"Oh! I say, baby, ain't lessons over yet?"
Three times a week, when her correspondence was done, and a wire basket full of square, rough envelopes with scarlet seals awaited the afternoon post, Lady Anne would go riding in the Park. She stumped through the hall in a short habit and wide-brimmed billycock hat, under whose elastic band the uses of the yellow-white knot of hair became suddenly obvious, looking more than ever like an abbess: a hunting, not a praying, abbess this time. Outside a stable lad from the mews held a tall, nervous horse by the head. Lady Anne would hold the child up to pat the hairy, quivering nose, bid her have no fear of the sliding eyes; would run her fingers down the horse's flanks and legs, maybe pick up and inspect a hoof cunningly; at last, jumping into her saddle out of the groom's hand, would straighten the sidling beast with one blow of her riding crop on his buttock, and be off, her right knee almost in line with the maned neck, and holding in the caitiff head with hands that were a proverb in the shires. Fenella always watched her out of sight, her eyes shining—the palms of her hands pressed hard together.
VIII
THE SECOND FLOOR
By this time Miss Rigby might possibly have arisen and be watching the horse and its rider through her curtains. Emilie Rigby was the second of the permanent paying guests. She was tall, languid, graceful and disorderly, of uncertain age, but with a growing opacity of skin and with darkening shadows under her short-sighted eyes to tell of the ebbing life forces within: much younger in the afternoon than in the morning, and recovering her youth hour by hour as the day aged. In her rooms on the second floor she led the spoiled, sensuous life of an odalisque or a Persian cat. She breakfasted in bed, lunched in a wrapper and with her hair coiled carelessly upon her neck, had a hot bath, with elaborations, at three, and left the house an hour later, in a cab whose destinations, despite all efforts of Druce and Kendal, remain conjectural to this day. She dined from home almost nightly, but had few correspondents, and her visitors gave Mrs. Barbour no anxiety. She had a telephone installed in her room, whose sharp summons soon became one of the habitual sounds of the dark, still house. The baffled Druce, carrying up an unascetic luncheon at one, frequently found the door locked in her face and was forced to wait until a conversation, punctuated with bursts of laughter and far too disjointed to be worth listening to through the keyhole, wore itself away. Lady Anne answered for her.
"Respectable?" she exclaimed abruptly, in response to a guarded query. "Of course Jasmine Rigby's respectable. We dined at the same house last month. Only, if I were you——" she hesitated, unwilling to spoil the perfect relief in her landlady's face, "if I were you, I wouldn't have Nelly in and out there too much, once she begins to grow up. Her clothes alone are enough to unsettle the girl."
But it is hard, with four servants and three households to control, to keep an efficient eye upon inquiring youth, whose fingers are already beginning to pluck restlessly at the many hued skirt of life; and the hardship becomes greater when you are filled with pity for a loneliness that is part of your own contriving. As long as Fenella was a very little girl, beyond coaxing her in now and then to pet as one would pet a pretty kitten, Miss Rigby took scant notice of the child. But as she grew in years and stature, and a beauty that was becoming more of the earth and less of the angels was confirmed in her, I am afraid the scented, sophisticated atmosphere of the second floor began to exercise its delayed but inevitable charm. One of those foolish intimacies began which almost every pretty young girl can remember, often with shame and impatience. There was a year when the woman, nearly forty, and the girl, not yet fourteen, were "Jasmine" and "Nelly" to each other; when little cocked-hat notes (oh, how deftly folded!) were apt to lurk under the doily mats on Fenella's dressing-table, to be answered by ignorant, misspelt letters from the blindly adoring child. The jaded woman of fashion and pleasure (no; I don't know what place she filled in her world, nor is speculation worth while) took an early opportunity of showing the little parson's daughter the beauty of her arms and shoulders—talked unreservedly before her, dressed her up in her gowns and lingerie, let her lie upon the bed and prattle while she herself sat before the mirror, waging her unwearied warfare with time—refreshed herself with the girl's homage, laughed away as much as she dared of her innocence, and finally, in a last spasm of confidence, unlocked a drawer, hesitated, and put into the girl's hands a bundle of letters, bidding her, with a flushed cheek and the ghost of a giggle, to read them over and to let her know how their literary beauties affected her. "When you've read them," said she, "maybe I'll tell you who they came from."
Fenella left the room puzzled, a little frightened, but with no instinct to tell her that possibly she was holding her damnation in her hand.
What happened next? One of those happy accidents, perhaps, that good angels know how to arrange. The packet was returned, unopened, next morning, by Lady Anne, in the course of an interview which left her fellow-lodger considerable repairs to effect before she faced the world anew. An hour later the good genius, habited for her ride, knocked timidly at the door of Mrs. Barbour's sanctum in the hitherto unvisited nether regions.
Mrs. Barbour rose to her feet when she saw who her caller was, but Lady Anne signed for her to remain seated. She seemed nervous and awkward, and put her hands to her side. They say her horse kicked her there the day she broke her ankle; oh! only a touch; no notice was taken of it at the time.