I often wondered why they slept there. I knew by the doors and windows that the ground-floor of that wing contained two rooms, a large and a small one. My own was in the same wing, but on the story above; and over mine was a turret that looked out high above the trees, but which was not used, so far as I knew. Haidee slept on the ground-floor in a cot in the dressing-room next to her parents’ bedroom, I knew, while the nursery and servants’ rooms and several spare-rooms were on the upper story besides my own. Why did not Mr. and Mrs. Rayner make one of these their own, and lift themselves out of the reeking damp which must be poisonous to delicate Mrs. Rayner? Even I, who slept in the upper story, soon began to lose my color and my appetite, and to feel at first languid, and then really ill. I showed the change more quickly than any one, being less used to the place; but little fragile Haidee soon followed suit, and grew more wan and listless than ever, until the lustre of her large blue eyes and the unhealthy flush that began to burn in her thin little cheeks frightened me and drew me to the child as her strange reserve had prevented my being drawn before. She answered to the change in my manner as sensitive children do, and one day, putting her little dry hand in mine, she said—
“You are getting thin and white too, like mamma and me. We’ll all go away and be angels together, Miss Christie, now you have begun to love me.”
I burst into tears; I had begun to love the fairy-like little creature long before, if she had only known it. Now I took her up in my arms and rested her flaxen head on my breast, and she said her lessons there that day. And after that, without any more explanation or comment, the sympathy between the child and me was perfect.
But as, on the one hand, the little one’s friendship was a great solace to me, so, on the other, it brought me fresh trouble. For in Mrs. Rayner’s indifferent eyes I could see now a dull flame of jealousy whenever Haidee put her languid little head upon my knee, or came up and said, “Tell me a story, Miss Christie—about fairies and the good Prince Caramel.” I began, from merely pitying, almost to dislike Mrs. Rayner. Why, if she was so fond of Haidee, did she not come into the schoolroom to see her, or take her out during her play-hours, instead of leaving her the whole day with me, without coming to see her until bedtime, when the child was put to bed in the room next to hers, while she herself went into the drawing-room? It was unreasonable to expect to keep the child’s undivided love like that; and yet at meals, when we all met together, she seemed to look at Haidee with strained wistful eyes, as if she loved the child, yet dared not show it. But what was there to prevent her, except the shroud of reserve she seemed to have wrapped round herself?
The weather had been so bad that for two Sundays we had not been able to go to church at all, for which I was very sorry, more sorry than I can tell; one misses church dreadfully in the country. So we knew nothing of what was going on in the parish for two whole weeks. We did not have to wait until the church-porch gathering on the following Sunday, though; for on the second day after the weather had at last grown fine again, when we were all in the drawing-room reading the morning papers over our coffee, as we always did after our early dinner, we heard the sound of a horse’s hoofs coming down the drive. Mr. Rayner threw open the window and stepped out on to the broad space of gravel before the front of the house.
“Hallo, Laurence, you are as welcome as the dove was to the ark! Come in, come in; the ladies will make even more of you than usual. We have had no visitors lately, but an occasional mermaid came up the river from the sea and overflowed into our garden.”
“Can’t come in, thanks, Mr. Rayner—I’m too much splashed; the roads are awful still. I’ve only come with a note from Mrs. Manners to Mrs. Rayner.”
“Nonsense! Come in, mud and all.”
So he tied up his horse and came in.
Mrs. Manners was the clergyman’s wife, and generally sent her notes by one of her half-dozen boys; and I confess I thought, when I heard what a flimsy sort of errand had brought Mr. Reade, that perhaps—that perhaps some other silly motive had helped to bring him too. But my only half-acknowledged fancy was disappointed. Not only did Mr. Reade devote all his conversation to Mr. and Mrs. Rayner, with an occasional word to Haidee, but, when I made a remark, he did not even look at me. I confess I was piqued; I certainly did not want Mr. Reade either to look at me or speak to me, but surely common courtesy, especially to a dependant, demanded that he should not ignore my presence altogether. So I thought I would take a small and impotent revenge by ignoring his, and, when Haidee got up and slipped out of the window to look at Mr. Reade’s horse, I followed her. She was not a bit afraid of him, but ran into the house for some sugar, and then, flattening out her small hand with a piece on it, fed him, and talked to him in a language which he seemed to understand, though I could not.