Mistress of Mellyn

  She shook her head, and I fancied that the eyes which surveyed me had lost something of their blankness; she was not trembling now, and I was sure that she was no longer afraid of me.

  Then suddenly she slipped out of my grasp and ran to the door. I did not pursue her and, as she opened the door and turned to look back at me, there was a faint smile on her lips. Then she was gone.

  I believed that I had established a little friendliness between us. I believed that she had lost her fear of me.

  Then I thought of Alice, who had been kind to this child. I was beginning to build up the picture of Alice more clearly in my mind.

  I went to the window and looked across the L-shaped building to the window of the room, and I thought of that night when I had seen the shadow on the blind.

  My discovery of Gilly did not explain that. It was no child I had seen silhouetted there. It had been a woman.

  Gilly might hide herself in Alice’s room, but the shadow I had seen on the blind that night did not belong to her.

  It was the next day when I went to Mrs. Polgrey’s room for a cup of tea. She was delighted to invite me. “Mrs. Polgrey,” I had said, “I have a matter which I feel to be of some importance, and I should very much like to discuss this with you.”

  She bridled with pride. I could see that the governess who sought her advice must be, in her eyes, the ideal governess.

  “I shall be delighted to give you an hour of my company and a cup of my best Earl Grey,” she told me.

  Over the tea cups she surveyed me with an expression bordering on the affectionate.

  “Now, Miss Leigh, pray tell me what it is you would ask of me.”

  “I am a little disturbed,” I told her, stirring my tea thoughtfully. “It is due to a remark of Alvean’s. I am sure that she listens to gossip, and I think it most undesirable in a child of her age.”

  “Or in any of us, as I am sure a young lady of your good sense would feel,” replied Mrs. Polgrey with what I could not help feeling was a certain amount of hypocrisy.

  I told her how we had walked in the cliff gardens and met the master with Lady Treslyn. “And then,” I went on, “Alvean made this offensive remark. She said that Lady Treslyn hoped to become her mamma.”

  Mrs. Polgrey shook her head. She said: “What about a spoonful of whisky in your tea, miss? There’s nothing like it for keeping up the spirits.”

  I had no desire for the whisky but I could see that Mrs. Polgrey had, and she would have been disappointed if I had refused to join her in her tea tippling, so I said: “A small teaspoonful, please, Mrs. Polgrey.”

  She unlocked the cupboard, took out the bottle and measured out the whisky even more meticulously than she measured her tea, I found myself wondering what other stores she kept in that cupboard of hers.

  Now we were like a pair of conspirators and Mrs. Polgrey was clearly enjoying herself.

  “I fear you will find it somewhat shocking, miss,” she began.

  “I am prepared,” I assured her.

  “Well, Sir Thomas Treslyn is a very old man and only a few years ago he married this young lady, a play-actress, some say, from London. Sir Thomas went there on a visit and returned with her. Her set the neighborhood agog, I can tell you, miss.”

  “I can well believe that.”

  “There’s some that say she’s one of the handsomest women in the country.”

  “I can believe that too.”

  “Handsome is as handsome does.”

  “But it remains handsome outwardly,” I added.

  “And men can be foolish. The master has his weakness,” admitted Mrs. Polgrey.

  “If there is gossip I am most anxious that it shall not reach Alvean’s ears.”

  “Of course you are, miss. But gossip there is, and that child’s got ears like a hare’s.”

  “Do you think Daisy and Kitty chatter?”

  Mrs. Polgrey came closer and I smelled the whisky on her breath. I was startled, wondering whether she could smell it on mine. “Everybody chatters, miss.”

  “I see.”

  “There’s some as say that they’m not the sort to wait for blessing of clergy.”

  “Well, perhaps they are not.”

  I felt wretched. I hate this, I told myself. It’s so sordid. So horrible for a sensitive girl like Alvean.

  “The master is impulsive by nature and in his way he is fond of the women.”

