Brides of Aberdar Read Online Free PDF Page A

‘Miss Tettyman understands it all perfectly well—’
    ‘Oh, Papa, her name is Miss Tetterman!’
    ‘I always get names wrong,’ he said, smiling at her in his faded way. ‘I daresay for all my trying, you will remain Miss Tettyman to the end.’ The small, sketched bow again. ‘And let us hope that that will be a long way away. We must try to make you happy here.’
    There is a magic in the place, she thought. For all it seemed so grim, there is some magic that will keep me here. Now, having lost all that in her twenty-four years she had come to care for, she had not thought to find love and happiness again. But here I am, all in half an hour in love with a pair of welcoming children; and finding it in my heart to find something almost of affection, what you will—for this man!
    ‘It will not be my fault if I am not happy,’ she said, dropping him a small bobbing curtsey in return for the bow, hastily bestowing the same on Madame, and preparing to lead the children away.
    ‘You Hilbourne men!’ said Madame Devalle in French before the door had closed. ‘You do nothing, you try nothing but within half a minute every female you meet s’évanouit à vos pieds .’
    ‘Then it’s a good thing for them that I meet so few,’ said. Edward Hilbourne. Poor pale, thin governess, with her scarred face and clear hazel eyes and that something about her of—gallantry! I don’t think she will swoon all that easily, he thought, at my feet or at any man’s.
    But let them swoon as they would, as far as he was concerned it would do them no good—and no ill. There would be no more marrying for the Squire of Aberdar.
    The man-servant’s name was Tomos, a Welshman from the south, something under forty years old perhaps, of middle height, very dark, rather swarthy indeed, but with a bright and teasing eye: he loved a drink and a laugh and a kiss from a pretty girl and a great deal more if she would give it to him. He returned to the staff quarters with surprising news. ‘Right enough she’d be—but for the scar, right down the side of her face. And thin—thin as a sparrow and dressed like a sparrow too, all brown and a streak here and there of darkness; but the feathers as sleek and flat as if they’d been oiled over, not a fold, not a wrinkle…’
    ‘A bit on the dull side then?’ suggested the footman, Rod, who had hoped for better things.
    ‘Well, a sparrow can be bright enough, mind, a nice clean country bird with none of the gloss taken off his feathers from the dusty streets. But that’s her dress. More like a hazel-nut she is herself, crau collen , we call them in Welsh; eyes bright, hair the same colour, very soft and smooth but a little curl creeping out from her bonnet, escaping.’
    ‘Nothing much escapes you, Tomos James,’ said Menna, the cook, laughing, ‘where a girl is concerned. You’ve set eyes on her half a minute in all.’
    ‘Aye, but there’s more to come. Come from some grand family she has—big man-shun, bigger than this she told the children; and proud as a little peacock. Though like I say, more sparrow than peacock every other way.’
    ‘Tomos, you’ve been listening at doors again!’
    ‘I like to know what’s going on,’ said Tomos. He added: ‘And so do you all, don’t mind pretending!’
    They put up little resistance. Not much that was new came their way through the long days of toil that had become a great deal more arduous since the advent of The Walloon as they called her. They had found out Madame’s origins and, ignorant of its meaning as simply a native of a southern part of Belgium, found the word comic and used it in a sort of jeering opprobrium. And the change from Nurse, one of themselves, sharing in the life of the servants’ hall, to the nursery governess, was meat for curiosity: a creature so far not encountered, a soul in limbo, hung between heaven and hell. ‘But the scar, Tomos?’
    (‘She writes that her face is scarred,’ the Squire had told them,