“You cannot do it, Anne. You cannot send a footman to the cottage and ask the man to come up here. In the first place, he is probably a socialist, and wouldn’t come. In the second place—well, it isn’t nice.”
Anne laughed outright. “Dear Matty, your favourite adjective! With the negative prefix it applies equally to a burnt pudding, or to a woman who leaves her husband in order to run away with another man. But you’re a dear, and I won’t laugh at you; and you [Pg 99]shan’t be present at the concert if you’d rather not.”
Miss Haldane spoke a little stiffly. “If you will be foolish, Anne, I must be present at your folly. It is the only way in which I can merit the liberal salary you give me.”
“Dear Matty, what nonsense!” said Anne.
Again there was silence, and it lasted some time. Butterflies flitted in the still air, bees droned lazily in a lime-tree to the west of the terrace, and once or twice a dragonfly skimmed past with a flash of iridescent wings.
Miss Haldane looked at Anne lying back in the deck-chair, which was placed at its lowest angle. Her own was as upright as was consistent with its nature. She had a piece of crochet in her hands, and was working industriously. Matilda Haldane was never idle, and she never lolled. From her earliest years she had been told to “get something useful to do,” if there happened to be a single spare moment in the ordinary routine of walks, meals, and lessons. Later she was obliged, on her own account, to get something useful to do, and to keep doing it, if she was to live in the smallest degree as she [Pg 100]imagined a lady should live. There had been nothing extravagant about Miss Haldane’s ideas, either, but they had included a seat in a church where sittings were rented and threepence to be placed Sunday morning and evening in the offertory-bag.
The useful occupation which provided her with a means of livelihood had been monotonous—how monotonous only Miss Haldane knew. Then suddenly, and by some intervention of providence, Lady Anne Garland came across her path, and at a moment when Lady Anne was—to use her own parlance—tired of companions who were either entirely opinionated or entirely deprecating, or, worse still, who dissolved into floods of injured tears if told that Anne wished to receive a guest alone.
Something about the little dried-up woman—probably her quiet and indomitable pluck under adverse conditions—appealed to Anne. A month after their first meeting, Miss Haldane found herself transplanted to Anne’s London house, with a salary that far exceeded her wildest dreams. The only fly in her ointment was the thought that she did nothing to merit it. Merely to [Pg 101]live in a house, to be waited upon by servants, to eat dainty food, and to drive with Anne in the Parks, seemed to her an utterly inadequate return for the money she received. It was, however, all that Lady Anne wished her to do. After a time she grew accustomed to the fact that this was all that was expected of her. Her own innate dignity and Anne’s charming and frank manner prevented her from feeling herself a dependent, and an odd but very sincere friendship was the result.
This was now the third summer that she had sat on the terrace and watched Anne lazing in the sunlight. Her beauty, her youthful vigour, in spite of her present indolent pose, struck Miss Haldane anew.
Suddenly Miss Haldane spoke. “Anne,” she said, “I wonder you have never married.”