IN SEARCH OF AN ‘ADMIRABLE CRICHTON.’

Jane Prior set about her inquiries for a governess on behalf of the little Woods in the most exhaustive fashion. The children were young, and were still only in the elementary stage of their education; but Jane had determined that the rudiments should be well seen to. She was an ardent supporter of the modern opinion that the foundation is of paramount importance, and that the insufficient foundations laid by incompetent hands are largely accountable for the failure in general knowledge, even in general capacity, of the present generation.

Jane went far to believing that a thorough acquaintance with philology is necessary for the proper teaching of the alphabet. She must have had a hankering for the first letters to be Greek or Hebrew, but here her common sense interposed. She was determined at least that poor Alice’s children should have the chance of becoming deeply erudite prodigies of ‘all-round’ culture. They should have such advantages as Jane herself had not enjoyed. Yet her father and mother had done the best they knew of for her. John Prior had even taken pains, when he learnt the talents and tastes of the girl, to impart something of his own college training to her, by making her read along with her brother Jack under a Cambridge coach of some eminence.

But then this was comparatively late in Jane’s life, and she still suffered, as she honestly believed, from having been taught her letters by Alice and Susie’s old governess. She had been an exemplary, old-fashioned lady, who was so inconsistent as to pique herself on her proficiency in such modern languages as French and Italian, when she had never been taught a word of Latin, who could triumphantly produce a musical certificate from a German conservatorium, but whose arithmetic was not strong enough to have secured her a situation as bookkeeper in any tradesman’s shop.

Jane, with an almost pathetic sense of her latent deficiencies from early neglect, went about her search for an efficient governess, where her small niece and nephews were concerned, in the most earnest, methodical manner, profoundly impressed as she was with the importance of the appointment. Nothing moved her. She was unscathed by her father’s sarcasms on the uselessness and the cost of the acquisition. For Alice Prior had married a man in the civil service who had not been very fortunate in his career and was still struggling up-hill in his profession, so that John Prior had undertaken as a matter of course the rearing of the children sent home to their dead mother’s relatives.

Mrs. Prior’s natural alarm at the intrusion of another learned woman into the family fell still more flat. Jane told her mother with the utmost conviction that not only would a female Porson condescend to teach the young idea how to shoot without a thought of condescension; she would be struck by a grand comprehensiveness of the undertaking, which would have utterly escaped the shallow conclusions of pert frivolous ignorance. Then why did Jane herself not devote all her energies to the noble enterprise, and sacrifice everything else? Just because Jane did not feel equal to it. She was by no means fully equipped as yet; she had a great deal of solitary study before her, ere she could aspire to have fairly grappled--even grappled--with the branches she had taken up, and she had that lamentable instability of foundation which she was afraid would cripple her to the day of her death.

Jane could also assure her mother, and here Mrs. Prior was more inclined to believe her daughter, that she might depend upon finding the female Porson simpler in her habits, more easily served, than nine-tenths of the unfortunate, pretentious, badly educated fine ladies driven by adversity to earn their living, who swell the lists of the great incompetents. These ladies were very inferior to poor old Miss Rossiter, with her good music and her halting arithmetic. Yet Miss Rossiter had been a little hard to please as to the boiling of her egg for breakfast, and the shaking up of her feather bed. But if the new comer were like Jane, she would be simple enough in her tastes.

Jane Prior was utterly impervious to the light ridicule of Susie and the broader ‘haw-haw’ mockery of Lambert Crabtree, who heard their children conning their A, B, C to their rustic nurse, and jabbering the most frightfully illiterate French with Mrs. Crabtree’s maid.

Innumerable letters were written from the schoolroom at Redcot, over which Jane still presided, with regard to its future mistress. The most promising recent colleges for girls were applied to. Searching investigations were made into L.A. degrees, first and second classes, examination papers, testimonials--very different from the old courteous, kindly tributes to birth, character, and moderate attainments which were held amply sufficient in the dark ages. Usually when everything was weighed and sifted, there was some objection, some drawback, on one side or other. For not only is a _rara avis_ difficult to find--the _avis_, in spite of Jane’s insistance on the modesty of intellectual merit of the highest order, is apt to ask a unique nest in proportion to its own uniqueness. Several times the engagement was all but completed, and fell through, either from the stringency of Jane’s demands as to the sum of learning on the part of the candidate, or from a corresponding rigidity on the other side with regard to the sum in coin of a salary which John Prior did not see himself justifiable in making more than liberal.

