Chapter Six.
An Opening
Miss Norreys had a tiny home of her own, at some considerable distance from the Balderson mansion, which was about as far west as it could be to be yet in a thoroughly good position. The house in question was tiny in some ways, but it scarcely gave one that impression, for it contained one very large room, originally, in all probability, intended for a studio, which Hertha had converted into a music-room, a small so-called drawing-room or boudoir leading into it, being her own private sanctum.
She lived alone now, save for an old servant, who had never left her – who had solved the problem of out-staying the proverbial twenty-one years without degenerating from the “faithful friend” of the middle seven into the “unendurable tyrant” of the last term. But Miss Norreys had not been long alone. Only three short years ago, the mother, the adored mother, whose later life had been rendered peaceful and happy by the daughter’s brave energy, the young brother, whose education and start in the world was all his sister’s doing, had both been with her. Now the former was at rest in the unknown country, which yet, as life goes on, and we think of the sweet souls who have preceded us there, loses the dread sense of strangeness – seems almost to grow more familiar than this side of the river. And the other, Hertha’s dearly-loved Jasper, was away in India, the right place for him as a poor man, and where he was already rewarding her for her devotion by his unexceptionable and promising life.
“If only it were not so far away,” she would say to herself sometimes, as many another woman in England says to herself every day. And then she would let her thoughts revert to the time when they were all three together, to the struggles which, viewed in the tender light of the past, seemed to have been nothing but happiness, to the delight, doubled by being shared, with which she had realised the fact of her first success.
“How proud we were when we took this house!” she said to herself. “How hot Jasper made himself with hanging up all the curtains and things in the studio! How could I ever have murmured at anything then!”
It was not often she allowed herself to indulge in these reminiscences. She was full of real sentiment, but she had a wholesome dread of anything approaching sentimentalism, of which, living alone as she did, she knew she must beware. Only sometimes, in the enforced pauses of her busy life, she would allow herself the “treat,” as she called it, of going back to the past for a while, though there were other pages of her girl-life which, for the sake of her own peace of mind, she kept resolutely under lock and key.
She was sitting idle for once – her thoughts busied with the bright and peaceful memories of the two so dear to her – on the day that she was expecting Miss Maryon to call. It was not often that she could afford to spare an afternoon, and her doing so now was out of the purest and most disinterested kindness to the girl who had appealed to her so unexpectedly. And when Hertha made up her mind to a thing she did it thoroughly.
“To judge by her talk at Helena Campion’s, that day,” she said to herself, “she will not be content with half an hour or so. I had better arrange to be free for the rest of the afternoon. Besides, of course, there really will be a good deal to discuss, for I am sure she is quite extraordinarily inexperienced, despite her funny little assumptions of wisdom.”
Almost on the stroke of the appointed hour, the bell rang.
“Come,” thought Miss Norreys, as she heard Winifred’s clear, decided tones, inquiring for herself, “she is punctual, and so much the better. So many of these would-be independent and self-reliant young women prejudice others almost from the first by their airy disregard of every one else’s convenience.”
No – to a certain extent Winifred was really practical and reliable. She was grateful, too, to Hertha, and so anxious to stand well with her that the last twenty minutes had been spent in walking up and down the street till within a minute or so of the appointed hour.
She came in, looking eager and yet a little shy. Her bright, short-sighted eyes glanced with evident interest round the pretty little room, opening at one end, “à deux battants,” into the large studio, which was but dimly lighted, then returned to rest with unmistakable admiration upon her young hostess.
“Oh, how delightful, how charming it all is!” she exclaimed, impulsively. “Oh, Miss Norreys, thank you so much, so very much, for letting me come to see you.”
“I am pleased to see you. I shall be very glad if I can be of any use to you,” Hertha replied. It was not in her essentially generous nature to repress the girl, whose enthusiasm was plainly sincere. “Will you take your cloak off? My rooms are not cold. We shall have tea directly. In the meantime, before we begin to talk, would you like to see my little domain? I am very proud of my music-room.”
She led the way into the larger room, turning up the light as she entered it. It was very tastefully arranged – some few good pictures, one or two pretty cabinets, and a respectable number of well-bound books filling glass-doored cases at one end, all relics of more prosperous times, giving a certain dignity to the whole. There were two pianos, and a harp stood in one corner.
