Man and Maid

“Yes,” said he, picking up the bunch of red roses, “but – here are your flowers – don’t you know yet that I can’t possibly do without you? In a few months I’m to have the editorship of a new weekly, a much better berth than this. If only you would – ”

“Write the correspondence?” said Kitty, brightening; “of course I will. I don’t know what I should do without – ”

“I wish,” he interrupted, “that I could think it was me you couldn’t do without.” Her pretty eyes met his over the red roses, and he caught her hands with the flowers in them. “Is it? Oh, say you can’t do without me either. Say it, say it!”

“I – I – don’t want to do without you,” said Kitty at last. He was holding her hands fast, and she was trying, not very earnestly, perhaps, to pull them away. The pair made a pretty picture.

“Oh, Kitty, Kitty, Kitty!” he said softly, and then the door opened, and suddenly, without the least warning, a middle-aged lady became a spectator of the little tableau. The newcomer wore a mantle with beads on it, a black bonnet wherein nodded a violet flower – and beads and flower and bonnet were absolutely familiar to each of the astonished ones now standing consciously with the breadth of the office between them. For in that middle-aged lady the editor recognised Aunt Kate, the pleasant, sensible, companionable woman who for years had written those sympathetic “Answers to Correspondents” in the Girls’ Very Own Friend. And at the same moment Kitty recognised, beyond all possibility of doubt, Aunt Eliza – her own grim, harsh, uncongenial Aunt Eliza.

Kitty cowered – in her frightened soul she cowered. But her little figure drew itself up, and the point of her chin rose a quarter of an inch.

“Aunt Eliza,” she said firmly, “I know you will – ”

“Your Aunt Eliza, Kitty?” cried the editor.

“‘Kitty’?” said the aunt.

And now the situation hung all too nicely balanced on the extreme edge of the absolutely impossible. Would this middle-aged lady – an aunt beyond doubt – an aunt who so long had played a double rôle, assume, now that one rôle must be chosen, the part of Aunt Eliza the Terrible or of Aunt Kate the Kind? The aunt was dumb. Kitty was dumb. But the editor had his wits about him, and Kate, though shaken, was not absolutely paralysed.

“It’s almost too good to be true,” he said, “that my Aunt Kate is really your Aunt Eliza. Aunt Kate, Kitty and I have just decided that we can’t do without each other. I am so glad that you are the first to wish us joy.”

At his words all the “Kate” in the aunt rose triumphant, trampling down the “Eliza.”

“My dear boy,” she said – and she said it in a voice which Kitty had never heard before – the sound of that voice drew Kitty like a magnet. She did the only possible thing – she put her arms timidly round her aunt’s neck and whispered: “Oh, don’t be Aunt Eliza any more, be Aunt Kate!”

It was Aunt Kate’s arms undoubtedly that went round the girl. Certainly not Aunt Eliza’s.

“I will take a walk down Fleet Street,” said the editor discreetly.

Then there were explanations in the office.

“But why,” said Kitty, when all the questions had been asked and answered, “why were you Aunt Eliza to me, and Aunt Kate to him?”

“My dear, one must spoil somebody, and I was determined not to spoil you; I wanted to save you. All my life was ruined because I was a spoiled child – and because I tried to write. I had such dreams, such ambitions – just like yours, you silly child! But then I was never clever – perhaps you may be – and it all ended in my losing my lover. He married a nice, quiet, domestic girl, and I never made name or fame at all – I never got anything taken but fashion articles – and ‘Answers to Correspondents.’ Now, that’s the whole tale. Don’t mention it again.”

“But you did love me, even when – ”

“Of course I did,” said Aunt Kate in the testy tones of Aunt Eliza; “or why should I have bothered at all about whether you were going to be happy or not? Now, Kitty, you’re not to expect me to gush. I’ve forgotten how to be sentimental except on paper.”

“I don’t want to be sentimental,” said Kitty, a little injured, “neither does – ”

Here the editor came in.

“You don’t want to be sentimental either,” Kitty went on; “do you – Mr Editor?”

The editor looked a little doubtful.

“I want to be happy, at any rate,” said he, “and I mean to be.”

“And he can’t be happy unless you smile on him. Smile on him, Auntie!” cried a new, radiant Kitty, to whom aunts no longer presented any terrors. “Say ‘Bless you, my children!’ Auntie – do!”

“Get along with your nonsense!” said Aunt Eliza. Or was it Aunt Kate?

VIII

MISS MOUSE

They were poor, not with the desperate poverty that has to look on both sides of a penny, but with the decent bearable poverty that must look at a shilling with attention, and with respect at half-a-crown. There was money for the necessities of life, the mother said, but no money to waste. This was what she always tried to say when Maisie came in with rainbow representations of the glories of local “sales” piteous pictures of beautiful things going almost for nothing – things not absolutely needed, but which would “come in useful.” Maisie’s dress was never allowed those touches of cheap finery which would have made it characteristic of her. Her clothes were good, and she had to patch and mend and contrive so much that sometimes it seemed to her as though all her life was going by in the effort to achieve, by a distasteful process, a result which she abhorred. For her artistic sense was too weak to show her how the bright, soft freshness of her tints gained by contrast with the dull greys and browns and drabs that were her mother’s choice – good wearing colours, from which the pink and white of her face rose triumphantly, like a beautiful flower out of a rough calyx.

