Star of India by Alice Perrin (ereader ebook txt) 📗

as though[Pg 7] nothing had happened. It was not a Carrington custom to discuss unpleasant occurrences at meals, or, indeed, at any other time, if such discussions could possibly be avoided; the Carrington elders possessed a fine faculty for ignoring difficult subjects. It was a gift that had carried them apparently unscathed through various trials. When it became imperative to speak of anything painful it was done as briefly and reservedly as possible. It was not until well on in the afternoon, when Mrs. Carrington had awakened from her nap in the drawing-room, that Stella's outrageous behaviour was mentioned.

The drawing-room at The Chestnuts was a long narrow room with three French windows opening on a little paved terrace. Formerly the house had been a farm dwelling, the last remnant of a property acquired a century ago by a Carrington ancestor with a fortune made in the East and dissipated in the West. The Court, where the Verralls now reigned, had once belonged to this magnificent Carrington, and the ladies of The Chestnuts never forgot the fact. They regarded the Verralls as interlopers, though by now the Verralls had been lords of the manor for several generations.

But though The Court and all its acres were lost to the Carringtons, they had clung as a family to Chestnut Farm, adding to it from time to time as fluctuating fortunes permitted. It was a haven for Carrington widows, unmarried daughters, retired old-soldier Carringtons; a jumping-off place for sons as they started in life, a holiday home for successions of young Carringtons while their parents were abroad;[Pg 8] and there was still the family vault in the parish church where they could be buried if India spared them to die in England. Stella's grandfather, whom she could not remember, lay there with others of his name, and it had never entered grandmamma's mind to live or die anywhere but at The Chestnuts.

But to return to the drawing-room—a room that breathed of a people long connected with the East—here were sandal-wood boxes, caskets composed of porcupine quills, coloured clay models of Indian servants, brasses and embroideries. The warmth of the afternoon drew forth faint aromas still stored in these relics, mementoes of travel and service and adventure, the perfume that still hung in the folds of the handsome cashmere shawl draped about old Mrs. Carrington's shoulders.

It was she who opened the debate; failing her lead, neither of her daughters would have dreamed of alluding to their niece's outburst at the luncheon table.

"What do you imagine is wrong with Stella?" The old lady's sunken dark eyes, that yet were quick and bright, turned from one daughter to the other. The rest of her muscles were perfectly still.

"She is growing up," said Augusta boldly. She was the elder of the two and more nearly resembled her mother, physically and mentally, than did faint-hearted Ellen.

"She is still a child!" pronounced Mrs. Carrington, oblivious of the fact that she herself had been married at the age of seventeen, had sailed to India and returned with three children before she was twenty-one.

[Pg 9]

"Perhaps," ventured Ellen, "seeing Maud Verrall in church dressed as a grown-up young lady made her feel a little—well, I hardly know how to express myself—rather kept back?"

Ellen herself had been guiltily conscious of a vague feeling of envy caused by the sight of The Court people in all their prosperity and finery.

"Kept back from what?" demanded Mrs. Carrington. "Would you wish to see Stella trigged out like that forward monkey Maud Verrall?"

"Maud was always a most underbred child," said Augusta.

Ellen hastily took up the cue. "Yes, don't you remember the day she came to tea and broke the vase, and allowed Stella to be blamed? I saw her break it myself, but of course we could say nothing as Maud was our guest, and dear little Stella said nothing."

"But what has that to do with the way Stella behaved to-day?" inquired her sister. Ellen thought this rather unkind of Augusta.

"Oh! nothing, of course," Ellen admitted. "Only it just shows——"

"We are all aware that Stella has spirit," said grandmamma, ignoring this passage, "she is a true Carrington, but spirit in certain circumstances is a danger and not to be encouraged, just as in others it may be admirable. Now if the child had been a boy——"

The old lady's gaze turned to a portrait that hung over the mantelpiece—that of a gentleman in a blue velvet coat with lace and silver buttons, powdered hair and bold, bright eyes that seemed to smile on the little[Pg 10] feminine conclave in amused toleration. "Spirit" in a man was to be accepted and, whatever its consequences, condoned; but in a female, particularly in a young girl, it should be guarded against, suppressed. Ellen Carrington's eyes turned also to the portrait. Long years ago she had shown symptoms of "spirit" in connection with the attentions of a dashing young cousin who had strongly resembled the portrait. Mamma was antagonistic; he had sailed for India (just as had all male Carringtons one after the other), and the ship had gone down; so that his vow to return with a fortune and claim his sweet Ellen was never fulfilled.

Augusta, so far as anyone was aware, had known no romance. The family spirit in Augusta found outlet in a fierce devotion to her mother, and in the maintenance of a pathetically pretentious sort of state in the household; the very manner in which she would ring the bell might have argued the existence of a host of retainers. Not for worlds would she have answered the front door herself, neither would she have permitted Ellen or Stella to do so. Her attitude towards the domestic staff at The Chestnuts—old Betty, with a daily slave from the village, and the aged, bad-tempered factotum out of doors—was almost that of a Royal personage, punctilious in the matter of good mornings and thank yous, yet carefully distant as became the upholding of class distinction.

