The Alington Inheritance (2 page)

Jenny’s spurt of independence did not last. She packed the suit-case with Mrs. Forbes standing over her.

“Your toothbrush, Jenny—and the toothpaste—and what else?”

“My face-cloth,” said Jenny in the obedient voice of a little girl.

“That’s right—put them in. Do you use a hot-water bottle?”

Jenny stood quite still and stared at her. The pupils of her eyes were larger than usual. It seemed to her that Mrs. Forbes’ voice came from a long way off. It seemed to her as if she was floating in the air. It was with a great effort that she could come down and touch the things she needed.

The voice went on. It was Mrs. Forbes’ voice. It said things like “You’ll need your bedroom slippers, and your dressing-gown, and your night things. That dress you’ve got on will do to wear again tomorrow. Now your brush and comb—and that, I think, is all.”

Jenny placed all the things in the suit-case neatly.

When they were walking up the drive together Mrs. Forbes asked her whether she had had anything to eat. She had to stop and think about that before she answered. Everything seemed so long ago and so far away, but when she got down to it she remembered that she and Miss Adamson had had tea at five o’clock, and that Miss Adamson had made her eat an egg. It felt like a long time ago—a long, long time. Garsty was alive then. It felt as if she had come a long way from the kettle boiling and Miss Adamson speaking cheerfully. It was a long, long way, and there was a gap in the middle of it which she could never cross over.

Mrs. Forbes asked her question again, “When did you have anything to eat?” and this time Jenny answered it.

“At five. We had tea. Miss Adamson boiled me an egg.”

“Then you had better get straight to bed,” said Mrs. Forbes briskly. “Carter can bring you up a cup of hot milk.”

They came into the lighted hall. There was neither sight nor sound of the little girls, only Carter stout and flurried.

“I’ve brought Jenny back with me,” said Mrs. Forbes. “You’ve got the room ready? Now just get her a cup of hot milk, and she’ll be going to bed at once. She’s had a trying day. Miss Garstone is dead.”

The words went with Jenny and up the stairs into the little bedroom which she was to have. Mrs. Forbes threw open the door, put on the light, and said in a clear, firm, practical voice,

“Now, Jenny, no fretting if you please. We’ll talk things over tomorrow. Get into your bed and go to sleep. I told Carter to give you two hot bottles.”

Jenny stood in the middle of the floor and looked unseeingly at the door which had closed behind Mrs. Forbes. She was still standing there when it opened again. Carter stood there with a cup of milk and a piece of cake on a plate beside it.

“Oh, Jenny!” she said. “Oh, my dear, I know how you feel indeed, for I was just your age when my mother went, and I’m sure Miss Garstone’s been a mother to you, hasn’t she? You never remembering your own mother and all. And how should you when she died the day you was born, poor dear. But I’m sure you favour her something quite out of the way. Now you drink this up, and you eat the little bit of cake, my dear, for it’ll do you good.”

The kindness came in amongst Jenny’s scattered thoughts and gathered them together. She crumbled the cake and drank the milk, sat when Carter told her to sit, and stood when Carter told her to stand. She was vaguely aware of her clothes being taken from her and her shoes and stockings being removed, and of Carter’s soft country voice which never stopped talking but always said kind comforting things.

In the end she went into the warm bed, the clothes were tucked round her, the window thrown open, and the curtain drawn back. Did Carter actually say, “God bless you, my child?” or was it an echo of something she felt—and knew…

The light was gone. There was a little moonlight outside. Jenny slept. She slept without a dream or any conscious waking. There was an enfolding sense of comfort and peace. That was all, and it was enough.

She came back gradually to morning light and her strange bed. Those were the first of her thoughts. The light had the hushed look which means the early morning. She waked and remembered, but even as the memory flowed into her mind there was a whispering sound on either side of her.

“You’re awake at last.”

“We thought you would never wake up.”

“We’ve been sitting here as quiet as mice.”

“We promised ourselves we would.”

“But you’re awake now, aren’t you?”

“Oh, darling, do be awake!”

Jenny put out bare arms and stretched them. Somehow the arms became entangled with two plump little forms in teddy-bear dressing-gowns. They finished up, Jenny scarcely knew how, in the bed with her, one on each side, their arms about her neck, their little cold noses burrowing into a cheek on either side.

“We were frozen, but we waited till you were awake,” said Meg on the right.

