MERELY THE GOVERNESS.

New Zealand Graphic, Volume VII, Issue 2, 10 January 1891, Page 16

MERELY THE GOVERNESS.

IT was a June day, the wannest of the season, and all the schoolroom windows were opened to admit the lagging breeze that hardly stirred the leafy boughs. Old Bounce, the superb St. Bernard dog, lay stretched on the flagged terrace walk, where the shadow of the gum-treecame and went, his red tongue lolled Tjaßrnfr''’ out, his sleepy eyes winking at the sunbeams. ’ An opaque mist of heat seemed to quiver on the distant hills, and Miss Darley, sitting at the desk, felt almost inclined to envy the cattle standing knee-deep in the river ford below. * Miss Darley, tell Marmaduke to stop pinching me !’ • Miss Darley, can’t Rosalie stop squeaking her slatepencil ?’ ‘ Miss Darley, is this exercise right ? Tell me quick, please, for I want to run out and see Marian go horsebackriding with Captain Pinnock. It’s Marian’s Birthday, and Fred Pinnock— 5 Miss Darley held up a slim finger at the vicious Marmaduke, shook her head at Rosalie, and glanced wearily over the blotted German exercise. * It’s as bad as it can be, Alicia ! Go out quickly and see them start, if you want, and then come back and do your exercise over again. ’ Alicia Forester Hew like a bird. Rosalie, one of those sulky children who never exhibit the least alacrity, kept on drawing impossible dogs and horses on her slate. Marmaduke applied himself to the manufacture of a paper fly-trap, and plump little Frances climbed on the window-sill to see the equestrian party set forth. ‘ They’re gone now,’ said she, with a long breath. ‘ How nice Marian’s new jockey cap looked ! How I should like to be nineteen !’ Miss Darley looked up. *ls she nineteen 1 lam nineteen to-day, too,’ said she. ‘Are you?’ Frances opened her laughing blue eyes very wide. ‘ Ain’t it funny ? But nobody has given you a diamond arrow to wear in your hair ? And you’re not engaged ?' ‘No !’ said Melicent Darley, shortly. ‘ Marmaduke, put down the scissors. Rosalie, is your sum ready ? Now, Alicia’ (to the returning eldest pupil), ‘ you’ll oblige me if you will try to write a less disgraceful German exercise.’ ‘ The governess is cross,’ whispered Frances to her sister. * It’s her birthday, too, and there’s nobody to give her pretty things. ’ ‘ And serves her right,’returned Alicia. ‘She’s no business to nag one so about the German verbs !’ Alicia was purposely stupid about the verbs. Rosalie took every opportunity to ‘squeak’ her slate pencil, just to see the governess jump. Marmaduke set himself to work to torment Frances. A pert maid came in to say ‘ missus wanted to know why there were no flowers in the drawingroom this morning.’ ‘ I forgot them,’ said Mies Darley, colouring. It was an effort of self-denial not to add : ‘ I was engaged as governess, not as useful help. ’ ‘ You’ll please to get some as soon as school hours is •over,’ said Bridget. ‘ And Miss Forester, she left word you was to sew lace into her white dress for the four o’clock tea, and the old lady wants some one to read to her, and missus has mislaid her moonstone clasp, and says you’re to come and hunt it up before the new house-maid sweeps the room.’

Miss Darley listened with compressed lips. All the morning she had been looking forward to spending a cool hour by the river-side when the wearisome school hours were over, and this was to be the end of her anticipations ! ‘ Children,’ said she, abruptly, ‘ you are dismissed. It is a great deal too hot for lessons to-day !’ The small captives dispersed with whoops and shouts, and Miss Darley was just about to issue out with her shady ■straw hat and a pair of garden scissors to cut roses when a tall, spare lady with protuberant light blue eyes and a Roman nose appeared at the end of the hall. ‘Am I mistaken in the time, Miss Darley ?’ said Mrs Forester, for she it was, ‘oris it only eleven ? I understand that school hours are from ten till one ! May I ask the meaning of all this screaming and shouting under my window when I am lying down with a headache ?’ Miss Darley explained that she had dismissed the children •early on account of the heat and their restlessness. ‘ Then,’ said Mrs Forester, ‘ you took a great liberty. Be so good as to call them back again, and resume lessons. Please remember, also, for the future, that I do not wish my orders to be tampered with. I believe you were engaged here as a governess, not to saunter around and enjoy yourself.’ And Miss Darley with crimsoned cheeks and angrily beating heart, had nothing for it but to obey. ‘ It is not fair,’ she kept saying to herself, ‘ that I should l>e ordered around and bullied like this, while Marian Forester, nineteen years old to-day, like myself, walks a path of roses, and drinks life’s sweetest cup. lam young, too, and lam not ugly, and I was brought up a lady. And why does everybody snub me and treat me like a drudge ? It is too cruel !’ As she put her shady hat back on to its peg in her own room, she sighed deeply, and opening a drawer, took out her last photograph. It represented a tall, slim girl in a dainty summer dress of grey-brown cotton, with sleeves and skirt trimmings of a darker striped shade. Her little bonnet was relieved with a moss green velvet baud, and aigrette of the saute coloured feathers. Melicent Darley was fighting her own battle with Fortune. Her only brother had been compelled to abandon his profession, the law, on account of failing health, and had gone as a plain farm-hand up the country. Melicent had been devotedly attached to him, and her greatest grief was that Rudolph seemed to have forgotten her among his new associations. ‘ He might have remembered how utterly solitary I am,’ she said to herself. ‘ A letter a week would have been very little for him, and it would have given me new life and courage.’ Alone ! It was a hard lot. For twelve months she had •drudged on for a pitiful salary, until now she felt like a mere automaton. But at last a door-way of possible escape seemed opened to her. Mr Simeon Sebright, Mrs Forester’s rich brother, had fallen in love with her, a yellow-faced, battered old East Indian merchant.

