Mary Gray
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Katharine Tynan >> Mary Gray
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"My poor little girl!" he said, with an arm about Mary's shoulder.
Then he took off his hat to Lady Anne. There was respect in his manner,
but nothing over-humble, nothing to say that they were not equals in a
sense. His eyes, at once bright and dreamy, rested on her with a
friendly regard.
"The man has gentle blood in him somewhere," said the old lady to
herself. She had a sense of humour which kept her knowledge of her own
importance from becoming overweening. "I believe his respect is for my
age, not for my rank. I wonder what the world is coming to!"
She went away then and left the father and daughter together. Walter,
who had taken a chair by Mary's, looked with a half-conscious pleasure
round the velvet sward on which the shadows of the trees lay long. The
trees were at their full summer foliage, dark as night, mysterious,
magnificent.
"What a very pleasant place!" Walter Gray said, with grave enjoyment.
"How sweet the evening smells are! How quiet everything is! Who could
believe that Wistaria Terrace was over the wall?"
"I have been missing Wistaria Terrace," Mary said. "You don't know how
lonesome it feels for the children. I wonder how Mamie is getting on
without me. I want to go home. Indeed, I feel quite able to. I don't
know how I shall do without going home."
"If you went home," said Walter Gray, unexpectedly practical, "your arm
would never set, Mary. You'd be forgetting and doing all manner of
things you oughtn't to do. If Lady Anne is kind enough to ask you to
visit her, stay a while and rest, dear. Indeed, you do too much for your
size."
"You will all miss me so dreadfully."
"Indeed, I don't think we shall miss you--in that way. Oddly enough--I
suppose Matilda was on her mettle--the house seemed quieter when I came
home. The children were in bed. I smelt something good from the kitchen.
Don't imagine that we shall not be able to do without you, child."
Mary, who knew no more of the capable charwoman than Walter Gray did,
looked on this speech of her father's as a mere string of tender
subterfuges. She said nothing, but her eyes rested on her grey woollen
skirt, faded by wear and the weather, and she had an unchildish sense of
the incongruity of her presence as a visitor in Lady Anne's house.
Walter Gray's glance roamed over his young daughter. He saw nothing of
her dreary attire. He saw only the spiritual face, over-pale, the
slender, young, unformed body, graceful as a half-opened flower in its
ill-fitting covering, the slender feet that had a suggestion of race,
the toil-worn hands the fingers of which tapered to fine points.
"You have always done too much, child," he said, with sudden, tender
compunction.
When he rose to go Mary clung to him as though their parting was to be
for years.
"I will come in again to-morrow," he said. "I shall sleep better
to-night for thinking of you in this quiet, restful place. Get some
roses in your cheeks, little girl, before you come back to us."
"I wish I were going back now," said Mary piteously. She looked round
the old walls with their climbing fruit trees as though they were the
walls of a prison. "It is awful not to be able to come and go. And Mamie
will never be able to do without me. The children will be ill----"
He left her in tears. As he re-entered the house by its iron steps up to
a glass door Lady Anne came out from her morning-room and called him
within. He looked about him at the room, walled in with books, with
yellowed marble busts of great men on top of the book-cases. His feet
sank in soft carpets. The smell of a pot of lilies mingled with the
smell of leather bindings. The light in the room, filtered through the
leaves of an overhanging creeper, was green and gold. It seemed to him
that he must have known such a room in some other world, where he had
not had to make watches all day with a glass screwed in his eye, but had
abundant leisure for books and beautiful things. Not but that there
might be worse things than the watchmaking. Over the works of the
watches, the fine little wheels and springs, Walter Gray thought hard,
thought incessantly. He thought, perhaps, the harder that he had neither
the leisure nor opportunity for putting down his thoughts on paper or
imparting them to another like-minded with himself. How his fellows
would have stared if they could have known the things that went on
inside Walter Gray's mind as he leant above his table, peering into the
interior of the watch-cases!
"Sit down, Mr. Gray," said Lady Anne graciously; "I want to talk to you
about Mary."
She approached the matter delicately, having wit enough to see that
Walter Gray was no common person. While she talked she looked with frank
admiration at his face: the fine, high, delicate nose; the arched brows,
like Mary's own; the over-development of the forehead. The dust of years
and worries lay thick upon his face, yet Lady Anne said to herself that
it was a beautiful face beneath the dust.
"I want to talk to you about Mary," she went on. "The child interests me
strongly. She is a fine vessel, this little daughter of yours. Pray
excuse me if I speak plainly. She has been doing far too much for her
age and her strength. Haven't you noticed that she is pulled down to
earth? Those babies, Mr. Gray--they are remarkably fat and heavy; they
are killing Mary."
"Her mother died of consumption," Walter Gray said, his face whitening
with terror.
"Ah!" the old lady thought; "she is the child of his heart. Those three
twins are merely the children of his home. That poor drudge of a mother
of theirs! Mary is the child of her father's heart and mind."
Then aloud: "You had better let me have her, Mr. Gray."
"Let you have her, Lady Anne? What would you do with my Mary?"
