Man and Maid

“I’m sure it’s my duty,” Maisie went on, with more tears than ever in her voice. “I’m eighteen, and I ought to be earning something, instead of being a burden to you.”

The mother looked hopelessly into the fire. She had always tried to explain things to Maisie; how was it that Maisie never understood?

“I’m sure,” said Maisie, echoing her mother’s thought, “I always try to tell you how I think about things, and you never seem to understand. Of course, I won’t go if you wish it, but I do think – ”

She left the room in tears, and the mother remained to torment herself with the eternal questions, What had she done wrong? Why was Maisie not contented? What could she do to please her? Would nothing please her but the things that were not for her good – smart clothes, change, novelty? How could she bear her life if Maisie was not pleased?

She went down to supper shivering with misery and apprehension. What a meal it would be with Maisie cold and aloof, polite and indifferent! But Maisie was cheerful, gay almost, and her mother felt a passion of gratitude to her daughter for not being sulky or unapproachable. Maisie, however, was only stepping back to jump the better.

The same scene, with intenser variations, was played about twice a week till the girl got her way, as she always did in the end, except in the matter of cheap finery. Taste in dress was as vital to the mother as her religion. Then, through the influence of an old governess of her mother’s, Maisie got her wish. She was to go as companion to an old lady, the mother of Lady Yalding, and she was to live at Yalding Towers. Here was splendour – here would be life, incident, opportunity! For her reading had sometimes strayed from Home Hints to the Family Herald, and she knew exactly what are the chances of romance to a humble companion in the family of a lady of title.

And now Maisie’s mother gave way to her, finally and completely, even on the question of dress. The old wardrobe was ransacked to find materials to fit her out with clothes for her new venture. It was a beautiful time for Maisie. New things, and old things made to look as good as new, or better. It was like having a trousseau. The mother lavished on her child every inch of the old lace, every one of the treasured trinkets – even the little old locket that had been the dead husband’s first love-gift.

And Maisie, in the flutter of her excitement and anticipation, was loving and tender and charming, and the mother had her reward.

Edward opposed a stolid and stony disapproval to all the new enthusiasm. He said little because he feared to say too much.

“Poor little Maisie!” he said. “You’ll soon find out that you didn’t know when you were well off.”

“Edward, I hate you,” said Maisie, and she thought she did.

But when all the beautiful new clothes were packed and her cab was at the door, some sense of what she was leaving did come to the girl, and she flung her arms round her mother in an embrace such as she had never given in her life.

“I don’t want to go,” she cried. “Mummy darling, I’ve been a little beast about it. I won’t go if you say you’d rather not. Shall I send the cab away? I will if you say so, my own dear old Mummy!”

Maisie’s mother was not a very wise woman, but she was not fool enough to trust this new softness.

“No, no, dearest,” she said; “go and try your own way. God bless you, my darling! You’ll miss the train if you stay. God bless you, my darling!”

And Maisie went away crying hard through the new veil with the black velvet spots on it; as for the mother – but she was elderly, and plain, and foolishly fond, and her emotions can have but little interest for the readers of romances.

And now Maisie, for the first time, knew the meaning of home. And before she had been at Yalding a week she had learned to analyse home and to give names to its constituents: love, interest, sympathy, liberty – these were some.

At Yalding Towers Maisie was nothing to any one. No one knew or cared one single little bit of a straw whether she was unhappy or no. Her time was filled, and overfilled, by the attentions exacted by an old, eccentric, and very disagreeable lady. When she put on, for the first evening, the least pretty of the pretty dresses she had brought with her, the old lady looked at her with a disapproval almost rising to repulsion, and said: “I expect you to wear black; and a linen collar and cuffs.”

So another black dress had to be ordered from home, and all the pretty, dainty things lay creasing themselves with disuse in the ample drawers and cupboards of her vast, dreary bedroom.

Her employer was exacting and irritable. When on the third day Maisie broke into tears under the constant flood of nagging, the old lady told her to go away and not to come back till she could control her temper.

“I’ll come back when you send for me, and not before, you hateful old thing!” said Maisie to herself.

And she sat down in her fireless bedroom and wrote a long letter to her mother, saying how happy she felt, and how kind every one was, and what a lovely and altogether desirable place was Yalding Towers. Who shall say whether pride or love, or both, dictated that letter?

When her employer did send for her, it was to tell her, very sharply, that one more such exhibition of sullenness would cost her her situation. So she had to learn to school herself. And she did it. But the learning was hard, very hard, and in the learning she grew thinner, and some of the pretty pink in her cheeks faded away.