  “So you think …”

  She nodded gravely. “When Sir Thomas dies there’ll be a new mistress in this house. All they have to wait for now is for him to go. Mrs. TreMellyn, her … her’s already gone.”

  I did not want to ask the question which came to my lips but it seemed as though there were some force within me which would not let me avoid it. “And was it so … when Mrs. TreMellyn was alive?”

  Mrs. Polgrey nodded slowly. “He visited her often. It started almost as soon as she came. Sometimes he rides out at night and we don’t see him till morning. Well, he’m master and ’tis for him to make his own rules. ‘Tis for us to cook and dust and housekeep, or teach the child … whatsoever we’m here for. And there’s an end of it.”

  “So you think that Alvean is only repeating what everyone knows? When Sir Thomas dies Lady Treslyn will be her new mamma.”

  “There’s some of us that thinks it’s more than likely, and some that wouldn’t be sorry to see it. Her ladyship’s not the kind to interfere much with our side of the house; and ‘tis better to have these things regularized, so I do say.” She went on piously: “I’d sooner see the master of the house I serve living in wedlock than in sin, I do assure you. And so would we all.”

  “Could we warn the girls not to chatter, before Alvean, of these matters?”

  “As well try to keep a cuckoo from singing in the spring. I could wallop them two till I dropped with exhaustion and still they’d gossip. They can’t help it. It be in their blood. And there’s nothing much to choose between one girl and the other. Nowadays …”

  I nodded sympathetically. I was thinking of Alice, who had watched the relationship between her husband and Lady Treslyn. No wonder she had been prepared to run way with Geoffry Nansellock.

  Poor Alice! I thought. What you must have suffered, married to such a man.

  Mrs. Polgrey was in such an expansive mood that I felt I might extend the conversation to other matters in which I happened to be very interested.

  I said: “Have you ever thought of teaching Gilly her letters?”

  “Gilly! Why, that would be a senseless thing to do. You must know, miss, that Gilly is not quite as she should be.” Mrs. Polgrey tapped her forehead.

  “She sings a great deal. She must have learned the songs. If she could learn songs, could she not learn other things?”

  “She’s a queer little thing. Reckon it was the way she come. I don’t often talk of such things, but I’ll swear you’ve been hearing about my Jennifer.” Mrs. Polgrey’s voice changed a little, became touched with sentiment. I wondered if it had anything to do with the whisky and how many spoonfuls she had taken that day. “Sometimes I think that Gillyflower be a cursed child. Us didn’t want her; why, she was only a little thing in a cradle … two months old … when Jennifer went. The tide brought her body in two days after. ’Twas found there in Mellyn Cove.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said gently.

  Mrs. Polgrey shook herself free of sentiment. “Her’d gone, but there was still Gilly. And right from the first her didn’t seem quite like other children.”

  “Perhaps she sensed the tragedy,” I ventured.

  Mrs. Polgrey looked at me with hauteur. “We did all we could for her—me and Mr. Polgrey. He thought the world of her.”

  “When did you notice that she was not like other children?”

  “Come to think of it, it would be when she was about four years old.”

  “That would be how many years ago?”

  “About four.”

  “She must be the same age as Alvean
. She looks so much younger.”

  “Born a few months after Miss Alvean. They’d play together now and then … being in the house, you do see, and being of an age. There was an accident when she was, let me see … she’d be approaching her fourth birthday.”

  “What sort of accident?”

  “She were playing in the drive there, not far from the lodge gates. The mistress were riding along the drive to the house. She was a great horsewoman, the mistress. Gilly, her darted out from the bushes and caught a blow from the horse. She fell on her head. It was a mercy she weren’t killed.”

  “Poor Gilly,” I said.

  “The mistress were distressed. Blamed herself although ’twas no blame to her. Gilly should have known better. She’d been told to watch the roads often enough. Darted out after a butterfly, like as not. Gilly has always been taken with birds and flowers and insects and such like. The mistress made much of her after that. Gilly used to follow her about and fret when she was away.”

