Мэри Элизабет Брэддон
Mount Royal: A Novel. Volume 1 of 3
CHAPTER VI
IN SOCIETY
The Easter recess was over. Society had returned from its brief holiday – its glimpse of budding hedges and primrose-dotted banks, blue skies and blue violets, the snowy bloom of orchards, the tender green of young cornfields. Society had come back again, and was hard at the London treadmill – yawning at old operas, and damning new plays – sniggering at crowded soirées – laying down the law, each man his particular branch thereof, at carefully planned dinner parties – quarrelling and making friends again – eating and drinking – spending and wasting, and pretending to care very little about anything; for society is as salt that has lost its savour if it is not cynical and affected.
But there was one débutante at least that season for whom town pleasures had lost none of their freshness, for whom the old operas were all melody, and the new plays all wit – who admired everything with frankest wonder and enthusiasm, and without a thought of Horace, or Pope, or Creech, or anybody, except the lover who was always at her side, and who shed the rose-coloured light of happiness upon the commonest things. To sit in the Green Park on a mild April morning, to see the guard turn out by St. James's Palace after breakfast, to loiter away an hour or two at a picture gallery – was to be infinitely happy. Neither opera nor play, dinner nor dance, race-course nor flower-show, was needed to complete the sum of Christabel's bliss when Angus Hamleigh was with her.
He had returned from Hyères, quietest among the southern towns, wonderfully improved in health and strength. Even Mrs. Tregonell and Miss Bridgeman perceived the change in him.
"I think you must have been very ill when you came to Mount Royal, Mr. Hamleigh," said Jessie, one day. "You look so much better now."
"My life was empty then – it is full now," he answered. "It is hope that keeps a man alive, and I had very little to hope for when I went westward. How strange the road of life is, and how little a man knows what is waiting for him round the corner."
The house in Bolton Row was charming; just large enough to be convenient, just small enough to be snug. At the back, the windows looked into Lord Somebody's garden – not quite a tropical paradise – nay, even somewhat flavoured with bricks and mortar – but still a garden, where, by sedulous art, the gardeners kept alive ferns and flowers, and where trees, warranted to resist smoke, put forth young leaves in the springtime, and only languished and sickened in untimely decay when the London season was over, and their function as fashionable trees had been fulfilled.
The house was furnished in a Georgian style, pleasant to modern taste. The drawing-room was of the spindle-legged order – satin-wood card tables; groups of miniatures in oval frames; Japanese folding screen, behind which Belinda might have played Bo-peep; china jars, at whose fall Narcissa might have inly suffered, while outwardly serene. The dining-room was sombre and substantial. The bedrooms had been improved by modern upholstery; for the sleeping apartments of our ancestors leave a good deal to be desired. All the windows were full of flowers – inside and out there was the perfume and colour of many blossoms. The three drawing-rooms, growing smaller to a diminishing point, like a practical lesson in perspective, were altogether charming.
Major Bree had escorted the ladies to London, and was their constant guest, camping out in a bachelor lodging in Jermyn Street, and coming across Piccadilly every day to eat his luncheon in Bolton Row, and to discuss the evening's engagements.
Long as he had been away from London, he acclimatized himself very quickly – found out everything about everybody – what singers were best worth hearing – what plays best worth seeing – what actors should be praised – which pictures should be looked at and talked about – what horses were likely to win the notable races. He was a walking guide, a living hand-book to fashionable London.
All Mrs. Tregonell's old friends – all the Cornish people who came to London – called in Bolton Row; and at every house where the lady and her niece visited there were new introductions, whereby the widow's visiting list widened like a circle in the water – and cards for dances and evening parties, afternoons and dinners were super-abundant. Christabel wanted to see everything. She had quite a country girl's taste, and cared much more for the theatre and the opera than to be dressed in a new gown, and to be crushed in a crowd of other young women in new gowns – or to sit still and be admired at a stately dinner. Nor was she particularly interested in the leaders of fashion, their ways and manners – the newest professed or professional beauty – the last social scandal. She wanted to see the great city of which she had read in history – the Tower, the Savoy, Westminster Hall, the Abbey, St. Paul's, the Temple – the London of Elizabeth, the still older London of the Edwards and Henries, the house in which Milton was born, the organ on which he played, the place where Shakespeare's Theatre once stood, the old Inn whence Chaucer's Pilgrims started on their journey. Even Dickens's London – the London of Pickwick and Winkle – the Saracen's Head at which Mr. Squeers put up – had charms for her.
