The Making of a Marchioness & Its Sequel, The Methods of Lady Walderhurst. Frances Hodgson Burnett
Walderhurst knows Sir Bruce Norman,” said Agatha. “Isn’t it strange? He spoke of him to me to-day. He says he is clever.”
“You had a nice talk this afternoon, hadn’t you?” said Emily. “You both looked so—so—as if you were enjoying yourselves when I passed.”
“Did he look as if he were enjoying himself? He was very agreeable. I did not know he could be so agreeable.”
“I have never seen him look as much pleased,” answered Emily Fox-Seton. “Though he always looks as if he liked talking to you, Lady Agatha. That large white gauze garden-hat”—reflectively—“is so very becoming.”
“It was very expensive,” sighed lovely Agatha. “And they last such a short time. Mamma said it really seemed almost criminal to buy it.”
“How delightful it will be,” remarked cheering Emily, “when—when you need not think of things like that!”
“Oh!”—with another sigh, this time a catch of the breath,—“it would be like Heaven! People don’t know; they think girls are frivolous when they care, and that it isn’t serious. But when one knows one must have things,—that they are like bread,—it is awful!”
“The things you wear really matter.” Emily was bringing all her powers to bear upon the subject, and with an anxious kindness which was quite angelic. “Each dress makes you look like another sort of picture. Have you,”—contemplatively—“anything quite different to wear tonight and tomorrow?”
“I have two evening dresses I have not worn here yet”—a little hesitatingly. “I—well I saved them. One is a very thin black one with silver on it. It has a trembling silver butterfly for the shoulder, and one for the hair.”
“Oh, put that on tonight!” said Emily, eagerly. “When you come down to dinner you will look so—so new! I always think that to see a fair person suddenly for the first time all in black gives one a kind of delighted start—though start isn’t the word, quite. Do put it on.”
Lady Agatha put it on. Emily Fox-Seton came into her room to help to add the last touches to her beauty before she went down to dinner. She suggested that the fair hair should be dressed even higher and more lightly than usual, so that the silver butterfly should poise the more airily over the knot, with its quivering, outstretched wings. She herself poised the butterfly high upon the shoulder.
“Oh, it is lovely!” she exclaimed, drawing back to gaze at the girl. “Do let me go down a moment or so before you do, so that I can see you come into the room.”
She was sitting in a chair quite near Lord Walderhurst when her charge entered. She saw him really give something quite like a start when Agatha appeared. His monocle, which had been in his eye, fell out of it, and he picked it up by its thin cord and replaced it.
“Psyche!” she heard him say in his odd voice, which seemed merely to make a statement without committing him to an opinion—“Psyche!”
He did not say it to her or to any one else. It was simply a kind of exclamation,—appreciative and perceptive without being enthusiastic,—and it was curious. He talked to Agatha nearly all the evening.
Emily came to Lady Agatha before she retired, looking even a little flushed.
“What are you going to wear at the treat tomorrow?” she asked.
“A white muslin, with entre-deux of lace, and the gauze garden-hat, and a white parasol and shoes.”
Lady Agatha looked a little nervous; her pink fluttered in her cheek.
“And tomorrow night?” said Emily.
“I have a very pale blue. Won’t you sit down, dear Miss Fox-Seton?”
“We must both go to bed and sleep. You must not get tired.”
But she sat down for a few minutes, because she saw the girl’s eyes asking her to do it.
The afternoon post had brought a more than usually depressing letter from Curzon Street. Lady Claraway was at her motherly wits’ ends, and was really quite touching in her distraction. A dressmaker was entering a suit. The thing would get into the papers, of course.
“Unless something happens, something to save us by staving off things, we shall have to go to Castle Clare at once. It will be all over. No girl could be presented with such a thing in the air. They don’t like it.”
“They,” of course, meant persons whose opinions made London’s society’s law.
“To go to Castle Clare,” faltered Agatha, “will be like being sentenced to starve to death. Alix and Hilda and Millicent and Eve and I will be starved, quite slowly, for the want of the things that make girls’ lives bearable when they have been born in a certain class. And even if the most splendid thing happened in three or four years, it would be too late for us four—almost too late for Eve. If you are out of London, of course you are forgotten. People can’t help forgetting. Why shouldn’t they, when there are such crowds of new girls every year?”
Emily Fox-Seton was sweet. She was quite sure that they would not be obliged to go to Castle Clare. Without being indelicate, she was really able to bring hope to the fore. She said a good deal of the black gauze dress and the lovely effect of the silver butterflies.
“I suppose it was the butterflies which made Lord Walderhurst say ‘Psyche! Psyche!’ when he first saw you,” she added, en passant.
“Did he say that?” And immediately Lady Agatha looked as if she had not intended to say the words.
“Yes,” answered Emily, hurrying on with a casual air which had a good deal of tact in it. “And black makes you so wonderfully fair and aërial. You scarcely look quite real in it; you might float away. But you must go to sleep now.”
Lady Agatha went with her to the door of the room to bid her goodnight. Her eyes looked like those of a child who might presently cry a little. “Oh, Miss Fox-Seton,” she said, in a very young voice, “you are so kind!”
Chapter Four
The parts of the park nearest to the house already presented a busy aspect when Miss Fox-Seton passed through the gardens the following morning. Tables were being put up, and baskets of bread and cake and groceries were being carried into the tent where the tea was to be prepared. The workers looked interested and good-humoured; the men touched their hats as Emily appeared, and the women courtesied smilingly. They had all discovered that she was amiable and to be relied on in her capacity of her ladyship’s representative.
“She’s a worker, that Miss Fox-Seton,” one said to the other. “I never seen one that was a lady fall to as she does. Ladies, even when they means well, has a way of standing about and telling you to do things without seeming to know quite how they ought to be done. She’s coming to help with the bread-and-butter-cutting herself this morning, and she put up all them packages of sweets yesterday with her own hands. She did ‘em up in different-coloured papers, and tied ‘em with bits of ribbon, because she said she knowed children was prouder of coloured things than plain—they was like that. And so they are: a bit of red or blue goes a long way with a child.”
Emily cut bread-and-butter and cake, and placed seats and arranged toys on tables all the morning. The day was hot, though beautiful, and she was so busy that she had scarcely time for her breakfast. The household party was in the gayest spirits. Lady Maria was in her most amusing mood. She had planned a drive to some interesting ruins for the afternoon of the next day, and a dinner-party for the evening. Her favourite neighbours had just returned to their country-seat five miles away, and they were coming to the dinner, to her great satisfaction. Most of her neighbours bored her, and she took them in doses at her dinners, as she would have taken medicine. But the Lockyers were young and good-looking