Perdita. A novel

Front matter

PERDITA PERDITA H IHovel 1!Y MARY E. MANN AUTHOR OF 'a lost estate,' 'a winter's tale,' 'one another's burdens ' My prettiest Perdita !' SH._KESrE.-RE IN TWO VOLUMES VOL. II. LONDON RICHARD BENTLEY AND SON tfnblieh.rs in ©.binary to Sjrr Ijlsjxstjj the Qurtn i893 [All rig hts reserved] CONTENTS OF VOL. II. CHAPTER FAGK I. HOW LOLLIE KEPT HIS PROMISE - - I II. PERDITA PREPARES FOR MARRIAGE - - 21 III. DEATH AT ROSARY GARDENS - "45 IV. RUSSEL DECIDES TO TRY AGAIN - 6 1 V. CONCERNING THE TRAMP - - - 88 VI. AT RIPPENHAM RECTORY - - - II4 VII. RIPLEY RUSSEL SAYS GRACE- , - - 1 30 VIII. LOLLIE TRIUMPHS - - - - 1 59 IX. FOUND AND LOST - - - l8o X. A DARK NIGHT ... - 205 XI. MISS NARR1COTT HEARS THE CAT - - 222 XII. CONCLUSION ----- PERDITA

Chapter I How Lollie Kept His Promise

Mrs. Norris refused to let Perdita go that evening on her nursing mission to Mrs. Whitley ; and although the girl would not listen to the prayers of Ripley Russel, to whom her action in the matter was an affair of life and death, she listened, with womanly consistency, to her hostess, who had no stronger argument to adduce than that her place must not be empty at the dinner-table, and that some people were coming in the vol. il PERDITA 2 evening, to whom it would be necessary that Perdita should sing. But on the next morning she went ; and she took up her place at Mrs. Whitley's bedside, and spent the remaining precious days of her holiday in waiting on that dear friend. And Laurence got himself out of the comfortable dressing-gown of his deceased father for the occasion, and, shivering and shaking and aching still, repaired to the family sitting-room, in the cheerless under ground regions where, on those occasions when she was driven from the sick-room, he was ready to enliven Perdita by his presence.

He was really ill and depressed and miserable ; it was nothing but his love for Perdita which kept him from going to bed. She, for her part, strove anxiously to be as interested in his symptoms as in those of his mother, saw that he took his proper doses of quinine, and that his gruel was as palatable as might be. If she had loved him these offices would have been a delight to her ; she would have deplored the rend ing agony of his sneezings, have ached with his neuralgic pains, have lain awake at night in tender terror, listening for his racking cough. But as she did not love him, as the most that she had ever felt for him had been a gratitude to his mother and a mild toleration of himself, all the details of his distressful illness were irksome and disagreeable to her. By the side of the image enshrined in her heart of a so different, so entirely loved person, the wasted figure of poor Laurence, with un kempt hair, precocious straggling beard, sallow, sunken cheeks, and sad eyes, for ever appealing to the heart that was hardened against him, for ever following her about with an observation that was torture, was fast becoming in Perdita's wicked eyes a loathsome sight.

Once when she had administered to him his tonic, and had tempted him in vain with the quarter of orange which she had PERDITA 4 prepared for him 'to take the taste away," he caught her hand in his hot, feverish one as she was moving away. 'Dita darling,' he said, 'there is some thing I promised to mention to you. Kneel down here by my side, dearest ; you must not be angry, or if you are angry it must not be with me.' Perdita knelt obediently by the couch on which he was extended. She hated the touch of those hot, small fingers, and she pulled her hand from his. ' You must not be angry, darling, ' he repeated ; ' and when I have fulfilled the promise which was forced from me, we will forget that the subject has ever been mentioned between us. Dita — my sweet Dita — I have never for one instant doubted your affection for me.

Believe that ! 1 have not so wronged you. But, dearest, one came here — that Russel — he who, by reason of the paltry three or four guineas a week which are a necessity to my poor mother, has acquired a temporary right beneath our roof — the man who annoyed you with his unwelcome attentions once before — Russel came and insulted you and me, dear one, and our mutual love.' Perdita sank from her kneeling posture to a sitting one, with her face turned away from the recumbent Lollie ' I don't know how I gained the patience to listen to him. I don't know where I got the strength to refrain from kicking him from my door. They came from my confidence in you, darling, I think. It was that which made me strong — that and a certain pity for him. For although he was ridiculous, he was in earnest, Dita, and a man who is not consciously playing the fool is worthy of a certain amount of respect, however grotesque he may appear.

