“Indeed, I want you to treat me just as an ordinary servant, except that I don’t want any pay or to be a burden on you in any way,” the old lady declared. “You see, I was in service all my life, with very good families, too, till I saved enough money to buy the cottage and set up for myself. So I do know my place, dear Mrs. Carling, and I shouldn’t have assumed to come to you, uninvited, under any other circumstances.”
“You’re going to stay as my dear and honoured and most welcome guest,” Grace assured her. “And I promise you that in every other respect you shall have all your own way, and cherish me as much as ever you like, when you are rested.”
Miss Culpepper’s anxious, loving old eyes had already noted the changes which these weeks of sorrow and anxiety had wrought in the girl since those few days of radiant happiness at the cottage. She looked, indeed, more beautiful than ever, but with a pathetic, etherealized beauty, fragile to a degree.
“It’s high time somebody came to take care of her; she’s on the very verge of a breakdown,” Miss Culpepper inwardly decided, and unobtrusively entered on her self-imposed labour of love. Within twenty-four hours she and Dear Brutus were as much at home in the little flat as if they had lived there all their lives—and the cheerful confidence with which she regarded the future, as it concerned Roger and Grace, was an unspeakable comfort to her young hostess, while her amazing phraseology was entertaining as ever, and provided Grace with a new occupation—that of committing to memory the quaintest of the old lady’s expressions in order to retail them to Roger when next she visited him.
“Never fear that everything will be made clear in the long run, and your dear husband triumphantly vitiated,” she declared. “It’s terribly hard for you both now, but keep your courage up, mettez votre suspirance in Dieu: that means ‘put your hope in God,’ as I dare say you know. You’ll wonder where I picked up such a lot of French,” she continued complacently. “It was when I was a girl living in Paris with one of my ladies, and I’ve never forgotten it in all these years.”
She sighed, and lapsed into silence, gazing meditatively into the fire. Grace, lying on the sofa, with Dear Brutus curled up in her arms, watched the wistful, gentle old face, and wondered what the little woman was pondering over.
“How long were you in Paris?” she asked presently.
Miss Culpepper started, and resumed her knitting with a slightly flurried action.
“I’m afraid I was relevée in the past,” she confessed. “I was only there for about two years—the very happiest in all my life: at least the last year was. Then my lady’s husband died suddenly—he was Sir Henry Robinson, who had a post at the Embassy, a very nice gentleman though a little pomptious sometimes—and the establishment had to be broken up. I came back to England, and soon got another place, a very good one—again with a lady of title, where I stayed for many years. And—and that’s all!”
Again she was silent, apparently absorbed in her knitting, but Grace saw two tears roll down her withered cheeks, and wondered more than ever what train of remembrance had roused the old lady’s emotion, though she did not like to question her further.