Lady Yalding, when she swept in, in beautiful dream-dresses, always spoke to the companion quite kindly and nicely and pleasantly, but there were none of those invitations to come into the drawing-room after dinner which the Family Herald had led her to expect. Lady Yalding was always charming to every one, and Maisie tortured herself with the thought that it was only because she had no opportunity to explain herself that Lady Yalding failed to see how very much out of the common she was. She read Ruskin industriously, and once she left her own book of Browning selections that Edward had given her in the conservatory. She imagined Lady Yalding returning it to her with, “So, are you fond of poetry?” or, “It’s delightful to find that you are a lover of Browning!” But the book was brought back to her by a footman, and the old lady lectured her for leaving her rubbish littering about.

But towards Christmas a change came. Maisie had hoped – more intensely than she had ever in her life hoped for anything – for a few days’ grace, for a sight of her mother, and the mahogany, and the damask curtains, and – yes – of Edward. But the old lady, who really was exceptionally horrid, wondered how she could ask for a holiday when she had only been in her situation six weeks.

Then the old lady went off at half an hour’s notice to spend Christmas with her other daughter – Maisie would have suspected a “row” if Lady Yalding had been a shade less charming – and the girl was left. Thus it happened that Lord Yalding’s brother lounged into Lady Yalding’s room one day, and said: “Who’s the piteous black mouse you’ve tamed?”

“I beg your pardon, Jim?” said Lady Yalding.

“The crushed apple-blossom in a black frock – one meets her about the corridors. Gloomy sight. Chestnut hair. Princess-in-exile sort of look.”

“Oh, that! It’s mother’s companion.”

“Poor little devil!” said the Honourable James. “What does she do now the cat’s away? I beg your pardon – my mind was running on mice.”

“Do? I don’t know,” said Lady Yalding a little guiltily. “She’s a good, quiet little thing – literary tastes, reads Browning, and all that sort of rot. She’s all right.”

“Why don’t you give her a show? She’d take the shine out of some of the girls here if you had her dressed.”

“My dear Jim,” Lady Yalding said, “she’s all right as she is. What’s the good of turning the child’s head and giving her notions out of her proper station?”

“If I were that child I’d like to have a little bit of a fling just for once. The poor little rat looks starved, as though it hadn’t laughed for a year. Then it’s Christmas – peace and goodwill, and all that, don’t you know. If I were you I’d ask her down a bit – ”

Lady Yalding thought – a thing she rarely did.

“Well,” she said, “it is pretty slow for her, I suppose. I’ll send her home to her people.”

“On Christmas Eve? Fog and frost, and the trains all anyhow? Fanny, Fanny!”

“Oh, very well. We’ll have her down, and go the whole hog. Only don’t make a fool of the child, Jim; she’s a good little thing.”

And that was how the dream-dressed Lady Yalding came to sweep into the old lady’s sitting-room – it was as full of mahogany, by the way, as Maisie’s home in Lewisham – and spoke so kindly of Maisie’s loneliness, that the girl could have fallen down and worshipped at her Paris shoes.

When Maisie, in the figured lavender satin that had been her mother’s, swept across the great hall on the arm of the Honourable James, she felt that this indeed was life. Here was the great world with its infinite possibilities.

“How did you get on?” his sister-in-law asked him later.

“Oh, it’s quite a decent sort of little mouse,” he said. “Wants to make sure you see how cultivated it is, quotes poetry – what? – and talks about art. It’s a little touching and all that to see how busy it is putting all its poor little stock in the tiny shop-window.”

Maisie, alone in her room, was walking up and down, trailing the lavender satin, recalling with kindled eyes and red-rose cheeks every word, every look of her cavalier. How kindly he had spoken, yet how deferentially; how he had looked, how he had smiled! At dinner she supposed it was his business to talk to her. But afterwards, when she was sitting, a little forlornly and apart from the noisy chatter of the bright-plumaged house-party, how he had come straight over to her directly the gentlemen came into the drawing-room! And she felt that she had not been wanting to herself on so great an occasion.

“I know I talked well. I’m certain he saw directly that I wasn’t a silly idiot.”

She lay long awake, and, as the men trooped up the stairs, she tried to fancy that she could already distinguish his footsteps.

The letter she wrote to her mother next day was, compared to those other lying letters, as a lit chandelier to a stable-lantern. And the mother knew the difference.

“Poor darling!” she thought. “She must have been very miserable all this time. But she’s happy now, God bless her!”

By the week’s end, every thought, every dream, every hope of Maisie’s life was centred in the Honourable James; her tenderness, her ambition turned towards him as flowers to the sun.

And her happiness lighted a thousand little candles all around her. No one could see the candles, of course, but every one saw the radiant illumination of her beauty. And the other men of the house-party saw it too. Even Lord Yalding distinguished her by asking whether she had read some horrid book about earthworms.

“You’re making a fool of that girl, Jim,” said Lady Yalding. “I really think it’s too bad.”