White Turrets

White Turrets
Mrs. Molesworth

Mrs. Molesworth

White Turrets

Chapter One.

“Hertha.”

A dull afternoon in November. In London, too, where, though bright and beautiful November days are not utterly unknown, they are, it must be allowed, the exception.

A not very lively scene indoors either.

A large – too large for the present purpose at least – concert-room in a public building, very far from well filled, and somewhat dimly lighted; the dimness aggravated by a suspicion of fog.

“Rather an unlucky day, I fear,” said one lady to her next neighbour. “Still, at this season, what can one expect?”

“And after all,” was the reply, “the dull season is the best for charity things. People – such of them as are in town – are glad of something to do.”

For the concert was one for a benevolent object, not seemingly a very popular one, or possibly merely but little known. It had been difficult to collect the performers, more difficult to obtain the lady patronesses, most difficult of all to sell the tickets. And as a natural consequence, but few had been sold.

“The programme is a very fair one,” resumed the first speaker, glancing at it as she spoke.

“I’m glad you think so,” replied the other lady, who had had some hand in getting up the concert. “That last violin solo was a little too long.”

“Perhaps so – but still – the audience was very attentive; more than attentive indeed. Just look at those two girls – I have been watching their faces. They seem quite absorbed and delighted. Look at them now. What pretty girls they are, too!”

Mrs Balderson – for such was the name of the second speaker – smiled. Her companion’s remarks pleased her.

“They are two young friends of mine,” she replied in a lower tone. “I put them in front so as to see the performers well. They are full of interest in everything. They are staying with me for two or three weeks – their first real visit to London.”

“Indeed! how you must enjoy having them! Are they relations?” came next.

Mrs Balderson answered in a semi-whisper, till a slight rustle of expectancy warned her that the momentary interval between the long solo and a song which came next was over, and she relapsed into dutiful silence.

The sisters in front had been talking also, though in subdued tones.

“Celia,” said the elder of the two, a handsome, eager-faced girl, with brown hair and eyes – “Celia, are we not lucky? Do you see what the first song is?”

“I saw it ever so long ago, but I did not tell you. I thought it would be such a surprise. I wish you hadn’t seen it till you heard it,” said the younger girl.

“What an Irishism!” returned the other, laughing. “You mustn’t count on my short-sightedness, you see;” for Winifred, the elder girl, was a trifle short-sighted. “I am very glad I saw it; I like the pleasures of anticipation.”

She did not look her age, though she was fond of impressing upon her friends that she was “no longer very young.” Her complexion and the rounded outlines of her face might have been in keeping with seventeen or eighteen. Only a certain tone of decision, a slight, very slight touch of brusqueness, made her twenty-four years credible. Late hours and heated rooms, the wear and tear of over-amusement or over-excitement, had nothing to answer for in the case of these country girls – country girls, in a sense, of the old-fashioned kind.

Celia, who was not yet twenty, was prettier than her sister; taller and fairer – a more flowerlike creature – with an entire absence of self-consciousness, born to a certain extent, perhaps, of her absolute reliance upon Winifred, which added curiously to her charm.

“So do I,” she replied. “I like to know the name of the singer and to picture her to myself beforehand – especially when she is going to sing anything one loves so clearly as,” and she mentioned the song (an old ballad which I will not name, as I should like my readers to think of the old ballad they care for most). “If she is ugly or ungraceful, I shall just shut my eyes after the first glance and try to forget her. But her name is – pretty? no, not exactly, but nice, somehow, and rather queer. ‘Hertha Norreys.’ Did you ever hear it before, Winifred?”

”‘Norreys,’ spelt like that, is a very good name,” said Winifred the all-wise, “but ‘Hertha!’ What is it I know about ‘Hertha?’ We must look it out in our ‘Christian names,’ Celia, when – ”

But a touch on her arm from the quicker-eyed Celia silenced her, and like their chaperon and her friend, they grew mute, more than mute, motionless with interest which soon developed into an intenser feeling, as they watched the new-comer quietly making her way to the front of the platform. Saw her, and soon heard her. Yet the two perceptions seemed almost as one. From that first day, it was and ever remained to both – to Winifred especially, perhaps – impossible to think of Hertha Norreys in her absence except as singing, impossible to hear elsewhere the familiar notes of her favourite songs without seeing her.

For her songs, as a rule, were well known and simple; ballads familiar to most of us – the kind of thing which is, in great measure, “made” by the artist; which may be “marred” into utter nonentity.