"Is everything gone?" she asked, piteously, after being told how improvement had effaced the brick and mortar background of English History.
Yet there still remained enough to fill her mind with solemn thoughts of the past. She spent long hours in the Abbey, with Angus and Jessie, looking at the monuments, and recalling the lives and deeds of long vanished heroes and statesmen. The Tower, and the old Inns of Court, were full of interest. Her curiosity about old houses and streets was insatiable.
"No one less than Macaulay could satisfy you," said Angus, one day, when his memory was at fault. "A man of infinite reading, and infallible memory."
"But you have read so much, and you remember a great deal."
They had been prowling about the Whitehall end of the town in the bright early morning, before Fashion had begun to stir herself faintly among her down pillows. Christabel loved the parks and streets while the freshness of sunrise was still upon them – and these early walks were an institution.
"Where is the Decoy?" she asked Angus, one day, in St. James's Park; and on being interrogated, it appeared that she meant a certain piece of water, described in "Peveril of the Peak." All this part of London was peopled with Scott's heroes and heroines, or with suggestions of Goldsmith. Here Fenella danced before good-natured, loose-living Rowley. Here Nigel stood aside, amidst the crowd, to see Charles, Prince of Wales, and his ill-fated favourite, Buckingham, go by. Here the Citizen of the World met Beau Tibbs and the gentleman in black. For Christabel, the Park was like a scene in a stage play.
Then, after breakfast, there were long drives into fair suburban haunts, where they escaped in some degree from London smoke and London restraints of all kinds, where they could charter a boat, and row up the river to a still fairer scene, and picnic in some rushy creek, out of ken of society, and be almost as recklessly gay as if they had been at Tintagel.
These were the days Angus loved best. The days upon which he and his betrothed turned their backs upon London society, and seemed as far away from the outside world as ever they had been upon the wild western coast. Like most men educated at Eton and Oxford, and brought up in the neighbourhood of the metropolis, Angus loved the Thames with a love that was almost a passion.
"It is my native country," he said; "I have no other. All the pleasantest associations of my boyhood and youth are interwoven with the river. When I die, my spirit ought to haunt these shores, like that ghost of the 'Scholar Gipsy,' which you have read about in Arnold's poem."
He knew every bend and reach of the river – every tributary, creek, and eyot – almost every row of pollard willows, standing stunted and grim along the bank, like a line of rugged old men. He knew where the lilies grew, and where there were chances of trout. The haunts of monster pike were familiar to him – indeed, he declared that he knew many of these gentlemen personally – that they were as old as the Fontainebleau carp, and bore a charmed life.
"When I was at Eton I knew them all by sight," he said. "There was one which I set my heart upon landing, but he was ever so much stronger and cleverer than I. If I had caught him I should have worn his skin ever after, in the pride of my heart – like Hercules with his lion. But he still inhabits the same creek, still sulks among the same rushes, and devours the gentler members of the finny race by shoals. We christened him Dr. Parr, for we knew he was preternaturally old, and we thought he must, from mere force of association, be a profound scholar."
Mr. Hamleigh was always finding reasons for these country excursions, which he declared were the one sovereign antidote for the poisoned atmosphere of crowded rooms, and the evil effects of late hours.
"You wouldn't like to see Christabel fade and languish like the flowers in your drawing-room," he urged, when Mrs. Tregonell wanted her niece to make a round of London visits, instead of going down to Maidenhead on the coach, to lunch somewhere up the river. Not at Skindle's – or at any other hotel – but in the lazy sultry quiet of some sequestered nook below the hanging woods of Clieveden. "I'm sure you can spare her just for to-day – such a perfect spring day. It would be a crime to waste such sunlight and such balmy air in town drawing-rooms. Could not you strain a point, dear Mrs. Tregonell, and come with us?"
Aunt Diana shook her head. No, the fatigue would be too much – she had lived such a quiet life at Mount Royal, that a very little exertion tired her. Besides she had some calls to make; and then there was a dinner at Lady Bulteel's, to which she must take Christabel, and an evening party afterwards.
Christabel shrugged her shoulders impatiently.
"I am beginning to hate parties," she said. "They are amusing enough when one is in them – but they are all alike – and it would be so much nicer for us to live our own lives, and go wherever Angus likes. Don't you think you might defer the calls, and come with us to-day, Auntie dear?"