He looked scarcely less aghast than he had done a moment before at the
suggestion of consumption.
"Not separate her from you, Mr. Gray. This house is my home, and I am
not likely to leave it, except for a month or two at a time, at my age.
I think the child will be a companion to me. I have no romantic
suggestions to make. I am not proposing to adopt Mary. I shall pay her a
salary, and give her opportunities for education that you cannot. She
interests me, as I have said. Let me have her. When I no longer need
her--I am an old woman, Mr. Gray--she will be fit to earn her own
living. Everything I have goes back to my nephew Jarvis Lord Iniscrone.
But Mary will not suffer. Think! What have you to give her but a life of
drudgery under which she will break down--die, perhaps?"
She watched the emotion in his face with her little keen, bright eyes.
"It is not a fine lady's caprice?" he said. "You won't make my Mary
accustomed to better things than I could give her and then send her back
to be a drudge?"
"The Lord judge between thee and me," she answered solemnly.
"Then I trust you, Lady Anne Hamilton," he said.
The strange thing was that the proud old lady was gratified, almost
flattered, by the confidence in Walter Gray's unworldly eyes.
"Thank you, Mr. Gray," she said; then, as he took up his hat to go, she
laid a detaining hand on his shabby coat sleeve.
"Why not have dinner with Mary in the garden?" she suggested. "Do, pray.
I want you to tell her what we have agreed upon. I can send word to Mrs.
Gray."
Walter Gray was pleased enough to go back to his little girl whom he had
left in tears for the comfortless house and the burden of the young
stepbrothers and stepsisters. It was pleasure, half pain, to see the
uplifted face with which Mary regarded him when she saw him return. How
was he going to put the barrier between them that this plan to which he
had given his consent would surely mean? He had no illusions. Over the
wall, Lady Anne had said. But the wall that separated Wistaria Terrace
and the Mall was in reality a high and a great wall. He would never have
Mary in the old close communion again. All passes. How good the old
times were that were only a few hours away, yet seemed worlds! Never
again! They would never be all and all to each other in a solitude which
took no count of the others. Yet it was for Mary's sake. For Mary's sake
the wall was to rise between them. As he began to tell her the strange,
wonderful thing, his heart was heavy within him because a chapter of his
life was closed. He had come to the end of an epoch. Henceforth things
might be conceivably better, but--they would be different.
CHAPTER III
THE NEW ESTATE
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.
CHAPTER IV
BOY AND GIRL
It was during those early days that Mary made the acquaintance of Robin
Drummond. She had a comfortless feeling afterwards about the meeting;
but it was not because of Sir Robin or anything he did: he was always a
kind boy in her memory of him. It was because of his mother, Lady
Drummond. Mary knew from Lady Anne, who always thought aloud, that Lady
Drummond made a good many people feel uncomfortable.
They had driven out all the way from the city to the Court, the big
house on its wide plain below the mountains. It was a long drive--quite
twenty miles there and back--and Jennings, who liked to have a good deal
of his time to himself, had been rather cross about it. Not that he
dared show any temper to Lady Anne, who was easy and kindly with her
servants, as a rule, but could reduce an insubordinate one to humble
submission as well as any old lady ever could. But Mary, who knew the
household pretty well by this time, knew that Jennings was out of temper
by the set of his shoulders, as she surveyed them from her seat in the
barouche. It was a road, too, he never liked to take, because of a
certain steam tram which ran along it and made the horses uncomfortable
when they met it face to face. And there his mistress was unsympathetic
towards him. She had been a brilliant and daring horsewoman in her youth
and middle age.
"I never thought I should live to amble along like this," she confided
to Mary as they drove between golden harvest fields. "Rheumatic gout is
a great humbler of the spirit. Ah! here comes one of those black
monsters to make the pair curvet a little. They are too fat, Mary. They
have too easy a life. It is only on such an occasion as this that they
remember their hot youth."
They reached the Court without mishap, although once or twice the horses
behaved as though they meditated a mild runaway.
"You shall take the other road home, Jennings," Lady Anne said
graciously, as she alighted in front of the great square, imposing
house, amid its flower-beds of all shapes, its ornamental fountains
flinging high jets of golden water in the sun.
"It's time we gave up the horses, my lady," Jennings said, with
bitterness, "with the likes o' them black beasts on the road."
Later, as she and Mary waited in the great drawing-room for Lady
Drummond, she returned to the subject of Jennings and his grievance.
"He is always bad-tempered when we come to the Court," she said. "For
all its grandeur it is not a hospitable house. Jennings will have to go
without his tea this afternoon."
Mary looked with wonder down the great length of the magnificent room.
Her feet sank in the Turkey carpet. The walls, which were papered in
deep red, were lined with full-length portraits, some of them
equestrian. The place had an air of rich comfort. Was it possible that
the mistress of so much magnificence could grudge a visitor's coachman
his tea?
"Her ladyship looks after the bawbees," Lady Anne went on, thinking
aloud as usual, rather than talking to Mary. "And those who are in her
employment must think of them too, or they go. Ah! you are looking at
Gerald Drummond's portrait. What do you think of it, child?"
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