Bell sighed and shook her head whenever Miss Fay was mentioned. She bridled with pent-up indignation, as if the girl’s existence were an injury to her, Martha Bell. “If I hadn’t nursed Mrs. Fausset when she was the loveliest infant that ever drew breath, I shouldn’t feel it so much,” said Bell; and then tears would spring to her eyes and chokings would convulse her throat, and the housekeeper would shake her head and sympathise mysteriously.
At the end of July the establishment migrated from Parchment Street to The Hook, Mr. Fausset’s riverside villa between Chertsey and Windsor. The Hook was an expanse of meadow-land bordered with willows, round which the river made a loop; and on this enchanted bit of ground—a spot loved by the river-god—Mr. Fausset had built for himself the most delightful embodiment of that much-abused word villa; a long, low, white house, with spacious rooms, broad corridors, a double flight of marble stairs, meeting on a landing lit by an Italian cupola—a villa surrounded with a classic colonnade, and looking out upon peerless gardens sloping to the willow-shadowed stream.
To Fay The Hook seemed like a vision of Paradise. It was almost happiness even to her impatient spirit to sit in a corner of those lovely grounds, screened from the outer world by a dense wall of Portugal laurels and arbutus, with the blue water and the low, flat meadows of the further shore for her only prospect.
Miss Colville was left behind in London. For Fay and Mildred life was a perpetual holiday. Mrs. Fausset was almost as much in society at The Hook as she had been in London. Visitors came and visitors went. She was never alone. There were parties at Henley and Marlow, and Wargrave and Goring. Two pairs of horses were kept hard at work carrying Mr. and Mrs. Fausset about that lovely riverside landscape to garden-parties and dinners, picnics and regattas. John Fausset went because his wife liked him to go, and because he liked to see her happy and admired. The two girls were left, for the most part, to their own devices, under the supervision of Bell. They lived in the gardens, with an occasional excursion into the unknown world along the river. There was a trustworthy under-gardener, who was a good oarsman, and in his charge Mildred was allowed to go on the water in a big wherry, which looked substantial enough to have carried a select boarding-school.
This life by the Thames was the nearest approach to absolute happiness which Fay had ever known; but for her there was to be no such thing as unbroken bliss. In the midst of the sultry August weather Mildred fell ill—a mild attack of scarlet fever, which sounded less alarming to Mrs. Fausset’s ear, because the doctor spoke of it as scarlatina. It was a very mild case, the local practitioner told Mrs. Fausset; there was no occasion to send for a London physician; there was no occasion for alarm. Mildred must keep her bed for a fortnight, and must be isolated from the rest of the house. Her own maid might nurse her if she had had the complaint.
“How could she have caught the fever?” Mrs. Fausset asked, with an injured air; and there was a grand investigation, but no scarlet fever to be heard of nearer than Maidenhead.
“People are so artful in hiding these things,” said Mrs. Fausset; and ten minutes afterwards she begged the doctor not to mention Mildred’s malady to any of her neighbours.
“We have such a host of engagements, and crowds of visitors coming from London,” she said. “People are so ridiculously nervous. Of course I shall be extremely careful.”
The doctor gave elaborate instructions about isolation. Such measures being taken, Mrs. Fausset might receive all fashionable London with safety.
“And it is really such a mild case that you need not put yourself about in any way,” concluded the doctor.