Prev
| Next
| Contents
CHAPTER III.
OUR QUEEN OF' HEARTS.
THE chaise stopped in front of us, and before we had recovered
from our bewilderment the gardener had opened the door and let
down the steps.
A bright, laughing face, prettily framed round by a black veil
passed over the head and tied under the chin--a traveling-dress
of a nankeen color, studded with blue buttons and trimmed with
white braid--a light brown cloak over it--little neatly-gloved
hands, which seized in an instant on one of mine and on one of
Owen's--two dark blue eyes, which seemed to look us both through
and through in a moment--a clear, full, merrily confident
voice--a look and manner gayly and gracefully
self-possessed--such were the characteristics of our fair guest
which first struck me at the moment when she left the postchaise
and possessed herself of my hand.
"Don't begin by scolding me," she said, before I could utter a
word of welcome. "There will be time enough for that in the
course of the next six weeks. I beg pardon, with all possible
humility, for the offense of coming ten days before my time.
Don't ask me to account for it, please; if you do, I shall be
obliged to confess the truth. My dear sir, the fact is, this is
an act of impulse."
She paused, and looked us both in the face with a bright
confidence in her own flow of nonsense that was perfectly
irresistible.
"I must tell you all about it," she ran on, leading the way to
the bench, and inviting us, by a little mock gesture of
supplication, to seat ourselves on either side of her. "I feel so
guilty till I've told you. Dear me! how nice this is! Here I am
quite at home already. Isn't it odd? Well, and how do you think
it happene d? The morning before yesterday Matilda--there is
Matilda, picking up my bonnet from the bottom of that remarkably
musty carriage--Matilda came and woke me as usual, and I hadn't
an idea in my head, I assure you, till she began to brush my
hair. Can you account for it?--I can't--but she seemed, somehow,
to brush a sudden fancy for coming here into my head. When I went
down to breakfast, I said to my aunt, 'Darling, I have an
irresistible impulse to go to Wales at once, instead of waiting
till the twentieth.' She made all the necessary objections, poor
dear, and my impulse got stronger and stronger with every one of
them. 'I'm quite certain,' I said, 'I shall never go at all if I
don't go now.' 'In that case,' says my aunt, 'ring the bell, and
have your trunks packed. Your whole future depends on your going;
and you terrify me so inexpressibly that I shall be glad to get
rid of you.' You may not think it, to look at her--but Matilda is
a treasure; and in three hours more I was on the Great Western
Railway. I have not the least idea how I got here--except that
the men helped me everywhere. They are always such delightful
creatures! I have been casting myself, and my maid, and my trunks
on their tender mercies at every point in the journey, and their
polite attentions exceed all belief. I slept at your horrid
little county town last night; and the night before I missed a
steamer or a train, I forget which, and slept at Bristol; and
that's how I got here. And, now I am here, I ought to give my
guardian a kiss--oughtn't I? Shall I call you papa? I think I
will. And shall I call you uncle, sir, and give you a kiss too?
We shall come to it sooner or later--shan't we?--and we may as
well begin at once, I suppose."
Her fresh young lips touched my old withered cheek first, and
then Owen's; a soft, momentary shadow of tenderness, that was
very pretty and becoming, passing quickly over the sunshine and
gayety of her face as she saluted us. The next moment she was on
her feet again, inquiring "who the wonderful man was who built
The Glen Tower," and wanting to go all over it immediately from
top to bottom.
As we took her into the house, I made the necessary apologies for
the miserable condition of the lean-to, and assured her that, ten
days later, she would have found it perfectly ready to receive
her. She whisked into the rooms--looked all round them--whisked
out again--declared she had come to live in the old Tower, and
not in any modern addition to it, and flatly declined to inhabit
the lean-to on any terms whatever. I opened my lips to state
certain objections, but she slipped away in an instant and made
straight for the Tower staircase.
"Who lives here?" she asked, calling down to us, eagerly, from
the first-floor landing.
"I do," said Owen; "but, if you would like me to move out--"
She was away up the second flight before he could say any more.
The next sound we heard, as we slowly followed her, was a
peremptory drumming against the room door of the second story.
"Anybody here?" we heard her ask through the door.
I called up to her that, under ordinary circumstances, I was
there; but that, like Owen, I should be happy to move out--
My polite offer was cut short as my brother's had been. We heard
more drumming at the door of the third story. There were two
rooms here also--one perfectly empty, the other stocked with odds
and ends of dismal, old-fashioned furniture for which we had no
use, and grimly ornamented by a life-size basket figure
supporting a complete suit of armor in a sadly rusty condition.
When Owen and I got to the third-floor landing, the door was
open; Miss Jessie had taken possession of the rooms; and we found
her on a chair, dusting the man in armor with her cambric
pocket-handkerchief.
"I shall live here," she said, looking round at us briskly over
her shoulder.
