[MISS WEST'S CHRISTMAS ADVENTURE.]
I.
MISS WEST, I will thank you to see that the school-books and the school-work are in their proper places, and the school-room locked for the holidays."
The speaker, Miss Sandys, was the proprietor of Carter Hill School, and Miss West was the governess. The season was Christmas, and the children, without an exception, had departed rejoicing.
With a sense of liberty as keen as the children's, but with a glee of a decidedly soberer kind, Miss West executed the commission, and then took her place beside her superior at the parlour-fire.
Miss Sandys was quite an elderly woman. She was over fifty, and had grown grey in the service. Her features, even in her prime, had been gaunt, like the rest of her person. But she had mellowed with age, and had become what the Germans call charakteristisch, and what we may term original and sagacious. She dressed well—that is, soberly and substantially—in soft wools or strong silks, as she possibly did not find it easy to do in her youth. She was stately, if somewhat stiff, in her deportment. At present she felt intoxicated at the prospect of enjoying for ten days the irresponsibility of private life.
Miss West had not by any means attained the Indian summer of Miss Sandys; she was still in the more trying transition stage. In spite of the shady hollows in the cheeks, and the haggard lines about the mouth, she was a young woman yet. Indeed, had it not been for those hollows and lines, she would have been pretty—as she was when the clear cheeks had no wanness in their paleness, but were round and soft; when the straight mouth pouted ever so little, and the sharp eyes were bright, and the fine dark hair was profuse instead of scanty. But she laid no claim to prettiness now, and dressed as plainly as feminine propriety would allow.
As she sat in the linen and drugget-covered parlour, which was a drawing-room when in full-dress, she could not help a half-conscious restraint creeping over her. But this was not because Miss Sandys was an ogress, rather because she herself had grown semi-professional even in holiday trim. She looked into the compressed fire in the high, old-fashioned grate, and wondered how she would pass the coming idle week. She had spent a good many idle weeks at Carter Hill before; but they always came upon her afresh with a sense of strangeness, bringing at the same time a tide of old associations.
Miss Sandys was a blunt woman by nature, and it was only by great effort that she had become fine-edged. So she said to Miss West, with a sort of naïve abruptness, "I'll tell you what, Miss West, we'll have cake to tea, because there are only you and I, and it is the first night of the holidays; and we'll have a strong cup, since we have all the teapot to ourselves. I think I shall try my hand this week at some of my old tea-cakes and pies and things which my mother taught me to bake. I am going to have my cousin Jamie and his wife here. He is a rough sailor, and his conversation does not suit before the girls. She was only a small farmer's daughter, and cannot behave prettily at all. But they are worthy people, and are the nearest relations I have left in the world. Perhaps I'll take you to see them in the summer, Miss West. Ah, dear! it is liberty-hall at my cousin Jamie's little place. Peggy's Haven, he calls it, after his old ship and his old wife. But it is a fine change for me, though it would not do for the young people to hear about it—you understand, Miss West."