This preoccupation kept me from thinking of other things. I was always going over yesterday's conversation with Mr. Dabney, planning to-morrow's, enjoying to-day's. Mrs. Brane seemed to watch us with sympathy. After a week or so, she put an end to what she called “Paul Dabney's short comings and long goings” and invited him to stay with us. He accepted, and I was wonderfully happy. I felt very young for the first time in my whole sad life. I remember this period as a sort of shadowy green stretch in a long, horrible, rocky journey. It came—the quiet, shady stretch—soon enough to an end.
CHAPTER V—“NOT IN THE DAYTIME, MA'AM”
MARY'S labors and mine did not last very long. At the end of a week, a promising couple applied for the position described in Mrs. Brane's advertisement. They drove up to the house in a hired hack one morning, and Mrs. Brane and I interviewed them in my little office. They were English people, and had one or two super-excellent references. These were rather antiquated, to be sure, dating to a time before the couple's marriage, but they explained that for a long while they had been living on their savings, but that now the higher cost of living had forced them to go into service again.
The woman would have been very handsome except for a defect in her proportions: her face was very much too large. Also, there was a lack of expression in the large, heavy-lidded eyes. The man was the most discreet type of English house servant imaginable, with side whiskers and a small, thin-lipped, slightly caved-in mouth. His eyes were so small that they were almost negligible in the long, narrow head. Their general appearance, however, was presentable, and their manner left nothing to be desired. To me, especially, they were so respectful, so docile, so eager to serve, that I found it almost disconcerting. They had the oddest way of fixing their eyes on me, as though waiting for some sort of signal. Sometimes, I fancied that, far down underneath the servility of those two pairs of eyes, there was a furtive expression of something I could not quite translate, fear, perhaps, or—how can I express it?—a sort of fearful awareness of secret understanding. Perhaps there is no better way to describe it than to say that I should not have been astonished if, looking up quickly into the woman's large, blank, handsome face, I should have surprised a wink. And she would have expected me to understand the wink.
Of course, I did not gather all these impressions at once. It was only as the days went by that I accumulated them. Once, and once only, Henry Lorrence, the new man, was guilty of a real impertinence. I had been busy in the bookroom with my interminable, but delightful, task of dusting and arranging Mr. Brane's books in Paul Dabney's company, and, hearing Mary's voice calling from the garden rather anxiously for “Miss Gale,” I came out suddenly into the hall. Henry was standing there near the door of the bookroom, doing nothing that I could see, though he certainly had a dust-cloth in his hand. He looked not at all abashed by my discovery of him; on the contrary, that indescribable look of mutual understanding or of an expectation of mutual understanding took strong possession of his face.
“I see you're keepin' your eyes on him, madam,” said he softly, jerking his head towards the room where I had left Mr. Dabney.
I was vexed, of course, and I suppose my face showed it. My reproof was not so severe, however, as to cause such a look of cowering fear. Henry turned pale, his thin, loose lips seemed to find themselves unable to fit together properly. He stammered out an abject apology, and melted away in the hall.
I stood for several minutes staring after him, I remember, and when, turning, I found that Mr. Dabney had followed me to the door and was watching both me and the departing man, I was distinctly and unreasonably annoyed with him.