“An enquiry—not an offer,” replied Mr. Trivett. “Yes. I forgot to mention it. A Major somebody. Wait——” He lugged out a fat pocket-book which he consulted. “That’s it. Major Olifant. Coming down here to-morrow to look over it. Appointment at twelve, if that suits you. Unfortunately, I’ve an engagement and can’t show him round. But I’ll send Perkins, if you like.”
“If the Major wants to eat me, he’ll eat up poor little Mr. Perkins, too,” said Olivia. “So don’t worry.”
She waited until Myra, the maid, had helped them into their overcoats and opened the front door. After final leavetakings, they were gone. Olivia put up her hands, one of them still holding the cheque, on Myra’s gaunt shoulders and shook her and laughed.
“I’ve beaten them at last. I knew I should. Now you and I are going to have the devil’s own time.”
“We’ll have, Miss Olivia,” said Myra, withdrawing like a wooden automaton from the embrace, “the time we’ll be deserving.”
Myra was long, lean, and angular, dressed precisely in parlourmaid’s black; but the absence of cap on her faultlessly neat iron grey hair and the black apron suggested a cross between the housekeeper and personal maid. She shared, with a cook and a vague, print-attired help, the whole service of the house. The fact of Myra had been one of the earliest implanted in the consciousness of Olivia’s awakening childhood. Myra was there, perdurable as father and mother, as Polly, the parrot, whose “Drat the child” of that morning was the same echo of Myra’s voice, as it was when, at the age of two, she began to interpret the bird’s articulate speech. And, as far as she could remember, Myra had always been the same. Age had not withered her, nor had custom staled her infinite invariability. She had been withered since the beginning of time, and she had been as unchanging in aspect and flavour as Olivia’s lifelong breakfast egg. Myra’s origins were hidden in mystery. A family legend declared her a foundling. She had come as a girl from Essex, recommended by a friend, long since dead, of Mrs. Gale. She never spoke of father, mother, sisters, and brothers; but every year, when she took her holiday, she was presumed to return to her native county. With that exception she seemed to have far less of a private life than the household cat. It never occurred to Olivia that she could possibly lead an independent existence. Her age was about forty-five.
“They think I’m either mad or immoral,” said Olivia. “Thank God, they’re not religious, or they’d be holding prayer meetings over me.”
“They might do worse,” replied Myra.
The girl laughed. “So you disapprove, too, do you? Well, you’ll have to get over it.”
“I’ve got over many things—one more or less don’t matter. And if I were you, Miss, I wouldn’t stand in this draughty hall.”
“All that I’m thinking of,” said Olivia, in high good humour, “is that, with you as duenna, I shall look too respectable. No one will believe it possible for any one except an adventuress.”
“That’s what I gather you’re going to be,” said Myra. If she had put any sting into her words it would have been a retort. But no one knew what emotions guided Myra’s speech. With the same tonelessness she would have proclaimed the house to be on fire, or dinner to be ready, or the day to be fine.
“Well, if you don’t like the prospect, Myra, you needn’t come,” said Olivia. “I’ll easily find something fluffy in short skirts and silk stockings to do for me.”
“We’re wasting gas, Miss,” said Myra, pulling the little chain of the bye-pass and thereby plunging the hall in darkness.
“Oh, bother you!” cried Olivia, stumbling into the passage and knocking against the parrot’s cage outside the dining-room door, and Polly shrieked out:
“Drat the child! Drat the child!”
Before entering the dining-room she aimed a Parthian shot at Myra.
“I suppose you agree with the little beast. Well, the two of you’ll have to look after each other, and I wish you joy.”
She cleared the dining-room table of the tea things and the whisky and glasses and the superfluous papers, and opened the window to let out the smell of Mr. Trivett’s strong cigar, and crossed the passage to the drawing-room opposite, where a small fire was still burning. And there, in spite of the exultation of her triumph over Mr. Trivett and Mr. Fenmarch, she suddenly felt very dreadfully alone; also just a whit frightened. The precious cheque, symbol of independence, which she had taken up, laid down, taken up again, during her little household duties, fell to the ground as she lay in the arm-chair by the fireside.
Was her victory, and all it implied, that of a reasonable being and a decent girl, or that of a little fool and a hussy?
Perhaps the mother whom she worshipped and to whom she had devotedly sacrificed the last four years of her young life was the inspiration of her revolt. For her mother had been a highly bred woman, of a proud old Anglo-Indian family, all Generals and Colonels and Sirs and Ladies, whose names had been involved in the history of British India for generations; and when she threw the Anglo-Indian family halo over the windmills and married young Stephen Gale, who used to stand in the market-place of Medlow and bawl out the bidding for pigs and sheep, the family turned her down with the Anglo-Indian thoroughness that had compelled her mother to lose her life in a plague-stricken district and her father to lose his on the North-West Frontier. The family argument was simple. When you—or everything mattering that means you—have ruled provinces and commanded armies and been Sahibs from the beginning of Anglo-Indian time, you can’t go and marry a man who sells pigs at auction, and remain alive. None of the family deigned to gauge the personal value of the pig-seller. The Anglo-Brahmin lost caste. It is true that, afterwards, patronizing efforts were made by Brahminical uncles and aunts and cousins to bridge over the impassable gulf; but Mrs. Gale, very much in love with her pig-selling husband, snapped her fingers at them and told them, in individually opposite terms, to go hang.
It was a love match right enough. And a love match it remained to the very end of all things; after she had borne him two sons and a daughter; all through the young lives of the children; up to the day when the telegram came announcing the death of their elder son—the younger had been killed in the curious world accident a month or so before—and Stephen Gale stood by her bedside—she had even then succumbed to her incurable malady—and said, shaken with an emotion to which one does not refer nowadays:
“Mary, my dear, what am I to do?”
And she, the blood in her speaking—the blood that had given itself at Agra, Lucknow, Khandahar, Chitral—replied:
“Go, dear.”
Olivia, sitting by, gripped her young hands in mingled horror and grief and passionate wonder. And Stephen Gale, just fifty, went out to avenge his sons and do what was right in his wife’s eyes—for his wife was his country incarnate, her voice, being England’s voice. A love match it was and a love match it remained while he stuck it for two or three years—an elderly man at an inglorious Base, until he died of pneumonia—over there.
Mrs. Gale had lingered for a year, and, close as their relations had been all Olivia’s life, they grew infinitely closer during this period of bereavement. It was only then that the mother gave delicate expression to the nostalgia of half a lifetime, the longing for her own kind, and the ways and thoughts and imponderable principles of her own caste. And, imperceptibly, Olivia’s eyes were opened to the essential differences between her mother and the social circle into which she had married. Olivia, ever since her shrewd child’s mind began to appreciate values, knew perfectly well that the Trivetts and the Gales were not accounted as gentlefolk in the town. She early became aware of the socially divided line across which she could not pass so as to enter Blair Park, the high-class girls’ school on the hill, but narrowed her to Landsdowne House, where the daughters of the tradespeople received their education. And when the two crocodiles