What do you suppose he asked of me, Dita — my own dear Dita ■ — most precious possession of mine ? He asked me to give you up — to give you to him. Only a small boon PERDITA to ask, you see, my Dita — only the giving up of all my hope, my ambition, my career ; for without you, as I have told you many times, I should do and be — nothing ! The mainspring of all my energies would be destroyed ; I should be a mere broken machine — worthless, only fit to be cast to the void ! A small thing to ask, dear Dita!' ' A very small thing — to mean so much,' she said in a choked voice, with averted face, thinking more of what it meant to that other one than to this. ' But I am so secure that I conceded him something. I made him this promise — that I would let you make your choice again between us — him and me.

His vanity or his madness would not be appeased with less ; and perhaps I was not altogether displeased ; perhaps I also am vain — of your favour, darling, of nothing else — and would show him triumphantly, once and for ever, how entirely it is mine. So that, while you sit there, dear one, keeping your post so faithfully at my side, you are free — do you know it ? — free ! And for how long ? Till you turn, Dita — turn your smiling face, and put your dear hand once again in mine ' Mrs. Sant rose slowly from her sitting posture, and the face she turned upon her lover was not smiling at all. ' Of course I do not go back from my promise,' she said. 'Of course I shall not forget what I owe to you and your mother ; while you wish for me I am yours. Only, you overrate my value ; I can never be to you any of the things you expect — never !

I do not feel about it as you do. I She had put a cold and reluctant hand in his, and by it he drew her down to him. ' You must seal our re -engagement,' he said. But she would take no active part in that PERDITA ceremony, and turned her lips decidedly away when his would have met them, so that his hurried kiss fell on her ear-tip, and he had to be thankful for that grace. Perdita did not at once return to her duties in the sick-room, but betook herself to the apartment on the drawing-room floor sacred to Russel. There had been a time when the pretty bay-windowed room, with its cheerful un-' hired-apartment ' look, had been eloquent to her of her own brief matrimonial experience. She had been wont to sit lonely in the chair drawn up to the round table, on which the first and only shared - together meal of the new - married pair had been laid, to go over again in her own recollection every incident of those long - forgotten hours.

She had tried to recall the feelings with which she had sat through that dainty and, to her inexperienced eye, luxuriant repast. She had repeated the few sentences of Robert Sant which memory had reserved. She had remem bered, with remorseful tenderness, the signs of a passion which at the time had so embarrassed her ; the fervour, which had seemed so unnecessary, of his farewell ; his hurried but welcome reappearance, with the red roses for ever to be associated with his memory ; the mingled feelings of dread and longing with which she had sat for hours awaiting the footsteps of him who was never to return. It was for memories of Robert Sant she had been wont to haunt the drawing - room floor, and to hold that region a sacred place. All this was altered now. It was here that Ripley Russel had first told her that he loved her ; it was here that, under the neglectful charge of Simons, the charwoman, he had recently passed a couple of days and nights.

Two or three newspapers lay as they had dropped from his hand by an easy - chair ; some books which he had brought with him were in a PERDITA 10 heap as he had cast them down against the wall ; some unframed canvases lay, face downward, upon the sofa ; an open letter, addressed to Ripley Russel, Esquire, rested against the brazen image of the little girl, who, with her lap full of roses, turned her back upon the seated Time holding in his arms the dial of that clock which had tolled so dismally through all the lonely hours of Perdita Sant's wedding-night. Perdita had touched none of these things. She had looked in upon them many times with bated breath, as a devotee looks upon holy relics too sacred for handling. Once she had crossed the floor, and, hesitating, longing, yet afraid, had opened the bed room door.

Here she had paused trem bling upon the threshold. But the effect was disappointing, and she did not repeat that pilgrimage, for the place did not recall its latest tenant at all, but a fevered night she herself had passed there, weeping hysterically in Mrs. Whitley 's arms. Perdita stood now in the middle of the drawing-room and looked round upon the familiar signs of a sometime presence with dry eyes and a tightened lip. ' I shall marry him, but I hate him !' she said, fiercely setting her teeth together. 'If he were not so blinded — so blinded with vanity — he would see that I hate him.' Mrs. Sant was doubtless familiar with a proverb which sets forth the blindness of those who do not wish to see, although she forgot to apply it in this case. While she stood there with anger and bitterness in her heart, and no tears in her eyes with which to wash them away, the post man swung in at the gate, and came up the short gravel path.

