Man and Maid

But the girl spoke: “Oh, wait a moment. Is this Mr Selwyn, mother?”

“My daughter, Miss Sheepmarsh – Mr Selwyn,” said the mother reluctantly.

“We were just talking about you,” said the girl, “and wondering whether you were ill or anything, or whether your servant hasn’t turned up, or something.”

“Miss Sheepmarsh.” He was still speechless. This the little adventuress, the tobacconist’s assistant? This girl with the glorious hair severely braided, the round face, the proud chin, the most honest eyes in the world? She might be sister to the adventuress – cousin, perhaps? But the room, too – shining mahogany, old china, worn silver, and fine napery – all spoke of a luxury as temperate as refined: the luxury of delicate custom, of habit bred in the bone; no mushroom growth of gross self-indulgence, but the unconscious outcome of generations of clear self-respect.

“Can we send anything over for you?” the elder lady asked. “Of course we – ”

“We didn’t mean by ‘entirely private’ that we would let our tenant starve,” the girl interrupted.

“There is some mistake.” Selborne came to himself suddenly. “I thought I was engaging furnished apartments with er – attendance.”

The girl drew a journal from a heap on the sofa.

“This was the advertisement, wasn’t it?” she asked.

And he read:

“Four-roomed cottage, furnished, in beautiful grounds. Part of these are fenced in for use of tenant of cottage. And in the absence of the family the whole of the grounds are open to tenant. When at home the family wish to be entirely private.”

“I never saw this at all,” said Selborne desperately. “My – I mean I was told it was furnished lodgings. I am very sorry I have no servant and no means of getting one. I will go back to London at once. I am sorry.”

“The last train’s gone,” said Miss Sheepmarsh. “Mother, ask Mr Selborne to come in, and I’ll get him something to eat.”

“My dear,” said the mother, “surely Mary – ”

“My dear mother,” said the girl, “you know Mary is having her supper.”

The bewildered Selborne presently found himself seated at the white-spread, silver-sparkling table, served with food and drink by this Hebe with the honest eyes. He exerted himself to talk with the mother – not of the difference between a lodger and a tenant, but of music, art, and the life of the great world.

It was the girl who brought the conversation down from the gossip of Courts and concert-rooms to the tenant’s immediate needs.

“If you mean to stay, you could have a woman in from the village,” said she.

“But wouldn’t you rather I went?” he said.

“Why should we? We want to let the cottage, or we shouldn’t have advertised it. I’ll get you some one to-morrow. Mrs Bates would be the very thing, mother. And you’ll like her, Mr Selwyn. She’s a great dear – ”

Sure enough, the next morning brought a gentle, middle-aged woman to “do for” Mr Selwyn. And she did excellently. And three slow days passed. He got a boat and pulled up and down the green willow-fringed river. He tried to fish; he read somewhat, and he thought more. And he went in and out of his cottage, which had its own private path debouching on the highway. Many times a day he went in and out, but he saw no more the red hair, the round face, and the honest eyes.

On the fourth day he had nursed his interest in the girl to a strong, well-grown sentiment of curiosity and attraction. Coming in at his own gate, he saw the mother leaving hers, with sunshade and cardcase – an afternoon of calls evidently setting in.

Now or never! The swift impulse took him, and before he had time to recall the terms of that advertisement, he had passed the green fence of division, and his feet were on the wandering ways of the shrubbery. He felt, as he went, a glow of gratitude to the fate which was rewarding his care of his brother’s future with an interest like this. The adventuress? – the tobacconist’s assistant? – he could deal with her later.

Through the garden’s green a gleam of white guided – even, it seemed, beckoned.

He found the girl with the red hair and the honest eyes in a hammock swung between two cedars.

“Have pity on me,” he said abruptly.

She raised her eyes from her book.

“Oh, it’s you!” she said. “I am so glad. Get a chair from under the weeping ash, and sit down and talk.”

“This turf is good enough for me,” said he; “but are you sure I’m not trespassing?”