And she was not – no, certainly not – “pretty,” and by no means “to the multitude” beautiful, though the word describes less inadequately than a poorer one the impression she made on the “some;” an impression which after knowledge of her, never lessened or effaced. She was not very tall, though of what used to be considered more than average height for a woman: nothing in or about her was startling or even striking. Her features, though in almost perfect proportion – perhaps for that very reason – never provoked admiration of their individual merits; her eyes, clear and sweet, could light up with affection or with occasionally a flash of consciousness almost approaching the inspiration of genius, into rare beauty; her whole face, her whole personality, spoke above all of simple yet powerful goodness, the true, large-hearted, thoughtful goodness of a noble woman.

At this time Hertha Norreys was twenty-eight.

The Maryon sisters – for Maryon was their surname – sat, as I said, in more than silence, while the wonderful – yes, wonderful I must call them in their perfect purity and sweetness – notes floated over them; now in joyousness, now in pathos, to die away at last in unutterable regret, as dies the wind on an autumn evening.

She was encored, of course. Though not in the first ranks of vocalists, for her voice was of no astounding compass, Miss Norreys was allowed on all hands to be “very good, very good indeed in her way,” and in herself she was a favourite with many, though not with all; so it was the proper thing, especially on an occasion like the present, when she gave her services gratuitously, to applaud her heartily.

And till she had reappeared and sung again the last verse of the ballad, neither Winifred nor Celia spoke or moved.

Then came – from Celia – the first half-timid words.

“I am so glad she sang the last verse over again,” she whispered. “Anything else would have spoilt it.”

“Of course,” said Winifred, and her tone was a little impatient. But in a moment, ashamed of her hastiness, she spoke again. “Oh, Celia,” she said, “I am not cross. But I seem so – so worked up. Isn’t she wonderful? Not her singing only – and after all, I know you understand music better than I do – but the whole of her, her face, her way of moving, even her dress! It was just perfect.”

“Blue-grey bengaline – that lovely shade,” said Celia, in whom there was now and then a queer, sudden matter-of-fact-ness which a superficial observer would rather have expected to find in Winifred. “And it fitted so well – so naturally, you know.”

“Everything about her is natural – that’s the beauty of it,” Winifred replied, repressing her indignation at hearing the texture of her divinity’s garments put into vulgar words. (“I wonder Celia does not tell me how many yards of stuff there must be in the dress,” she said to herself.) “Everything about her is natural – at least in perfect harmony,” she repeated, and then she gave a deep sigh. “Celia, is she to sing again?” she inquired in a low voice.

“Yes,” Celia replied, consulting the programme she held, “once – no, twice – once alone and another time in a trio, or quartette rather. I daresay it is some kind of glee: the name sounds like that.”

“I shall not care for that,” said Winifred, “but oh, I am so glad she is to sing again alone.”

She did care for the quartette when it came, for Miss Norreys’ voice was far ahead of the others, and then there was the pleasure of seeing her! And the third time she sang, the impression of the first was intensified, for though the song itself was a gayer one, the indescribable pathos of her voice was there too – it was as if a spirit were singing of joys which had once been his, long ago, in some golden age of childhood.

After that, Winifred, though she sat silent and apparently attentive, heard but little of the music.

Then came the little bustle of collecting discarded cloaks and furs, and the interchange of remarks upon the performance, as the “assistants,” in the French sense, most of whom were women, made their way to the door.

“Winifred, my dear, Celia,” said their hostess, when they were waiting with her for the carriage at the entrance, “I want to introduce you to my friend, Lady Campion.”

“You have enjoyed the concert, I think,” said the stranger – the same whose remarks about the Maryon girls had pleased Mrs Balderson.

“Very much, oh, very, very much,” both sisters replied.

Their chaperon gave a little smile of satisfaction as she glanced at Lady Campion.

“There’s some pleasure in having girls like these to take about, isn’t there?” the smile and glance seemed to say, and the answering expression in Lady Campion’s bright eyes showed that she understood.

“It is cold, isn’t it?” said Mrs Balderson, drawing her fur-lined cloak more closely round her, with a slight shiver.

“It looks cold,” replied Lady Campion, as she glanced up and down the street where the incipient fog veiling the dim red still lingering in the sky, and the yellow glare of the just-lighted lamps, gave a curious, half-mysterious effect, not without its charm. “It looks cold,” she repeated, “but I don’t think that it really is so.”