Lady Jane by Norma Lee Clark Page B

exactly, sir. That’s exactly what she reminded me of!”
    “The idea is not original with either of us, since everyone around here calls her The Old Haddock.”
    She laughed even harder and he watched her, the shining sherry-coloured eyes lit with merriment, the red lips against the white teeth, the round, flushed cheeks, the entire youthful glow of her holding him helplessly spellbound as it did each day when he first saw her. The feelings she stirred in him were feelings until now sternly repressed, at least during the daylight hours, since his realization as a very young man that for him such things were never to be. His dreams, as a result, were wildly erotic, but he had long ago given up all feelings of guilt about this, having learned from his reading that it was not a phenomenon peculiar to himself.
    However, he had never in his life had his senses stirred by a real woman and found it required the most rigourous self-control to prevent her from occupying his every waking thought. During sleep, his imagination, slipping the chains consciousness and conscience imposed, rampaged through every possible sexual variation with her, though never, as in previous dream encounters with faceless females, reaching with her that fulfillment that had come so easily before. Added to this frustration was the guilt he had foresworn so long ago. He was ashamed to use Jane in this way, an innocent young child who had already suffered so much at a lecherous man’s whim.
    He wrenched his eyes away from her and called her to order. She meekly subsided and sat down to her book, already spread open to today’s lesson on the desk he had had carried to his room for her use, and began to read aloud.
    As he listened he was aware that there was really nothing so surprising about such rapid progress in a reasonably intelligent fifteen-year-old who possessed great eagerness to learn. Still he felt all the pride of a maestro discovering and nurturing a prodigy.
    He had left her free of all learning by rote and followed along as her mind leaped from geography to poetry to philosophy, allowing her to explore each avenue that was opened up to her by a word or an idea. In the process, due to quiet but persistent correction on his part, she had lost most of her Cockney accent, along with her fear that if she displeased him he would ask his mother to send her back to London. Contrary to Miss Gilbert’s belief, however, she never forgot her place with him, always addressing him as “sir,” or “m’lord,” and though she giggled at the things he said, never became overfamiliar with him.
    The other part of Miss Gilberts dire prediction had, of course, taken effect as far as Sebastian was concerned. Several hours a day in close contact with him had, for Jane, created an image of him in her mind that had very little to do with reality. As the fount of all the good things that had come to her he was beyond judgment; his stunted body so unimportant in the totality of her respect and admiration for him that the fact of his physical appearance no longer entered her thoughts as a separate idea. She had, like everyone else in the household, succumbed to his dominating personality. Jane, like his mother and all the servants, was now devoted to making his life bearable.
    The servants had slowly become aware that she had joined forces with them and their attitudes toward her had changed accordingly. They competed with one another in their efforts to spoil her, and Lady Payton, grateful beyond measure to see a new lightness in her son’s face, and to have had him free from illness for six months, went out of her way to treat Jane with warm consideration. For Jane’s birthday in the first week of September she had given the child a new gown of claret merino and insisted that she put it on and come down to the drawing room after dinner and drink a glass of wine with herself and Lord Payton.
    Though Lady Payton had firmly resolved to forget the unpleasant episode