"It's a pity she was not a boy," said Augusta, "then she could have gone to school—a little more discipline——"

"Yes, Stella's education——" interrupted Mrs.[Pg 11] Carrington, and paused thoughtfully. Her daughters listened. Augusta was responsible for Stella's arithmetic, geography, history; Ellen for her progress in music, needlework, drawing. Was fault to be found with these educational efforts?—which in truth were not altogether congenial to the teachers, conscientiously though they pursued them. Stella was frequently tiresome, and she did such odd things—for example, she had "a trick," as they called it, of rising at dawn and rambling about the woods and commons and returning late for breakfast, and then she would be listless and inattentive for the rest of the day. At times she was "wild" and disobedient, although at others disarmingly docile and quick and affectionate. On the whole, the aunts were proud of their pupil; what was mamma about to say concerning Stella's education?

Mamma said: "Though unfortunately Stella is not a boy, I have lately been thinking that if a suitable school can be found—— What was the name of that friend of yours, Augusta, who years ago started a school for young ladies at Torquay?"

"Jane Ogle," said Augusta shortly. In the opinion of Augusta, Jane Ogle had lost caste when she opened a school. As the daughter of an officer, Jane should not have descended to such depths as the earning of her living when she had plenty of relations with any of whom she could have made her home in genteel idleness. Still, if mamma had any serious notion of a school for Stella it was so far fortunate that Miss Ogle had thus bemeaned herself, seeing that none of them knew anything about boarding schools[Pg 12] for girls, institutions which were to be regarded with suspicion.

"Then you really think, mamma," said Augusta incredulously, "that Stella needs different tuition, or at least different management?"

"Her behaviour to-day would point to it," mamma replied. "Perhaps you would write to Miss Ogle, my dear, and make inquiries as to her methods and terms. I am inclined to think Stella is getting a little beyond us in every way."

Stella, after rushing from the dining-room and up the stairs in such unladylike fashion, had thrown herself on her bed and wept until her ill-humour evaporated and she began to think more kindly of milk pudding and boiled mutton. Then, feeling hungry and rather ashamed, she had bathed her eyes and "tidied" her hair, and for a while sat and gazed from the low window of her bedroom—gazed on the familiar lawn sloping to a narrow stream that had been the cause of many punishments in her childhood, what with her attempts to jump it, the catching of imaginary fish, the sailing of paper boats, all of which had involved "getting her feet wet," a crime in the view of grandmamma and the aunts. The cedar tree on the lawn had also been a source of trouble, for Stella had never fought the temptation to climb it, and the climbing of trees was forbidden as not only hoydenish but disastrous to clothes—the same with the high wall of the kitchen garden. There seemed hardly a spot in the limited domain that for Stella was not associated with punishment; yet she[Pg 13] adored "the grounds," as Aunt Augusta entitled the garden, at all seasons of the year, and at this season she still found it heavenly to dabble in the stream, to climb the branches of the cedar tree, even to roll on the fragrant turf.... She loved the old house as well, though two of the rooms she had always avoided instinctively—grandmamma's bedroom was one; Stella felt it held secrets, there was something mysterious and "dead" in its atmosphere. The painted toy horse and the wooden soldier, the half-finished sampler, and the shabby doll enshrined on the chest of drawers seemed to her ghostly objects, sad reminders as they were of uncles and aunts who had never grown up. When, for any reason, she was obliged to enter the room it was as if these little dead uncles and aunts still hovered about the big bed with its faded chintz curtains, as if they were listening, watching, hating her for her being alive.

Aunt Augusta's room she also disliked; it might have been a spare room, so cold, so polished, so neat, and the enlarged photographs of bygone Carringtons, framed and hung on the walls, were hideous—all crinolines and strings of black beads and stove-pipe hats and long whiskers.... Aunt Ellen's room was different; it harboured an apologetic air of frivolity, imparted by gay little ornaments and a screen covered with Christmas cards and pictures cut from illustrated papers. Whenever Stella studied this screen she found something she had never noticed before. Above all, in one corner stood a cabinet containing drawers full of birds' eggs and butterflies collected by her father as a boy. Aunt Ellen was the only person who[Pg 14] would answer Stella's eager questions about her father, and even those answers told her too little—only that he had gone to India as a very young man, like all the Carringtons; that he was brave and handsome, that he had died in battle when his little daughter was about two years old.

And concerning her mother Stella had never succeeded in extracting definite information.

"She is dead, my dear," was all Aunt Ellen would say with grave reserve, "she died when you were born—in India." Was there a picture of her? No, there was no picture. What was she like? We never saw her. What was her Christian name? It was Stella—and clearly the name itself was not approved—considered foolish, fantastic.

Indeed the child's periodical questions on the subject of her mother were torture to the three secretive, old-fashioned women, who shrank from all remembrance of the shameless being who had bewitched their "poor Charles" and led him astray, dragging the name of Carrington through the divorce court. At the time of the scandal they had blamed Charles for marrying the abandoned creature, and when she died, a year later, they were glad, though she left an unwelcome infant who was promptly sent home by the widower to The Chestnuts. The child was, of course, received, but under protest, a protest that vanished when "poor Charles" was killed in a frontier skirmish, a death (for his country) that in the eyes of his mother and sisters fully atoned for his backslidings and the disgrace he had brought on a name that had ever been associated with brave deeds in the East.

[Pg 15]

India!—the very word held a magic fascination for the child of "poor Charles." Stella loved the smell of the curios in the drawing-room, and her "great treat" on wet days was permission to open the camphor-wood chest on the landing; fingering the contents, she would feel almost intoxicated