Auntie dear shook her head.
"Even if I were equal to the fatigue, Belle, I couldn't defer my visits. Thursday is Lady Onslow's day – and Mrs. Trevannion's day – and Mrs. Vansittart's day – and when people have been so wonderfully kind to us, it would be uncivil not to call."
"And you will sit in stifling drawing-rooms, with the curtains lowered to shut out the sunlight – and you will drink ever so much more tea than is good for you – and hear a lot of people prosing about the same things over and over again – Epsom and the Opera – and Mrs. This and Miss That – and Mrs. Somebody's new book, which everybody reads and talks about, just as if there were not another book in the world, or as if the old book counted for nothing," concluded Christabel, contemptuously, having by this time discovered the conventional quality of kettle-drum conversations, wherein people discourse authoritatively about books they have not read, plays they have not seen, and people they do not know.
Mr. Hamleigh had his own way, and carried off Christabel and Miss Bridgeman to the White Horse Cellar, with the faithful Major in attendance.
"You will bring Belle home in time to dress for Lady Bulteel's dinner," said Mrs. Tregonell, impressively, as they were departing. "Mind, Major, I hold you responsible for her return. You are the only sober person in the party. I believe Jessie Bridgeman is as wild as a hawk, when she gets out of my sight."
Jessie's shrewd grey eyes twinkled at the reproof.
"I am not very sorry to get away from Bolton Row, and the fine ladies who come to see you – and who always look at me as much as to say, 'Who is she? – what is she? – how did she come here?' – and who are obviously surprised if I say anything intelligent – first, at my audacity in speaking before company, and next that such a thing as I should have any brains."
"Nonsense, Jessie, how thin-skinned you are; everybody praises you," said Mrs. Tregonell, while they all waited on the threshold for Christabel to fasten her eight-button gloves – a delicate operation, in which she was assisted by Mr. Hamleigh.
"How clever you are at buttoning gloves," exclaimed Christabel; "one would think you had served an apprenticeship."
"That's not the first pair he has buttoned, I'll wager," cried the Major, in his loud, hearty voice; and then, seeing Angus redden ever so slightly, and remembering certain rumours which he had heard at his club, the kindly bachelor regretted his speech.
Happily, Christabel was engaged at this moment in kissing her aunt, and did not observe Mr. Hamleigh's heightened colour. Ten minutes later they were all seated outside the coach, bowling down Piccadilly Hill on their way westward.
"In the good old days this is how you would have started for Cornwall," said Angus.
"I wish we were going to Cornwall now."
"So do I, if your aunt would let us be married at that dear little church in the glen. Christabel, when I die, if you have the ordering of my funeral, be sure that I am buried in Minster Churchyard."
"Angus, don't," murmured Christabel, piteously.
"Dearest, 'we must all die – 'tis an inevitable chance – the first Statute in Magna Charta – it is an everlasting Act of Parliament' – that's what he says of death, dear, who jested at all things, and laid his cap and bells down one day in a lodging in Bond Street – the end of which we passed just now – sad and lonely, and perhaps longing for the kindred whom he had forsaken."
"You mean Sterne," said Christabel. "Jessie and I hunted for that house, yesterday. I think we all feel sorrier for him than for many a better man."
In the early afternoon they had reached their destination – a lovely creek shaded by chestnut and alder – a spot known to few, and rarely visited. Here, under green leaves, they moored their boat, and lunched on the contents of a basket which had been got ready for them at Skindle's – dawdling over the meal – taking their ease – full of talk and laughter. Never had Angus looked better, or talked more gaily. Jessie, too, was at her brightest, and had a great deal to say.
"It is wonderful how well you two get on," said Christabel, smiling at her friend's prompt capping of some bitter little speech from Angus. "You always seem to understand each other so quickly – indeed, Jessie seems to know what Angus is going to say before the words are spoken. I can see it in her face."
"Perhaps, that is because we are both cynics," said Mr. Hamleigh.
"Yes, that is no doubt the reason," said Jessie, reddening a little; "the bond of sympathy between us is founded on our very poor opinion of our fellow-creatures."
But after this Miss Bridgeman became more silent, and gave way much less than usual to those sudden impulses of sharp speech which Christabel had noticed.
They landed presently, and went wandering away into the inland – a strange world to Christabel, albeit very familiar to her lover.
