Blanche: A Story for Girls

“Oh yes,” said Blanche; “but she doesn’t seem very interested in us, mamma. And then, of course, as she has let Alderwood, she is not going to live here; so perhaps it doesn’t very much matter. But I wish that Lady Harriot had been nicer.”

Mrs Derwent’s face lost its joyous expression.

“I wish Sir Adam were going to be at Alderwood again,” she said with a little sigh. “That would have made all the difference. Mrs Lilford did not know me well. She was four or five years older, and she married and went to India before I was grown up. She only remembers me as a child more or less. But now I can write to Sir Adam himself, and he will be sure to ask some old friends to come to see us.”

And that very day she did so.

But the result was not what she had hoped. A few thoroughly kind words from her old friend came in response in the course of a week or two, hoping to see her and her children on his return to England the following spring, but evidently not “taking in” the Derwents’ present loneliness. “I hear from Amy Lilford that she has asked her tenants to look after you a little,” he said. “I don’t know them personally, but you will like to have the run of the old place again.”

And Mrs Derwent could not make up her mind to trouble him further. “Men hate writing any letters that are not business ones,” she said to Blanche. “We must just wait till he comes back in the spring, and make ourselves as happy as we can till then; though, of course, I hope some people will call on us as soon as we are settled. The Marths at East Moddersham could scarcely do less.”

To some little extent her expectations were fulfilled. The wife of the vicar of Blissmore called. The vicar was a younger son of the important Enneslie family, enjoying the living in his father’s gift after old-fashioned orthodox fashion, and Mrs Enneslie was a conscientious “caller” on all her husbands parishioners. She had perception enough to discern the Derwents’ refinement and superiority at a glance, but she was a very busy woman, with experience enough to know that to be accepted by the “County,” much more than these qualities was demanded. And she contented herself with such kindly attentions to the strangers as lay in her own power. She did a little more. She spoke of them to her brother, the Pinnerton Green parson, who promised that his wife should look them up as soon as they came under his clerical wing.

“They seem nice girls,” she said, with perhaps some kindly meant diplomacy. “It would be good for them to do a little Sunday-schooling or something of that kind.”

So the weeks passed, bringing with them the exasperating delays which every one in the agonies of house changing thinks peculiar to one’s own case; and Christmas came and went before the Derwents could even name a time with any certainty for taking possession of their new home. It was a dull Christmas. Not that, with their French experience, the young people were accustomed to Yule-tide joviality; but they had heard so much about it – had pictured to themselves the delights of an overflowing country-house, the glories of a real English Christmas, as their mother had so often from their earliest years described it to them.

And the reality – Miss Halliday’s best sitting-room, with some sprigs of holly, a miniature (though far from badly made) plum-pudding, no presents or felicitations except those they gave each other!

“Another of my illusions gone,” said Stasy, with half-comical pathos, which drew forth a warning whisper from Blanche of “Don’t, Stasy. It worries mamma,” and aloud the reminder:

“Everything will be quite different when we are in our own house, you silly girl.”

And when at last the own house did come, and the pleasant stage began of making the rooms home-like and pretty with the old friends so long immured in packing cases, and the new dainty trifles picked up in London, in spite of the fogs, for a short time they were all very busy, and perfectly happy – satisfied that the lonely half-homesick feeling had only been a passing experience.

“I am really glad not to have made new friends till now,” said Mrs Derwent. “It does look so different here, though we have been very comfortable at Miss Halliday’s, and she has been most good to us.”

“Yes,” Blanche agreed; “and I think we should make up our minds to be happy here, whether we know many nice people or not, mamma. The only thing I really care about is a little good companionship for Stasy.”

“She must not make friends with any girls beneath her – as to that I am determined,” said Mrs Derwent.

“Far better have none. Not that anything could make her common, but it would be bad for her to feel herself the superior; and I can picture her queening it over others, and then making fun of them and their homes and ways. She has such a sense of the ridiculous. No; Stasy needs to be with those she can look up to. I am sure, Blanche, it is better not to think of her going to that day-school at Blissmore.”

For Stasy was only sixteen, and the question of her studies was still a question. At Blissmore, under the shadow of the now important public school for boys, various minor institutions for girls were springing up, all, as might have been expected, of a rather mixed class, though the teaching in most was good.

And Stasy, for her part, would have thought it “great fun” to go to school for a year or so.

The matter was compromised by arrangements being made for her having private lessons at home on certain days of the week, and joining one or two classes at the best girls’ school at Blissmore on others, to which she could be escorted by Aline when she took little Herty to his day-school.

Chapter Eight

Old Scenes

By March the Derwents felt quite at home in their new abode; in one sense, almost too much so. The excitement of settling had sobered down; the housekeeping arrangements were completed, and promising to work smoothly. For Mrs Derwent had profited by her twenty years of French life in becoming a most capable and practical housewife, and being naturally quick and able to adapt herself, she soon mastered the little difficulties consequent on the very different ideas as to material questions of her own and her adopted country.

So that, in point of fact, time was in danger of hanging rather heavily on their hands; there was really so little to do!

Their peculiar position cut them off from many of the occupations with which most of us nowadays are only too heavily burdened. They had few letters to write, for Frenchwomen are not great correspondents – in the provinces, at least – and when the Derwents left Bordeaux, their old friends there extracted no promises of “writing very often – very, very often.”

