Miss Silver Comes To Stay

CHAPTER 1

Mary Stuart wrote, “My end is in my beginning.” It is easier to agree with her than to decide what is the beginning, and what the end. When Miss Silver came down to Melling on a visit to an old school friend she became involved in a story which had begun a long time before, and whose end may yet be quite unknown, since what happened yesterday must needs affect today and set out a pattern for tomorrow. It is not, of course, necessary to follow the pattern, but is sometimes easier, and ease is always tempting.

Just where does the story begin-twenty-five years before when two young girls went to a dance and met the same young man? A fair girl who was Catherine Lee, and a dark girl who was Henrietta Cray-Catherine and Rietta, distant cousins, schoolfellows, and bosom friends, eighteen years of age, and James Theodulph Lessiter just turned twenty-one. Perhaps it begins there, or perhaps still farther back when three generations of Lessiters took whatever they wanted from the world and paid out of a steadily dwindling capital till in the end there wasn’t much for the last of them except an impoverished estate, a shabby old house, and an inherited conviction that the world was his oyster.

The story might begin there, or a little later when what James Lessiter wanted most out of all the world was Rietta Cray. He told her so in the orchard of Melling House under a May moon when she was nineteen and he was twenty-two. She told Catherine, and Catherine condoled. “You know, darling, there really isn’t any money at all, and Aunt Mildred will be furious.“ On the strength of long association and distant kinship, Mrs. Lessiter was Aunt Mildred to both the girls. None of which would have made either of them anything but a most unwelcome daughter-in-law, and what little money there was remained quite firmly in Mildred Lessiter’s hands. James couldn’t lay a finger on it. He went out into the world to make his fortune with large expectations and a conquering air. At twenty-three Catherine had married Edward Welby and was gone from Melling, and Rietta was settling down to nurse an invalid mother and bring up her sister’s boy, Carr Robertson, because Margaret and her husband were in India. Margaret died there, and after a decent interval Major Robertson married again. He sent money for Carr’s education, but he did not come home, and by and by he practically ceased to write. He died when Carr was fifteen. Perhaps the story begins there with Carr’s grudge against a world which would have got along very well without him. Or perhaps it begins with Catherine Welby’s return as a childless widow. Mildred Lessiter was still alive. Catherine went to see her, cried a good deal, and was offered the Gate House at a nominal rent. ”Really quite sweet, you know, Rietta- those dear little crinkly roses all over it. And being in the grounds of Melling House-well, it’s rather nice, don’t you think? And Aunt Mildred says Alexander can keep up the garden for me whilst he’s doing all the rest. It’s too, too sweet of her, and I shall be able to live on practically nothing at all, which is just as well, because that’s about as much as I shall have when everything is settled. It’s a very great shock to me Edward’s affairs being in such a state, and you know, when you’ve been accustomed to having everything it isn’t at all easy to come down to thinking about every halfpenny- is it?”

Rietta gave her an odd fleeting smile.

“I don’t know, Cathy, but then, you see, I’ve never had-” she paused deliberately, and then added, “everything.”

It was fifteen years after this that Miss Silver came down to visit her old friend Mrs. Voycey.