And here is Susan Smith!' he said, looking me over in my velvet, his lip twitching towards a smile. 'But I should have supposed her a lady, I am sure!' He stepped towards me and took my hand, and Maud also came to me. He said, 'I hope you are liking your place at Briar, Sue. I hope you are proving a good girl for your new mistress.'
I said, 'I hope I am too, sir.'
'She is a very good girl,' said Maud. 'She is a very good girl, indeed.'
She said it in a nervous, grateful kind of way— like you would say it to a stranger, feeling pushed for conversation, about your dog.
Gentleman pressed my hand once, then let it fall. He said, 'Of course, she could not help but be good— I should say, no girl could help but be good, Miss Lilly— with you as her example.'
Her colour had gone down. Now it rose again. 'You are too kind,' she said.
He shook his head and bit at his lip. 'No gentleman could but be,' he murmured, 'with you to be kind to,'
Now his cheeks were pink as hers. I should say he must have had a way of holding his breath to make the blood come. He kept his eyes upon her, and at last she gazed at him and smiled; and then she laughed.
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And I thought then, for the first time, that he had been right. She was handsome, she was very fair and slight— I knew it, seeing her stand beside him with her eyes on his.
Pigeons and geese. The great clock sounded, and they started and looked away.
Gentleman said he had kept her too long. 'I shall see you at supper, I hope, with your uncle?'
'With my uncle, yes,' she said quietly.
He made her a bow, and went to the door; then, when he was almost out of it he seemed to remember me, and went through a kind of pantomime, of patting at his pockets, looking for coins. He came up with a shilling, and beckoned me close to take it.
'Here you are, Sue,' he said. He lifted my hand and pressed the shilling in it. It was a bad one. 'All well?' he added softly, so that Maud should not overhear.
I said, 'Oh, thank you, sir!' And I made another curtsey, and winked.— Two curious things to do together, as it happened, and I would not recommend you try it: for I fear the wink unbalanced the curtsey; and I'm certain the curtsey threw off the wink.
I don't think Gentleman noticed, however. He only smiled in a satisfied way, bowed again, and left us. Maud looked once at me, then went silently to her own room and closed the door— I don't know what she did in there. I sat until she called me, a half- hour later, to help her change into her gown for dinner.
I sat and tossed the shilling. 'Well,' I thought, 'bad coins will gleam as well as good.'
But I thought it in a discontented sort of way; and didn't know why.
That night she stayed an hour or two after supper, reading to her uncle and to Gentleman in the drawing-room. I had not seen the drawing-room then. I only knew what she did when I wasn't with her, through Mr Way or Mrs Stiles happening to remark on it as we took our meals. I still passed my evenings in the kitchen and in Mrs Stiles's pantry; and pretty dull evenings they generally were. This night, however, was different. I went down to find Margaret with two forks in a great piece of roasting ham, and Mrs Cakebread spooning honey on it. Honeyed ham, said Margaret, plumping up her lips, was Mr Rivers's favourite dish. Mr Rivers, said Mrs Cakebread, was a pleasure to cook for.
She had changed her old wool stockings for the black silk pair I had given her. The parlourmaids had changed their caps, for ones with extra ruffles. Charles, the knife-boy, had combed his hair flat, and made the parting straight as a blade: he sat whistling, on a stool beside the fire, rubbing polish into one of Gentleman's boots.
He was the same age as John Vroom; but was fair, where John was swarthy. He said,
'What do you say to this, Mrs Stiles? Mr Rivers says that, in London, you may see elephants. He says they keep elephants in pens in the parks of London, as we keep sheep; and a boy can pay a man sixpence, and ride on an elephant's back.'
'Well, bless my soul!' said Mrs Stiles.
She had fastened a brooch at the neck of her gown. It was a mourning brooch, with more black hair in it.
Elephants! I thought. I could see that Gentleman had come among them, like a cock into a coop of roosting hens, and set them all fluttering. They said he was handsome.
They said he was better-bred than many dukes, and knew the proper treating of a 68
servant. They said what a fine thing it was for Miss Maud that a clever young person like him should be about the house again. If I had stood up and told them the truth— that they were a bunch of flats; that Mr Rivers was a fiend in human form, who meant to marry Maud and steal her cash, then lock her up and more or less hope she died— if I had stood and told them that, they should never have believed it. They should have said that I was mad.
They will always believe a gentleman, over someone like me.
And of course, I wasn't about to tell them any such thing. I kept my thoughts to myself; and later, over pudding in her pantry, Mrs Stiles sat, fingering her brooch, and was also rather quiet. Mr Way took his newspaper away to the privy. He had had to serve up two fine wines with Mr Lilly's dinner; and was the only one, out of all of us, not glad that Gentleman had come.
At least, I supposed I was glad. 'You are,' I told myself, 'but just don't know it. You'll feel it, when you've seen him on his own.'— I thought we would find a way to meet, in a day or two. It was almost another two weeks, however, before we did. For of course, I had no
reason for wandering, without Maud, into the grand parts of the house. I never saw the room he slept in, and he never came to mine. Besides, the days at Briar were run so very regular, it was quite like some great mechanical show, you could not change it.
The house bell woke us up in the mornings, and after that we all went moving on our ways from room to room, on our set courses, until the bell rang us back into our beds at night. There might as well have been grooves laid for us in the floorboards; we might have glided on sticks. There might have been a great handle set into the side of the house, and a great hand winding it.— Sometimes, when the view beyond the windows was dark or grey with mist, I imagined that handle and thought that I could almost hear it turning. I grew afraid of what would happen if the turning was to stop.
That's what living in the country does to you.
When Gentleman came, the show gave a kind of jog. There was a growling of the levers, people quivering for a second upon their sticks, the carving of one or two new grooves; and then it all went on, smooth as before, but with the scenes in a different order. Maud did not go to her uncle, now, to read to him while he took notes. She kept to her rooms. We sat and sewed, or played at cards, or went walking to the river or to the yew trees and the graves.
As for Gentleman: he rose at seven, and took his breakfast in his bed. He was served by Charles. At eight o'clock he began his work on Mr Lilly's pictures. Mr Lilly directed him. He was as mad over his pictures as he was over his books, and had fitted up a little room for Gentleman to work in, darker and closer even than his library. I suppose the pictures were old and pretty precious. I never saw them. Nobody did. Mr Lilly and Gentleman carried keys about with them, and they locked the door to that room whether they were out of it or in it.
They worked until one o'clock, then took their lunch. Maud and I took ours alone. We ate in silence. She might not eat at all, but only sit waiting. Then, at a quarter to two, she would fetch out drawing-things— pencils and paints, papers and cards, a wooden triangle— and she would set them ready, very neatly, in an order that was always the 69
same. She would not let me help. If a brush fell and