The Story of a Governess. Mrs. Oliphant
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cried Mrs. Harwood, “I thought you might have seen by this time how little they care for anything I say.”
She looked irritable, cross, disturbed, as Janet thought she had never seen her before, and moved uneasily in her chair. But she had shown no such annoyance when the visitor came in. She had received him with a cheerful welcome, and he had seemed in no doubt on that subject. Indeed, the young man had come in and taken his place among them with the familiarity and complacency of a favored visitor who expected to confer as well as to receive pleasure. That line in Mrs. Harwood’s brow had not appeared till Julia, with her dogged look, had stared into her mother’s face.
“I wish,” cried the old lady, “oh, I wish that Adolphus would come home!” and she wrung her white, plump hands with almost a tragic gesture, which was so strangely unlike her comfortable person, and all that Janet had hitherto known of her, that the little governess had hard ado not to laugh.
“Do you expect Mr. Harwood soon?” she asked.
“They are all very self-willed, Miss Summerhayes. You must have seen that, already. Gussy of course will not be guided by me. She thinks that things are meant which probably are not meant at all—except to pass the time. And Julia, though she is not more than a child, sets herself up in judgment as if she were—do you think I can do anything to stop it?—even if it were desirable to stop it. And why should I, for that matter, even if I could? It would be suitable enough. How am I to tell, Miss Summerhayes, with no one to advise me, and such self-willed children to deal with? Oh, I wish—I wish that Adolphus were here!”
Janet did not know what to make of this sudden burst of confidence. She was afraid to seem to wish to pry into her employer’s concerns, yet, with the impulse of youth, which is at once a kind meaning and a movement of vanity, wanted to say something which should be consolatory—to put forth her own little hand as a guide in the circumstances of which she was so entirely ignorant.
“I am sure, dear Mrs. Harwood, no one would do anything which they knew you really disliked—you are so good. Perhaps they don’t know that you really dislike—anything that may be going on.”
To Janet’s surprise, Mrs. Harwood received this enigmatical utterance as if it had thrown real light upon the situation. She put her handkerchief to her eyes.
“I dare say you are right, my dear. I always said you were full of understanding for so young a thing. Perhaps that’s what it is, after all. I don’t speak out. It would be much more sensible if I were to speak out.”
There was a momentary silence, and the sound of the singing came in, the two voices “going” together, rising into a burst of melody in the higher notes which made Janet pause and hold her breath. Mr. Meredith had a beautiful tenor voice, and Gussy’s, though not so good, aided the effect with a somewhat tremulous second, twining out and in of the clear and liquid masculine notes. Janet let her work drop and her attempt at consolation together, and sat rapt gazing at the pair. She was too young, too energetic, too ambitious for pure sympathy. She gazed with impatient longing to be in the midst of it.
“Oh! what a weak accompaniment!” she said to herself. “Why don’t they ask me to play it for them? She might sing to her heart’s content; but why doesn’t she ask me to play?”
Jane forgot Mrs. Harwood, whom she had been in the act of advising and consoling, and Julia, who was her special care. She could scarcely restrain herself.
“It is too much for Miss Harwood to sing and play both,” she said, with a sudden impulse, dropping her work upon the floor, half rising as if to rush to the rescue. Her own movement, however, brought her to herself; for what right had she, a stranger and a hireling, to interfere?
“Miss Summerhayes!” said Mrs. Harwood.
As this was all that was said, Janet detached her eyes from the scene at the piano, and looked at the old lady in the chair. Mrs. Harwood was talking energetically with her eyes and gestures, though she said nothing. She indicated Julia with a glance, then looked towards the door. She put her plump hands together with a little pantomimic prayer. Janet saw and understood, and sighed. She wanted to have a hand in the music; she wanted to watch the story which was going on, which as yet she did not understand. But no. Her duty lay in another direction. It was the first time that she had felt her chains.
“Julia, come, come; it is our time,” she said briskly.
Miss Harwood at the piano, who had her back turned, took no notice of the little commotion of the withdrawal; but Mr. Meredith turned round, still singing, and gave Janet a look out of those eyes which she had declared to herself were too black, too bright, too ostentatiously fringed with eyelashes—a look which meant respectful regret, a tinge of remonstrance, a veiled entreaty to stay, a sort of au revoir unspoken but eloquent. He could not make more than a slight inclination of his head, as he was singing, but the effect was that of the most deferential bow. Janet was taken altogether by surprise. Had he appreciated her position all in a moment, read her abilities in her eyes, longed to have her at the piano as she longed to be there? or was it a mere impulse of subjugation, the instinct of the conqueror who desired another victim? She was so startled that her heart jumped up suddenly like a bird as she left the room, and made one or two big beats in her ears. And then she laughed to herself apparently without any meaning at all.
CHAPTER X.
“Miss Summerhayes! why did you laugh as we came upstairs?”
“Oh!” said Janet, quite restored from that momentary impression. “I don’t know. Because it is curious to come into the middle of a story; it is like beginning a book, as you do sometimes, at the third volume. One wonders what has happened before, as well as what is going to happen now.”
“You think that’s a story!” cried Julia, with scorn; “because Gussy’s a fool, and that man—I can’t endure that man.”
“You make that too easy for anyone to see. I think you made a sound like what they do in the theatre.”
“I hissed him,” said Julia, her lowering eyebrows closing down over her eyes. “I always do. He can’t bear to be hissed. He is just like an actor: it makes him mad, and that is why I do it, and I always shall. I don’t care what anyone says.”
“That is a pity,” said Janet; “for it will not harm him, but you. You forget that people care very little for the opinion of a girl at your age, especially when it is rudely expressed.”
“They don’t care much for your opinion,” said Julia, furiously.
“No; I did not expect it; and I have no opinion, except that you must learn to be a gentlewoman—if that can be learnt—or else I must go away.”
Julia received this, as she usually did Janet’s remonstrances, with a look of rage, a flush of shame, and then a sudden self-subdual.
“You want to go away,” she said. “You are the only nice one that has ever been here; and you want to go and leave me. I know you do. You’ll go before Dolff comes home, and then he’ll never know you, and will think—will just think I am a stupid and don’t know anything, as they all do!”
“Well, my dear child,” said Janet, who understood this broken speech perfectly well, and knew that she was being represented to “Dolff” in the brightest colors, a thing by no means indifferent to her, “they are not very far wrong if they think so; for a girl who hisses—even in the theatre——”
“I did once,” cried Julia, “in the theatre! They had a hideous ballet in the pantomime like what one reads of in books—a woman making a show of herself—oh!” The girl’s cheeks blazed crimson at the thought. “And I hissed—like this.” Here Julia uttered a sound, in comparison with which a whole serpent-house in highest exasperation would have retired defeated, with