  “I see,” I said.

  Mrs. Polgrey poured herself another cup of tea and asked me if I would have another. I declined. I saw her tilt the teaspoonful of whisky into the cup. “Gilly,” she went on, “were born in sin. Her had no right to come into the world. It looks like God be taking vengeance on her, for it do say that the sins of the fathers be visited on the children.”

  I felt a sudden wave of anger sweep over me. I was in revolt against such distortions. I felt I wanted to slap the face of the woman who could sit there calmly drinking her whisky and accepting the plight of her little grandaughter as God’s will.

  I marveled too at the ignorance of these people, who did not connect Gilly’s strangeness with the accident she had had but believed it was due punishment for her parents’ sins meted out to her by a vengeful God.

  But I said nothing, because I believed that I was battling against strange forces in this house and if I were going to succeed, I needed all the allies I could command.

  I wanted to understand Gilly. I wanted to soothe Alvean. I was discovering a fondness for children in myself which I had not known I possessed before I came into this house. Indeed, since I had come here I had begun to discover quite a lot about myself.

  There was one other reason why I wanted to concentrate on the affairs of these two children; doing so prevented my thinking of Connan TreMellyn and Lady Treslyn. Thoughts of them made me feel quite angry; at this time I called my anger “disgust.”

  So I sat in Mrs. Polgrey’s room, listening to her talk, and I did not tell her what was in my mind.

  There was excitement throughout the house because there was to be a ball—the first since Alice’s death—and for a week there was little talk of anything else. I found it difficult to keep Alvean’s attention on her lessons; Kitty and Daisy were almost hysterical with delight, and I was constantly coming upon them clasped in each other’s arms in an attempt to waltz.

  The gardeners were busy. They were going to bring in flowers from the greenhouses to decorate the ballroom and were eager that the blooms should do them credit; and invitations were being sent out all over the countryside.

  “I fail to see,” I said to Alvean, “why you should feel this excitement. Neither you nor I will take part in the ball.”

  Alvean said dreamily: “When my mother was alive there were lots of balls. She loved them. She danced beautifully. She used to come in and show me how she looked. She was beautiful. Then she would take me into the solarium and I would sit in a recess behind the curtains and look down on the hall through the peep.”

  “The peep?” I asked.

  “Ah, you don’t know.” She regarded me triumphantly. I suppose it was rather pleasing to her to discover that her governess, who was constantly shocked by her ignorance, should herself be discovered in that state.

  “There is a great deal about this house that I do not know,” I said sharply. “I have not seen a third of it.”

  “You haven’t seen the solarium,” she agreed. “There are several peeps in this house. Oh, miss, you don’t know what peeps are, but a lot of big houses have them. There’s even one in Mount Widden. My mother told me that it is where the ladies used to sit when the men were feasting and it was considered no place for them among the men. They could look down and watch, but they must not be there. There’s one in the chapel … a sort of one. We call it the lepers’ squint there. They couldn’t come in because they were lepers, so they could only look through the squint. But I shall go to the solarium and look down on the hall through the peep up there. Why, miss, you ought to come with me. Please do.”

  “We’ll see,” I said.

  On the day of the ball Alvean and I took our riding lesson as usual, only instead of riding Buttercup, Alvean was mounted on Black Prince.

  When I had first seen the child on that horse I had felt a faint twinge of uneasiness, but I stifled this, for I told myself that if she were going to become a rider she must get beyond the Buttercup stage. Once she had ridden Prince she would gain more confidence, and very likely never wish to go back to Buttercup.

  We had done rather well for the first few lessons. Prince behaved admirably and Alvean’s confidence was growing. We had no doubt, either of us, that she would be able to enter for at least one of the events at the November horse show.

  But this day we were not so fortunate. I suspect that Alvean’s thoughts were on the ball rather than on her riding. She was still diffident with me, except perhaps during our riding lessons, when oddly enough we were the best of friends; but as soon as we had divested ourselves of our riding kit we seemed automatically to slip back to the old relationship. I had tried to change this, without success.