We both remonstrated, but it was quite in vain. She told us that
she had an impulse to live with the man in armor, and that she
would have her way, or go back immediately in the post-chaise,
which we pleased. Finding it impossible to move her, we bargained
that she should, at least, allow the new bed and the rest of the
comfortable furniture in the lean-to to be moved up into the
empty room for her sleeping accommodation. She consented to this
condition, protesting, however, to the last against being
compelled to sleep in a bed, because it was a modern
conventionality, out of all harmony with her place of residence
and her friend in armor.
Fortunately for the repose of Morgan, who, under other
circumstances, would have discovered on the very first day that
his airy retreat was by no means high enough to place him out of
Jessie's reach, the idea of settling herself instantly in her new
habitation excluded every other idea from the mind of our fair
guest. She pinned up the nankeen-colored traveling dress in
festoons all round her on the spot; informed us that we were now
about to make acquaintance with her in the new character of a
woman of business; and darted downstairs in mad high spirits,
screaming for Matilda and the trunks like a child for a set of
new toys. The wholesome protest of Nature against the artificial
restraints of modern life expressed itself in all that she said
and in all that she did. She had never known what it was to be
happy before, because she had never been allowed, until now, to
do anything for herself. She was down on her knees at one moment,
blowing the fire, and telling us that she felt like Cinderella;
she was up on a table the next, attacking the cobwebs with a long
broom, and wishing she had been born a housemaid. As for my
unfortunate friend, the upholsterer, he was leveled to the ranks
at the first effort he made to assume the command of the domestic
forces in the furniture department. She laughed at him, pushed
him about, disputed all his conclusions, altered all his
arrangements, and ended by ordering half his bedroom furniture to
be taken back again, for the one unanswerable reason that she
meant to do without it.
As evening approached, the scene presented by the two rooms
became eccentric to a pitch of absurdity which is quite
indescribable. The grim, ancient walls of the bedroom had the
liveliest modern dressing-gowns and morning-wrappers hanging all
about them. The man in armor had a collection of smart little
boots and shoes dangling by laces and ribbons round his iron
legs. A worm-eaten, steel-clasped casket, dragged out of a
corner, frowned on the upholsterer's brand-new toilet-table, and
held a miscellaneous assortment of combs, hairpins, and brushes.
Here stood a gloomy antique chair, the patriarch of its tribe,
whose arms of blackened oak embraced a pair of pert, new deal
bonnet-boxes not a fortnight old. There, thrown down lightly on a
rugged tapestry table-cover, the long labor of centuries past,
lay the brief, delicate work of a week ago in the shape of silk
and muslin dresses turned inside out. In the midst of all these
confusions and contradictions, Miss Jessie ranged to and fro, the
active center of the whole scene of disorder, now singing at the
top of her voice, and now declaring in her lighthearted way that
one of us must make up his mind to marry her immediately, as she
was determined to settle for the rest of her life at The Glen
Tower.
She followed up that announcement, when we met at dinner, by
inquiring if we quite understood by this time that she had left
her "company manners" in London, and that she meant to govern us
all at her absolute will and pleasure, throughout the whole
period of her stay. Having thus provided at the outset for the
due recognition of her authority by the household generally and
individually having briskly planned out all her own forthcoming
occupations and amusements over the wine and fruit at dessert,
and having positively settled, between her first and second cups
of tea, where our connection with them was to begin and where it
was to end, she had actually succeeded, when the time came to
separate for the night, in setting us as much at our ease, and in
making herself as completely a necessary part of our household as
if she had lived among us for years and years past.
Such was our first day's experience of the formidable guest whose
anticipated visit had so sorely and so absurdly discomposed us
all. I could hardly believe that I had actually wasted hours of
precious time in worrying myself and everybody else in the house
about the best means of laboriously entertaining a lively,
high-spirited girl, who was perfectly capable, without an effort
on her own part or on ours, of entertaining herself.
Having upset every one of our calculations on the first day of
her arrival, she next falsified all our predictions before she
had been with us a week. Instead of fracturing her skull with the
pony, as Morgan had prophesied, she sat the sturdy, sure-footed,
mischievous little brute as if she were part and parcel of
himself. With an old water-proof cloak of mine on her shoulders,
with a broad-flapped Spanish hat of Owen's on her head, with a
wild imp of a Welsh boy following her as guide and groom on a
bare-backed pony, and with one of the largest and ugliest
cur-dogs in England (which she had picked up, lost and starved by
the wayside) barking at her heels, she scoured the country in all
directions, and came back to dinner, as she herself expressed it,
"with the manners of an Amazon, the complexion of a dairy-maid,
and the appetite of a wolf."