“Oh, yes—we promised ourselves we wouldn’t wake you up. And we didn’t, did we?” said Joyce. She wiggled her cold toes into a warm chink as she spoke.

Jenny sat up and hugged them both. The little warm bodies and the little warm ways of them were just what she needed. They brought her back to an everyday world.

“Nearly half past six,” said Meg. “At six we came in, and you weren’t awake, so we waited very patiently.”

“We didn’t make a single sound,” said Joyce “—not a single one.”

“And what we want to know is, have you come to stay—are you here for good? Because we want you—don’t we, Joyce?”

“We want you dreadfully,” said Joyce.

“And we’ve got it all fixed up,” said Meg on her other side. “Joyce isn’t supposed to go to school, or to do very much in the way of lessons —not since she was ill, you know. And first of all Mother had the horrid idea of sending me to school and keeping Joyce here with a governess. And you were to be the governess—lucky Joyce! But then she thought again. And this time she thought of having Joyce like a drip round her neck all the time, and she decided not to do it.”

“Oh, Meg!”

“Well, you know what you are without me to brisk you up and keep you in order.”

“Oh, Meg!”

“It was all arranged,” said Meg, nodding.

Jenny had an odd mixture of feelings. It was so exactly like Mrs. Forbes to plan all this and not to say a word to her. Had she just gone on her own way and planned it all without a word to Garsty, too? Perhaps she hadn’t gone quite as far as that. Perhaps Garsty knew. But how did these children know? She said,

“Nonsense!”

“It isn’t nonsense,” said Joyce, and Meg said,

“Didn’t you know?”

“What I want to know is how you knew anything about it.”

“You can’t keep things from us. We always find them out,” said Meg. “And this time—this time we were playing at being mice in the drawing-room, and Mother came past with Mac, and she said, ‘I’ve decided not to send either of the girls to school for another term. That girl Jenny can come in and teach them. As a matter of fact she might just as well come and live in.’ And Mac whistled and said, ‘Garsty won’t let her.’ ”

“And then they went away. We sat ever so still and held our breath, and they went right away. Wasn’t it fortunate?”

“We stayed like mice without a single twitch until they had gone. We thought we should have died,” said Joyce.

They both shuddered.

The next few days were got through as days of that sort are got through. You have to live them, and know them, and feel them, and when they are over you have to get on with the business of living again. It was all rather like a dream. The disturbing thing was that Miss Garstone’s sister suddenly appeared on the scene. Miss Garstone had met her once a year. She was ten years the younger of the two, and there was a certain dreadful likeness which made Jenny feel angry. But the younger Miss Garstone was hard and dictatorial where her sister had been patient and kind. She disapproved of Jenny and made no bones about it

“Let me see now, you’re seventeen, aren’t you? Well then, we must find you a job! What could you do?”

Jenny was thankful to be able to say, “I have a job.”

The sharp grey eyes looked her over.

“Indeed? Will it keep you? What is it?”

“I’m to be governess to the two little girls at Alington House.”

“Oh. Well, that’s quite suitable. As you know, under my sister’s will made twenty years ago everything comes to me.”

“Yes, I know.”

Her thoughts went back a week to Garsty talking—“I really ought to see about making a will, Jenny. It doesn’t do to put these things off too long. If I died tomorrow, you’d have only the hundred a year that Colonel Forbes left you. No, I must make an appointment with Mr. Hambleton and get it all fixed up. I can’t leave you very much because I haven’t got very much to leave, but if you’ve got something at your back it does make all the difference. I’ll make an appointment with Mr. Hambleton and get it all fixed up.” But she hadn’t made the appointment, and next day she had been killed.

Jenny’s eyes had been heavy with tears as she remembered dear Garsty. She helped Miss Garstone’s sister to sort and pack the things she was going to keep. There were not a great many. Garsty’s sister was a mistress in a big school. Most of the things were to be sold. Jenny remembered the little chest with her father’s letter in it. She asked for it, and was met with a cool, suspicious look.

“Why do you want it?”

“There’s a letter in it from my father to my mother.”

“How do you know?”

“Garsty told me when she was dying.”

The hard grey eyes looked at her. The hard voice said,

“You may look and see if it is there. We will go up together. If there is a letter from your father there you may have it, but I should say you would be wise not to count on finding it. If my sister was dying when she spoke of it, it is quite likely that she imagined the whole thing.”