‘ Can I marry him f Melicent asked herself. ‘ I would as soon marry tne hideous Punjaub idol on the pedestal in the back drawing-room,’ and she shuddered as she mentally compared him with Harry Lindley, the handsome young sea captain, who had once seemed to care so much for her in the old days when he was Rudolph’s friend and companion. Mr Sebright was sixty, with a saffron complexion, an irritable temper, and false teeth that somehow made one think of a beast of prey. But he was very rich ; his wife need not toil her life away as a governess, and Melicent’s nerves were worn to such a degree that she sometimes felt as if suicide would be preferable to the dreary monotony of her daily tread-mill of work. * And I don’t earn enough to buy my clothes and postage stamps,’ she said to herself, ‘ and everybody calls on me to do all the odd£ and ends that no one else will undertake. I can’t sleep at nights, and I have no appetite, and—and I am nineteen years old to-day, and there isn’t a solitary soul to remember it!’ She was standing looking sadly at the river, with bethand on Bounce’s collar, when Mr Sebright came hobbling out. (Chronic rheumatism was one of his standard possessions. )

‘ Ah, my dear young lady,’ said he, ‘ I hoped I should find you. Ugh ! ugh !’ as a sudden twinge seized him. ‘ May I beg for an answer to-day to my suit ? I have waited very patiently.’ Melicent looked at him with distate. Would it be possible for her to link her young life with this gray antiquity? Upon the whole, would not even suicide be preferable to Mr Simeon Sebright? Yet she was so weary of fighting life’s battle —and Mr Sebright was a millionaire. For a minute she hesitated. ‘ What shall Ido ?’ she asked herself. ‘ Oh, what shall I do? No, no, I cannot deliver myself over, like a package bought and sold, in exchange for this man’s gold ! I am a drudge now, but as his wife I should be a slave ! If I were to betray myself into such a doom, where would be my selflespect ? I may fall low, but never so low as this !’ And with a courage born of this conviction, she refused Mr Sebright’s suit. He showed his yellow teeth—an evil light came into his shaggy-browed eyes. ‘ I suppose you know,’ said he, ‘ that a word from me would lose you your situation.’ ‘ Yes, I know it’ ‘ And of course it won’t be pleasant for me to have you remain here after ’ She turned away and vanished into the wooded copses. Homeless ! Yes, that was it—homeless, and on her nineteenth birthday I Yet she could not doubt that she had done right. She could toil, suffer, starve, if need be, but she could not give herself up to a man whom in her secret heart she abhorred. Old Mr Sebright, however, did not despair. ‘ She’ll come to it yet,’ he said to himself. ‘ I’ve only to get Jane Forester to turn her out-of-doors—only to make her utterly friendless and alone—and she will come to me quick enough I Aha! we shall see 1’

Mrs Forester discharged Mias Darley in a fit of virtuous wrath when she discovered that the pretty governess had attracted the regards of the retired East Indian merchant. But the rest of Mr Sebright’s predictions did not come true. On that very day a letter arrived inviting her to the farm, and, to his dismay, old Simeon saw the bird he had fancied entrapped soar out of his reach at last. It was a pretty, one-storied cottage, covered nearly to the roof with roses, and acres on acres of green paddocks stretching away into distance like the vineyards of the Rhine, to which Rudolph conducted his sister that evening. ‘My home, said he proudly. ‘ How do you like it, Mel ?’ ‘Yours, Rudy?’ ‘ Yes, mine. Bought and paid for.’ ‘ And who is your nousekeeper, Rudy ?’ ‘My wife, to be sure. Yes, you may well stare. We wanted to give you a genuine surprise. I was married last week to Kate Lindley, Farmer Marston’s niece and Harry Lindley’s sister. And hereafter your home is to be with us, dear little sister Mel. Your room is all furnished in rosepink, the colour you like best— ’ ‘ But how did your wife know I liked pink ?’ interrupted Melicent. * Harry told her. And there’s a .green-winged linnet there, your favourite bird—Harry told us that— and a view of the river from the window ! And if you like the neighbourhood, and if the air agrees with you— ’ • What then, Rudolph r ‘ Well, it’s a profound secret—but Harry is going to leave the sea, and build another cottage, and—and ask Miss Somebody to come and live in it 1 But mind you don't tell ! Here she is, Kate !’ as a laughing, dark-eyed girl came running out to welcome her, crying : ‘ Was it really a surprise, Melicent ? I may call you Melicent, mayn’t I ? Oh, we have been planning it so long, Rudolph and I. A surprise for your birthday. Harry remembered your birthday, and here he is ! Come and welcome her to her new home, Harry ! What makes you turn so pale, Melicent ? Are you going to faint ?’ But Melicent Darley did not faint, although for a second everything seemed to swim around her ! Home ! It was such a strange secret word ! And standing out in the moonlight with Harry Lindley that night, with the scent of the roses above, and the thrill of a great happiness in her heart, Melicent thanked Heaven that she had had courage to say ‘ No ’ to the old man who would have bought her like a Circassian slave into life-long servitude !