Even Jane Prior’s infinite capacity for taking pains was sorely tried, and showed signs of suddenly and ignominiously collapsing, when the right woman presented herself at the right time, as if by a special interposition of Providence. Jane heard of a Miss Gray, who, according to hearsay, was all Jane’s fancy painted the perfect governess or schoolmistress, as the last development of the female teacher prefers to be called, returning proudly to the old unvarnished title. She had been trained in a college of preceptresses; she had passed more or less stiff examinations with credit, nay distinction; she had already gained some experience as a teacher, though she was not more than three-and-twenty--Jane’s own age.

Miss Gray was vouched for as the daughter of a professional man of unexceptionable antecedents. She had been early left an orphan, with a patrimony that just sufficed to give her an excellent education, consequently she had been brought up to maintain herself.

In spite of Jane’s burning zeal for loftier attributes, she was not indifferent to the consideration of Miss Gray’s birth and early associations. Jane Prior had at least her share of the prejudices, so called, of her class. ‘Gray is a good name,’ she said, dwelling on it with satisfaction, ‘though, of course, there are Grays and Grays,’ she wound up judicially, not pausing to explain whether the Gray which tended to whiteness or the other Gray, which, running down in the scale, bore on blackness, had to do with moral blamelessness and turpitude, or simply ranged from aristocratic to democratic proclivities.

Apparently nothing was lacking in Miss Gray, and, for a wonder, the conscientiously explicit statement with which Jane furnished her as to terms, privileges, and the duties of the post she was expected to fill at Redcot, also lacked nothing in her eyes. For that matter, if Jane Prior had only known it, Miss Gray had set her heart on coming to Redcot even more than Jane had set hers on securing the phœnix. If it had not been for the shame of the thing and for exciting suspicion, the all-accomplished Miss Gray would have come without costing Mr. Prior a farthing of salary--nay, would have paid a premium for the coveted post.

Every preliminary was arranged, the day was fixed for the lady’s arrival; the only thing that remained to be done was for Miss Prior to make use of the old phaeton, all that was left available of the Redcot carriages, to drive to Newton and meet the stranger at the station. Jane was punctilious in this piece of courtesy, though it cost her a whole afternoon of Plato’s company. Mrs. Prior seldom went from home, and even when the social duties were less her daughter’s particular business, Jane was tolerably well accustomed to act, with a wry or rueful face, as her mother’s deputy. She was determined Miss Gray should not find herself treated from the first otherwise than as a valued friend and guest of the family in which, it was to be hoped, she would dwell for a period of years.

The new comer was certainly in clover. The expectations entertained of her acquirements might be inordinately high; the work required of her might be greatly in excess of what was necessary; there might be imperative reasons for her being scholastically on her mettle. All the same, the days of her mourning as a governess who was systematically overlooked, or contemptuously hustled aside, or even rudely snubbed, were ended. Whether she fraternised with the unmarried daughter of the house, as Jane for one ardently desired, or not, Miss Gray might depend upon being received with the respect due to learning--to a competent instructress of youth. Jane would no more have thought of slighting her niece and nephews’ governess, than an undergraduate, however idle and thoughtless, would dream of openly insulting a college tutor.

Therefore, while fully measuring the wrong done to Plato, and the loss to herself, Jane found a severe satisfaction in making the sacrifice as complete as possible. She was at the Newton Station in such good time that she had to wait a quarter of an hour for the arrival of the train; but she did not spend the entire interval pacing the platform in solitude, except for the porters. Before the train was due Mrs. Crabtree appeared. Of course, she was known to the stationmaster--when it came to that, he knew the whole neighbourhood. But while Jane and he did not think it necessary to acknowledge their acquaintance by more than a slight bow on the one side and two fingers to the hat on the other, Susie had to interview the official graciously. She had to keep him standing talking to her in the dusk of the winter afternoon.

Susie put little pertinent inquiries as to the amount of traffic on the line, interspersing them with small sympathetic regrets--amounting to exclamations of personal distress, ‘Mr. Panton, you don’t say so. Oh, dear, oh, dear! that is too bad,’ on the extent of his engagements. She dropped accidental references, which gave the impression that she knew all about his family and connections, and their various walks in life. She took one small delicately-gloved hand from her sealskin muff, and occasionally used it with the prettiest appropriate gesture. Without departing a hair’s breadth from her place, she shone in her beauty, her gentle breeding, and what he, like his betters, called her ‘smart clothes’ on the worthy man till she turned his head. He forgot to the last moment the obligations of his post. He had to run to set matters straight, and appease the just wrath of several commercial travellers, impatiently standing aside till he had done listening to the ‘soft sawder’ of Crabtree the banker’s genteel, handsome wife. This was exactly the result Susie counted on and cared for.

