Princess Puck

It was in March that Bill Alardy went to Ashelton. She was sent there “to grow up,” Polly said, and added some sceptical remarks with regard to both place and person. “Poor little Wilhelmina,” said Miss Brownlow, “she has never had a fair chance among us all; the best possible thing for her would be to go to Ashelton with Theresa.” And Miss Brownlow should have known, for she was acquainted with Ashelton, and even better acquainted with Bill, having had the doubtful pleasure of her charge and company from early childhood. Polly did not know much about Ashelton; she had only been there once to spend the day with Theresa, which was a grievance in itself, for Theresa had lived there ever since her marriage last June. That, however, was beside the point; Polly did not so much base her doubts of the efficacy of the plan on Ashelton as on Bill, and she had known her as long as Miss Brownlow, for she was the eldest, as Bill was the youngest, of the four nieces Miss Brownlow had taken into her household. Polly’s opinion and Miss Brownlow’s were not identical on the subject of Bill; but when the matter of the going to Ashelton was being discussed Polly did not consider it necessary to give undue prominence to the difference, thinking Bill might as well go even if it did her no good.

It was a Monday evening when the plan was first mentioned, and Miss Brownlow was making up her accounts at the time. She always made up her accounts on Monday evenings. In her opinion there was no other time half so satisfactory, because, as she said, there was Sunday just before, and it was so easy to remember forgotten things on a Sunday. Perhaps it was not right to think of such things then, and of course she never did so on purpose, only one cannot help things flashing across one’s mind. Occasionally the things flashed away again before she had time to secure them on Monday evening; occasionally also, the flashes were delusive and baseless; but on the other hand, sometimes they did chance to be correct, and then it was most satisfactory. This did not make any material difference to Miss Brownlow’s accounts, which never by any chance came right; they never had come right since she first began keeping them in her girlhood, more years ago than she ever mentioned.

“My father always insisted on our keeping an account of our money, and how we spent it,” she used to say to her nieces. “It is an excellent plan, my dears, for then you know where you are and how you stand.” These desirable results did not always occur in her own case, though that did not deter her nieces from following the suggestion, each according to her nature,—Theresa with neatness and some success, Bella with results not unlike her aunt’s, Polly—there were commercial instincts in Polly’s blood and her untidy books were kept with an accuracy which might have savoured of sharp practice to any one who could comprehend them. Bill, of course, was too young to be considered, and too penniless to keep a record of her non-existent income; moreover, she was only “Poor little Bill—Wilhelmina”—Miss Brownlow invariably made the correction in mind and sometimes in speech. She sighed as she thought about the girl,—she had just come to the item one shilling, a bottle of Stephens’s blue-black writing-ink. Bill had on Thursday upset the last bottle on the schoolroom-floor, in class, too, with all the little girls looking on. How they giggled! Polly said afterwards that Bill made them, but Miss Brownlow did not think so. Bill was too old to do anything so wrong; she was seventeen now, though she seemed such a child. Polly, who was perhaps not without authority on the subject, was of opinion that age had little to do with iniquity, but Miss Brownlow was not convinced. In any case she had to pay the shilling for another bottle of ink. The column of figures she was now counting up did not come to the total she expected: “Now what have I forgotten?” she said.

Bella and Theresa glanced up but did not hazard a suggestion; they knew the remark was not addressed to them, and they went on correcting French exercises in silence. These French exercises were really Bella’s work, but Theresa was helping her with them to-night. A year ago they were Theresa’s own, but when she married her sister had taken up that part of her work. Theresa was on a visit to Miss Brownlow, and finding herself back among the familiar surroundings it came quite natural to her to take up some part of the old duties; besides, she liked to help Bella.

As the two tall sisters sat close together, sharing the same dictionary and sometimes bending over the same page, Miss Brownlow thought they made a beautiful picture; possibly even a less prejudiced observer might not have entirely disagreed. Polly was certainly not a prejudiced observer, yet even she admitted the sisters’ beauty in a general way. She did not look in their direction now, for she was busy with her needlework. She sat opposite to Miss Brownlow, close to the lamp, her dressmaking scattered around her. She possessed a perfect genius for what is technically known as “doing up” her clothes; consequently some of them were always undergoing alterations and repairs, and none of them kept the same appearance for long together.

“I cannot account for sixpence,” Miss Brownlow said at last; “on what can I have spent sixpence?”

“Cabbages,” Polly said briefly.

“Cabbages! My dear Polly, one cannot buy cabbages at this time of year, nor hardly anything else either; vegetables are so dear and scarce, it is really quite dreadful.”

“Sweep,” was Polly’s only comment.

