Being nearly the same height, they were so near each other that it was a little awkward.
“I beg pardon,” he said, stepping back a pace and lifting his straw hat.
But he did not say, “I beg pardon, Miss Fox-Seton,” and Emily knew that he had not recognised her again, and had not the remotest idea who she was or where she came from.
She passed him with her agreeable, friendly smile, and there returned to her mind Lady Maria’s remarks of the night before.
“To think that if he married poor pretty Lady Agatha she will be mistress of three places quite as beautiful as Mallowe, three lovely old houses, three sets of gardens, with thousands of flowers to bloom every year! How nice it would be for her! She is so lovely that it seems as if he must fall in love with her. Then, if she was Marchioness of Walderhurst, she could do so much for her sisters.”
After breakfast she spent her morning in doing a hundred things for Lady Maria. She wrote notes for her, and helped her to arrange plans for the entertainment of her visitors. She was very busy and happy. In the afternoon she drove across the moor to Maundell, a village on the other side of it. She really went on an errand for her hostess, but as she was fond of driving and the brown cob was a beauty, she felt that she was being given a treat on a level with the rest of her ladyship’s generous hospitalities. She drove well, and her straight, strong figure showed to much advantage on the high seat of the cart. Lord Walderhurst himself commented on her as he saw her drive away.
“She has a nice, flat, straight back, that woman,” he remarked to Lady Maria. “What is her name? One never hears people’s names when one is introduced.”
“Her name is Emily Fox-Seton,” her ladyship answered, “and she’s a nice creature.”
“That would be an inhuman thing to say to most men, but if one is a thoroughly selfish being, and has some knowledge of one’s own character, one sees that a nice creature might be a nice companion.”
“You are quite right,” was Lady Maria’s reply, as she held up her lorgnette and watched the cart spin down the avenue. “I am selfish myself, and I realise that is the reason why Emily Fox-Seton is becoming the lodestar of my existence. There is such comfort in being pandered to by a person who is not even aware that she is pandering. She doesn’t suspect that she is entitled to thanks for it.”
That evening Mrs. Ralph came shining to dinner in amber satin, which seemed to possess some quality of stimulating her to brilliance. She was witty enough to collect an audience, and Lord Walderhurst was drawn within it. This was Mrs. Ralph’s evening. When the men returned to the drawing-room, she secured his lordship at once and managed to keep him. She was a woman who could talk pretty well, and perhaps Lord Walderhurst was amused. Emily Fox-Seton was not quite sure that he was, but at least he listened. Lady Agatha Slade looked a little listless and pale. Lovely as she was, she did not always collect an audience, and this evening she said she had a headache. She actually crossed the room, and taking a seat by Miss Emily Fox-Seton, began to talk to her about Lady Maria’s charity-knitting which she had taken up. Emily was so gratified that she found conversation easy. She did not realise that at that particular moment she was a most agreeable and comforting companion for Agatha Slade. She had heard so much of her beauty during the season, and remembered so many little things that a girl who was a thought depressed might like to hear referred to again. Sometimes to Agatha the balls where people had collected in groups to watch her dancing, the flattering speeches she had heard, the dazzling hopes which had been raised, seemed a little unreal, as if, after all, they could have been only dreams. This was particularly so, of course, when life had dulled for a while and the atmosphere of unpaid bills became heavy at home. It was so to-day, because the girl had received a long, anxious letter from her mother, in which much was said of the importance of an early preparation for the presentation of Alix, who had really been kept back a year, and was in fact nearer twenty than nineteen.
“If we were not in Debrett and Burke, one might be reserved about such matters,” poor Lady Claraway wrote; “but what is one to do when all the world can buy one’s daughters’ ages at the booksellers’?”
Miss Fox-Seton had seen Lady Agatha’s portrait at the Academy and the way in which people had crowded about it. She had chanced to hear comments also, and she agreed with a number of persons who had not thought the picture did the original justice.
“Sir Bruce Norman was standing by me with an elderly lady the first time I saw it,” she said, as she turned a new row of the big white-wool scarf her hostess was knitting for a Deep-Sea Fisherman’s Charity. “He really looked quite annoyed. I heard him say: ‘It is not good at all. She is far, far lovelier. Her eyes are like blue flowers.’ The moment I saw you, I found myself looking at your eyes. I hope I didn’t seem rude.”
Lady Agatha smiled. She had flushed delicately, and took up in her slim hand a skein of the white wool.
“There are some people who are never rude,” she sweetly said, “and you are one of them, I am sure. That knitting looks nice. I wonder if I could make a comforter for a deep-sea fisherman.”
“If it would amuse you to try,” Emily answered, “I will begin one for you. Lady Maria has several pairs of wooden needles. Shall I?”
“Do, please. How kind of you!”
In a pause of her conversation, Mrs. Ralph, a little later, looked across the room at Emily Fox-Seton bending over Lady Agatha and the knitting, as she gave her instructions.
“What a goodnatured creature that is!” she said.
Lord Walderhurst lifted his monocle and inserted it in his unillumined eye. He also looked across the room. Emily wore the black evening dress which gave such opportunities to her square white shoulders and firm column of throat; the country air and sun had deepened the colour on her cheek, and the light of the nearest lamp fell kindly on the big twist of her nut-brown hair, and burnished it. She looked soft and warm, and so generously interested in her pupil’s progress that she was rather sweet.
Lord Walderhurst simply looked at her. He was a man of but few words. Women who were sprightly found him somewhat unresponsive. In fact, he was aware that a man in his position need not exert himself. The women themselves would talk. They wanted to talk because they wanted him to hear them.
Mrs. Ralph talked.
“She is the most primeval person I know. She accepts her fate without a trace of resentment; she simply accepts it.”
“What is her fate?” asked Lord Walderhurst, still gazing in his unbiassed manner through his monocle, and not turning his head as he spoke.
“It is her fate to be a woman who is perfectly well born, and who is as penniless as a charwoman, and works like one. She is at the beck and call of any one who will give her an odd job to earn a meal with. That is one of the new ways women have found of making a living.”
“Good skin,” remarked Lord Walderhurst, irrelevantly. “Good hair—quite a lot.”
“She has some of the nicest blood in England in her veins, and she engaged my last cook for me,” said Mrs. Ralph.
“Hope she was a good cook.”
“Very. Emily Fox-Seton has a faculty of finding decent people. I believe it is because she is so decent herself”—with a little laugh.
“Looks quite decent,” commented Walderhurst. The knitting was getting on famously.