Miss Sophia Wharf owned a cosy little house at the far end of the cliffs, and just at the point where Marport begins to melt into the country. It was a modern house comfortably furnished and brilliant with electric lights. The garden in front of it was well taken care of, there were scarlet and white shades to the windows and flower boxes filled with blossoms on the sills. Everyone who passed remarked on the beauty of the house, and Miss Wharf was always pleased when she heard them envy her possessions. She liked to possess a Naboth's Vineyard of her own, and appreciated it the more, when others would have liked to take it. She had an income of one thousand a year and therefore could live very comfortably. The house (Ivy Lodge was it's highly original name) was her own, bought in the days when Marport was nothing but a fishing village. She knew everyone in the neighbourhood, was a staunch friend to the vicar who was high church and quite after her own heart in the use of banners, incense, candles and side-altars, and on the whole was one of the leading ladies of the place. She had the reputation of being charitable, but this was owing to Miss Pewsey who constantly trumpeted the bestowal of any stray shilling being by her patroness.
Miss Wharf was a lady of good family, but had quarrelled with her relatives. She was a tall, cold, blonde woman who had once been handsome and still retained a certain portion of good looks, in spite of her forty and more years. She lived with her niece Olivia the child of a sister long since dead, and with Miss Pewsey, to whom she gave a home as a companion. But Miss Wharf well knew, that Lavinia Pewsey was worth her weight in gold owing to the way she praised up her good, kind, devoted, loving, sweet, friend. The adjectives are Miss Pewsey's own, but some people said that Sophia Wharf did not deserve to have them attached to her. The lady had her enemies, and these openly declared, as the Major had done, that she was a mass of granite. Other people, less prejudiced, urged that Miss Wharf looked after Olivia, who was a penniless orphan. To which the grumblers retorted that Miss Wharf liked someone to vent her temper on, and that the poor girl, being too pretty, did duty as a whipping boy. This was possibly true, for Olivia and her aunt did not get on well together. In her own way the girl looked as cold as Miss Wharf, but this coldness was merely a mask to hide a warm and loving nature, while Miss Wharf was an ice-berg through and through. However, on the whole, Sophia Wharf was well liked, and took care to make the most of her looks and her moderate income and her reputation as a charitable lady. And Miss Pewsey was the show-woman who displayed her patroness's points to their best advantage.
The drawing-room of Ivy Lodge was a flimsy, pretty, feminine, room, furnished in a gim-crack fashion, of the high art style. The floor was waxed, and covered with Persian praying mats, the chairs were gilt and had spindle legs the settee was Empire, the piano was encased in green wood and adorned with much brass, the sofa was Louis Quinze and covered with brocade, and there were many tables of rose-wood, dainty and light, heaped high with useless nick-knacks.
The walls of pale green were adorned with water-colour pictures, and many mirrors draped with Liberty silk. Everywhere were large bowls of flowers, miniatures of Miss Wharf at various times of her life, curiosities from China and Japan and the near East, and all sorts of odds and ends which Miss Wharf had collected on her travels. Not that she had been to the East, for the evidences of civilisation in those lands came from Dr. Forge and Major Tidman, but Miss Wharf had explored Germany, Switzerland and Italy and consequently had brought home cuckoo-clocks, quaint carvings, pictures of the Madonna, Etruscan idols and such like things with which every tourist loads himself or herself. The result was, that the drawing-room looked like a curiosity shop, but it was considered to be one of the prettiest drawing-rooms in Essex.
Miss Wharf looked too large and too substantial for the frail furniture of the room. She had a double chin and was certainly very stout. Very wisely she had a special arm-chair placed in the window--from which she could see all that was going on,--and here she sat working most of the day. She was great on doing fancy articles for bazaars, and silk ties for such gentlemen as she admired, for Miss Wharf, old maid as she was, liked male society. The Major was her great admirer, so was young Walker, Lady Jabe's nephew. Sophia was not very sure of this last gentleman, as she shrewdly suspected--prompted by Miss Pewsey--that he admired Olivia. Rupert also admired Olivia and wanted to marry her, a proceeding which Miss Wharf objected to. Miss Pewsey supported her in this, for both women were envious of the youth which had passed from them for ever. But Miss Wharf had also another reason, which Miss Pewsey knew, but of which Olivia was ignorant. Hitherto Sophia had kept it from the girl but this afternoon in a fit of rage she let it out. The explosion did not come at once, for Lady Jabe was in the room drinking tea, and Miss Pewsey was flitting about, filling odd vases with flowers. Olivia sat on the settee very straight and very cold, looking dark and handsome, and altogether too splendid a woman for her aunt to tolerate.
"Can't you do something?" said Miss Wharf turning her jealous eyes on the girl. "I should think you must be tired, twiddling your thumbs all day."
"I'll do whatever you wish me to do," said Olivia coldly.
"Then help Lavinia with the flowers."
Olivia rose to do so, but Miss Pewsey refused her assistance in a shrill speech spoken as usual between her teeth and with an emphasis on every other word.
"Oh no dear, dear, Sophia," cried Miss Pewsey, "I have just finished, and I may say that my eye for colour is better than Olivia's--you don't mind my saying so, darling," she added to the girl.