The Lion's Share by Arnold Bennett (booksvooks TXT) 📕

earth do you mean?"

"I mean me."

"You aren't a woman, Audrey."

"I'm just as much of a woman as you are. All father's behaviour proves it."

"But your father treats you as a child."

"No, he doesn't. He treats me as a woman. If he thought I was a child he wouldn't have anything to worry about. I'm over nineteen."

"You don't look it."

"Of course I don't. But I could if I liked. I simply won't look it because I don't care to be made ridiculous. I should start to look my age at once if father stopped treating me like a child."

"But you've just said he treats you as a woman!"

"You don't understand, Winnie," said the girl sharply. "Unless you're pretending. Now you've never told me anything about yourself, and I've always told you lots about myself. You belong to an old-fashioned family. How were you treated when you were my age?"

"In what way?"

"You know what way," said Audrey, gazing at her.

"Well, my dear. Things seemed to come very naturally, somehow."

"Were you ever engaged?"

"Me? Oh, no!" answered Miss Ingate with tranquillity. "I'm vehy interested in them. Oh, vehy! Oh, vehy! And I like talking to them. But anything more than that gets on my nerves. My eldest sister was the one. Oh! She was the one. She refused eleven men, and when she was going to be married she made me embroider the monograms of all of them on the skirt of her wedding-dress. She made me, and I had to do it. I sat up all night the night before the wedding to finish them."

"And what did the bridegroom say about it?"

"The bridegroom didn't say anything about it because he didn't know. Nobody knew except Arabella and me. She just wanted to feel that the monograms were on her dress, that was all."

"How strange!"

"Yes, it was. But this is a vehy strange part of the world."

"And what happened afterwards?"

"Bella died when she had her first baby, and the baby died as well. And the father's dead now, too."

"What a horrid story, Winnie!" Audrey murmured. And after a pause: "I like your sister."

"She was vehy uncommon. But I liked her too. I don't know why, but I did. She could make the best marmalade I ever tasted in my born days."

"I could make the best marmalade you ever tasted in your born days," said Audrey, sinking neatly to the floor and crossing her legs, "but they won't let me."

"Won't let you! But I thought you did all sorts of things in the house."

"No, Winnie. I only do one thing. I do as I'm told--and not always even that. Now, if I wanted to make the best marmalade you ever tasted in your born days, first of all there would be a fearful row about the oranges. Secondly, father would tell mother she must tell me exactly what I was to do. He would also tell cook. Thirdly and lastly, dear friends, he would come into the kitchen himself. It wouldn't be my marmalade at all. I should only be a marmalade-making machine. They never let me have any responsibility--no, not even when mother's operation was on--and I'm never officially free. The kitchen-maid has far more responsibility than I have. And she has an evening off and an afternoon off. She can write a letter without everybody asking her who she's writing to. She's only seventeen. She has the morning postman for a young man now, and probably one or two others that I don't know of. And she has money and she buys her own clothes. She's a very naughty, wicked girl, and I wish I was in her place. She scorns me, naturally. Who wouldn't?"

Miss Ingate said not a word. She merely sat with her hands in the lap of her spotted pale-blue dress, faintly and sadly smiling.

Audrey burst out:

"Miss Ingate, what can I do? I must do something. What can I do?"

Miss Ingate shook her head, and put her lips tightly together, while mechanically smoothing the sides of her grey coat.

"I don't know," she said. "It beats me."

"Then _I'll_ tell you what I can do!" answered Audrey firmly, wriggling somewhat nearer to her along the floor. "And what I shall do."

"What?"

"Will you promise to keep it a secret?"

Miss Ingate nodded, smiling and showing her teeth. Her broad polished forehead positively shone with kindly eagerness.

"Will you swear?"

Miss Ingate hesitated, and then nodded again.

"Then put your hand on my head and say, 'I swear.'"

Miss Ingate obeyed.

"I shall leave this house," said Audrey in a low voice.

"You won't, Audrey!"

"I'll eat my hand off if I've not left this house by to-morrow, anyway."

"To-morrow!" Miss Ingate nearly screamed. "Now, Audrey, do reflect. Think what you are!"

Audrey bounded to her feet.

"That's what father's always saying," she exploded angrily. "He's always telling me to examine myself. The fact is, I know too much about myself. I know exactly the kind of girl it is who's going to leave this house. Exactly!"

"Audrey, you frighten me. Where are you going to?"

"London."

"Oh! That's all right then. I am relieved. I thought perhaps you waited to come to _my_ house. You won't get to London, because you haven't any money."

"Oh, yes, I have. I've got a hundred pounds."

"Where?"

"Remember, you've sworn.... Here!" she cried suddenly, and drawing her hand from behind her back she most sensationally displayed a crushed roll of bank-notes.

"And who did you get those from?"