But it was not the sweep, Miss Brownlow said. “We have not had him this fortnight past,” she declared. “Don’t you remember, the last—”

“Then we ought to have had.”

“Oh, I am sure we do not need him yet, don’t you remember the last time he came—”

Polly did not remember, and she showed no interest in the reminiscence; but Theresa, who did not like to hear Miss Brownlow treated so cavalierly, encouraged her aunt to describe the last coming of the sweep and the delinquencies of the maid-servant who overslept herself on that occasion. “And I really do believe he would never have got in at all if it had not been for Bill; she heard him ringing and went down and let him in,—in her nightdress too!”

“That sixpence is for mending Bill’s boots.” This was Polly’s remark.

“What a memory you have!” Miss Brownlow exclaimed, and Polly showed signs of remembering the incident of the sweep. “Bill did go down to him,” she said, “in her nightdress and nothing else. I should like to know how long she stopped down with him!”

Polly had a habit of talking in italics; her treatment of the English language made it acquire an almost double value, her intonation giving the words an additional worth and meaning. Her last speech was an admirable example of her methods; there were many more things implied in it than were said. It was the implications which made Bella exclaim, “You are hard on the child.”

“Oh, well!” And Polly shrugged her shoulders and bent over her work again.

“Poor little Bill, poor little Wilhelmina!” Miss Brownlow sighed softly.

Polly sniffed and Theresa asked: “How much longer are you going to let her be in the school?”

“Oh, a long time,” Miss Brownlow answered readily; she had not begun to contemplate the problem of Bill’s future, nor even to admit its existence. Polly knew that and her small dark eyes showed that she knew it as she remarked: “I began to teach the little ones before I was seventeen.”

Miss Brownlow looked distressed, but Bella said cheerfully: “That was long ago; Auntie wanted help then. Now it is quite different; if Bill were ever so able to teach there would not be the slightest need for her to do it; in fact I don’t see whom she would teach.”

This speech, though perhaps hardly likely to fulfil its comforting intention, was unfortunately only too true. It was indisputable that Miss Brownlow’s school was not what it had been, that its best days lay behind it. At one time it had been almost an Establishment, the recognised school of Wrugglesby, the place to which the country clergymen and gentlemen-farmers of the surrounding districts sent their daughters. The boarders were so many then that it had been necessary to have a mademoiselle and a visiting English governess. That was some time ago, but even when Theresa first began to help with the teaching, things were more prosperous than they were now. Gradually they had changed; times had changed, boarders had fallen off one by one, new ones did not come; girls went further now,—to Brighton, to Bournemouth, even to France and Germany. Mademoiselle left, and it hardly seemed necessary to fill her place, for Theresa was a very good French scholar. The English governess married, and Bella was found equal to doing all that was left of her work. Then, rather more than a year ago, Theresa married, and though Miss Brownlow talked of finding some nice well-educated girl to fill her place, nothing came of it. Theresa used to take the elder girls, and they were so few now that Bella could quite well help Miss Brownlow with them, especially as she was rather clever; she had passed the Cambridge Local Examination and attended some history lectures. Polly, of course, still taught the little ones; she always had done so, and had always contrived to drill a certain amount of information into them. It is to be feared that she did not know very much herself; even Miss Brownlow was obliged to admit that; yet she possessed a far greater faculty for teaching than did the more accomplished Bella. As the school was chiefly composed of little girls, it really was important that they should be well taught. Sometimes Miss Brownlow felt a passing regret when she saw them struggling for their overshoes in the lobby; they were not what her old pupils had been, not of the same social position, not of the same age; most of them were “reductions” on account of sisters past, present, or to come; none of them were likely to remain any length of time, none of them were even weekly boarders. There were only two boarders besides Wilhelmina, who could hardly be counted since she belonged to the household.

Miss Wilson, the principal of the High School two stations up the line, thought of Miss Brownlow when, in her able paper on the education of girls, she had written of teachers of the past. Miss Brownlow was of the past, not highly educated, not clever, but kindly, simple, pleasant, well loved by those pupils of long ago, a gentle power for good in those past best days,—and in the present? Ah, well, the school was going; there were no boarders to be influenced one way or the other now, and the little girls who came daily did not trouble about Miss Brownlow. She was of a race of schoolmistresses fast disappearing from the earth, vanishing under the inexorable law of the survival of the fittest. She was not the fittest. Inefficient? Yes, that was it; inefficient for modern needs, modern wants; growing old, just a little past the work she once did, not at all fit for the work now to be done; never a very wise woman, thank God, not wise enough to know that she was a failure.

“Wilhelmina will teach somewhere else,” Miss Brownlow said, after she had mentally reviewed the prospect called up by Bella’s words; and mercifully the prospect she reviewed was not quite that which other people saw.