  We were about halfway through the lesson when Prince broke into a gallop. I had not allowed her to gallop unless she was on the leading rein; in any case there was little room for that sort of thing in the field; and I wanted to be absolutely sure of Alvean’s confidence before I allowed her more license.

  All would have been well if Alvean had kept her head and remembered what I had taught her, but as Prince started to gallop she gave a little cry of fear and her terror seemed immediately to communicate itself to the frightened animal.

  Prince was off; the thud of his hoofs on the turf struck terror into me. I saw Alvean, forgetting what I had taught her, swaying to one side.

  It was all over in a flash because as soon as it happened I was on the spot. I was after her immediately. I had to grasp Prince’s bridle before he reached the hedge, for I believed that he might attempt to jump and that would mean a nasty fall for my pupil. Fear gave me new strength and I had his rein in my hands and had pulled him up just as he was coming up to the hedge. I brought him to a standstill while a white-faced, trembling Alvean slid unharmed to the ground.

  “It’s all right,” I said. “Your mind was wandering. You haven’t reached that stage when you can afford to forget for a moment what you’re doing.”

  I knew that was the only way to deal with her. Shaken as she was, I made her remount Prince; I knew that she had become terrified of horses through some such incident as this. I had overcome that fear and I was not going to allow it to return.

  She obeyed me, although reluctantly. But by the time our lesson was finished she was well over her fright, and I knew that she would want to ride next day. So I was more satisfied that day that I would eventually make a rider of Alvean than I had been before.

  It was when we were leaving the field that she suddenly burst out laughing.

  “What is it?” I asked, turning my head, for I was riding ahead of her.

  “Oh, miss,” she cried. “You’ve split!”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Your dress has split under the armhole. Oh … it’s getting worse and worse.”

  I put my hand behind my back and realized what had happened. The riding habit had always been a little too tight for me, and during my efforts to save Alvean from a nasty fall, the sleeve seam had been unable to stand the extra strain. r />
  I must have shown my dismay, for Alvean said: “Never mind, miss. I’ll find you another. There are more, I know.”

  Alvean was secretly amused as we went back to the house. Odd that I had never seen her in such good spirits. It was however somewhat disconcerting to discover that the sight of my discomfiture could give her so much pleasure that she could forget the danger through which she had so recently passed.

  The guests had begun to arrive. I had been unable to resist taking peeps at them from my window. The approach was filled with carriages, and the dresses I had glimpsed made me gasp with envy.

  The ball was being held in the great hall which I had seen earlier that day. Before that I had not been in it since my arrival, for I always used the back staircase. It was Kitty who had urged me to take a peep. “It looks so lovely, miss. Mr. Polgrey’s going round like a dog with two tails. He’ll murder one of us if anything happens to his plants.”

  I thought I had rarely seen a setting so beautiful. The beams had been decorated with leaves. “An old Cornish custom,” Kitty told me, “specially at Maytime. But what’s it matter, miss, if this be September. Reckon there’ll be other balls now the period of mourning be up. Well, so it should be. Can’t go on mourning forever, can ‘ee. You might say this is a sort of Maytime, don’t ’ee see? ’Tis the end of one old year and the beginning of another like.”

  I said, as I looked at the pots of hothouse blooms which had been brought in from the greenhouses and the great wax candles in their sconces, that the hall did Mr. Polgrey and his gardeners great credit. I pictured how it would look when those candles were lighted and the guests danced in their colorful gowns, their pearls and their diamonds.

  I wanted to be one of those guests. How I wanted it! Kitty had begun to dance in the hall, smiling and bowing to an imaginary partner. I smiled. She looked so abandoned, so full of joy.

  Then I thought that I ought not to be here like this. It was quite unbecoming. I was as bad as Kitty.

  I turned away and there was a foolish lump in my throat.