‘I’m sorry to know it’s true,’ Ernest said, taking her hand gently; ‘very, very sorry. We must do what we can to lighten the trouble for them.’
‘Yes,’ Edie replied, looking at him through her tears; ‘I mean to try. At any rate, I won’t be a burden to them myself any longer. I’ve written already up to an agency in London to see whether they can manage to get me a place as a nursery-governess.’
‘You a governess, Edie!’ Ernest exclaimed hastily, with a gesture of deprecation. ‘You a governess! Why, my own precious darling, you would never do for it!’
‘Oh yes, indeed,’ Edie answered quickly, ‘I really think I could, Ernest. Of course I don’t know very much—not judged by a standard like yours or our dear Harry’s. Harry used to say all a woman could ever know was to find out how ignorant she was. Dear fellow! he was so very learned himself he couldn’t understand the complacency of little perky, half-educated schoolmistresses. But still, I know quite as much, I think, in my little way, as a great many girls who get good places in London as governesses. I can speak French fairly well, you know, and read German decently; and then dear Harry took such a lot of pains to make me get up books that he thought were good for me—history and so forth—and even to teach me a little, a very little, Latin. Of course I know I’m dreadfully ignorant; but not more so, I really believe, than a great many girls whom people consider quite well-educated enough to teach their daughters. After all, the daughters themselves are only women, too, you see, Ernest, and don’t expect more than a smattering of book-knowledge, and a few showy fashionable accomplishments.’
‘My dear Edie,’ Ernest answered, smiling at her gently in spite of her tearful earnestness; ‘you quite misunderstand me. It wasn’t THAT I was thinking of at all. There are very few governesses and very few women anywhere who have half the knowledge and accomplishments and literary taste and artistic culture that you have; very few who have had the advantage of associating daily with such a man as poor Harry; and if you really wanted to get a place of the sort, the mere fact that you’re Harry’s sister, and that he interested himself in superintending your education, ought, by itself, to ensure your getting a very good one. But what I meant was rather this—I couldn’t endure to think that you should be put to all the petty slights and small humiliations that a governess has always to endure in rich families. You don’t know what it is, Edie; you can’t imagine the endless devices for making her feel her dependence and her artificial inferiority that these great people have devised in their cleverness and their Christian condescension. You don’t know what it is, Edie, and I pray heaven you may never know; but I do, for I’ve seen it—and, darling, I CAN’T let you expose yourself to it.’
To say the truth, at that moment there rose very vividly before Ernest’s eyes the picture of poor shy Miss Merivale, the governess at Dunbude to little Lady Sybil, Lynmouth’s younger sister. Miss Merivale was a rector’s daughter—an orphan, and a very nice girl in her way; and Ernest had often thought to himself while he lived at the Exmoors’, ‘With just the slightest turn of Fortune’s wheel that might be my own Edie.’ Now, for himself he had never felt any sense of social inferiority at all at Dunbude; he was an Oxford man, and by the ordinary courtesy of English society he was always treated accordingly in every way as an equal. But there were galling distinctions made in Miss Merivale’s case which he could not think of even at the time without a blush of ingenuous shame, and which he did not like now even to mention to pretty, shrinking, eager little Edie. One thing alone was enough to make his cheeks burn whenever he thought of it—a little thing, and yet how unendurable! Miss Merivale lunched with the family and with her pupil in the middle of the day, but she did not dine with them in the evening. She had tea by herself instead in Lady Sybil’s little school-room. Many a time when Ernest had been out walking with her on the terrace just before dinner, and the dressing-gong sounded, he had felt almost too ashamed to go in at the summons and leave the poor little governess out there alone with her social disabilities. The gong seemed to raise such a hideous artificial barrier between himself and that delicately-bred, sensitive, cultivated English lady. That Edie should be subjected to such a life of affronts as that was simply unendurable. True, there are social distinctions of the sort which even Ernest Le Breton, communist as he was, could not practically get over; but then they were distinctions familiarised to the sufferers from childhood upward, and so perhaps a little less insupportable. But that Harry Oswald’s sister—that Edie, his own precious delicate little Edie, a dainty English wild-flower of the tenderest, should be transplanted from her own appreciative home to such a chilly and ungenial soil as that—the very idea of it was horribly unspeakable.
‘But, Ernest,’ Edie answered, breaking in upon his bitter meditation, ‘I assure you I wouldn’t mind it a bit. I know—it’s very dreadful, but then,’—and here she blushed one of her pretty apologetic little blushes—‘you know I’m used to it. People in business always are. They expect to be treated just like servant—now THAT, I know you’ll say, is itself a piece of hubris, the expression of a horrid class prejudice. And so it is, no doubt. But they do, for all that. As dear Harry used to say, even the polypes in aristocratic useless sponges at the sea-bottom won’t have anything to say to the sponges of commerce. I’m sure nobody I could meet in a governess’s place could possibly be worse in that respect than poor old Miss Catherine Luttrell.’
‘That may be true, Edie darling,’ Ernest answered, not caring to let her know that he had overheard a specimen of the Calcombe squirearchy, ‘but in any case I don’t want you to be troubled now, either with old Miss Luttrell or any other bitter old busybodies. I want to speak seriously to you about a very different project. Just look at this advertisement.’
He took a scrap of paper from his pocket and handed it to Edie. It ran thus:—
‘WANTED at Pilbury Regis Grammar School, Dorset, a
Third Classical Master. Must be a Graduate of Oxford or
Cambridge; University Prizeman preferred. If unmarried,
to take house duty. Commence September 20th. Salary,
200L a year. Apply, as above, to the Rev. J. Greatrex,
D.D., Head Master.’