Mary Gray Part 2

"The man has gentle blood in him somewhere," said the old lady to herself. She had a sense of humour which kept her knowledge of her own importance from becoming overweening. "I believe his respect is for my age, not for my rank. I wonder what the world is coming to!"

She went away then and left the father and daughter together. Walter, who had taken a chair by Mary's, looked with a half-conscious pleasure round the velvet sward on which the shadows of the trees lay long. The trees were at their full summer foliage, dark as night, mysterious, magnificent.

"What a very pleasant place!" Walter Gray said, with grave enjoyment.

"How sweet the evening smells are! How quiet everything is! Who could believe that Wistaria Terrace was over the wall?"

"I have been missing Wistaria Terrace," Mary said. "You don't know how lonesome it feels for the children. I wonder how Mamie is getting on without me. I want to go home. Indeed, I feel quite able to. I don't know how I shall do without going home."

"If you went home," said Walter Gray, unexpectedly practical, "your arm would never set, Mary. You'd be forgetting and doing all manner of things you oughtn't to do. If Lady Anne is kind enough to ask you to visit her, stay a while and rest, dear. Indeed, you do too much for your size."

"You will all miss me so dreadfully."

"Indeed, I don't think we shall miss you--in that way. Oddly enough--I suppose Matilda was on her mettle--the house seemed quieter when I came home. The children were in bed. I smelt something good from the kitchen.

Don't imagine that we shall not be able to do without you, child."

Mary, who knew no more of the capable charwoman than Walter Gray did, looked on this speech of her father's as a mere string of tender subterfuges. She said nothing, but her eyes rested on her grey woollen skirt, faded by wear and the weather, and she had an unchildish sense of the incongruity of her presence as a visitor in Lady Anne's house.

Walter Gray's glance roamed over his young daughter. He saw nothing of her dreary attire. He saw only the spiritual face, over-pale, the slender, young, unformed body, graceful as a half-opened flower in its ill-fitting covering, the slender feet that had a suggestion of race, the toil-worn hands the fingers of which tapered to fine points.

"You have always done too much, child," he said, with sudden, tender compunction.

When he rose to go Mary clung to him as though their parting was to be for years.

"I will come in again to-morrow," he said. "I shall sleep better to-night for thinking of you in this quiet, restful place. Get some roses in your cheeks, little girl, before you come back to us."

"I wish I were going back now," said Mary piteously. She looked round the old walls with their climbing fruit trees as though they were the walls of a prison. "It is awful not to be able to come and go. And Mamie will never be able to do without me. The children will be ill----"

He left her in tears. As he re-entered the house by its iron steps up to a gla.s.s door Lady Anne came out from her morning-room and called him within. He looked about him at the room, walled in with books, with yellowed marble busts of great men on top of the book-cases. His feet sank in soft carpets. The smell of a pot of lilies mingled with the smell of leather bindings. The light in the room, filtered through the leaves of an overhanging creeper, was green and gold. It seemed to him that he must have known such a room in some other world, where he had not had to make watches all day with a gla.s.s screwed in his eye, but had abundant leisure for books and beautiful things. Not but that there might be worse things than the watchmaking. Over the works of the watches, the fine little wheels and springs, Walter Gray thought hard, thought incessantly. He thought, perhaps, the harder that he had neither the leisure nor opportunity for putting down his thoughts on paper or imparting them to another like-minded with himself. How his fellows would have stared if they could have known the things that went on inside Walter Gray's mind as he leant above his table, peering into the interior of the watch-cases!

"Sit down, Mr. Gray," said Lady Anne graciously; "I want to talk to you about Mary."

She approached the matter delicately, having wit enough to see that Walter Gray was no common person. While she talked she looked with frank admiration at his face: the fine, high, delicate nose; the arched brows, like Mary's own; the over-development of the forehead. The dust of years and worries lay thick upon his face, yet Lady Anne said to herself that it was a beautiful face beneath the dust.

"I want to talk to you about Mary," she went on. "The child interests me strongly. She is a fine vessel, this little daughter of yours. Pray excuse me if I speak plainly. She has been doing far too much for her age and her strength. Haven't you noticed that she is pulled down to earth? Those babies, Mr. Gray--they are remarkably fat and heavy; they are killing Mary."

"Her mother died of consumption," Walter Gray said, his face whitening with terror.

"Ah!" the old lady thought; "she is the child of his heart. Those three twins are merely the children of his home. That poor drudge of a mother of theirs! Mary is the child of her father's heart and mind."

Then aloud: "You had better let me have her, Mr. Gray."

"Let you have her, Lady Anne? What would you do with my Mary?"

He looked scarcely less aghast than he had done a moment before at the suggestion of consumption.

"Not separate her from you, Mr. Gray. This house is my home, and I am not likely to leave it, except for a month or two at a time, at my age.

I think the child will be a companion to me. I have no romantic suggestions to make. I am not proposing to adopt Mary. I shall pay her a salary, and give her opportunities for education that you cannot. She interests me, as I have said. Let me have her. When I no longer need her--I am an old woman, Mr. Gray--she will be fit to earn her own living. Everything I have goes back to my nephew Jarvis Lord Iniscrone.

