The moonlight was streaming in a lean ray across the floor of my room. I ran down this luminous pathway into the dusk at the open door. At the stair-head beyond, still and silent, I saw my poor dear. On through the cold dark air I ran, and stood in her loosened hair beside her head. It lay unstirring, her cheek colourless, her hand stretched out, palm upward, on the stone. I called into her ear, first gently and pleadingly, then loud and shrill. I ran and chafed her fingers, then back again, and stooped, listening with my cheek to her lips. She exhaled a trembling sigh. I called and called; but my shrillness was utterly swallowed up in the vast night-hung house. Then softly in the silence her lids unsealed and her eyes, as if wonderful with a remote dream, looked up into my face. "My dear," she whispered, wakefulness gathering faintly into her gaze, "my dear, is it you?" There was an accent in her voice that I had never heard before. Perhaps her tranceful eyes had magnified me. Then once more the lids closed down and I was alone. I fell on my knees beside her and crouched, praying into her heedless ear.
It was my first acquaintance with calamity, and physically powerless to aid her, I could think of nothing for a moment but to persuade her to speak to me again. Then my senses returned to me. To descend that flight of stairs--down which hitherto I had always been carried--would waste more precious time than I could spare. There seemed to be but one alternative--to waken Pollie. I ran back into my bedroom and tugged violently at the slack of her bedclothes. A mouse might as well have striven to ring Great Paul. She breathed on with open mouth, flat on her back, like a log. Then a thought came to me.
There was a bra.s.s-bound box under my bed, a full fifteen inches long, though shallow, in which my grandfather had lately sent me some gowns and finery from Paris. With some little difficulty I lugged and pushed this all across the room, and out on to the staircase. My strength seemed to be superhuman. One moment I flew to my mother, but now she lay in a profound sleep indeed, her cheek like marble. With a last effort I edged my box on its side between the bal.u.s.ters, and at some risk of falling after it, shoved it over into the moon-silvered dusk below. The house echoed with its resounding brazen clatter as it pitched from stair to stair. Then quiet. Clutching with either hand the bal.u.s.ter I leaned over, listening. Then a voice cried sleepily: "Hah!" then a call, "Caroline!" and a moment afterwards I discerned my father ascending the staircase....
For weeks I lay desperately ill. The chill, the anguish, and horror of that night had come upon a frame already weakened. Life was nothing but an evil dream, a world of terrifying shadows and phantoms. But our old friend Dr Grose was familiar with my const.i.tution, and at last I began to mend. Pollie, stricken with remorse, nursed me night and day, giving my small bed every hour she could spare in a house stricken and disordered. I was never told in so many words that my mother was dead.
In my extreme weakness I learned it of the air around me, of every secret sound and movement in the house.
Morning and evening appeared my father"s great face in the doorway, his eyebrows lifted high above his spectacles. To see his misery I almost wished that I might die to spare him more. When Dr Grose gave him permission, he sat down beside my bed and stooping low, told me that my mother had remembered our last speech together on the staircase, and he gave me her last message. A thousand and one remembrances of her patience and impulsiveness, of our long hours of solitude together, of her fits of new life as if she were a tree blossoming in the Spring, of her voice, her dignified silence with Miss Fenne, her sallies with my grandfather, her absent musings--these all return to me.
Alas, that it was never in my power, except perhaps at that last moment, to be to her a true comfort and companion, anything much better, in fact, than a familiar and tragic playmate. Worse beyond words; how little I had done for her that I might have done!
But regret must not lead me into extremes. That is not the whole truth.
There were occasions, I think, when she almost forgot my disabilities, when we were just two quiet, equal spirits in the world and conversed together gravely and simply, not as children, but as fellow-women. It is these I treasure dearest, while thanking her for all. Why, in the whirligig of time, if my authorities are trustworthy, and my life had fallen out differently, the problem might now have been reversed! I myself might have had natural-sized children and they a pygmy mother.
