? I suppose it was just devilry that made me do it—and I wanted to see more of Lionel, since we were engaged. After all, I was quite fit for the place, wasn’t I? All I had to do was to make myself thoroughly undesirable; and I did!”
“And to think that I wasted all that good lotion on you!” cried Lady Jane, laughing.
She would have thought the whole trick an abominable fraud on the part of Ellen Scott, but quite entered into the fun of the practical joke, since it had been played by Miss Diana Trevelyan. After all, she never made any pretence of being magnanimous or bursting with noble sentiments. She was just an ordinary woman of the world, and a very good mother, who had been horrified at the idea that her eldest son should marry badly, and was delighted to find that he was going to marry well after all; and let any natural mother who would not feel just as she did, find fault with her and call her worldly!
That is the story of that Undesirable Governess they had at King’s Follitt last year, and it explains why Lionel and Jocelyn were married on the same day to two Trevelyan girls who were only very distantly related. In a nice story-book it would of course have been the penniless younger son who would have married the governess-heiress, and the heir of King’s Follitt would have married Anne Trevelyan, who was not particularly well off. But in real life things do not happen in that way, and yet people are happy just the same—when they are.
The darker side of the whole affair was that, after Ellen turned into somebody else, those girls ran perfectly wild, and fell back into their old ways of poaching and exchanging game for chocolates with the postman; and they sat up in the King’s Oak by the lodge and peppered the passing horses on the Malton road with catapults, and potted rooks, and rode steeplechases in the park on the best horses in the stable; and they strenuously did all those things which they should have left undone, to the total exclusion of the other things, till Lady Jane felt that she was going mad, and it looked as if no one but the matron of a police station could ever be satisfactory as a governess at King’s Follitt.