Perdita's abstraction was not too great for her to notice him, and to recall the fact that Mrs. Whitley had just fallen into a doze and must not be awakened by any postman's knock. She went herself to the door, therefore, and was rewarded by PERDITA 12 finding the one letter delivered addressed to herself. She went back to the drawing-room bearing this missive with a flushed face and a beating heart and an eager step. For, although she had never received a letter in that hand writing before, she knew from whom it came. Yes ; Fate, which had been unkind and stingy with her as a rule, had given her one or two good things certainly — things that would dwell in her heart to her dying day ; and, not least among all, this — straight from him to her — a thing upon which she might feast her eyes, which she might touch to her lips and lay upon her heart !

So Perdita, newly pledged to be another man's wife ! Before opening the precious letter she ran up to Mrs. Whitley's room and listened with an eager satisfaction to that lady's regular breathing. The sleep was likely to last. Gently Perdita crept again downstairs and regained the drawing-room, and locked the door upon herself, defeating a possible aim of the neglectful Simons, who might have chosen that moment of all others to carry away those newspapers, to arrange those books, to dust the sacred chair upon which Russel had sat. Perdita sat down there now and broke the seal of her letter. Ripley Russel was not so eloquent with pen and ink as it sometimes happened to him to be with tongue. In his writing he was conscious often of a yawning abyss between the thought and its expression. He adopted quite involuntarily a stilted style in direct opposition to his manner of speech, and abhorrent to him when he observed it.

The terms of endearment that rushed to his lips all too readily when in her actual presence, and that kept on repeating themselves with a fond iteration in his thoughts of her, would not allow themselves to be set down tamely in black and white. Perdita was puzzled, PERDITA 14 chilled to the heart, to find how unlike him his letter was. The missive began without the customary inscription. ' You tell me that you have decided to carry out the engagement from which Mr. Whitley promised to release you. I shall be much obliged if you will inform me if this is your deliberate intention. The matter is one of great moment to me, and I must ask you to let me know your final decision at your earliest convenience. I have already used every argument in my power to influence your action — it would be idle, and perhaps impertinent, in me to repeat these now.

Unless your memory is unusually treacherous in such matters, it is impossible that you can have forgotten. ' I need not say with how much impatience, and with what painful suspense, I await your reply. ' I am, ' Yours always faithfully, ' Riplev Russel. With a vivid recollection of the warmth of his words and the ardour of his glance, and the delicious sense of love and admiration of which his presence assured her, this letter appeared to Perdita cold and disappointing. Her fingers ceased to tremble as they had done in her eagerness, but held the letter in a steady grasp as her eyes roamed blankly over it, seeking in vain for one word of the love she had expected to find lavishly ex pressed, for one of the epithets of endearment which, although under the circumstances they might be wrong, were so precious.

In reading his passionate appeal to her there might be pain, she had thought, yet there would be a cruel pleasure, too — for if he suffered for her she would weep with her heart's blood for such suffering, yet must be a little tri umphant, a little joyous, to know that he so suffered ; but there had been nothing of joy, nothing of triumph, no pleasure — only a pain whose dull aching, if it continued, would be intolerable. PERDITA ' He does not care any more,' she said, looking blankly upon the disappointing sheet. ' Not any more — oh, not any more !' Perdita had made up her mind to the losing of the man who loved her, but to this unexpected losing of his love she felt that she could not be resigned. She read the letter through again, seeking for some grain of comfort. Finding none, she turned herself upon the chair on which she sat, and pressed her face into its chintz covered back and let the painful scalding tears force themselves through closed eye lids.

Oh, this was unbearable, this loss of all — this aching emptiness where her heart had been ! How had she lived before she had known him ? how was it that life had ever seemed to be fair ? And now what was it ? A burthen from which she could only pray to be relieved. What would it be, at best, in the future ? Only a stretching onward of empty meaningless days, only a dragging chain of joyless duties, only a tasteless, aching ex perience, only an existence robbed of all its meaning. Perdita had known all along that she was making a sacrifice in marrying Mrs. Whitley 's son, but there had been a certain exaltation about the deed. This had vanished utterly now ; the glamour had faded from her eyes on the instant of her conception of the as tonishing fact that Russel no longer greatly cared, that he was practically acquiescing in her action.

There is, perhaps, no excuse for her that she was so affected, unless the fact of her being a woman very much like other women be one. It was Russel who had last sat in that soft backed chair. She remembered well whose head had lain where her face was pressed. In her sudden feeling of desolation she clung to the senseless chair with warm, soft arms, and imprinted a shamed, hurried kiss upon the crimson carnation of the cretonne. vol. 11. 2I PERDITA ' How could you change so completely ?" she mentally demanded of Russel's inanimate representative. ' How could you abandon me so quickly and give me up without a murmur to such a fate ? Never — never — never could I have failed you in your necessity. P'or I love you — I love you !' Then she cried again, until the pretty cretonne was quite wet, and perhaps im printed another noiseless, unsatisfactory kiss. 'Do you hear?' she demanded, 'do you hear, beloved ?' and clung closer with her arms.