"Not far from here there is a dell which is the most wonderful place in the world for bluebells," said Angus, looking at his watch. "I wonder whether we should have time to walk there."
"Let us try, if it is not very, very far," urged Christabel. "I adore bluebells, and skylarks, and the cuckoo, and all the dear country flowers and birds. I have been surfeited with hot-house flowers and caged canaries since I came to London."
A skylark was singing in the deep blue, far aloft, over the little wood in which they were wandering. It was the loneliest, loveliest spot; and Christabel felt as if it would be agony to leave it. She and her lover seemed ever so much nearer, dearer, more entirely united here than in London drawing-rooms, where she hardly dared to be civil to him lest society should be amused or contemptuous. Here she could cling to his arm – it seemed a strong and helpful arm now – and look up at his face with love irradiating her own countenance, and feel no more ashamed than Eve in the Garden. Here they could talk without fear of being heard; for Jessie and the Major followed at a most respectful distance – just keeping the lovers in view, and no more.
Christabel ran back presently to say they were going to look for bluebells.
"You'll come, won't you?" she pleaded; "Angus says the dell is not far off."
"I don't believe a bit in his topography," said the Major; "do you happen to know that it is three o'clock, and that you are due at a State dinner?"
"At eight," cried Christabel, "ages away. Angus says the train goes at six. We are to have some tea at Skindle's, at five. We have two hours in which to do what we like."
"There is the row back to Skindle's."
"Say half an hour for that, which gives us ninety minutes for the bluebells."
"Do you count life by minutes, child?" asked the Major.
"Yes, Uncle Oliver, when I am utterly happy; for then every minute is precious."
And then she and her lover went rambling on, talking, laughing, poetising under the flickering shadows and glancing lights; while the other two followed at a leisurely pace, like the dull foot of reality following the winged heel of romance. Jessie Bridgeman was only twenty-seven, yet in her own mind it seemed as if she were the Major's contemporary – nay, indeed, his senior; for he had never known that grinding poverty which ages the eldest daughter in a large shabby genteel family. Jessie Bridgeman had been old in care before she left off pinafores. Her childish pleasure in the shabbiest of dolls had been poisoned by a precocious familiarity with poor-rates, and water-rates – a sickening dread of the shabby man in pepper-and-salt tweed, with the end of an oblong account-book protruding from his breast-pocket, who came to collect money that was never ready for him, and departed, leaving a printed notice, like the trail of the serpent, behind him. The first twenty years of Jessie Bridgeman's life had been steeped in poverty, every day, every hour flavoured with the bitter taste of deprivation and the world's contempt, the want of common comforts, the natural longing for fairer surroundings, the ever-present dread of a still lower deep in which pinching should become starvation, and even the shabby home should be no longer tenable. With a father whose mission upon this earth was to docket and file a certain class of accounts in Somerset House, for a salary of a hundred-and-eighty pounds a year, and a bi-annual rise of five, a harmless man, whose only crime was to have married young and made himself responsible for an unanticipated family – "How could a young fellow of two-and-twenty know that God was going to afflict him with ten children?" Mr. Bridgeman used to observe plaintively – with a mother whose life was one long domestic drudgery, who spent more of her days in a back kitchen than is consistent with the maintenance of personal dignity, and whose only chance of an airing was that stern necessity which impelled her to go and interview the tax-gatherer, in the hope of obtaining "time" – Jessie's opportunities of tasting the pleasures of youth had been of the rarest. Once in six months or so, perhaps, a shabby-genteel friend gave her father an order for some theatre, which was in that palpable stage of ruin when orders are freely given to the tavern loafer and the stage-door hanger-on – and then, oh, what rapture to trudge from Shepherd's Bush to the West End, and to spend a long hot evening in the gassy paradise of the Upper Boxes! Once in a year or so Mr. Bridgeman gave his wife and eldest girl a dinner at an Italian Restaurant near Leicester Square – a cheap little pinchy dinner, in which the meagre modicum of meat and poultry was eked out by much sauce, redolent of garlic, by delicious foreign bread, and too-odorous foreign cheese. It was a tradition in the family that Mr. Bridgeman had been a great dinner-giver in his bachelor days, and knew every restaurant in London.
"They don't forget me here, you see," he said, when the sleek Italian waiter brought him extra knives and forks for the dual portion which was to serve for three.