“Notes,” of course, which in London seem to use up hours of each day, there was never any occasion for. They had no calls to pay, beyond a rare one at the vicarage; no visitors to receive. For the Pinnerton Green folk had not followed suit, as the Derwents had feared, after Mrs Burgess’s invasion. Nothing had been heard of Mrs Wandle, and – probably through some breath of the great Lady Harriot Dunstan’s visit, and Mrs Enneslie’s introduction of the new-comers to her relations at Pinnerton Vicarage – the immediate neighbours had held back: the “butchers and bakers and candlestick-makers” had left them in peace. Mrs Burgess having been called away to a sick sister or niece early in the winter, and not yet having returned, even the excitement of watching her tactics had been wanting.

In short, the Derwents, socially speaking, were very distinctly in the position, to use a homely old saying, of “falling between two stools.”

And though Stasy was the least to be pitied, for her lessons kept her pretty fairly busy, and she managed to find food for amusement and material for mimicry among her class companions – some of whom, too, she really liked – at Mrs Maxton’s school, she was the readiest to grumble.

“What is the use of making the house pretty when there is no one to see it?” she said to her sister one afternoon, when the two had been employing themselves in hunting for early violets and primroses in the woods, with which to adorn the library, their favourite sitting-room. There were not many of these spring treasures as yet, for the season was a late one, but they were laden with other spoil, as lovely in its way – great trails of ivy and bunches of withered or half-withered leaves of every shade, from golden brown to crimson, which in sheltered nooks were still to be found arrested in their beautiful decay.

“What is the use of making the house pretty when there is never any one to see it?” Stasy repeated, as she flicked away an unsightly twig from the quaint posy she was carrying, for Blanche had not at once replied.

“There is always use in making one’s home as pretty as possible. There are ourselves to see it, and the – the thing itself,” replied Blanche a little vaguely.

“What do you mean by the thing itself?” Stasy demanded.

“The being pretty, or the trying to be – the aiming at beauty, I suppose, I mean,” said Blanche. “Can’t you imagine a painter giving years to a beautiful picture, even though he knew no one would ever see it but himself? or a musician composing music no one would ever hear?”

“No,” said Stasy, “I can’t. That sort of thing is flights above me, Blanchie. I like human beings about me – lots of them; they generally interest me, and often amuse me. I like a good many, and I am quite ready to love some. I want sympathy and life, and – and – well, perhaps, a little admiration. And I do think it’s too horribly dull here; at least, I’m afraid it’s going to be. I would rather leave off being at all grand, and get some fun out of the Wandles, and the Beltons, and all the rest of them.”

“Mamma is still looking forward to Sir Adam’s return in the spring – well, soon, it should be now. It is spring already,” said Blanche, rather at a loss, as she often was, how to reply to Stasy’s outburst.

“I don’t believe he’ll come to see us; or if he does, I don’t suppose it would do us much good. He has been away so long, and is no use to the neighbourhood; and I believe that’s all that most people care about,” said Stasy cynically. “These families round about here live their own lives and have their own circles. They’ll all be going up to London directly, I suppose, for the season. They don’t want us, or care about quiet, not very rich, people like us. England isn’t a bit like what I thought it would be.”

“We can’t quite judge yet,” said Blanche. “And – I am sure you are too sweeping, Stasy. Mamma may have been too sanguine, and have seen things too much through rose-coloured spectacles, but she cannot be altogether mistaken in her pleasant remembrances of her old friends – the ‘best’ people – among whom she lived.”

“Would you give Lady Harriot Dunstan as a specimen?” said Stasy snappishly.

“No; she would be a common-minded, inferior woman in any class,” said Blanche. “I believe that is the truth of it all: there are refined and charming natures to be found in every class, and there are the opposite.”

“Well, then, let us hunt up a few among the Blissmore bourgeoisie, and content ourselves with them,” said Stasy.

“No,” said Blanche again. “It is one’s duty to live in one’s own class unless one is plainly shown it is necessary to leave it. And that reminds me, speaking of Lady Harriot, I really think mamma should call there, now we are settled. She did not mean to be impertinent, we must remember.”

“I don’t need to go, as I’m not out,” said Stasy. “Besides, one of us would be enough in any case. I would have liked to see Alderwood, though, but I won’t go the way those Blissmore girls go, on a ‘show’ day – ‘open to the public’ – faugh!” with great disgust.

Blanche could not help laughing.

“How consistent you are,” she said. – “Well, Herty,” as at that moment her little brother came flying out of their own gate to meet them, “why didn’t you come with us to the woods to gather leaves and hunt for violets?”

“I meant to come,” said Herty regretfully, “but when I’d finished my lessons for Monday, you were gone, and I couldn’t see you, though I ran as far down the road as I could. Oh, Blanchie,” he went on, “I met such a nice lady riding. She saw I was looking up and down, and she stopped her horse and spoke to me. I asked her if she’d seen two girls like you and Stasy, and she said no, but if she did, she’d tell you I was looking for you. She said she knew you by sight, and she hoped we liked living at Pinnerton.”

“Was it a young lady?” asked Blanche.

“Yes,” said the boy, “and she came out of those big gates, nearly opposite the lane, you know. She had a nice face, not as pretty as yours, Blanchie, but about as pretty as – ” And he glanced at his younger sister dubiously. “No, she wasn’t like Stasy. She had a more shiny face.”

“Thank you,” said Stasy. “Perhaps she uses Pears’s soap, which I don’t.”

Herty looked puzzled.

“That’s not what I mean,” he said. “It was a pretty, shiny way – out of her eyes, too. Not soapy. You are silly, Stasy.”