Truthful Jane. Florence Morse Kingsley

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СКАЧАТЬ resigned herself with a sigh to Susan's deft hands. "You do brush my hair so nicely, Susan," she murmured, after a long silence filled with the steady stroking of the brush through her long brown tresses.

      "It's the Lord's own mussy you'll let me do it, miss," cried Susan fervently, "else a 'ouse-maid I'd live an' die, an' me wantin' to be a lidy's maid sence I was knee high to a grass-'opper. I says to Miss Gwendolen on'y yesterday, 'Mayn't I brush your 'air, miss,' I says, 'Parks bein' busy, I think I can do it satisfactory.' 'Go 'way, Susan!' she snaps out, 'do you s'pose I'd 'ave your great, rough, clumsy 'ands about my 'ead?' she says."

      "Your hands are not rough, nor clumsy, either," said Jane, understanding the pause, and filling it exactly as Susan wished; "and if I ever do have a lady's maid it shall be you, Susan."

      "Thank you kindly, Miss Jane Evelyn," beamed Susan. "Now ain't that a lovely coffer? I'll bet Parks couldn't do no better nor that in a hundred years! But it 'ud be a simple idgit what couldn't do your 'air, miss; it's that soft an' shinin' an' curls itself better nor curlin'-tongs could do it."

      All of which was strictly true, as Jane's brown eyes told her. Then the white frock was carefully put on, and Susan next produced from somewhere three great creamy buds, one of which she fastened behind Miss Blythe's pretty pink ear; the other two she pinned to the modest little bodice, standing off to survey her handiwork with an air of honest pride.

      "I 'ooked them three roses from Miss Gwendolen's bouquet," she announced unblushingly, "an' a mighty good job it were."

      "Then I'll not wear them," said Jane decidedly. "You may take them away, Susan. I may be forced to wear Gwen's cast-off frocks; but I'll not wear her flowers!"

      An ethical differentiation which it would have puzzled Miss Blythe to explain, and which left poor Susan in open-mouthed dismay.

      "She's a reg'lar lidy, is Miss Jane Evelyn, as ever was," cogitated that worthy hand-maiden, as Jane's light step passed down the corridor, "'igh an' 'aughty as the 'aughtiest, yet that sweet an' lovely in her w'ys I can't 'elp a-worshipin' the ground she walks on. It's a dook or a lord as ought to marry Miss Jane Evelyn, an' it's me as 'll be her lidy's maid." And she proceeded to put the poor little room with its shabby appointments into truly exquisite order with all the zeal born of her anticipations.

      There was no one in the library when Jane entered it, so she sat down in one of the great carved chairs by the fire, feeling very small and young and lonely. The gentle hum of conversation and the subdued tinkle of glass and silver reached her where she sat, and between curtained doorways she could catch glimpses of the softly lighted drawing-room beyond, gay with masses of azaleas and ferns.

      After a little Jane found herself busy with dim memories of her past. She had been a child of three when her father and mother died, within a month of each other, she had been told; the broken-hearted young wife apparently not caring enough for her one child to face her bleak future.

      "Oliver Aubrey-Blythe's wife was an exceedingly weak woman," Lady Agatha had once told Jane cruelly; "and I feel that it is my duty to train you into something far different, if such a thing is at all possible."

      Jane's little hands grew quite cold, as she strove vainly to fix the illusive memory of the two faces which had bent over her on the day she had fallen into the fountain at Blythe Court. She remembered the fountain distinctly, with its darting goldfish and the stout cherub in the middle staggering under the weight of an impossible dolphin from whose open mouth gushed a dazzling jet of water.

      There were blue flowers growing about the edge of the marble basin, and she had recklessly trampled them under foot in her baby efforts to grasp a particularly beautiful goldfish. The rest was a blur, wherein dazzling blue sky seen through green waving treetops an immense distance away made a background for the two shadowy figures which stood out from the others. It was pleasant at the bottom of the fountain, Jane remembered, where one could look up through the clear water and see the far blue sky and the waving trees. For an instant she paused to wonder what would have happened had the shadowy figures of her parents been farther away when she shrieked and fell—quite at the other side of the garden, say. Would the blue sky and the waving trees have faded quite away into nothingness after a little? And was somethingness so much better than nothingness, after all?

      But all this ghostly cogitation being quite at variance with Miss Blythe's usual optimistic and cheerfully human way of looking at things, she presently abandoned it altogether to speculate on the nature of the interview with her uncle, an event which certainly concerned her immediate fortunes much more intimately. Mr. Robert Aubrey-Blythe was an exalted personage with whom Jane felt herself to be very slightly acquainted. He was kind; yes, certainly. Jane could not recall a single occasion upon which he had spoken to her in a manner even remotely approaching unkindness. Indeed, he very rarely spoke to her at all beyond a curt 'Good evening, Jane' when she slipped into her place at the family dinner table. Twice before this she had been summoned to the library; each time to receive a perfunctory rebuke for some childish piece of mischief, reported presumably by Lady Agatha; whereat she had gone away shaking in her small shoes to lead a blameless existence for many days thereafter.

      "Aunt Agatha has told Uncle Robert what I said to her about being paid for teaching Percy and Cecil," the girl decided. "Well, I hope she has. I don't mind being a nursery governess, not in the least; but I hate—hate—hate the way I am living now. Even the servants pity me!"

      She stood up and drew her slight figure to its full height as she heard the swish and rustle of silken skirts in the corridor; the women were coming away from table. It was a small party, after all. Jane watched the vanishing trains of the five dinner-gowns with a speculative smile. How would it seem, she wondered, to be beautifully dressed every night and dine with guests who were not forever carping at one, but whose chief business in life it was to be agreeable. Then she faced about at sound of her cousin Gwendolen's voice.

      "What are you doing in here, Jane?" demanded that young lady snappishly, as she advanced to the fire.

      "Waiting for Uncle Robert," Jane told her briefly.

      Gwendolen frowned and twisted her rings so as to make them sparkle in the firelight. "How very coy and unconscious we are!" she said sneeringly. Then suddenly she burst into a disagreeable laugh.

      "What are you laughing at, Gwen?" asked Jane, with real curiosity.

      "At you, goose," replied Miss Aubrey-Blythe crossly. She turned and moved toward the door. "Don't you know what papa wants with you?" she paused to demand.

      "No, I don't," said Jane steadily. "Do you?"

      But Miss Gwendolen merely shrugged her ugly shoulders as she dropped the heavy curtains into place behind her.

CHAPTER III

       Table of Contents

      When Mr. Robert Aubrey-Blythe finally entered the library, it was with the pleasant glow of a good dinner, good wine, and good company enveloping his portly form like a visible halo. He actually bowed before Jane, as though she were a great lady of his acquaintance, instead of his niece, left on his hands to bring up with scarce a penny to her name.

      "Ah, Jane," he began, swelling out the shining expanse of his shirt front like a pouter pigeon, "I see—er—that you are here, as I bade you."

      "Yes, Uncle Robert," murmured Jane, with a beating heart; "you wished to speak with me, sir?"

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