Winifred stood entranced.
“It is quite charming,” she said; “just the sort of nest one would long to have.”
Hertha was amused at the expression. She considered her big room much more than a “nest.”
“My young friend does not seem to realise how rare such quarters are in London,” she thought. “I suppose she is used to a bare, but perhaps not very small, country vicarage.”
“Yes, I am very lucky indeed,” she replied. “A room like this is a great ‘find’ in London.”
“Is it really?” said Winifred, peering up at the ceiling. “Oh dear, it is just what I should like.”
Miss Norreys repressed the desire to tell her that, as things were with her, she might as well wish for Aladdin’s palace at once.
“She will learn by experience,” she said to herself.
“And the whole thing – your life, yourself,” Winifred went on – “it is like the realisation of a dream to me. Your splendid independence and freedom. Just think of the contrast between you and an ordinary girl living at home in slavery, or at least in a sort of prolonged childhood, with no personal standing, no liberty to follow her own intuitions.”
A shadow crossed Hertha’s beautiful forehead.
“I have not always lived alone like this,” she said. “Not, indeed, for very long. This house is endeared to me by having spent several years in it with my two,” – her voice faltered a little – “my mother and my brother. I have never wished for what you call ‘independence.’ I was too happy while I had one or two who cared to direct me. I loved being treated like a child.”
“You must have been most fortunately placed,” said Winifred.
“I was,” replied Hertha. “My parents were just perfect. It was circumstances and,” – she hesitated, for she was touching on uncertain ground – “a good deal, perhaps, the fact of my having a voice, a talent, which led me to leave the beaten path. No desire to throw off the dear home ties. I have often wondered what I should have done with my voice had I not needed to utilise it; how far it would have been right to give up time to cultivating it; how far, so to say, the possession of a voice means ‘a vocation.’ That sounds like a poor attempt at a pun,” she ended off with a smile.
But Winifred did not notice her little piece of fun.
“You would have done just what you have done,” she burst out. “You would never have been content in the beaten track – in the narrow, hedged-in life, which is what most women lead.”
“I’m afraid I should have been very content,” said Hertha. “I am not at all sure that I am not by nature very lazy. The energy of many – I think I might say of most women now-a-days – appals me. I don’t agree with you that the ‘narrow, hedged-in lives’ are the lot of the ‘most,’ not in London, anyhow.”
“Well, no, perhaps not in London,” Winifred agreed. “That is why I want to come here.”
“And, oh dear!” said Miss Norreys with again a little smile that seemed more of the nature of a sigh, “you don’t know how I long sometimes for that sort of life. Fancy, with parents and sisters and an old-fashioned home in the country – the sort of place that has not changed much for hundreds of years, where you can distil your own lavender-water and make great jars full of pot-pourri, where there is a lady’s walk and a ghost, and where you know every saint’s face in the windows at church – oh, what a lovely life it might be! If my lot had fallen in such lines, I hope I should have had the energy to cultivate my voice and to use it to give pleasure to others, to poor folk above all; but oh, how joyfully I should have hurried home from my enforced visits to London! I used to dream of such a life,” she added. “Now it is different. I am alone. No place could be much ‘home’ to me.”
A curious expression flickered over Winifred’s face.
“How – how strange!” she said, vaguely. “I did not think you were like that, Miss Norreys. I suppose it is poetry,” she went on. “I suppose you are poetical in a way I don’t understand. Have you ever seen the sort of place you describe? If you had such a home, it would pretty certainly not have the charm you imagine.”
“Oh yes, it would,” said Hertha. “It would have had, I mean. I am not high-flown. There must be such a beautiful content in feeling there you are, in a centre where God has put you – where you can be of use to many, ‘hedged-in’ to clear and distinct duties and responsibilities. I suppose I needed the other side or it would not have come to me. I might have been lazy.”
She took a certain satisfaction in repeating this, for, though she really meant all she said, there was something about Winifred’s half dogmatic, half matter-of-fact insistance on her own views and opinions that provoked Hertha to a kind of contradiction – almost to wish to shock her!
Just then the entrance of tea caused a momentary diversion. There was nothing of the Bohemian about Hertha. The little table was set out with scrupulous though simple care. There was a touch of genuine “old-fashionedness,” very distinct from the modern affectations and imitations of picturesque quaintness, about her, which added to her charm by its unexpectedness. But Winifred Maryon, for reasons which will explain themselves, was not specially struck by it. She accepted all she saw, in her inexperience, as a matter of course.