"I didn't get them from anybody. I got them out of father's safe. They're his reserve. He keeps them right at the back of the left-hand drawer, and he's so sure they're there that he never looks for them. He thinks he's a perfect model, but really he's careless. There's a duplicate key to the safe, you know, and he leaves it with a lot of other keys loose in his desk. I expect he thought nobody would ever dream of guessing it was a key of the safe. I know he never looked at this roll, because I've been opening the safe every day for weeks past, and the roll was always the same. In fact, it was dusty. Then to-day I decided to take it, and here you are! He finished himself off yesterday, so far as I'm concerned, with the business about the punt."

"But do you know you're a thief, Audrey?" breathed Miss Ingate, extremely embarrassed, and for once somewhat staggered by the vagaries of human nature.

"You seem to forget, Miss Ingate," said Audrey solemnly, "that Cousin Caroline left me a legacy of two hundred pounds last year, and that I've never seen a penny of it. Father absolutely declined to let me have the tiniest bit of it. Well, I've taken half. He can keep the other half for his trouble."

Miss Ingate's mouth stood open, and her eyes seemed startled.

"But you can't go to London alone. You wouldn't know what to do."

"Yes, I should. I've arranged everything. I shall wear my best clothes. When I arrive at Liverpool Street I shall take a taxi. I've got three addresses of boarding-houses out of the _Daily Telegraph_, and they're all in Bloomsbury, W.C. I shall have lessons in shorthand and typewriting at Pitman's School, and then I shall get a situation. My name will be Vavasour."

"But you'll be caught."

"I shan't. I shall book to Ipswich first and begin again from there. Girls like me aren't so easy to catch as all that."

"You're vehy cunning."

"I get that from mother. She's most frightfully cunning with father."

"Audrey," said Miss Ingate with a strange grin, "I don't know how I can sit here and listen to you. You'll ruin me with your father, because if you go I'm sure I shall never be able to keep from him that I knew all about it."

"Then you shouldn't have sworn," retorted Audrey. "But I'm glad you did swear, because I had to tell somebody, and there was nobody but you."

Miss Ingate might possibly have contrived to employ some of that sagacity in which she took a secret pride upon a very critical and urgent situation, had not Mrs. Moze, with a white handkerchief wrapped round her forehead, at that moment come into the room. Immediately the study was full of neuralgia and eau-de-Cologne.

When Mrs. Moze and Miss Ingate at length recovered from the tenderness of meeting each other after a separation of ten days or more, Audrey had vanished like an illusion. She was not afraid of her mother; and she could trust Miss Ingate, though Miss Ingate and Mrs. Moze were dangerously intimate; but she was too self-conscious to remain in the presence of her fellow-creatures; and in spite of her faith in Miss Ingate she thought of the spinster as of a vase filled now with a fatal liquor which by any accident might spill and spread ruin--so that she could scarcely bear to look upon Miss Ingate.

At the back of the house a young Pomeranian dog, which had recently solaced Miss Ingate in the loss of a Pekingese done to death by a spinster's too-nourishing love, was prancing on his four springs round the chained yard-dog, his friend and patron. In a series of marvellous short bounds, he followed Audrey with yapping eagerness down the slope of the garden; and the yard-dog, aware that none but the omnipotent deity, Mr. Moze, sole source of good and evil, had the right to loose him, turned round once and laid himself flat and long on the ground, sighing.

The garden, after developing into an orchard and deteriorating into a scraggy plantation, ended in a low wall that was at about the level of the sea-wall and separated from it by a water-course and a strip of very green meadow. Audrey glanced instinctively back at the house to see if anybody was watching her.

Flank Hall, which for a hundred years had been called "the new hall," was a seemly Georgian residence, warm in colour, with some quaint woodwork; and like most such buildings in Essex, it made a very happy marriage with the landscape. Its dormers and fine chimneys glowed amid the dark bare trees, and they alone would have captivated a Londoner possessing those precious attributes, fortunately ever spreading among the enlightened middle-classes, a motor-car, a cultured taste in architecture, and a desire to enter the squirearchy. Audrey loathed the house. For her it was the last depth of sordidness and the commonplace. She could imagine positively nothing less romantic. She thought of the ground floor on chill March mornings with no fires anywhere save a red gleam in the dining-room, and herself wandering about in it idle, at a loss for a diversion, an ambition, an effort, a real task; and she thought of the upper floor, a mainly unoccupied wilderness of iron bedsteads and yellow chests of drawers and chipped earthenware and islands of carpets, and her mother plaintively and weariedly arguing with some servant over a slop-pail in a corner. The images of the interior, indelibly printed in her soul, desolated her.

Mozewater she loved, and every souvenir of it was exquisite--red barges beating miraculously up the shallow puddles to Moze Quay, equinoctial spring-tides when the estuary was a tremendous ocean covered with foam and the sea-wall felt the light lash