“You mean the advertisement? Oh, that was just because we had some rather awful people last year, and we couldn’t get away from them, and mother wanted to be quite safe; but, of course, you’re different. We like you very much, what we’ve seen of you.” This straightforward compliment somehow pleased him less than it might have done. “The other people were – well, he was a butterman. I believe he called himself an artist.”

“Do you mean that you do not like persons who are in trade,” he asked, thinking of the tobacconist’s assistant.

“Of course I don’t mean that,” she said; “why, I’m a Socialist! Butterman just means a person without manners or ideals. But I do like working people better than shoppy people, though I know it’s wrong.”

“How can an involuntary liking or disliking be wrong?” he asked.

“It’s snobbish, don’t you think? We ought to like people for what they are, not for what they have, or what they work at.”

“If you weren’t so pretty, and hadn’t that delightful air of having just embraced the Social Gospel, you’d be a prig,” he said to himself. To her he said: “Roughly speaking, don’t you think the conventional classifications correspond fairly well with the real ones?”

“No,” she answered roundly.

And when the mother returned, weary from her calls, she found her tenant and her daughter still discussing the problems of good and evil, of heredity and environment, of social inequalities and the injustice of the world. The girl fought for her views, and she fought fairly, if fiercely. It was the first of many such fights. When he had gone the mother protested.

“Dearest,” said the girl, “I can’t help it! I must live my own life, as people say in plays. After all, I’m twenty-six. I’ve always talked to people if I liked them – even strangers in railway carriages. And people aren’t wild beasts, you know: everything is always all right. And this man can talk; he knows about things. And he’s a gentleman. That ought to satisfy you – that and his references. Don’t worry, there’s a darling. Just be nice to him yourself. He’s simply a godsend in a place like this.”

“He’ll fall in love with you, Celia,” said the mother warningly.

“Not he!” said the daughter. But the mother was right.

Living alone in the queer little cottage, the world, his accustomed life, the Brydges woman, all seemed very far away. Miss Sheepmarsh was very near. Her frank enjoyment of his talk, her gay acceptance of their now almost constant companionship, were things new in his experience of women, and might have warned him that she at least was heart-whole. They would have done had he ever faced the fact that his own heart had caught fire. He bicycled with her along the pleasant Kentish lanes; he rowed with her on the little river of dreams; he read to her in the quiet of the August garden; he gave himself up wholly to the pleasure of those hours that flew like moments – those days that passed like hours. They talked of books and of the heart of books – and inevitably they talked of themselves. He talked of himself less than most men, but he learned much of her life. She was an ardent social reformer; had lived in an Art-and-Culture-for-the-People settlement in Whitechapel; had studied at the London School of Economics. Now she had come back to be with her mother, who needed her. She and her mother were almost alone in the world; there was enough to live on, but not too much. The letting of the little house had been Celia’s idea: its rent was merely for “luxuries.” He found out from the mother, when she came to tolerate him, that the “luxuries” were Celia’s – the luxuries of helping the unfortunate, feeding the hungry, and clothing little shivering children in winter time.

And all this while he had not heard a word of sister or cousin – of any one whom he might identify as the tobacconist’s assistant.

It was on an evening when the level sunbeams turned the meadows by the riverside to fine gold, and the willows and alders to trees of Paradise, that he spoke suddenly, leaning forward on his sculls. “Have you,” he asked, looking into her face, “any relation who is in a shop?”

“No,” said she; “why?”

“I only wondered,” said he coldly.

“But what an extraordinary thing to wonder!” she said. “Do tell me what made you think of it.”

“Very well,” he said, “I will. The person who told me that your mother had lodgings, also told me that your mother had a daughter who served in a shop.”

“Never!” she cried. “What a hateful idea!”

“A tobacconist’s shop,” he persisted; “and her name was Susannah Sheepmarsh.”

“Oh,” she answered, “that was me.” She spoke instantly and frankly, but she blushed crimson.