Such had been the utmost limit of Jessie's pleasures before she answered an advertisement in the Times, which stated that a lady, living in a retired part of Cornwall, required the services of a young lady who could write a good hand, keep accounts, and had some knowledge of housekeeping – who was willing, active, cheerful, and good-tempered. Salary, thirty pounds per annum.
It was not the first advertisement by many that Jessie had answered. Indeed, she seemed, to her own mind, to have been doing nothing but answering advertisements, and hoping against hope for a favourable reply, since her eighteenth birthday, when it had been borne in upon her, as the Evangelicals say, that she ought to go out into the world, and do something for her living, making one mouth less to be filled from the family bread-pan.
"There's no use talking, mother," she said, when Mrs. Bridgeman tried to prove that the bright useful eldest daughter cost nothing; "I eat, and food costs money. I have a dreadfully healthy appetite, and if I could get a decent situation I should cost you nothing, and should be able to send you half my salary. And now that Milly is getting a big girl – "
"She hasn't an idea of making herself useful," sighed the mother; "only yesterday she let the milkman ring three times and then march away without leaving us a drop of milk, because she was too proud or too lazy to open the door, while Sarah and I were up to our eyes in the wash."
"Perhaps she didn't hear him," suggested Jessie, charitably.
"She must have heard his pails if she didn't hear him," said Mrs. Bridgeman; "besides he 'yooped,' for I heard him, and relied upon that idle child for taking in the milk. But put not your trust in princes," concluded the overworked matron, rather vaguely.
"Salary, thirty pounds per annum," repeated Jessie, reading the Cornish lady's advertisement over and over again, as if it had been a charm; "why that would be a perfect fortune; think what you could do with an extra fifteen pounds a year!"
"My dear, it would make my life heaven. But you would want all the money for your dress: you would have to be always nice. There would be dinner parties, no doubt, and you would be asked to come into the drawing-room of an evening," said Mrs. Bridgeman, whose ideas of the governess's social status were derived solely from "Jane Eyre."
Jessie's reply to the advertisement was straight-forward and succinct, and she wrote a fine bold hand. These two facts favourably impressed Mrs. Tregonell, and of the three or four dozen answers which her advertisement brought forth, Jessie's pleased her the most. The young lady's references to her father's landlord and the incumbent of the nearest church, were satisfactory. So one bleak wintry morning Miss Bridgeman left Paddington in one of the Great Western's almost luxurious third-class carriages, and travelled straight to Launceston, whence a carriage – the very first private carriage she had ever sat in, and every detail of which was a wonder and a delight to her – conveyed her to Mount Royal.
That fine old Tudor manor-house, after the shabby ten-roomed villa at Shepherd's Bush – badly built, badly drained, badly situated, badly furnished, always smelling of yesterday's dinner, always damp and oozy with yesterday's rain – was almost too beautiful to be real. For days after her arrival Jessie felt as if she must be walking about in a dream. The elegancies and luxuries of life were all new to her. The perfect quiet and order of this country home; the beauty in every detail – from the old silver urn and Worcester china which greeted her eyes on the breakfast-table, to the quaint little Queen Anne candlestick which she carried up to her bedroom at night – seemed like a revelation of a hitherto unknown world. The face of Nature – the hills and the moors – the sea and the cliffs – was as new to her as all that indoor luxury. An occasional week at Ramsgate or South-end had been all her previous experience of this world's loveliness. Happily, she was not a shy or awkward young person. She accommodated herself with wonderful ease to her altered surroundings – was not tempted to drink out of a finger-glass, and did not waver for a moment as to the proper use of her fish-knife and fork – took no wine – and ate moderately of that luxurious and plentiful fare which was as new and wonderful to her as if she had been transported from the barren larder of Shepherd's Bush to that fabulous land where the roasted piglings ran about with knives and forks in their backs, squeaking, in pig language, "Come, eat me; come, eat me."
Often in this paradise of pasties and clotted cream, mountain mutton and barn-door fowls, she thought with a bitter pang of the hungry circle at home, with whom dinner was the exception rather than the rule, and who made believe to think tea and bloaters an ever so much cosier meal than a formal repast of roast and boiled.
On the very day she drew her first quarter's salary – not for worlds would she have anticipated it by an hour – Jessie ran off to a farm she knew of, and ordered a monster hamper to be sent to Rosslyn Villa, Shepherd's Bush – a hamper full of chickens, and goose, and cream, and butter, with a big saffron-flavoured cake for its crowning glory – such a cake as would delight the younger members of the household!