But the chair, needless to say, was un responsive to the words and the caress which would have driven the man delirious with delight. And soon there came the tinkle of the invalid's bell, and Perdita, remorseful at her forgetfulness of her friend, rubbed away her tears and flew upstairs. That night she sent Russel his answer, fortifying herself beforehand with many reperusals of his letter, steeling her heart against him, finding a womanish, cruel plea sure in couching her reply in terms more cold than his : ' Dear Mr. Russel ' (she wrote), ' I beg to repeat to you, at your request, the fact that I am engaged to be married to Mr. Laurence Whitley. I hoped that you thoroughly understood that my position with regard to him remains, and will remain, unaltered until our marriage. I endeavoured to make this clear to you on the occasion of our last meeting. ' If I have misled you, I hope that you will forgive me, as it has been involuntary ; and any false impressions I may have allowed you to form with regard to me, believe me, I deeply regret.

With all good wishes, ' I remain ' Yours sincerely, ' Perdita Sant. PERDITA The charwoman was waiting to take the letters to the post while this epistle was penned. Perdita did not even read it through — had no time to linger over the writing of the beloved name upon the envelope — but stamped, and sealed, and despatched the missive in a kind of ruthless haste, feeling as if she were signing her own death-warrant the while.

Chapter II. Perdita Prepares For Marriage

The fourteen weeks of the Easter term (always considered the dreariest of the three in school annals) seemed longer, sadder, more irksome far to Mrs. Sant than to the most home-sick little ' new ' girl beneath her care. She might have derived comfort from the fact that she was becoming more expert in her duties, that Madame could find less excuse for chiding, that the work was easier, and could be performed without the old nervous trepidation. But she was in reality too listless to care for this satisfactory state. It was all one to her now if Madame [ 21 ] PERDITA 22 was ' astonished ' at some breach of disci pline, some trivial error, or if those prim lips of hers were forced unwillingly to utter chill words of approbation. So that she could drag through the dull routine to the close of another gray and cheerless day of her life, could fling herself upon her pillow in the midst of the innocent sleeping heads around her, and have the hours of darkness for her own, she asked no more.

That she might be so tired when that wel come hour came that she should fall asleep without an instant's time for thought was the strongest longing of which she seemed capable ; that the hours of darkness and rest and forgetfulness might for her be inter minable, was her wildest, dearest desire. She was so patient, so methodical, so subdued and depressed, that she ceased to be an object of much interest to the other governesses, who during her first term had speculated upon her in their spare moments as a being removed from their own dull round, who had had experiences, and in whom new developments might be looked for. Ripley Russel had evidently turned his back upon her, and a great deal had been thought at Surrey House of the marks of favour shown by Ripley Russel. It was impossible even for Miss Narricott to be jealous of Perdita because old Clark still contrived to pour into the pretty widow's ears his endless stories of ' Perdita,' the cat.

Poor Mr. Clark had tried even Miss Nar ricott herself with those anecdotes, till she who was strictly truthful, and would have thought it a deadly sin to tell a fib even to spare a harmless old man's tender feelings or to give him an instant's pleasure, had owned up that she not only took no pleasure in this particular ' Perdita,' but loathed the whole feline race. She scornfully made over to Perdita poor Mr. Clark and his pussy. Miss Narricott agreed with the French governess that Mrs. Sant was no longer PERDITA 24 remarkable for prettiness now. She had always thought her style not one likely to attract an artist for long. She was too slight and pale a thing — not of a commanding presence at all — her cheeks too round, her features quite insignificant. And Miss Nar ricott was not one to withhold her admiration, when due, from any of her own sex.

Had she not always openly expressed the opinion that Madame herself was a very fine woman — her face of a colour a little too deep, perhaps, but of a charming regularity of feature ? If Mrs. Sant had been anything of a beauty, she surely would have made a better bargain than she was going to do. In the eyes even of Louisa Narricott, used to regarding the male sex in general with the awe inspired by the unattainable and the unknown, poor Lollie was a worthless thing. And this was a feeling shared by every school-girl. Even Barbara's admiration was sorely tried by the fact that her goddess was going to descend to this. ' And I made mother ask her to the house, and insisted that much should be made of her !' Barbara said to her ally Sarion Jay. 'I do hope and pray mother may never see the creature she is going to marry !