“Have I ever seen such a house as I have been talking about?” Miss Norreys went on, as she poured out the tea into two really old willow-pattern cups, adding sugar and cream from a small silver bowl and jug, worn thin with many years of daily use. “No, not exactly. There was a place which we once had reason to think would have been ours, which could have been made perfectly beautiful – but it never came into our hands, and now it is pulled down and the land built over. As things are, I do not regret it. Will you have another cup of tea, Miss Maryon? Yes; that’s right. And now we must get to business, and talk about you, not me.”
But Winifred’s enthusiasm for her new friend was so great that even the absorbing interest of her own affairs paled before it.
“I love so to hear about yourself and what you think and feel,” she said. “I cannot believe we really differ about anything. You have beautified your life so, unconsciously, that you can scarcely realise the dullness and monotony of some women’s lives.”
“Oh yes, indeed I do,” replied Miss Norreys.
“If I did not, do you think you would now be sitting here with me? I could never pretend sympathy I did not feel. Lady Campion told me a little, very little, about you, but, of course, I understand you far better from yourself. I sympathise with all my heart in your wish to do something – to strike out a career for yourself.”
“Oh yes,” said Winifred, breathlessly.
“No one could sympathise in it more heartily than I,” Hertha went on. “For years, you know, I worked hard for my mother and brother, and – though I don’t need you to tell me about it – I am sure that some similar motive inspires you, as well as the wish to feel yourself some one, something, which an energetic woman, placed as you are, must feel.”
The colour rose a little in Winifred’s face. Hertha, with instinctive delicacy, glanced away. She knew that direct owning to poverty was painful to some people.
“Ye-es,” said Miss Maryon, at last. “It is – there are – more than one motive. I want to help my sister, too, the one you saw. I am positively certain she has great talent for painting if she had a chance of cultivating it.
“Indeed?” said Hertha, “that simplifies her line of action. What she has to do is to test herself. Then you want to help her to get good teaching, and, I suppose, to make a home for her in London? Yes, she is too young and too beautiful to attempt anything of the kind without some one to take care of her. And – can you both be spared at home?”
“We have another sister at home, and, though my father is in delicate health, my mother is well and active. We have thought about it for a long time – Celia and I.”
“Poor souls! Two fewer to provide for, no doubt, is a consideration,” thought Hertha.
“Does Mrs Balderson know about it? Is she likely to help you in any way?” she asked aloud. “I do not know her personally, but I have heard she is truly kind.”
“She has been very kind in having us here. But she would not sympathise in our plans. She is – old-fashioned, I suppose. She thinks girls should stay quietly at home.”
“Ah, indeed,” said Hertha, her mind rapidly picturing to itself what, in such a case, the “staying quietly at home” must mean: the poor, unbeautiful surroundings, the colourless lives, the pain and almost degradation of the terrible “genteel poverty.”
“But she is very kind,” repeated Winifred, her conscience smiting her; “she asked us out of kindness. She would like us to marry,” with a little smile. “But, of course, I never shall. She likes Celia the best, I think.”
Again Hertha’s imagination jumped to hasty conclusions. “I see it all,” she thought. “She wants to show the pretty one to advantage, to give her a chance, as people say.”
“And is there any prospect of Celia’s marrying?” she asked.
Winifred shook her head.
“Oh no!” she replied, with a touch of something like indignation, which Miss Norreys could not understand. “Celia would never change so – she would not desert me.”
“But, my dear Miss Maryon, it might be a very good thing, if and always supposing, of course, that it was some one she cared for,” said Hertha.
“Placed as – ”
“There is no use discussing remote contingencies,” interrupted Winifred, and Miss Norreys, imagining that her pride in her sister made it bitter to realise that the possibility was remote, beautiful though Celia was, said no more.
“Well, then, to be practical,” she replied, “what you have told me makes me feel that the proposal I have to lay before you may suit you even better than I had expected. For you cannot have Celia with you, or – or afford good teaching for her until you have made a beginning yourself, and got a home ready.”