But Mary will not suffer. Think! What have you to give her but a life of drudgery under which she will break down--die, perhaps?"

She watched the emotion in his face with her little keen, bright eyes.

"It is not a fine lady's caprice?" he said. "You won't make my Mary accustomed to better things than I could give her and then send her back to be a drudge?"

"The Lord judge between thee and me," she answered solemnly.

"Then I trust you, Lady Anne Hamilton," he said.

The strange thing was that the proud old lady was gratified, almost flattered, by the confidence in Walter Gray's unworldly eyes.

"Thank you, Mr. Gray," she said; then, as he took up his hat to go, she laid a detaining hand on his shabby coat sleeve.

"Why not have dinner with Mary in the garden?" she suggested. "Do, pray.

I want you to tell her what we have agreed upon. I can send word to Mrs.

Gray."

Walter Gray was pleased enough to go back to his little girl whom he had left in tears for the comfortless house and the burden of the young stepbrothers and stepsisters. It was pleasure, half pain, to see the uplifted face with which Mary regarded him when she saw him return. How was he going to put the barrier between them that this plan to which he had given his consent would surely mean? He had no illusions. Over the wall, Lady Anne had said. But the wall that separated Wistaria Terrace and the Mall was in reality a high and a great wall. He would never have Mary in the old close communion again. All pa.s.ses. How good the old times were that were only a few hours away, yet seemed worlds! Never again! They would never be all and all to each other in a solitude which took no count of the others. Yet it was for Mary's sake. For Mary's sake the wall was to rise between them. As he began to tell her the strange, wonderful thing, his heart was heavy within him because a chapter of his life was closed. He had come to the end of an epoch. Henceforth things might be conceivably better, but--they would be different.

CHAPTER III

THE NEW ESTATE

Mary took the news of her great promotion in an unthankful spirit.

"Lady Anne is very kind," she said tearfully; "but I don't want to stay with her. I couldn't bear to live anywhere but in Wistaria Terrace. It is absurd that you should say you have given your consent, papa. How could you possibly have consented when the house could not get on without me? You know it could not. Why, even for a day things would be all topsy-turvy without me."

"And so you have not gone to school," the father answered, with an accent of self-reproach. "You have been weighed down with responsibilities and cares that you ought to have been free of for years to come. You have even been stunted in your growth, as Lady Anne said.

It is time things were altered. I don't know how I was so blind. We ought to be grateful to the accident that has opened a door to us."

When he had gone, Lady Anne came and comforted Mary. There was a deal of kindness in the old lady's heart.

"You shall help them," she said. "Dear me, how much help you will be able to give them! Imagine beginning with a salary at fifteen! You are to leave things to me, Mary. I have sent help to your stepmother--an excellent woman, Mrs. Devine, whom I have known for many years. She is very capable. I will tell her that she must remain with your stepmother.

It is amazing what one really capable woman can do. And afterwards there will be the salary."

The salary, and perhaps a quick, warm feeling for Lady Anne which sprang up suddenly in Mary's heart, settled the question. After all, as Lady Anne said, despite her greatness she was very lonely. She had lost her son and her grandson, and she could not endure her nephew or his family.

She had only a few old cronies. As a matter of fact, although she had taken a fancy to Mary Gray and captured the child's susceptible heart, she was not a particularly amiable or lovable old lady to the rest of the world. She was too keen-sighted and sharp-tongued to be popular.

Mary slept that night in such a room as she had never dreamt of. There was a little bed in the corner of it with a flowing veil of white, lace-trimmed muslin like a baby's cot. There was white muslin tied with blue ribbons at the window, and the dressing-table was as gaily and innocently adorned. There was a work-box on a little table, a writing-desk on another; a shelf of books hung on the wall. The room had really been made ready for a dear young cousin of Lady Anne's, who had not lived to enjoy it. If Mary had only known, she owed something of Lady Anne's interest to the fact that her eyes were grey, like Viola's, her cheek transparent like Viola's.

Apart from the discomfort of the broken arm, as she lay in the soft, downy little bed, she was ill at ease, wondering how they were getting on without her at Wistaria Terrace. Her breast had an ache for the baby who was used to lie warm against it. Her good arm felt strange and lonely for the familiar little body. She kept putting it out in a panic during her sleep because she missed the baby.

In the morning Simmons, Lady Anne's maid, came to help her dress. It was very difficult, Mary found, to do things for one's self with a broken arm. Her head ached because of the disturbed sleep and the pain of the broken limb. Simmons had come to her in a somewhat hostile frame of mind. She did not hold with picking up gutter-children from no one knew where and setting people as were respectable to wait upon them. But at heart she was a good-natured woman, and her indignation disappeared before the unchildish pain and weariness of Mary's face.

"There," she said, "I wouldn't be fretting, if I were you. Lor' bless you, there's fine treats in store for you. Her ladyship sent only last night for a roll of grey cashmere. I'm to fit you after your breakfast and make it up as quick as I can. Then you'll be fit to go out with her ladyship in the carriage and get your other things."

It was the last day of the ugly linsey. Simmons got through her task with great quickness. She was a woman of taste, else she had not been Lady Anne's maid. Lady Anne was more particular about her garments than most young women. And, having once made up her mind to like Mary, Simmons took an interest in her task.