Alas for Miss Jilian’s tawny fleece of hair! The golden masses had fallen to the shears, and nothing but a sharp, crisp aureole remained. On a little table beside the couch lay a black silk mask, a hand-mirror, a powder box and puff, and a rosewood case that told of Dutch pink and Chinese paints, lip-salves, wash-balls, and ointments scented with orange and with jessamine. Even these inanimate things gave a pathetic significance to the scene, hinting at the havoc disease had wrought upon poor Jilian’s comeliness. The truth was evident enough to the most casual of glances. Angry pits disfiguring cheeks and forehead, eyes injected and inflamed, the lids red and half empty as to lashes.
It was plain that Mr. Richardson’s sentimentalities tended rather to aggravate Miss Hardacre’s troubles to herself. She laid down the book betimes, took up her glass, toyed with it awhile as though dreading its candor, and then compelled herself to snatch a glimpse at her own face. She frowned at the reflection, and put the glass aside with a gesture of impatience. Poor child, the chastening she was receiving seemed over-hard and malicious despite the fact that she had been courting bitterness by the cultivation of her own vanities. For Jilian, a month’s sickness had changed the whole complexion of earth and of heaven. She had none of the comfortable religious spirit in her that creates a passive heroism out of the renunciation of her own comeliness. She was of the world, and loved every pretty stitch and glistening gew-gaw and silken flower in its gay attire, and saw nothing in quiet sanctity that could recompense her soul.
The little old woman in black had been blinking her eyes and fidgeting with her work, while Miss Hardacre was suffering the ordeal of looking for the hundredth time at her own face. Jilian’s own maid had refused to attend on her mistress at the very beginning of her illness, and old Mrs. Martha, who had handled both Lot and his sister in their infancy, had been brought from the cottage, where she had been pensioned, to nurse Jilian through the small-pox.
Mrs. Martha was unable to restrain the impatience of her loyalty and pride when Miss Hardacre’s hand wavered once more towards the mirror. She jumped up very briskly for so shrivelled an old lady, toddled across the polished floor, snatched up the mirror, and plunged it into the pocket of her voluminous apron.
“The good Lord knows, my dear,” she said, with the affectionate familiarity of an old servant—“the good Lord knows why you should be for making yourself vaporish and miserable with this paltry bit of glass! You should forget to look into a mirror, my dear, and in a month you won’t be so much afraid of your own pretty face. I’ve seen ladies as have had the small-pox before, haven’t I? And very decent faces they managed to keep after it, though I’ll warrant they were more like plum dumplings afore the pock-marks healed.”
Jilian lay back looking piteously about the mouth, as though she were trying not to believe a word of what this silly old woman said. Mrs. Martha had toddled back to her chair with the air of a grandmother who has done her duty by a peevish child.
“I hope you may be right, Martha,” said Miss Hardacre, miserably; “to be sure I look ugly enough now to make Mr. Richard go off into a faint.”
Mrs. Martha seated herself in her chair with solid precision. She fingered her work irritably, and continued her declaiming as though some imaginary person were threatening her constantly with contradictions.
“And I should like to know who Mr. Richard Jeffray is, to give himself airs before a Hardacre of Hardacre? His grandfather was an ‘iron man,’ as we all know, I reckon; he made his money by turning the country-side upside down, and cutting down all the trees. And hasn’t Mr. Jeffray been down with the small-pox himself, and didn’t he give it to you, sure; for you must have had it of him, my dear, or I never heard Parson Jessel read the Bible. As for your purty face, my dear, it’ll just mend superb with all the fine stuffs you may be using in that there box. And the hair always grows stronger, like a tree, for being pruned. And maybe Mr. Jeffray may be worse off than you in the matter of scars.”
Jilian looked round the room wearily, her eyes resting at last on the tulips and jonquils in the blue bowl, an offering from Rodenham. The old woman had uttered many of the thoughts in her busy, cackling way that had been moving in Miss Hardacre’s brain itself. Had not Jeffray given her the disease, and was it not his duty to be all the more tender and sympathetic in consequence? Jilian almost hoped that he had been more disfigured than herself so that his senses should have no cause to boast. And then, after all, her face would be fairer to look upon when her hair had grown and the red pock-marks had paled.