Nor did she forget her promise to send the over-tasked house-mother half her earnings. "You needn't mind taking the money, dearest," she wrote in the letter which enclosed the Post-Office order. "Mrs. Tregonell has given me a lovely grey silk gown; and I have bought a brown merino at Launceston, and a new hat and jacket. You would stare to see how splendidly your homely little Jessie is dressed! Christabel found out the date of my birthday, and gave me a dozen of the loveliest gloves, my favourite grey, with four buttons. A whole dozen! Did you ever see a dozen of gloves all at once, mother? You have no idea how lovely they look. I quite shrink from breaking into the packet; but I must wear a pair at church next Sunday, in compliment to the dear little giver. If it were not for thoughts of you and the brood, dearest, I should be intensely happy here! The house is an ideal house – the people are ideal people; and they treat me ever so much better than I deserve. I think I have the knack of being useful to them, which is a great comfort; and I am able to get on with the servants – old servants who had a great deal too much of their own way before I came – which is also a comfort. It is not easy to introduce reform without making oneself detested. Christabel, who has been steeping herself in French history lately, calls me Turgot in petticoats – by which you will see she has a high opinion of my ministerial talents – if you can remember Turgot, poor dear! amidst all your worries," added Jessie, bethinking herself that her mother's book-learning had gone to seed in an atmosphere of petty domestic cares – mending – washing – pinching – contriving.
This and much more had Jessie Bridgeman written seven years ago, while Mount Royal was still new to her. The place and the people – at least those two whom she first knew there – had grown dearer as time went on. When Leonard came home from the University, he and his mother's factotum did not get on quite so well as Mrs. Tregonell had hoped. Jessie was ready to be kind and obliging to the heir of the house; but Leonard did not like her – in the language of the servant's hall, he "put his back up at her." He looked upon her as an interloper and a spy, especially suspecting her in the latter capacity, perhaps from a lurking consciousness that some of his actions would not bear the fierce light of unfriendly observation. In vain did his mother plead for her favourite.
"You have no idea how good she is!" said Mrs. Tregonell.
"You're perfectly right there, mother; I have not," retorted Leonard.
"And so useful to me! I should be lost without her!"
"Of course; that's exactly what she wants: creeping and crawling – and pinching and saving – docking your tradesmen's accounts – grinding your servants – fingering your income – till, by-and-by, she will contrive to finger a good deal of it into her own pocket! That's the way they all begin – that's the way the man in the play, Sir Giles Overreach's man, began, you may be sure – till by-and-by he got Sir Giles under his thumb. And that's the way Miss Bridgeman will serve you. I wonder you are so shortsighted!"
Weak as Mrs. Tregonell was in her love for her son, she was too staunch to be set against a person she liked by any such assertions as these. She was quite able to form her own opinion about Miss Bridgeman's character, and she found the girl straight as an arrow – candid almost to insolence, yet pleasant withal; industrious, clever – sharp as a needle in all domestic details – able to manage pounds as carefully as she had managed pence and sixpences.
"Mother used to give me the housekeeping purse," she said, "and I did what I liked. I was always Chancellor of the Exchequer. It was a very small exchequer; but I learnt the habit of spending and managing, and keeping accounts."
While active and busy about domestic affairs, verifying accounts, settling supplies and expenditures with the cook-housekeeper, making herself a veritable clerk of the kitchen, and overlooking the housemaids in the finer details of their work, Miss Bridgeman still found ample leisure for the improvement of her mind. In a quiet country-house, where family prayers are read at eight o'clock every morning, the days are long enough for all things. Jessie had no active share in Christabel's education, which was Mrs. Tregonell's delight and care; but she contrived to learn what Christabel learnt – to study with her and read with her, and often to outrun her in the pursuit of a favourite subject. They learnt German together, they read good French books together, and were companions in the best sense of the word. It was a happy life – monotonous, uneventful, but a placid, busy, all-satisfying life, which Jessie Bridgeman led during those six years and a half which went before the advent of Angus Hamleigh at Mount Royal. The companion's salary had long ago been doubled, and Jessie, who had no caprices, and whose wants were modest, was able to send forty pounds a year to Shepherd's Bush, and found a rich reward in the increased cheerfulness of the letters from home.