The house was like Maisie, in that it never seemed to have anything new – none of those bright, picturesque cushions and screens and Japaneseries which she adored through the plate-glass windows of the big local draper. The curtains were of old damask, faded but rich; the furniture was mahogany, old and solid; the carpets were Turkey and Aubusson – patched and darned this last, but still beautiful. Maisie knew all about old oak – she had read her Home Hints and her Gentlewoman’s Guide– but she had no idea that mahogany could be fashionable. None of the photographs of the drawing-rooms of celebrities in her favourite papers were anything like the little sitting-room where her mother sat knitting by the hearth, surrounded by the relics of a house that had been handsome in the ’sixties, when it was her girlhood’s home. Maisie hated it all: the chairs covered in Berlin-wool needlework, the dark, polished surfaces of the tables and bureaux, the tinkling lustres of Bohemian glass, the shining brass trivet on which the toast kept itself warm, the crude colours of the tea-service, the smell of eau-de-Cologne mingling with the faint scent of beeswax and cedar-wood. She would have liked to change the old water-colours in their rubbed gilt frames for dark-mounted autotypes. How should she know that those hideous pigs were Morlands, and that the cow picture was a David Cox. She would have liked Japanese blue transfers instead of the gold-and-white china – old Bristol, by the way, but Maisie knew nothing of Bristol. The regular, sober orderliness of the house chafed and fretted her; the recurrent duties, all dull; the few guests who came to tea. Decent poverty cannot give dinner parties or dances. She visited her school friends, and when she came home again it seemed to her sometimes as though the atmosphere of the place would choke her.

“I want to go out and earn my own living,” she said to her cousin Edward one Sunday afternoon when her mother was resting and he and she were roasting chestnuts on the bars of the dining-room fire. “I’m simply useless here.”

Edward was a second cousin. To him the little house was the ideal home, just as Maisie was – well, not, perhaps, the ideal girl, but the only girl in the world, which comes to much the same thing. But he never told her so: he dared not risk losing the cousin’s place and missing for ever the lover’s.

So, in his anxiety lest she should know how much he cared, he scolded her a good deal. But he took her to picture galleries and to matinées, and softened her life in a hundred ways that she never noticed. He was only “Poor old Edward,” and he knew it.

“How can you?” he said. “Why, what on earth would Aunt do without you? Here, have this one – it’s a beauty.”

“I ought to have been taught a trade, like other poor girls,” she went on, waving away the roasted chestnut. “Lots of the girls I was at school with are earning as much as a pound a week now – typewriting or painting birthday cards, and some of them are in the Post Office – and I do nothing but drudge away at home. It’s too bad.”

Edward would have given a decent sum at that moment to be inspired with exactly the right thing to say. As it was he looked at her helplessly.

“I don’t understand, I’m afraid,” said he.

“You never do,” she answered crossly. There was a silence in which she felt the growth of a need to justify herself – to herself as well as to him. “Why, don’t you see,” she urged, “it’s my plain duty to go out and earn something. Why, we’re as poor as ever we can be – I haven’t any pocket-money hardly – I can’t even buy presents for people. I have to make presents out of odds and ends of old things, instead of buying them, like other girls.”

“I think you make awfully pretty things,” he said; “much prettier than any one can buy.”

“You’re thinking of that handkerchief-case I gave Aunt Emma at Christmas. Why, you silly, it was only a bit of one of mother’s old dresses. I do wish you’d talk to mother about it. I might go out as companion or something.”

The word came before the thought, but the thought was brought by the word and the thought stayed.

That very evening Maisie began to lay siege to her mother’s desired consent.

She put her arguments very neatly, so neatly that it was hard for the mother to oppose them without being betrayed into an attitude that would seem grossly selfish.

She sat looking into the fire, thinking of all the little, unceasing sacrifices that had been her life ever since Maisie had been hers – even the giving up of that treasured silk, her wedding dress, last Christmas, because Maisie wanted something pretty to make Christmas presents out of. She remembered it all; and now this new great sacrifice was called for. She had given up to Maisie everything but her taste in dress, and now it seemed that she was desired to give up even Maisie herself. But the other sacrifices had been for Maisie’s good or for her pleasure. Would this one be for either?

She saw her little girl alone among strangers, snubbed, looked down upon, a sort of upper servant with none of a servant’s privileges; she nerved herself to what was always to her an almost unbearable effort. Her heart was beating and her hands trembling as she said: “My dear, it’s quite impossible; I couldn’t possibly allow it.”

“I must say I don’t see why,” said Maisie, with tears in her voice.

Her mother dropped the mass of fleecy white wool and the clinking knitting needles and grasped the arms of her chair intensely. Her eyes behind the spectacles clouded with tears. It seemed to her that her child should surely understand the agony it was to her mother to refuse her anything.

“I could earn money for you – it’s not myself I’m thinking about,” the girl went on; the half-lie came out quite without her conscious volition. “I wish you didn’t always think I do everything for selfish reasons.”

“I don’t, my dear,” said the mother feebly.