Mrs. Die let the girl alone for the most part, unless when her youth and opening prospects, unblighted, however slender, pierced her aunt with the sting of recollection. Even then Mrs. Die would content herself with a passing taunt at the girl’s girlishness, untold fortunes, and imagined inspirations, and forget all about her the next moment.
Mrs. Kitty’s smaller nature and comparative leisure from introspection and desperate schemes, left her more at liberty to cherish a grudge and a jealousy, and to visit them continually, like the dropping of water, on the head of a hapless, defenceless victim.
But Mrs. Kitty, too, had an engrossing interest and occupation, which was not snubbing Lady Bell. Mrs. Kitty had room in her narrow heart for a slavish devotion, the more ardent that it flowed in a single confined channel, and that devotion was at once lavished and concentrated on Mrs. Die.
In the old days, when Mrs. Die had been a brilliant, ill-regulated, reckless girl, she had taken by storm the heart of the ungifted, branded dependant—reared and retained at St. Bevis’s in the spirit of a coarse tolerance—by the heedless generosity which had overleaped the gulf between the girls, and had raised Mrs. Kitty to a convenient place in Mrs. Die’s confidence and regard.
Mrs. Kitty’s hands were full not only with grasping tightly such reins of domestic government as were left at St. Bevis’s, but with protecting Mrs. Die from herself and her neighbours, and cherishing the lost woman so far as she would suffer herself to be cherished.
Notwithstanding, there were pullings down in her airs for Lady Bell, which, as she grew accustomed to the process, did not hurt the girl much, only put her on her mettle and provoked her to undesirable pertness.
There were little deprivations in what comforts and luxuries of soft pillows, hot water, apples, nuts, prunes, were going at St. Bevis’s—a piece of petty malice which might cause Lady Bell’s young bones, blood, and appetite to crave and cry out, and her sense of fairness and honour to smart, but which did not press hardly on a healthy girl already trained to some measure of self-denial, as such girls were commonly trained. What was worse, there was the sedulous, suspicious guarding of Lady Bell from ever coming near Mrs. Die in any moment of weakness or kindred kindness on Mrs. Die’s part. Mrs. Kitty took care that there should not be the most distant danger of Lady Bell’s stepping between them, and ousting Mrs. Kitty from the place which she prized so highly, that she fancied the whole world must prize it too, as the recipient of Mrs. Die’s unhappy secrets. But Lady Bell did not covet the post which was thus denied her.
This was the trifling amount of vengeance—even more trifling in sound than in reality—which, so far as it appeared, was all Mrs. Kitty chose to inflict on Lady Bell for coming to St. Bevis’s at all, and after coming for taking it upon her to give orders to Mrs. Kitty as if she were a common servant—the servant of a minx like Lady Bell, poorer than Mrs. Kitty herself, and doomed to hang as another burden on the Godwins, making up the dead weight under which the house was tottering to its fall.
Mr. Sneyd and Mr. Greenwood, the remaining authorities, with the exception of the bailiffs who were billeted at St. Bevis’s every month or two, were good-natured scamps and vagabonds each according to his cloth, who not uncharacteristically experienced a lingering sentiment of shame, pity, and tenderness, of which their master was destitute, where the young girl, Lady Bell, was concerned. The butler and the chaplain did not resent, like Mrs. Kitty, Lady Bell’s obstinately refusing to consent to any freedom of speech and bearing on their part. They even applauded her for it, crying. Curse them, Lady Bell was game. She was a proud, delicate-minded young lady, who deserved another fate, which they would have procured for her, if it had been in their power, and had not cost them too much. They did what they could.
Mr. Greenwood and Mr. Sneyd conformed themselves, where Lady Bell was in question, to her notion of propriety, and flattered and won her to some friendly feeling towards them in their debasement, by the respect which they showed her and the trouble which they took to be of use to her.