It was then that she met little Sybil Quarly, who promptly took an unaccountable, but very strong, liking to her. In a short time Sybil learnt which were the hours spent by Miss Mason in the garden, and from that moment those hours saw a fair-haired child in short petticoats busy in the flower-beds with her. To an onlooker Miss Mason’s manner would have appeared almost surly, but Sybil, with the infallible instinct of childhood, recognized the tenderness beneath the gruff exterior. The two became fast friends.
For seven years Sybil helped Miss Mason pull up weeds, destroy slugs, bud roses, and take cuttings of carnations. She called her “Granny,” and she confided all her childish woes and griefs to her. Her parents were conventional people, also they were somewhat strict and unsympathetic. They did not in the least understand Sybil’s timid nature. Miss Mason saw, to her sorrow, that the child was being driven to subterfuge and petty untruth by an overharsh system of treatment. But she was powerless to do anything. Mrs. Quarly would have resented the smallest interference. For seven years Miss Mason gave the child all the tenderness at her disposal. At the end of that time Sybil’s parents left the little town and took her to Pangbourne.
During the next three or four years Sybil and Miss Mason kept up a fitful correspondence. From much that the girl left unsaid Miss Mason felt that she was not happy. Had she herself been gifted with the pen of a ready writer, she might indirectly have sought the girl’s confidence, but neither written nor spoken words came easily to her. There were times—and those when she most longed for the power of speech—when she felt herself possessed of a dumb dog. She wrote and told Sybil that the roses were in bloom, that she had pickled a hundred and fifty slugs in salt and water after one shower of rain, that the Shirley poppies they had planted one year were spreading like weeds over the garden. She heard from Sybil that she had made a few new friends, among them one, Cecily Mainwaring, who lived in London, and that she stayed with her occasionally. Her letters, however, gave mere facts; there was no hint as to her thoughts, or whether she were happy in her new surroundings. And Miss Mason longed to ask her, yet all the time she could write of nothing but pickled slugs and the blight on rose-trees. And after four years Sybil’s letters suddenly ceased. Miss Mason wrote three times and received no answer. Then she, too, stopped writing. And thus the years, as far as Miss Mason was concerned, rolled on.
But, at last, one sunny morning when a boy and girl approached the gate they saw no one in the garden, and the blinds in the house pulled down. Old Miss Stanhope had died quietly in her sleep that morning, and after forty-three years Miss Mason had deserted the flower-beds. She was sitting in the desolate drawing-room, unable yet to grasp the meaning of the one really important event which had occurred in her life since she was five years old.
Four days later Miss Stanhope’s will was read. Miss Mason had been left sole heiress to an income which amounted to something like fifteen thousand a year. No one but Miss Stanhope herself and her trustees had had the smallest conception of her wealth. The terms of the will, which appeared in the local papers, had the effect of taking every one’s breath away.
Miss Mason spoke to the lawyer regarding it.
“Can’t spend anything like that amount a year,” she said gruffly. “Don’t know how Miss Stanhope managed to. Much rather you gave me one thousand and looked after the rest. Shan’t find it easy to spend one.”
Mr. Davis stared for a moment. Then he suddenly realized—and by a marvellous leap of intelligence on his part—that Miss Mason was under the impression that he would yearly press fifteen thousand sovereigns into her palm. The question of banks and cheque-books had not presented itself to her mind.
During the next half-hour Henry Davis found himself explaining matters to Miss Mason much as he would have explained them to a child of twelve. Miss Mason grasped the situation instantly.
“Then before you go you’d better show me how to draw a cheque,” she said. “Think that was your expression. I’m not imbecile, though when a woman of sixty doesn’t know the first principles of banks and cheque-books you might think she was.”