When Margaret answered that she had not yet seen them, Mrs. Danvers, after a short pause of astonishment, gave a vexed laugh. At least, to start with, the laugh was tinged with vexation; but as she continued to laugh the feeling of annoyance was merged into one of hearty amusement.
"That's Hannah all over," she said. "Hannah is jealous of you. She is their nurse, you know, and has been with them since they have been born. She's the only person who can manage them. I can't, and their mother can't, though Joanna would be very angry if she heard I had said that. But I told Hannah to bring the children down to see you here after breakfast. However, as she did not choose to do so, it is no good annoying her by saying anything about it. I will take you up to the nurseries presently, when we have had that nice little chat about my dear cousin. But Joanna," she said, reverting to her daughter and her children, "is always going in for new systems with them. At one time her theory was that they must not be spoiled by having any notice taken of them. During that period they lived entirely in the nursery. I remember I was staying there at the time, and I thought I had never enjoyed a visit to my daughter so much. Next time I went the children were being brought up in the fashion of their great-grandmothers. They were taught to say 'Ma'am' to their mother, and 'Sir' to their father, and were not allowed to sit down in their presence, and never, never to speak unless they were spoken to. I enjoyed that visit too. But the latest and the reigning idea is that they are not to be thwarted or crossed in any way, and as for being punished such barbarity is not to be thought of. If detected in naughtiness they are to be reasoned with only, and if the naughtiness is persisted in it is to be taken for granted that the small sinners are ill, and must be gently nursed into good health and goodness again."
As she listened to this Margaret came to the conclusion that their mother must be an extraordinarily silly woman, but when Mrs. Danvers went on to add that Joanna, after expounding her new theory in detail, had gone away to Norway to fish with her husband, and left her mother to find out how it worked, Margaret smiled outright.
Mrs. Danvers laughed too. "It is rather funny," she said in her good-natured way, "and the worst of it is that Joanna made me promise to give her system a fair trial, and as I never broke my word to any of my children yet, I am giving it a fair trial. And that is why, my dear, I am so glad of your help. When Miss McDonald wrote to me and asked me if I could find a holiday engagement for one of her governesses, I jumped at the chance of having you. For, I said to myself that a governess of Gertrude McDonald's would, of course, have discipline and all that sort of thing at her fingers ends."
"Of course," said poor Margaret rather feebly, as Mrs. Danvers paused not so much for a reply as to gain breath.
"Unyielding firmness without harshness on your side, implicit obedience without fear on theirs is what Joanna aims at I believe," said Mrs. Danvers cheerfully, "and it certainly sounds a delightful method. By the way, if you get on with the children, Joanna has an idea of asking you to stay with her permanently. She is going out to California next spring, and will have to look out for a governess to go with her, as, of course, she is taking the children. Would you like to go, or do you prefer school-work?"
"I—I don't know," stammered Margaret, who totally unprepared for such a proposition, did not know what answer to make. "I should have to ask El——(my friend, I mean) what she thought of it. Ask her advice, I mean."
"Quite so, quite so," Mrs. Danvers said. "But that's all in the future, of course. The first thing you have to do is to make the acquaintance of the children, and, as I said, Hannah has evidently carefully kept them up in the nursery this morning. She is devoted to them, and can't bear the idea of having to share her charge of them with a governess. So I am afraid you may have a little unpleasantness to put up with at first. But she is a good creature, and if you exercise a little tact you will soon be able to smooth her down."
"Yes," said Margaret even more feebly than before. But Mrs. Danvers was not an observant woman, and she was so far from suspecting the hidden dismay with which her new holiday governess listened to her, that later in the day she gave it as her opinion that underneath her exceedingly quiet manner Miss Carson concealed an iron will, and that the reign of stern discipline she was about to inaugurate would have an excellent effect on her grandchildren. And she was genuinely astonished at the derision with which her own children received this prophecy.