Mrs. Crabtree was on the platform on some trifling pretexts of half expecting friends from London--these Miss Smiths who had disappointed her so often, and of wishing to give a note with her own hand to any messenger from Redcot who might be at the station. She protested she had not hoped to see her sister. ‘You here, Jane!’ she exclaimed with quite a marked note of surprise, arching her fine eyebrows.

‘Yes, where else should I be?’ demanded Jane, with a flavour of asperity in her tone, drawing down her straight light brown brows, in decided contrast to those of her sister.

These two were always in contrast. They had never understood each other or harmonised together. True, Susie had married while Jane was still a schoolgirl of fifteen--at the very time she took her first plunge into study, and was most engrossed by it. But from childhood the sisters had not amalgamated or even bridged over the gulf between their natures and tastes. The pair had not quarrelled; their interests had never clashed. The women had agreed to differ, but there had been little satisfaction in the near relationship.

‘My mother, as you are aware, hardly ever drives to Redcot or anywhere else,’ Jane went on to say. ‘My father only rides in on market days, when he does ride in. We were not going to let Miss Gray arrive without finding anybody to meet her.’

‘I thought Richard would have come.’ Susie mentioned the old coachman blandly. ‘I meant to have given him this note,’ producing a tiny cocked hat of paper; ‘but there is no need,’ tearing it to shreds and scattering them lightly. ‘You can tell mam-ma that I am in despair because I have not found the cleaner’s address for her. I shall hunt all over the house, and perhaps I may be more fortunate.’ Then she added, with still more obliging alacrity, ‘If you had sent me word I should have been delighted to have come down and met Miss Gray in your place. It would have saved you a cold, dark drive.’

‘Thanks,’ said Jane, not very cordially. ‘I don’t know that it would quite have answered the purpose--even though you had happened to be here at any rate,’ she ended, with a slightly sarcastic emphasis. For both she and Susie were sensible the real motive of Mrs. Crabtree’s presence was that she might have the opportunity of satisfying her curiosity even about a person of no more consequence in her eyes than the little Woods’ governess.

Do not let any mistake arise. Susie would be thoroughly polite and kind, almost oppressively kind, to Miss Gray, but it would not be as Jane--notwithstanding her strain of formality and dryness--was friendly.

It was so late, the afternoon was getting so dusky, and the smoky lamps of Newton Station were so few and far between, that if Susie Crabtree’s eyes had not been Argus-eyes, and her observation--as far as it went--quick, keen, and sure, she could have made very little of what she saw when the train came in. A figure in a hat and ulster alighting from a second-class carriage, was pounced on by Jane Prior as if by instinct, taken to the heap of luggage, and had her trunks, with one exception, committed to the care of the left-luggage man, to be called for by the cart from Redcot next day. Finally, Miss Gray was ushered into the Redcot phaeton, established in it, and driven off with the least possible delay, and the fewest words of introduction or leave-taking between the ladies.

Susie might have had her stroll to the station’ and the spoiling of the pleasant dawdling over her afternoon tea for nothing, if she had not been able to use her eyes in the dark like a cat--a pleasing animal she resembled in several respects. But she was equal to the situation. She took a few mental notes with lightning rapidity, she conned them, after she had seen the others start, while she was walking back through the quiet streets of the old-fashioned market town to the Bank House, with its peculiar importance and dignity, out of sight the best house in Newton; Susie could not have imagined herself living in any other in the place. ‘She is not altogether Jane’s style,’ reflected Mrs. Lambert Crabtree; ‘she is not a fright either--anything rather than that; quite a handsome, well-grown young woman in her way, though it is not a way that I admire. She has not the pre-occupied, independent, practically unsettled air which usually distinguishes these learned monsters and makes them detestable to men. I don’t think she is an oddity, and as a rule such women are oddities whom one can detect at a glance. She has not spectacles on her nose like Cornelia Blimber, and she is decently dressed--a plain ulster, but a good cut, and really a nice hat. I should not object to wear a hat like that any morning when I was shopping. I wish Jane joy of her treasure. I should not be surprised if Jane got a surprise herself one of these days;’ and Susie laughed with a lively appreciation of the humour of the anticipated shock.