Jenny said nothing. She kept herself from speaking, because if she were to say anything at all she would say too much.

They went up the narrow twisting stair, Miss Garstone ahead, as if she were afraid that Jenny might come upon something and keep it.

“I mustn’t,” said Jenny to herself “—I mustn’t think of her like that. She doesn’t know me, and I don’t know her, but she must have known some horrid girls to think like she does.”

They came into the room where Garsty had died, and it wasn’t like the same room at all. The bed had been stripped and taken to pieces. It stood up on end now between the two little windows, and Jenny kept her eyes from it because it looked so strange and she remembered sitting on the bed when she was very small indeed and learning to count on her fingers and toes. Against the opposite wall there was a chest of drawers, and on the top of it, right in the middle, there was the little chest which held the letter. Jenny went to it at once.

“She said it was in here—that’s what she said.”

“Well, you can look and see if there is anything there, but don’t be disappointed if there isn’t.”

Jenny went up close to the chest of drawers and stood there. The little chest had two small drawers at the top and three below. It was very well made with beautifully turned ivory handles. But Jenny was not thinking of that. She drew out the two top drawers first. The right-hand one had some pink beads in it, and the left-hand one was empty. Jenny put them down carefully. Her hands were steady because she made them be steady, but her heart was not steady at all—how could it be?

The top long drawer was full. It had in it all those things which Jenny had fashioned with her unsteady childish fingers for Garsty’s birthday and for Christmas. The next drawer was full of them too. But in the bottom drawer there was only one thing, a photograph frame with a picture of a laughing baby in it—Jenny at two years old.

And that was all. There was no letter from her father to her mother. There was nothing more at all.

“Well, are you satisfied?” said Miss Garstone.

Jenny was putting the things back.

“Yes—it’s not here.” She turned and looked straight at Miss Garstone. “If it turns up anywhere, you will let me have it, won’t you?”

She expected a quick response, but she did not get it. Miss Garstone bit her lip and actually hesitated.

“Well, I suppose so,” she said at last. “But if it does turn up, I advise you to burn it straight away, and without reading it. That’s my advice, but I suppose you won’t take it.”

No, she wouldn’t take it. It was too much to ask of her. She did not make any reply out loud. In her own mind she said secretly and firmly, “It’s mine. And what I do with it is for me to say. Not for you, or for anyone else.”

Miss Garstone remained looking at her for a moment or two. Then she said,

“I don’t approve of keeping things—I’ve seen too much of it. But that’s a thing you’ll have to find out for yourself, Jenny. If you want to, you may have that little chest of drawers and the things in it.”

Jenny turned round, her hands clasped, the colour high in her cheeks. She couldn’t speak. Miss Garstone looked at her with disapproval—and something else. She didn’t quite know what the other thing was. She tidied it away quickly and wouldn’t let herself look at it. She told herself that she despised sentiment, and that girls were full of it and shouldn’t be encouraged. She said briskly,

“Well, that’s all, I think. If you want the chest of drawers you had better take it to Alington with you, then it won’t get mixed up with the things that are to be sold.”

Jenny said, “Oh, thank you.” She didn’t know how she got it said. It was somehow so difficult to speak, and Miss Garstone had turned round and gone briskly out of the room before she had done more than say her “Oh, thank you.” She picked up the little chest and held it tightly, tightly. It wasn’t just a little box with drawers in it. It was her life with Garsty—the whole seventeen years of it.

Miss Garstone was to go away that evening. She was to go back to her school, so they said good-bye at the door of the cottage. At the last moment she did a thing that surprised her. It really surprised her very much. She put out a hand and stopped Jenny at the front door.

“There’s just one thing—” she said.

Jenny stood still.

“What is it, Miss Garstone?”

“It’s not my business—I know that,” said Miss Garstone. “But my sister was very fond of you, and I just want to say—” She stopped and broke off. What did she want to say? She didn’t know. She was behaving like a fool. She took up her words again with a feeling that they were not her words at all.

“I just want to say that if at any time you don’t want to stay with the Forbeses, I shall be very pleased to do anything I can to help or advise you for my sister’s sake. I should like you to feel that I don’t say things that I don’t mean. Good-bye.”

Miss Garstone did not shut the door at once. She stood with her hand on the knob and watched Jenny cross the road and pass into the grounds of Alington House.