“Where?” Polly asked casually, as if the matter were of small moment.

Miss Brownlow did not know. She had not thought, and the question was embarrassing.

Bella came to the rescue. “Mrs. Caxton will want a governess if her little girls are leaving at Easter. They are leaving because they always catch colds from the other children, so she is sure to want a governess.”

“Yes, of course,” Miss Brownlow said enthusiastically; “it would be the very thing for Bill; she never has a cold.”

“H’m! What is she to teach? How not to catch cold? It is about the only thing she knows, and she does that by accident.”

“They are so young,” Miss Brownlow went on, delighted with the plan and regardless of Polly’s interruption; “they will only want elementary teaching, reading and writing and spelling.”

“Bill can’t spell, not that that matters so very much though”—Polly perhaps knew by experience that it was possible to teach a subject in which you were not very deeply learned. “It certainly would not matter to Bill, nothing would matter. If she could spell every word in the dictionary, do you suppose any one would have her for a governess?”

“I don’t know why not,—when she is a little older of course. She is such a child yet; wait till she is grown up.”

“We have been waiting,” Polly observed grimly.

“She is very young for her age; I am sure I don’t know how it is.”

“She was born without gumption,” said Polly with conviction, “and she has never been able to acquire any general knowledge.”

“She is not clever,” Miss Brownlow admitted sadly.

“Cleverness has nothing to do with it,” Polly retorted. “If you start in life lacking what Bill lacks, you must do what you can with common-sense. That will teach you a few things,—what not to say, and how to say it, and—and all that. Bill has no common-sense.”

“We have always treated her like a child;” and here Miss Brownlow sighed again.

It was then that Theresa suggested that Bill should come home with her to stay at Ashelton for a little while. Miss Brownlow was delighted with the suggestion; it was just the thing, she was sure. No doubt the girl would develop; Theresa would use her influence, and her young cousin had always been so fond of her, had always respected and admired her so much; such a visit would be the best possible thing. Theresa herself did not anticipate very great results, but she promised to do her best, and after some discussion of details regarding the proposed visit, Miss Brownlow returned to her accounts and the sisters to the exercises, interrupted only now and again by a repetition of the elder lady’s satisfaction with the plan. After the third interruption Polly yawned aggressively. When there was silence again she bit her cotton and looked thoughtfully across at Miss Brownlow, at the kindly face, the thin hair, the black stuff gown she knew so well. She did not approve of the whole effect; she thought it “snuffy,” and as such unlikely to create a favourable impression on the parents of possible scholars. She looked beyond Miss Brownlow to the wall behind,—to the pale-toned paper with faint gold lines and fainter grey flowers, to the old-fashioned water-colours in shabby gilt frames, the white marble mantelpiece with red glass candlesticks upon it, and to the rosewood chairs covered with green rep, standing one on either side of the fireplace. The room was no more attractive than Miss Brownlow’s dress, she thought; it was terribly old-fashioned in comparison with Miss Wilson’s flatted walls and artistic green cushions. Polly had a poor opinion of art-colours, but she seriously considered the advisability of draping some of the household gods with the best of the shades of yellow. She was, in her own mind, reckoning the quantity of material necessary, when Miss Brownlow again broke in on her reflections.

“Are you sure Robert won’t mind?” she asked for the fourth time.

“Quite sure,” was Theresa’s answer.

“That’s all right; I should not like to put him about at all. You are quite certain?”

Theresa was quite certain, and the subject was dismissed. Polly breathed a heavy sigh, and once more fell back on her own thoughts. These now turned from the art-materials to Robert Morton, Theresa’s husband. Polly had not a very high opinion of Robert Morton; she liked him well enough, but considered him a bad speculation. “He’ll die of apoplexy—poor Theresa—I’m sorry for that poor girl. He’ll certainly die of it, and I expect he’ll die young.” So she had once said to the indignant Bella, and she thought of the verdict again this evening as she glanced at the sisters and mentally dressed Theresa in widow’s weeds. She would make a handsome widow, though perhaps not so effective as Bella. Polly glanced meditatively at Bella; a widow’s cap would look well on that golden head. Theresa was darker and older too by nearly four years; she would be twenty-six in the summer and she looked her age; in fact, Theresa was almost too dignified. Bella was not dignified, though she was tall. They were both tall and graceful and clear-skinned; both had blue eyes, Theresa’s grave and sweet, Bella’s holy, innocent, suggesting a madonna’s eyes to the observer until he became aware of the turned-up nose between; “a flirt’s nose,” Polly called it. Theresa’s features were better, though less attractive; she had not a flirt’s nose, but also she had no tantalising dimple in her chin. Still they were both undeniably beauties, and Polly was nothing of the sort.