Page 24 of A Lesson in Forbidden Love

“I have thought about it very carefully, Miss Wharton. I have thought about it in bed. She does not laugh.”

“That is not —”

“She does not. I have watched her, at three dinners and a luncheon, and a picnic at Richmond last summer when I was permitted to sit at the side table. She smiles. She smiles very prettily. She does not laugh. And Stirling —” the child’s face changed; she became, for an instant, older than her years, and Madeleine’s throat closed on something she would not name “— Stirling used to laugh. When Papa was alive. He does not, now. And if he marries her he will never laugh, and I should rather not have her for a sister than have him not laugh for the rest of his life.”

There was an absolute silence in the schoolroom. Madeleine found that she could not, immediately, speak. She found that her hands had folded themselves in her lap of their own accord, in the posture that she had been instructed that Governesses should adopt in the presence of grief, and that she was looking down at them as though they belonged to another woman.

“Lady Sophia,” she said, when she could, “that is a very loving thing to say.”

“It is not loving. It is true.”

“It may be both.”

“Mama says it is impertinent.”

“You have said it to your mama?”

“I have said it to my mama once. I shall not say it to her again. I am saying it to you because you do not tell Mama things.”

Madeleine raised her eyes. The child was looking at her with the perfect trustful candour of a creature who has, in three weeks, made a calculation about the world and the people in it, and has decided that this particular adult, at this particular window, at the top of this particular flight of stairs, was a safe place in which to set down a thought she could not set down elsewhere.

It was a compliment Madeleine had not asked for. It was a compliment she was not entitled to accept. She accepted it.

“I do not tell your mama things,” she said carefully, “that have been told to me in this room, and that do not bear upon your safety or your conduct. That is the rule between Governesses and their charges. It is not a secret. It is a — confidence.”

“A confidence.”

“Yes.”

“Then this is a confidence.”

“It is.”

Lady Sophia nodded once, with great gravity, and picked up her pen, and dipped it, and bent her dark head over her exercise book, and wrote, with enormous concentration, Je vais, tu vas, il va, in a hand that had improved in a fortnight from a sprawl into something almost respectable. Madeleine sat very still and watched her, and did not, with great effort, go back to the window.

She did not need to go back to the window. She could see the window from where she sat. She could see, beyond it, the pale square of sky over Grosvenor Square, and a corner of the plane tree opposite, and nothing else; and she thought, with the part of her mind that was not occupied with the steady scratch of Lady Sophia’s pen, that somewhere three flights below her a woman in celadon green was sitting on a chair which was, presumably, apologising to her, and was speaking, in the low even voice of a woman who had never raised it in her life, to the Dowager Marchioness of Greyscarp about — what? The weather. A box at the opera. A list. A date in June, perhaps, or a date in July, with St. George’s, Hanover Square, and a breakfast afterward, and a wedding journey to the Lakes.

It was not her business.

She had no business with it at all. She had been engaged at sixty pounds the year to teach French and Italian and the use of the globes, and the woman in the drawing room three flights down was the woman the Marquess of Greyscarp was going to marry, and that was a fact as fixed and as little to be questioned as the price of bread or the run of the tides.

The only honourable thing — the only possible thing — was to fold it into the small, ordered cupboard at the back of her mind in which she kept the other facts that were not her business, and to close the door on it, and to go on conjugating aller.

She picked up her pencil.

“Nous allons,” she said, “is well written, Lady Sophia. Vous allez has too long a tail on the z. You are giving it the tail of a y. Mend it, if you please.”

Lady Sophia mended it.

They worked on for some time. The clock on the schoolroom mantel — a small brass thing, plain to the point of austerity, the only object in the room that did not appear to have been chosen by a person of taste — moved with its accustomed deliberation through the minutes. Outside, a sparrow quarrelled with another sparrow on the sill. Somewhere below, a door opened and shut. After a little while the small dim sound of a carriage on the cobbled street reached them through two panes of glass and a square of sky, and Lady Sophia, without lifting her head from her page, said:

“There. Her carriage is leaving. A quarter of an hour exactly. I told you.”

“You did.”

“She probably has six other houses to call upon.”

“Possibly seven.”