It is wicked — that ridiculous little man with no shoulders and a great black beard (do you remember how we laughed at him at the prize-giving, Sarion ?), and lovely, lovely Mrs. Sant !' ' I don't blame her,' said Sarion with indif ference. ' I'd marry even that to get away from here. Fancy what her life is — worse than ours ! If she don't like him she can get a divorce, I suppose. It's what I mean to do when I grow up — take the first that asks me, and be divorced if I find I don't care for him. Mamma says you can't possibly tell what men are until you've married them.' ' Yes ; but why didn't she take Mr. Russel ?' Barbara demurred. ' He was awfully in love — oh, down to his finger-tips ! And mother said it was a great honour to PERDITA her to have the admiration of such a man. She says that he will be famous, and he would have painted Mrs. Sant and put her in the Academy, and she would have been famous too.' ' Perhaps he has a wife already,' suggested Sarion, who certainly would not find the world when she went into it any wickeder than she, amid the classic and peaceful shades of Surrey House, had pictured it.

But Barbara repudiated the suggestion. ' There was my cousin Wilfred, too,' she said. ' Mother had to tell him she would not have him haunting the house while Mrs. Sant was with us. She said it was not fair to his parents for her to allow it. But Wil fred came, all the same. Think of Ripley Russel, the splendid artist, and my cousin Wilfred, that is enormously clever, and this little ugly lodging-keeping man !' No one knew how the news of the engage ment had spread in the school. It was brought there, like most of the idle talk which was so much to be deprecated, by the day-boarders, Miss Narricott believed. (She had a great grudge against that pestiferous army of day-boarders who were never satisfactorily under control, and who for so many hours of the day and night could laugh at their general's command.)

All discussions on the themes of love and marriage were tabooed at Surrey House, and Madame Mellington-Ashford herself firmly believed that speculation on such matters had never entered the carefully-tended imaginations of her charges. As she had cautioned Perdita against putting prominently before her pupils the misfortune of her widowhood, so she now counselled her to guard with extreme careful ness in her own breast the fact of her inten tion to remarry. For, before that Easter term was more than half over, circumstances had compelled Mrs. Sant to divulge the story of her engagement to Madame herself. She was obliged to entreat that lady to dispense with the PERDITA three months' notice to which she was en titled, and to allow her second English governess to depart at the end of the term in order that her marriage might take place.

Although no friendship had arisen between the inmates of No. 2,7 and the august prin cipal of the Surrey House establishment, little neighbourly compliments had passed to and fro, and Madame knew something of her governess's fiancd. ' I believe him to be a very worthy and intellectual young man,' she said, regarding the down-bent face of the bride-elect with some intentness. ' You should, if remarriage appears to you a desirable end, esteem your self very fortunate. But I thought I under stood you to be inconsolable for the loss of your first husband ? That was when you came to me — how many months ago : four ?' ' I did not think it possible that I could marry again then,' Perdita said gently. ' Four months is a long time, however. Things and people may change very much in four months.' Madame looked with an indrawn lip at the delicate prettiness of this girl-widow to whom four months was a long time.

She herself was at an age when years slip away like months — the period of her own widow hood had seemed as nothing to her. The time had flown, bringing a certain dreaded period all too near. ' There are some people who never change, ' she said severely, but with a great envy at her heart. ' I have never met them,' Perdita sadly replied. An unwonted softness of feeling, for which she could not herself satisfactorily account, came over Madame that afternoon. There had always been hidden in her heart an unde fined grudge against this young widow, whose fate had been so far less cruel than her own, whose soft, rounded prettiness had appealed to the hearts of all who looked upon her, gaining PERDITA 30 for her a pity which the elder woman thought all unneeded, and a sympathy for which redder, harder-featured women might have hungered in vain.

This sentiment, so un worthy of the character which Madame believed to be her own, suddenly died away. Side by side with it in that embittered heart of hers there had grown another feeling with regard to the unsatisfactory English governess — another cause of envy and dislike. We have seen how she had guessed at the fact — piecing evidence together, word to word, look to look, even silence to silence, as jealous women will — that during the last months of her husband's sojourn with her another woman had come between. She could never obtain positive news of such a person — Samuel Ashford being cunning and careful in that direction — and she had passed many a dark hour of that miserable time in picturing to herself what that rival might be like. She would be young, she knew well, and what men call pretty ; and probably, she herself being dark, she would be fair ; but she had not been successful in calling up betore her mind's eye a face and form which satisfied her as likely to attract her husband's notice until her eyes had fallen upon Perdita Sant.