On days when incessant rain kept her indoors, she amused herself
with a new freak. Making friends everywhere, as became The Queen
of Hearts, she even ingratiated herself with the sour old
housekeeper, who had predicted so obstinately that she was
certain to run away. To the amazement of everybody in the house,
she spent hours in the kitchen, learning to make puddings and
pies, and trying all sorts of recipes with very varying success,
from an antiquated cookery book which she had discovered at the
back of my bookshelves. At other times, when I expected her to be
upstairs, languidly examining her finery, and idly polishing her
trinkets, I heard of her in the stables, feeding the rabbits, and
talking to the raven, or found her in the conservatory,
fumigating the plants, and half suffocating the gardener, who was
trying to moderate her enthusiasm in the production of smoke.
Instead of finding amusement, as we had expected, in Owen's
studio, she puckered up her pretty face in grimaces of disgust at
the smell of paint in the room, and declared that the horrors of
the Earthquake at Lisbon made her feel hysterical. Instead of
showing a total want of interest in my business occupations on
the estate, she destroyed my dignity as steward by joining me in
my rounds on her pony, with her vagabond retinue at her heels.
Instead of devouring the novels I had ordered for her, she left
them in the box, and put her feet on it when she felt sleepy
after a hard day's riding. Instead of practicing for hours every
evening at the piano, which I had hired with such a firm
conviction of her using it, she showed us tricks on the cards,
taught us new games, initiated us into the mystics of dominoes,
challenged us with riddles, an even attempted to stimulate us
into acting charades--in short, tried every evening amusement in
the whole category except the amusement of music. Every new
aspect of her character was a new surprise to us, and every fresh
occupation that she chose was a fresh contradiction to our
previous expectations. The value of experience as a guide is
unquestionable in many of the most important affairs of life;
but, speaking for myself personally, I never understood the utter
futility of it, where a woman is concerned, until I was brought
into habits of daily communication with our fair guest.
In her domestic relations with ourselves she showed that
exquisite nicety of discrimination in studying our characters,
habits and tastes which comes by instinct with women, and which
even the longest practice rarely teaches in similar perfection to
men. She saw at a glance all the underlying tenderness and
generosity concealed beneath Owen's external shyness,
irresolution, and occasional reserve; and, from first to last,
even in her gayest moments, there was always a certain
quietly-implied consideration--an easy, graceful, delicate
deference--in her manner toward my eldest brother, which won upon
me and upon him every hour in the day.
With me she was freer in her talk, quicker in her actions,
readier and bolder in all the thousand little familiarities of
our daily intercourse. When we met in the morning she always took
Owen's hand, and waited till he kissed her on the forehead. In my
case she put both her hands on my shoulders, raised herself on
tiptoe, and saluted me briskly on both checks in the foreign way.
She never differed in opinion with Owen without propitiating him
first by some little artful compliment in the way of excuse. She
argued boldly with me on every subject under the sun, law and
politics included; and, when I got the better of her, never
hesitated to stop me by putting her hand on my lips, or by
dragging me out into the garden in the middle of a sentence.
As for Morgan, she abandoned all restraint in his case on the
second day of her sojourn among us. She had asked after him as
soon as she was settled in her two rooms on the third story; had
insisted on knowing why he lived at the top of the tower, and why
he had not appeared to welcome her at the door; had entrapped us
into all sorts of damaging admissions, and had thereupon
discovered the true state of the case in less than five minutes.
From that time my unfortunate second brother became the victim of
all that was mischievous and reckless in her disposition. She
forced him downstairs by a series of maneuvers which rendered his
refuge uninhabitable, and then pretended to fall violently in
love with him. She slipped little pink three-cornered notes under
his door, entreating him to make appointments with her, or
tenderly inquiring how he would like to see her hair dressed at
dinner on that day. She followed him into the garden, sometimes
to ask for the privilege of smelling his tobacco-smoke, sometimes
to beg for a lock of his hair, or a fragment of his ragged old
dressing-gown, to put among her keepsakes. She sighed at him when
he was in a passion, and put her handkerchief to her eyes when he
was sulky. In short, she tormented Morgan, whenever she could
catch him, with such ingenious and such relentless malice, that
he actually threatened to go back to London, and prey once more,
in the unscrupulous character of a doctor, on the credulity of
mankind.
Thus situated in her relations toward ourselves, and thus
occupied by country diversions of her own choosing, Miss Jessie
passed her time at The Glen Tower, excepting now and then a dull
hour in the long evenings, to her guardian's satisfaction--and,
all things considered, not without pleasure to herself. Day
followed day in calm and smooth succession, and five quiet weeks
had elapsed out of the six during which her stay was to last
without any remarkable occurrence to distinguish them, when an
event happened which personally affected me in a very serious
manner, and which suddenly caused our handsome Queen of Hearts to
become the object of my deepest anxiety in the present, and of my
dearest hopes for the future.
Prev
| Next
| Contents
|