Chapter 22 A Sweet Girl Graduate by L. T. Meade
A Black Satin Jacket
Very active preparations were being made in a certain rather humble little cottage in the country for the heroine’s return. Three small girls were making themselves busy with holly and ivy, with badly-cut paper flowers, with enormous texts coarsely illustrated, to render the home gay and festive in its greeting. A little worn old woman lay on a sofa, and superintended these active measures.
“How soon will she be here now?” said Hattie the vigorous.
“Do stay still, Hattie, and don’t fidget. Don’t you see how tired Aunt Raby looks?” exclaimed Rose. “Prissie can’t be here yet, and you are such a worry when you jump up and down like that, Hattie.”
Rose’s words were quite severe, and Hattie planted herself on the edge of a chair, folded her plump hands, managed to get a demure look into her laughing eyes and dimpled mouth, and sat motionless for about half a minute. At the end of that time she tumbled on the floor with a loud crash, and Aunt Raby sprang to her feet with some alarm.
“Good gracious, child! are you hurt? What’s the matter?”
Hattie was sitting on the floor in convulsions of mirth.
“I’m not hurt,” she exclaimed. “I slipped off the chair. I didn’t mean to; I couldn’t help it, really. I’m sorry I woke you, Aunt Raby.”
“I wasn’t asleep, child.” Miss Peel walked across the room, and vanished into the kitchen, from which very savoury smells issued.
Hattie and Rose began to quarrel and argue, and Katie, who was more or less of a little peacemaker, suggested that they should draw up the blind, and all three get into the window to watch for Prissie.
“I wonder how she will look?” said Rose, when they were all comfortably established.
“I hope she won’t talk in Latin,” exclaimed Hattie.
“Oh, it is nice to think of seeing Prissie so soon,” murmured Katie in an ecstasy.
“I wonder,” began Rose in her practical voice, “how soon Prissie will begin to earn money. We want money even more than when she went away. Aunt Raby isn’t as well as she was then, and since the cows were sold—”
“Hush!” said Hattie. “You know we promised we wouldn’t tell Prissie about the cows.”
Just then a distant sound of wheels was heard. The little girls began to jump and shout; a moment later and Priscilla stood in the midst of her family. A great excitement followed her arrival. There were kisses and hugs, and wild, rapturous words from the affectionate little sisters. Aunt Raby put her arms round Priscilla, and gave her a solemn sort of kiss, and then the whole party adjourned into the supper-room.
The feast which was spread was so dainty and abundant that Katie asked in a puzzled sort of way if Aunt Raby considered Prissie like the Prodigal Son.
“What fancies you have, child!” said Aunt Raby. “The Prodigal Son, indeed! Thank Heaven, I’ve never had to do with that sort! As to Priscilla here, she’s as steady as Old Time. Well, child, and are you getting up your learning very fast?”
“Pretty well, Aunt Raby.”
“And you like your grand college, and all those fine young-lady friends of yours?”
“I haven’t any fine young-lady friends.”
“H’m! I daresay they are like other girls; a little bit of learning, and a great deal of dress, eh?” Priscilla coloured.
“There are all sorts of girls at St. Benet’s,” she said after a pause. “Some are real students, earnest, devoted to their work.”
“Have you earned any money yet, Prissie?” exclaimed Hattie. “For if you have, I do want— look—” She thrust a small foot, encased in a broken shoe, prominently into view.
“Hattie, go to bed this minute!” exclaimed Aunt Raby. “Go up to your room all three of you little girls. No more words—off at once, all of you. Prissie, you and I will go into the drawing-room, and I’ll lie on the sofa, while you tell me a little bit about your college life.”
“Aunt Raby always lies oh the sofa in the evenings now,” burst from Hattie the irrepressible.
Miss Peel rushed after the plump little girl, and pushed her out of the room.
“To bed, all of you!” she exclaimed. “To bed, and to sleep! Now, Prissie, you are not to mind a word that child says. Come into the drawing-room, and let us have a few words quietly. Oh, yes, I’ll lie on the sofa, my dear, if you wish it. But Hattie is wrong; I don’t do it every night. I suffer no pain either, Prissie. Many a woman of my age is racked with rheumatics.”
The last words were said with a little gasp. The elder woman lay back on the sofa, with a sigh of relief. She turned her face so that the light from the lamp should not reveal the deathly tired lines round it.
Aunt Raby was dressed in a rough homespun garment. Her feet were clad in unbleached cotton stockings, also made at home; her little, iron-grey curls lay flat at each side of her hollow cheeks. She wore list slippers, very coarse and common in texture. Her whole appearance was the essence of the homely, the old-fashioned, even the ungainly.
