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.
“You are so kind, Mrs. Simmons,”
Mary said gratefully, feeling the gentleness and dexterity
with which the woman tried on her new garments without
once jarring the broken arm.
“I’m kind enough to those
who take me the proper way,” said Simmons, greatly
pleased with Mary’s prefix of Mrs., which was
brevet rank, since Simmons had never married.
It would have made a great difference to Mary’s
comfort at this time if she had been sufficiently ill-advised
to call Simmons without a prefix, as Lady Anne did.
Dr. Carruthers had called to see Mary
the morning after the accident. He had interviewed
his patient in the morning-room, and was passing out
through the hall when Lady Anne’s voice over
the banisters summoned him to her presence.
“You can give me a little while,
Dr. Carruthers?” she said. “I shall
not be interfering with your work?”
“I am quite free” a
little colour came into his cheeks. “The
friend whose work I was doing at the House of Mercy
returned last night. Yesterday was my last day.”
“Ah! and yesterday brought you
an unexpected patient. How do you find her?”
“She has less physique than she ought to have.”
“Yes, she has been underfed
and overworked. I am going to alter all that.
I have taken her into my house as my little companion.”
Dr. Carruthers stared in spite of himself.
“You think it very odd of me?
Well, I am odd, and I can afford to do what
pleases me. Mary Gray is going to live here.
You should know her father. A quite remarkable
man, I consider him. Now, about yourself.
I have heard of you, Dr. Carruthers. I have heard
that you are a very clever young man and devoted to
your work, that you have all the knowledge of the
schools at your fingertips, but very little experience,
and no practice to speak of.”
“Excuse me, Lady Anne.
I was three years house surgeon at the Good Samaritan;
and I have done a great deal of work since I have been
here. I will confess that my patients have been
of a poor class.”
“Who have not paid you a penny.
I don’t know whether you do it for philanthropy
or to keep your hand in
“A little of both,” the
young man said with a faint smile.
“But it is a good thing to do,”
the old lady went on, without noticing his interpellation.
“You’re spoken well of by the poor, if
the rich have not heard anything about you. I
know you’re living beyond your means in a big
house, hoping that a paying practice will come to you.
My dear man, it never will, so long as people think
you are in need of it. They like Dr. Pownall
at their doors with his carriage and pair, even if
he can only give them five minutes. Pownall forgot
himself with me. I remember his father a
very decent, respectable man who used to grow cabbages.
That’s nothing against Pownall creditable
to him, I should say. Still, he hadn’t
time to listen to my symptoms, and he was rude.
’A woman of your age,’ he said. I
should like to know who told Dr. Pownall my age.
A lady has no age. ‘It’s time you
retired,’ I said to him. ’I don’t
think of it,’ said he; ’not for ten years
yet. My patients won’t hear of it.’
‘You’re greedy,’ said I; ’if
you weren’t your patients might go to Hong Kong.’
He thought it was a joke hadn’t time
to find out whether I was serious or not. I made
him, Dr. Carruthers. It’s time for him
to retire now. I shall mention to all my friends
that you are my body-physician.”
She spoke like one of the Royal Family.
But Dr. Carruthers had no inclination to laugh.
His eyes were dim as he murmured his acknowledgments.
It was fame, it was fortune, in those parts to be
approved by Lady Anne Hamilton. Hitherto she had
been understood to swear by Dr. Pownall.
“It means a deal to us, Lady
Anne,” he said, stumbling over his words.
“We had made up our minds to give up the big
house and look for a slum practice. The children I
have two living are not very strong, any
more than Mildred. We put all we could into the
venture of taking the house. It was our bid for
fortune.”
“I wouldn’t approve of
it in a general way,” said Lady Anne. “Still,
it has turned out well. Will your wife be at
home to-morrow afternoon? I should like to call
upon her.”
“She will be delighted.”
Dr. Carruthers was regaining his self-control.
He knew that the presence of Lady Anne’s barouche
at his door for an hour in the afternoon would be
more potent in opening doors to him than if he had
made the most brilliant cure on record.
