So Tessa stayed on, and beyond the probationary month. She was a soft-hearted girl who gave her friendship easily but always sincerely. She tried to like everybody who liked her, and generally succeeded. It would be hard to analyse the quality of the friendship between the two women, but certainly it existed and at times they were able to touch hands over the barrier between youth and age. Miss Ludgate inspired in Tessa a queer tenderness. With all her wealth and despite her domineering manner, she was a pathetic and lonely figure. She reminded Tessa of some poor actress playing the part of Queen, wearing the tawdry crown jewels, uttering commands which the other mummers obeyed like automata; while all the while there awaited her the realities of life at the fall of the curtain – the wet streets, the poor meal, and the cold and comfortless lodging.
It filled Tessa with pity to think that here, close beside her, was a living, breathing creature, still clinging to life, who must, in the course of nature, so soon let go her hold. Tessa could think: ‘Fifty years hence I shall be seventy-two, and there’s no reason why I shouldn’t live till then.’ She wondered painfully how it must feel to be unable to look a month hence with average confidence, and to regard every nightfall as the threshold of a precarious tomorrow.
Tessa would have found life very dull but for the complete change in her surroundings. She had been brought up in a country vicarage, one of seven brothers and sisters who had worn one another’s clothes, tramped the carpets threadbare, mishandled the cheap furniture, broken everything frangible except their parents’ hearts, and had somehow tumbled into adolescence. The unwonted ‘grandeur’ of living with Miss Ludgate flavoured the monotony.
We have her writing home to her ‘Darling Mother’ as follows:
I expect when I get back home again our dear old rooms will look absurdly small. I thought at first that the house was huge, and every room as big as a barrack-room – not that I’ve ever been in a barrack-room! But I’m getting used to it now, and really it isn’t so enormous as I thought. Huge compared with ours, of course, but not so big as Lord Branbourne’s house, or even Colonel Exted’s.
Really, though, it’s a darling old place and might have come out of one of those books in which there’s a Mystery, and a Sliding Panel, and the heroine’s a nursery governess who marries the Young Baronet. But there’s no mystery that I’ve heard of, although I like to pretend there is, and even if I were the nursery governess there’s no young baronet within a radius of miles. But at least it ought to have a traditional ghost, although, since I haven’t heard of one, it’s probably deficient even in that respect! I don’t like to ask Miss Ludgate, because, although she’s a dear, there are questions I couldn’t ask her. She might believe in ghosts and it might scare her to talk about them; or she mightn’t, and then she’d be furious with me for talking rubbish. Of course, I know it’s all rubbish, but it would be very nice to know that we were supposed to be haunted by a nice Grey Lady – of, say, about the period of Queen Anne. But if we’re haunted by nothing else, we’re certainly haunted by tramps.
Her letter went on to describe the numerous daily visits of those nomads of the English countryside, who beg and steal on their way from workhouse to workhouse; those queer, illogical, feckless beings who prefer the most intense miseries and hardships to the comparative comforts attendant on honest work. Three or four was a day’s average of such callers, and not one went empty away. Mrs Finch had very definite orders, and she carried them out with the impassive face of a perfect subject of discipline. When there was no spare food there was the pleasanter alternative of money which could be transformed into liquor at the nearest inn.
Tessa was for ever meeting these vagrants in the drive. Male and female, they differed in a hundred ways; some still trying to cling to the last rags of self-respect, others obscene, leering, furtive, potential criminals who lacked the courage to rise above petty theft. Most faces were either evil or carried the rolling eyes and lewd, loose mouth of the semi-idiot, but they were all alike in their personal uncleanliness and in the insolence of their bearing.
Tessa grew used to receiving from them direct and insolent challenges of the eyes, familiar nods, blatant grins. In their several ways they told her that she was nobody and that, if she hated to see them, so much the better. They knew she was an underling, subject to dismissal, whereas they, for some occult reason, were always the welcome guests. Tessa resented their presence and their dumb insolence, and secretly raged against Miss Ludgate for encouraging them. They were the sewer-rats of society, foul, predatory, and carrying disease from village to village and from town to town.
The girl knew something of the struggles of the decent poor. Her upbringing in a country vicarage had given her intimate knowledge of farm-hands and builders’ labourers, the tragic poverty of their homes, their independence and their gallant struggles for existence. On Miss Ludgate’s estate there was more than one family living on bread and potatoes and getting not too much of either. Yet the old lady had no sympathy for them, and gave unlimited largess to the undeserving. In the ditches outside the park it was always possible to find a loaf