Priscilla had seen elegance and beauty since she went away; she had entered into the life of the cultivated, the intellectually great. In spite of her deep affection for Aunt Raby, she came back to the ugliness and the sordid surroundings of home with a pang which she hated herself for feeling. She forgot Aunt Raby’s sufferings for a moment in her uncouthness. She longed to shower riches, refinement, beauty upon her.
“How has your dress worn, Prissie?” said the elder woman, after a pause. “My sakes, child, you have got your best brown cashmere on! A beautiful fine bit of cashmere it was, too. I bought it out of the money I got for the lambs’ wool.”
Aunt Raby stretched out her hand, and, taking up a fold of the cashmere, she rubbed it softly between her finger and thumb.
“It’s as fine as velvet,” she said, “and I put strong work into it, too. It isn’t a bit worn, is it, Prissie?”
“No, Aunt Raby, except just round the tail. I got it very wet one day, and the colour went a trifle; but nothing to signify.”
A vivid picture rose up before Priscilla’s eyes as she spoke of Mrs Elliot-Smith’s drawing-room, and the dainty, disdainful ladies in their gay attire, and her own poor, little, forlorn figure in her muddy cashmere dress—the same dress Aunt Raby considered soft and beautiful as velvet.
“Oh, Aunt Raby,” she said with sudden impulse, “a great many things have happened to me since I went away. On the whole I have had a very good time.”
Aunt Raby opened her mouth to emit a prodigious yawn.
“I don’t know how it is,” she said, “but I’m a bit drowsy to-night. I suppose it’s the weather. The day was quite a muggy one. I’ll hear your news another time, Priscilla; but don’t you be turned with the vanities of the world, Priscilla. Life’s but a passing day: you mind that when you’re young, and it won’t come on you as a shock when you are old. I’m glad the cashmere has worn well—ay, that I am, Prissie. But don’t put it on in the morning, my love, for it’s a sin to wear through beautiful fine stuff like that. And, even if the colour is gone a bit round the hem, the stuff itself isn’t worn, and looks don’t signify. You’ll have to make up your mind to wear the cashmere for best again next term, Prissie, for, though I’m not pinched in any way, I’m not overflush either, my love.”
Priscilla, who had been sitting in a low chair near her aunt, now rose to her feet.
“Ought we not to come to bed?” she said. “If you don’t feel tired, you look it, Aunt Raby. Come upstairs, do, and let me help you to take your things off, and put you into bed. Come, Aunt Raby, it will be like old times to help you, you know.”
The girl knelt by the old woman, took one of her withered hands, raised it suddenly to her lips, and kissed it. Aunt Raby’s face was still turned from the light.
“Don’t you keep kneeling on your cashmere,” she said. “You’ll crease it awfully, and I don’t see my way to another best dress this term.”
“You needn’t, Aunt Raby,” said Priscilla, in a steady voice. “The cashmere is quite neat still. I can manage well with it.”
Aunt Raby rose slowly and feebly from the sofa.
“You may help me to get into bed if you like,” she said. “The muggy day has made me wonderfully drowsy, and I’ll be glad to lie down. It’s only that: I’ll be as pert as a cricket in the morning.”
The old woman leant on the girl’s strong, young arm, and stumbled a bit as she went up the narrow stairs.
When they entered the tiny bedroom Aunt Raby spoke again—
“Your dress will do, but I have been fretting about your winter jacket, Prissie. There’s my best one, though—you know, the quilted satin which my mother left me; its loose and full, and you shall have it.”
“But you want it to go to church in yourself, Aunt Raby.”
“I don’t often go to church lately, child. I take a power of comfort lying on the sofa, reading my Bible, and Mr Hayes doesn’t see anything contrary to Scripture in it, for I asked him. Yes, you shall have my quilted satin jacket to take back to college with you, Prissie, and then you’ll be set up fine.”
Priscilla bent forward and kissed Aunt Raby. She made no other response, but that night before she went to sleep she saw distinctly a vision of herself. Prissie was as little vain as a girl could be, but the vision of her own figure in Aunt Raby’s black satin quilted jacket was not a particularly inspiriting one. That jacket, full in the skirts, long in the shoulders, wide in the sleeves, and enormous round the neck, would scarcely bear comparison with the neat, tight-fitting garments which the other girl graduates of St. Benet’s were wont to patronise. Prissie felt glad she was not attired in it that unfortunate day when she sat in Mrs Elliot-Smith’s drawing-room; and yet—and yet—she knew that the poor, quaint, old-world jacket meant love and self-renunciation.
“Dear Aunt Raby!” whispered the girl.
Tears lay heavily on her eyelashes as she dropped asleep, with one arm thrown protectingly round her little sister Katie.