And Stephen, still catching her breath, looked straight at him. She nodded, and Sir Philip saw his own mournful eyes gazing back from his daughter’s tear-stained face. But her lips set more firmly, and the cleft in her chin grew more marked with a new, childish will to courage.
Bending down, he kissed her in absolute silence—it was like the sealing of a sorrowful pact.
VI
Anna, who had been out at the time of the disaster, returned to find her husband waiting for her in the hall.
“Stephen’s been naughty, she’s up in the nursery; she’s had one of her fits of temper,” he remarked.
In spite of the fact that he had obviously been waiting to intercept Anna, he now spoke quite lightly. Collins and the footman must go, he told her. As for Stephen, he had had a long talk with her already—Anna had better just let the thing drop, it had only been childish temper—
Anna hurried upstairs to her daughter. She, herself, had not been a turbulent child, and Stephen’s outbursts always made her feel helpless; however she was fully prepared for the worst. But she found Stephen sitting with her chin on her hand, and calmly staring out of the window; her eyes were still swollen and her face very pale, otherwise she showed no great signs of emotion; indeed she actually smiled up at Anna—it was rather a stiff little smile. Anna talked kindly and Stephen listened, nodding her head from time to time in acquiescence. But Anna felt awkward, and as though for some reason the child was anxious to reassure her; that smile had been meant to be reassuring—it had been such a very unchildish smile. The mother was doing all the talking she found. Stephen would not discuss her affection for Collins; on this point she was firmly, obdurately silent. She neither excused nor upheld her action in throwing a broken flowerpot at the footman.
“She’s trying to keep something back,” thought Anna, feeling more nonplussed every moment.
In the end Stephen took her mother’s hand gravely and proceeded to stroke it, as though she were consoling. She said: “Don’t feel worried, ’cause that worries Father—I promise I’ll try not to get into tempers, but you promise that you won’t go on feeling worried.”
And absurd though it seemed, Anna heard herself saying: “Very well then—I do promise, Stephen.”
III
I
Stephen never went to her father’s study in order to talk of her grief over Collins. A reticence strange in so young a child, together with a new, stubborn pride, held her tongue-tied, so that she fought out her battle alone, and Sir Philip allowed her to do so. Collins disappeared and with her the footman, and in Collins’ stead came a new second housemaid, a niece of Mrs. Bingham’s, who was even more timid than her predecessor, and who talked not at all. She was ugly, having small, round black eyes like currants—not inquisitive blue eyes like Collins.
With set lips and tight throat Stephen watched this intruder as she scuttled to and fro doing Collins’ duties. She would sit and scowl at poor Winefred darkly, devising small torments to add to her labours—such as stepping on dustpans and upsetting their contents, or hiding away brooms and brushes and slop-cloths—until Winefred, distracted, would finally unearth them from the most inappropriate places.
“ ’Owever did them slop-cloths get in ’ere!” she would mutter, discovering them under a nursery cushion. And her face would grow blotched with anxiety and fear as she glanced towards Mrs. Bingham.
But at night, when the child lay lonely and wakeful, these acts that had proved a consolation in the morning, having sprung from a desperate kind of loyalty to Collins—these acts would seem trivial and silly and useless, since Collins could neither know of them nor see them, and the tears that had been held in check through the day would well under Stephen’s eyelids. Nor could she, in those lonely watches of the nighttime, pluck up courage enough to reproach the Lord Jesus, who, she felt, could have helped her quite well had He chosen to accord her a housemaid’s knee.
She would think: “He loves neither me nor Collins—He wants all the pain for Himself; He won’t share it!”
And then she would feel contrite: “Oh, I’m sorry, Lord Jesus, ’cause I do know You love all miserable sinners!” And the thought that perhaps she had been unjust to Jesus would reduce her to still further tears.
Very dreadful indeed were those nights spent in weeping, spent in doubting the Lord and His servant Collins. The hours would drag by in intolerable blackness, that in passing seemed to envelop Stephen’s body, making her feel now hot and