Mary was with Lady Anne next day when
she went to call on Mrs. Carruthers. It was characteristic
of Lady Anne that she thought to tell Jennings, the
coachman, to drive up and down in front of the house
and round the sides, for Dr. Carruthers’ house
was a corner one with a frontage to three sides.
It was a hot summer day, and Jennings wondered disrespectfully
what bee the old lady had got in her bonnet. Such
a jangling of harness, such a flashing of polished
surfaces! Every window that commanded the three
sides of Dr. Carruthers’ house had an eye at
the pane. The tidings flew from one to another
that Lady Anne Hamilton was visiting Mrs. Carruthers,
and was making a very long call.
Mildred was still on her sofa.
She would have risen when Lady Anne came in, but the
old lady prevented her. Lady Anne could be royally
kind when it pleased her.
She drew a chair by the sofa and sat
down. Mary, who had come in with her, listened
in some wonder to Lady Anne’s sympathetic questions
about the children. That was something in which
Mary was interested, in which Mary had knowledge and
experience; but though she listened she would not
have spoken a word for worlds.
As she sat there on the edge of one
of Mrs. Carruthers’ chairs the drawing-room
furniture was of the sparsest; a chair or small table
dotted here and there on the wilderness of polished
floor she could see herself in a pier-glass
at the other end of the room. It was a quite
unfamiliar presentment she saw. This Mary was
dressed in soft dove-grey. She had a little white
muslin folded fichu about her shoulders. She had
a wide black hat, with one long white ostrich feather.
Her good hand was gloved in delicate grey kid.
There was something quaint about her aspect; for that
artist, Simmons, had discovered that Mary, for all
her fifteen years, looked her best with her soft fine
brown hair piled on top of her head. When she
presented Mary so to Lady Anne the old lady was fain
to acknowledge that Simmons was right. There was
a quaint and delightful stateliness about Mary which
made Lady Anne say to herself once more that the child
had gentle blood in her.
“Dear me,” Mildred Carruthers
thought, as her eyes wandered again and again to the
elegant little figure, “Kit said nothing of this.
I expected to find a rather interesting child of the
humbler classes. I remember particularly that
he said she looked as though she had had a hard time.”
Mary’s changed aspect had one
unforeseen result. When she presented herself
at Wistaria Terrace the baby did not know her.
Her stepmother shed a few tears, which were half-gratification.
The elder children were already a bit shy of her,
the baby’s immediate predecessor even murmuring
of her as “the yady,” and surveying her
from afar, finger in mouth. But the baby could
in no way be brought to recognise her, and only shouted
lustily when she tried to force herself upon his recognition.
“I shall come to-morrow in my
old frock,” Mary said, bitterly hurt by this
lack of perception on the baby’s part. “I
hate these hideous things; so I do. To-morrow
he will come to his Mary, so he will.”
But when the morrow came, and she
sought for her old work-a-day garments in that pretty
white and blue wardrobe where she had hung them when
she had discarded them for the grey frock and hat,
they were not to be found. There were numbers
of things such as Mary had never dreamed of.
Lady Anne had provided her with an outfit, simple according
to her thoughts, but splendid in Mary’s eyes.
A white cashmere dressing-gown, trimmed with lace,
hung on the peg where the grey linsey had been.
Mary flew to Simmons to know where
her old frock had gone to. The good woman, who
by this time had taken Mary under her wing to uphold
her against the rest of the household if it were inclined
to resent the new inmate, looked at her reprovingly.
“You never wanted that old frock,
and you her ladyship’s companion? No, Miss
Mary for so I shall call you, as by her
ladyship’s orders, let some people say what
they like that frock you never will see,
for gone it has to a poor child that’ll maybe
find it a comfort when winter comes. I wonder
at you for thinking on it, so I do, seeing as how I’ve
taken so much trouble with your clothes.”
Mary turned away with a desolate feeling.
The grey linsey might have been like the feathers
of the enchanted bird that became a woman for the
love of a mortal, the feathers which, if she wore them
again, had the power of transporting her back to her
kindred and her old estate. The old life was
indeed closed to Mary with the disappearance of the
grey linsey; and it was long before she lost the feeling
that if she could only have kept her old garments
she need not have been so separated from the old life.