Part 14 (1/2)

In 1905, Jan and Fay had been to a party at Ribston Hall: tea in the garden followed by a pastoral play. Anthony was sitting in the balcony, smoking, when the girls came back. He saw their hansom and ran downstairs to meet them, as he always did. They were a family who went in for affectionate greetings.

”Daddie,” cried Fay, seizing her father by the arm, ”one of the seven wonders of the world has happened. We have found an interesting person at Ribston Hall.”

Jan took the other arm. ”We can't possibly tell you all about it under an hour, so we'd better go and sit in the balcony.” And they gently propelled him towards the staircase.

”Not if you're going to discuss Cousin Amelia,” Anthony protested. ”You have carrying voices, both of you.”

”Cousin Amelia is only incidental,” Jan said, when they were all three seated in the balcony. ”The main theme is concerned with a queer little pixie creature called Meg Morton. She's a pupil-governess, and she's sixteen and a half--just the same age as Fay.”

”She doesn't reach up to Jan's elbow,” Fay added, ”and she chaperons the girls for music and singing, and sits in the drawing-cla.s.s because the master can't be quite seventy yet.”

”She's the wee-est thing you ever saw, and they dress her in Cousin Amelia's discarded Sunday frocks.”

”That's impossible,” Anthony interrupted. ”Amelia is so ma.s.sive and square; if the girl's so small she'd look like 'the Marchioness.'”

”She does, she does!” Jan cried delightedly. ”Of course the garments are 'made down,' but in the most elderly way possible. Daddie, can you picture a Botticelli angel of sixteen, with ma.s.ses of t.i.tian-red hair, clad in a queer plush garment once worn by Cousin Amelia, that retains all its ancient frumpiness of line. And it's not only her appearance that's so quaint, _she_ is quaint inside.”

”We were attracted by her hair,” Fay went on ”(You'll go down like a ninepin before that hair), and we got her in a corner and hemmed her in and declared it was her duty to attend to us because we were strangers and shy, and in three minutes we were friends. Sixteen, Daddie! And a governess-pupil in Cousin Amelia's school. She's a niece of the little husband, and Cousin Amelia is preening herself like anything because she takes her for nothing and makes her work like ten people.”

”Did the little girl say so?”

”Of course not,” Jan answered indignantly, ”but Cousin Amelia did. Oh, how thankful I am she is _your_ cousin, dear, and once-removed from us!”

”How many generations will it take to remove her altogether?” Fay asked.

”However,” she added, ”if we can have the pixie out and give her a good time I shan't mind the relations.h.i.+p so much. We _must_ do something, Daddie. What shall it be?”

Anthony Ross smoked thoughtfully and said very little. Perhaps he did not even listen with marked attention, because he was enjoying his girls. Just to see them healthy and happy; to know that they were naturally kind and gay; to hear them frank and eager and loquacious--sometimes gave him a sensation of almost physical pleasure.

He was like an idler basking in the sun, conscious of nothing but just the warmth and comfort of it.

Whatever those girls wanted they always got. Anthony's diplomacy was requisitioned and was, as usual, successful; for, in spite of her disapproval, Mrs. Ross-Morton could never resist her cousin's charm.

This time the result was that one Sat.u.r.day afternoon in the middle of June little Meg Morton, bearing a battered leather portmanteau and clad in the most-recently-converted plush abomination, appeared at the tall house in St. George's Square to stay over the week-end.

It was the mid-term holiday, and from the first moment to the last the visit was one almost delirious orgy of pleasure to the little pupil-governess.

It was also a revelation.

It would be hard to conceive of anything odder than the appearance of Meg Morton at this time. She just touched five feet in height, and was very slenderly and delicately made, with absurd, tiny hands and feet.

Yet there was a finish about the thin little body that proclaimed her fully grown. Her eyes, with their thick, dark lashes, looked overlarge in the pale little pointed face; strange eyes and sombre, with big, bright pupil, and curious dark-blue iris flecked with brown. Her features were regular, and her mouth would have been pretty had the lips not lacked colour. As it was, all the colour about Meg seemed concentrated in her hair; red as a flame and rippled as a river under a fresh breeze. There was so much of it, too, the little head seemed bowed in apology beneath its weight.

Yet for the time being Meg forgot to be apologetic about her hair, for Anthony and his girls frankly admired it.

These adorable, kind, amusing people actually admired it, and said so.

Hitherto Meg's experience had been that it was a thing to be slurred over, like a deformity. If mentioned, it was to be deprecated. In the strictly Evangelical circles where hitherto her lot had been cast, they even tried vainly to explain it away.

She had, of course, heard of artists, but she never expected to meet any. That sort of thing lay outside the lives of those who had to make their living as quickly as possible in beaten tracks; tracks so well-beaten, in fact, that all the flowers had been trodden underfoot and exterminated.

Meg, at sixteen, had received so little from life that her expectations were of the humblest. And as she stood before the gla.s.s in a pretty bedroom, fastening her one evening dress (of s.h.i.+ny black silk that crackled, made with the narrow V in front affected by Mrs. Ross-Morton), preparatory to going to the play for the first time in her life, she could have exclaimed, like the little old woman of the story, ”This be never I!”