“I must certainly have somewhere to bring her to,” said Winifred, evasively, “and somewhere for myself too,” with a smile. “I should like to get things a little in order, as it were, so far settled, for, you see, I am old enough to decide for myself, before I tell my people at home about it. It would make my mother so much less anxious if I could tell her it was settled.”
“But,” exclaimed Hertha, rather taken aback, “your people do know what you are intending? You are not acting against their wishes?”
“Oh no – that is to say, they do know, thoroughly,” said Winifred, with evident candour. “As for their wishes– why, no, mother does not wish us to leave home. Mothers never do – do they? She would like us all to stay near her always, I suppose. But she understands, and – she is very kind.”
“Kind” struck Hertha as a somewhat curious word to use of a mother in such a case.
“She should be very proud of you both,” she said quickly, while her mind’s eye pictured the overworked parson’s wife reluctant to let her girls go forth to make their way, even though the relief and satisfaction of seeing them in the path of success could not but be great. “If you get on well, it cannot but be a comfort to her, I should think.”
“She knows Celia has great talent, and she does think it should be cultivated,” replied Winifred, and again something in her tone slightly perplexed Miss Norreys. “I don’t think she feels the same about me, for, you see, I have no very special line. But there are quantities of men who have no very special line, and yet do well, and are of use in their generation. So why not women?”
And she looked up inquiringly at Hertha.
“Why not? There is no reason against it when the motives are sound and good, as in your case I think it must be,” Miss Norreys replied, half hoping that this would lead to further confidence. But Winifred did not speak, so she went on: “The chance I have to tell you of really is a chance, though it may not sound very splendid. Through an old friend of mine, Mr Montague, you can have the offer of a post in the Reasonable Help Society, provided, of course, you can pass a certain examination. It is a very well-managed society: they try to kill two birds with one stone by engaging to do the work – charitable work, of course – girls like yourself, who – who feel they should do something for themselves, to be independent, and in many cases, with the hope of eventually helping their friends.
“It is right they should be paid,” said Miss Maryon, quickly. “I have thought a good deal about that. I don’t believe in unpaid work.”
“I should be very sorry to make such a sweeping assertion,” said Hertha, with a smile. “However, in this case, the question is not raised. You will be paid – fifty pounds a year to begin, and the prospect of an increase, if all goes well. But remember,” as she caught sight of a bright gleam of satisfaction lighting up Winifred’s face, “fifty pounds are not a fortune. You are very inexperienced. I daresay it seems a great deal to you, but it won’t go very far.”
“I am not so inexperienced as you think, dear Miss Norreys,” said Winifred, quietly. “I shall be able to manage, and to have Celia with me before long. It is not the money, but the feeling that it is a beginning, something really to do, and that I shall take the greatest interest in. There is nothing I have more at heart than the problem of how to help without pauperising our lower classes I may be of more use to the Reasonable Help Society than would be thought likely,” she concluded, with a funny little touch of self-assertion.
“I hope so, I am sure – and with all my heart I hope the Reasonable Help Society will be of use to you. Then you decide on accepting it? – that is to say, on offering yourself as a candidate for the post?”
“Oh dear, yes. Most certainly I do,” said Winifred. “And I thank you a thousand times.”
“It was much more Mr Montague’s doing than mine,” said Hertha. “And, indeed, the whole thing was a chance – a lucky one, I trust.”
“And can you tell me when I must call at the office, or must I write, or what?” asked Winifred.
“Yes,” Miss Norreys replied. “Mr Montague sent full particulars. You must call any morning, but the sooner the better, at this address;” and she held out a paper.
“I will go to-morrow,” said Winifred.
“And if you say that you have no home in London, the secretary will give you a list of lodgings where some of their employees live. Nothing very grand, of course, plain, but not uncomfortable, with thoroughly respectable people.”
“Oh that will be all right,” said Winifred. “I will find something to begin with, I daresay, and if I don’t like it, I can easily move.”
Her tone made Hertha rather uneasy again.
“But all moves are expensive,” she said. “Try to settle down if possible.”
“Ah, well, yes, if I can get rooms for Celia too.”
“Rooms!” thought Hertha. “What does she expect? But she must buy experience, I suppose.” So after detailing to her some more of the information received from Mr Montague, she let her go, without volunteering further advice.
And Winifred, feeling that she had taken the first plunge into independence and “a career,” bade her new friend good-bye for the present, with many times repeated expressions of gratitude.