“Twenty dollars!” he exclaimed, at the end of the mile.
“Twenty dollars,” said Jill,
“But your father was a rich man.” Mr. Mariner’s voice was high and plaintive. “He made a fortune over here before he went to England.”
“It’s all gone. I got nipped,” said Jill, who was finding a certain amount of humor in the situation, “in Amalgamated Dyes.”
“Amalgamated Dyes?”
“They’re something,” explained Jill, “that people get nipped in.”
Mr Mariner digested this.
“You speculated?” he gasped.
“Yes.”
“You shouldn’t have been allowed to do it,” said Mr Mariner warmly. “Major Selby—your uncle ought to have known better than to allow you.”
“Yes, oughtn’t he,” said Jill demurely.
There was another silence, lasting for about a quarter of a mile.
“Well, it’s a bad business,” said Mr Mariner.
“Yes,” said Jill. “I’ve felt that myself.”
* * *
The result of this conversation was to effect a change in the atmosphere of Sandringham. The alteration in the demeanor of people of parsimonious habit, when they discover that the guest they are entertaining is a pauper and not, as they had supposed, an heiress, is subtle but well-marked. In most cases, more well-marked than subtle. Nothing was actually said, but there are thoughts that are almost as audible as words. A certain suspense seemed to creep into the air, as happens when a situation has been reached which is too poignant to last. Greek Tragedy affects the reader with the same sense of over-hanging doom. Things, we feel, cannot go on as they are.
That night, after dinner, Mrs Mariner asked Jill to read to her.
“Print tries my eyes so, dear,” said Mrs Mariner. It was a small thing, but it had the significance of that little cloud that arose out of the sea like a man’s hand. Jill appreciated the portent. She was, she perceived, to make herself useful.
“Of course I will,” she said cordially. “What would you me to read?”
She hated reading aloud. It always made her throat sore, and her eye skipped to the end of each page and took the interest out of it long before the proper time. But she proceeded bravely, for her conscience was troubling her. Her sympathy was divided equally between these unfortunate people who had been saddled with an undesired visitor and herself who had been placed in a position at which every independent nerve in her rebelled. Even as a child she had loathed being under obligations to strangers or those whom she did not love.
“Thank you, dear,” said Mrs Mariner, when Jill’s voice had roughened to a weary croak. “You read so well.” She wrestled ineffectually with her handkerchief against the cold in the head from which she always suffered. “It would be nice if you would do it every night, don’t you think? You have no idea how tired print makes my eyes.”
On the following morning after breakfast, at the hour when she had hitherto gone house-hunting with Mr Mariner, the child Tibby, of whom up till now she had seen little except at meals, presented himself to her, coated and shod for the open and regarding her with a dull and phlegmatic gaze.
“Ma says will you please take me for a nice walk!”
Jill’s heart sank. She loved children, but Tibby was not an ingratiating child. He was a Mr Mariner in little. He had the family gloom. It puzzled Jill sometimes why this branch of the family should look on life with so jaundiced an eye. She remembered her father as a cheerful man, alive to the small humors of life.
“All right, Tibby. Where shall we go?”
“Ma says we must keep on the roads and I mustn’t slide.”
Jill was thoughtful during the walk. Tibby, who was no conversationalist, gave her every opportunity for meditation. She perceived that in the space of a few hours she had sunk in the social scale. If there was any difference between her position and that of a paid nurse and companion, it lay in the fact that she was not paid. She looked about her at the grim countryside, gave a thought to the chill gloom of the house to which she was about to return, and her heart sank.