Elizabeth's Campaign Part 7

'Take away the tea, please, Forest. And--and I should like to consult you. Do you think anybody wants as much tea and cakes in war-time?' She pointed to the table.

Forest paused as he was lifting the silver tray, and put it down again. He looked at the table; then he looked at the lady opposite.

'We servants, Miss, have never been asked what _we_ think. Mr.

Mannering--that's not his way.'

'But I may ask it, mayn't I, Forest?'

Forest's intelligent face flamed.

'Well, if we've really to speak out what we think, Miss--that's Cook and me--why, of course, the feeding here--well, it's a scandal!

that's what it is. The Master will have it. No change, he says, from what it used to be. And the waste--well, you ask Cook! _She_ can't help it!'

'Has she been here long, Forest?'

'Fifteen years.'

'And you?'

'Twenty-two, Miss.'

'Well, Forest,' Miss Bremerton approached him confidingly, 'don't you think that you, and Cook, and I--you know Mr. Mannering wishes me to do the housekeeping--well, that between us we could do something?'

Forest considered it.

'I don't see why not, Miss,' he said at last, with caution. 'You can reckon on me, that's certain, and on Cook, that's certain too. As for the young uns, we can get round them! They'll eat what they're given. But you'll have to go careful with the Squire.'

Miss Bremerton smiled and nodded. They stood colloguing in the twilight for ten minutes more.

CHAPTER III

'I say, Pamela, who _is_ this female, and why has she descended on us?'

The speaker was Desmond Mannering. He was sitting on the edge of a much dilapidated arm-chair in the room which had been the twins'

"den" from their childhood, in which Pamela's governess even, before the girl's school years, was allowed only on occasional and precarious footing. Here Pamela dabbed in photography, made triumphant piles of the socks and mittens she kept from her father's eye, read history, novels, and poetry, and wrote to her school friends and the boys she had met in Scotland. Ranged along the mantelpiece were numbers of snapshots--groups and single figures--taken by her, with results that showed her no great performer.

At the moment, however, Pamela was engaged in marking Desmond's socks. She was very jealous of her sisterly prerogative in the matter of Desmond's kit, and personal affairs generally. Forest was the only person she would allow to advise her, and one or two innocent suggestions made that morning by her new chaperon had produced a good deal of irritation.

Pamela looked up with a flushed countenance.

'I believe father did it specially that he might be able to tell Alice and Margaret that he hadn't a farthing for their war charities.'

'You mean because she costs so much?'

'Two hundred and fifty,' said Pamela drily.

'My hat!--and her keep! I call that mean of father,' said Desmond indignantly. 'You can't go tick with a secretary. It means cash.

There'll never be anything for you, Pam, and nothing for the garden.

The two old fellows that were here last week have been turned off, Forest tells me?'

'Father expects me to do the garden,' said Pamela, with rather pinched lips.

'Well, jolly good thing,' laughed her brother. 'Do you a lot of good, Pam. You never get half enough exercise.'

'I wouldn't mind if I were paid wages and could spend the money as I liked.'

'Poor old Pam! It is hard lines. I heard father tell the Rector he'd spent eighteen hundred at that sale.'

'And I'm ashamed to face any of the tradesmen,' said Pamela fiercely. 'Why they go on trusting us I don't know.'

Desmond looked out of the window with a puckered brow--a slim figure in his cadet's uniform. To judge from a picture on the wall behind his head, an enlarged photograph of the late Mrs. Mannering taken a year before the birth of the twins--an event which had cost the mother her life--Desmond resembled her rather than his father. In both faces there was the same smiling youthfulness, combined--as indeed also in Pamela--with something that entirely banished any suggestion of insipidity--something that seemed to say, 'There is a soul here--and a brain.' It had sometimes occurred, in a dreamy way to Pamela, to connect that smile on her mother's face with a line in a poem of Browning's, which she had learnt for recitation at school:

This grew; I gave commands; Then all smiles stopped together.

Had her mother been happy? That her children could never know.

Desmond's countenance, however, soon cleared. It was impossible for him to frown for long on any subject. He was very sorry for 'old Pam.' His father's opinions and behaviour were too queer for words.

He would be jolly worried if he had to stay long at home, like Pamela. But then he wasn't going to be long at home. He was going off to his artillery camp in two days, and the thought filled him with a restless and impatient delight. At the same time he was more tolerant of his father than Pamela was, though he could not have told why.

'Desmond, give me your foot,' Pamela presently commanded.

The boy bared his foot obediently, and held it out while Pamela tried on a sock she had just finished knitting on a new pattern.

'I'm not very good at it,' sighed Pamela. 'Are you sure you can wear them, Dezzy?'

'Wear them? Ripping!' said the boy, surveying his foot at different angles. 'But you know, Pam, I can't take half the things you want me to take. What on earth did you get me a Gieve waistcoat for?'

'How do you know you won't be going to Mesopotamia?'

'Well, I don't know; but I don't somehow think it's very likely.

They get their drafts from Egypt, and there's lots of artillery there.'

Pamela remembered with annoyance that Miss Bremerton had gently hinted the same thing when the Gieve waistcoat had been unpacked in her presence. It was true, of course, that she had a brother fighting under General Maude. That, no doubt, did give her a modest right to speak.

'How old do you think she is?' said Desmond, nodding in the direction of the library.

'Well, she's over thirty.'

'She doesn't look it.'

'Oh, Desmond, she does!'

'Let's call her the New Broom--Broomie for short,' said Desmond.

'Look here, Pam, I wish you'd try and like her. I shall have a dreadful hump when I get to camp if I think she's going to make you miserable.'