“Yes, you. Though I should be sorry to part with such an old servant, yet one may keep a servant too long.”
“Old! I wasn’t always old!” she broke out passionately.
“Therefore you were not always in receipt of such good wages as you get now. Now go in and get tea ready. And take care the toast is not burnt again.”
I could see that she glared at him with her great black eyes like a tigress at bay, but she did not dare to answer again, but slunk away cowed into the house. I was not surprised, for the tone of cold command with which he spoke those last insignificant words inspired me with a sudden sense of fear of him, with a feeling that I was face to face with an irresistible will, such as I should have thought it impossible for light-hearted Mr. Rayner to inspire.
The whole scene had puzzled me a little. What did Sarah the housemaid want to stand like a spy in the shrubbery for? How had Mr. Rayner seen and recognized her without seeming even to look in that direction? Was there any deeper meaning under the words that had passed between them? There was suppressed passion in the woman’s manner which could hardly have been stirred by her master’s orders to keep to the garden paths and not to burn the toast; and there was a hard decision in Mr. Rayner’s which I had never noticed before, even when he was seriously displeased. I waited behind the curtain by the window until long after he had gone back towards the study, feeling guiltily that his sharp eyes must find me out, innocently as I had played the spy. If he were to speak to me in the tone that he had used to Sarah, I felt that I should run away or burst into tears, or do something else equally foolish and unbecoming in an instructress of youth. But no one molested me. When I crept away from the window and went softly upstairs to my room, there was no one about, and no sound to be heard in the house save a faint clatter of tea-things in the servants’ hall. At tea-time Mr. Rayner was as bright as usual, and laughingly declared that they should never trust me to go to church by myself again.
That night I pondered Mr. Reade’s warning to me to leave the Alders; but I soon decided that the suggestion was quite unpractical. For, putting aside the fact that I had no stronger grounds than other people’s prejudice and suspicion for thinking it imprudent to stay, and that I could see no sign of the dangers Mr. Reade had hinted at so vaguely, what reason could I offer either to my employers or to my mother for wishing to go? This sort of diffidence at inventing excuses is a strong barrier to action in young people. And, if I had overcome this diffidence sufficiently to offer a plausible motive for leaving the Alders, where was I to go?
My father was dead; my mother, who had been left with very little to live upon, had been glad, at the time when it was agreed that I should begin to earn my own living, to accept an offer to superintend the household of a brother of hers who had not long lost his wife. My uncle would, I know, give me a home while I looked out for another situation; but I understood now how few people seemed to want the services of “a young lady, aged eighteen, who preferred children under twelve.”
And what a bad recommendation it would be to have left my first situation within a month! And what could I say I did it for? If I said, Because the house was damp, people would think I was too particular. And, if I said I was afraid my pupil’s mother was mad, they would want some better reason than the fact that she talked very little and moved very softly for believing me. And, if I said I had been told the place was dangerous, and so thought I had better go, they would think I was mad myself. And, besides these objections to my leaving, was there not, to a young mind, an unacknowledged attraction in the faint air of mystery that hung about the place, which would have made the ordinary British middle-class household seem rather uninteresting after it? So I decided to pay no attention to vague warnings, but to stay where I was certainly, on the whole, well off.
The next morning, as I put on a dainty china-blue cotton frock that I had never worn before, I could not help noticing how much better I was looking than when I lived in London. Instead of being pale, I had now a pink color in my cheeks, and my eyes seemed to look larger and brighter than they used to do. After a minute’s pleased contemplation of my altered appearance, I turned from the glass in shame. What would my mother say if she could see how vain her daughter was growing? Without another look even to see whether I had put in my brooch straight, I went downstairs. Mr. Rayner was already in the dining-room, but no one else was there yet. He put down his newspaper and smiled at me.
“Come into the garden for a few minutes until the rest of the family assembles,” said he; and I followed him through the French window on to the lawn.