The strangeness of the world.
Out of the listlessness of convalescence my interests began to renew themselves. Across the gulf that separated us I could still commune with my mother"s quiet spirit. Her peace and the peace of her forgiveness began to descend on me; and her grave in my imagination has now no more sorrow than the antic.i.p.ation of my own. From my windowsill loggia I could command a full "Hundred" of Kent. Up there on the barrowed hill-top it was said that on fine days a keen eye could descry the sea to north and south; though Dr Grose dismissed it as a piece of local presumption. Now that my mother was gone the clouds were stranger, the birds more sweetly melancholy, the flowers more fleeting. Something of youth had pa.s.sed away to return no more.
Half my thoughts were wasted in futile resentment at my incapacities.
Yet it was a helplessness that in part was forced on me from without.
Still less now could my father take me seriously. We shared our silent meals together. He would sit moping, pushing his hand over his whitening hair, or staring over his spectacles out of the window to the low whistling of some endless, monotonous tune that would haunt him for days together and fret me to distraction. Now and again he would favour me with a serious speech, and then, with a glance, perhaps hurry away to his study before I could answer. To his half-completed dissertations on Hop, Cherry, and Paper, I learned he had added another, on the Oyster.
Many of his letters were now postmarked Whitstable. He even advertised in his old enemy, the _Courier_, for information: and would break out into furious abuse at the stupidity of his correspondents. Meanwhile his appet.i.te increased; he would nod in his chair; his clothes grew shabby; his appearance neglected. Poor dear, he missed my mother.
But I made a struggle to take her place. Every morning Pollie would carry me off to the kitchen for a discussion with Mrs Ballard over the household affairs of the day. With her fat, floury hand, she would hide her mouth and gravely nod her head at my instructions. But I knew she was concealing her amus.e.m.e.nt. "Oh, these men!" she once exclaimed at some new caprice of "the master"s," "they are never happy unless they can be where they bain"t." With my own hand I printed out for her a list of my father"s favourite dishes. I left off my black and wore bright colours again, so that he might not be constantly reminded of the past.
But when after long debate I took courage one day to propose myself as his housekeeper--I shall never forget the facial expression which he quickly rubbed off with his hand.
He fetched out of his trousers pocket a great bunch of keys, and jangled them almost ferociously in the air at me for a full minute together with tears of amus.e.m.e.nt in his eyes. Then he tossed down the last gulp or two of his port and went off. A moment after he must have realized how cruel a blow he had dealt my vanity and my love. He returned, seated himself heavily in his chair, and looked at me. Then stretching out his hand he dropped his face on to his arm. A horrible quietness spread over the room. For the first time I looked with a kind of terror at the hairy fingers and whitening head, and could not stir.
How oddly chance repeats itself. The door opened and once more, unannounced, Miss Fenne appeared in our midst. My father hastily rose to greet her, pretending that nothing was amiss. But when she held out her clawlike hand to me to be kissed, I merely stared at her. She screwed up her countenance into a smile; mumbled that I was looking pale and peaked again; and, with difficulty keeping her eyes from mine, explained that she had come for a business talk with my father.
A few days afterwards I was standing up at the window of my mother"s little sewing-room--always a favourite refuge of mine, for there the afternoon sun and the colours of evening used to beat into the corner.
And I saw a small-sized woman with a large black bonnet come waddling up the drive. She was followed by a boy wheeling a square box on a two-wheeled trolley. It was Mrs Sheppey come to be housekeeper to the widower and his daughter.
Mrs Sheppey proved to be a hara.s.sed and muddling woman, and she came to a hara.s.sed home. My father"s affairs had gone from bad to worse. He was gloomy and morose. A hunted look sometimes gleamed in his eyes, and the spectacled nose seemed to grow the smaller the more solemn its surroundings were. He spent most of the day in his dressing-gown now, had quarrelled with Dr Grose, and dismissed Mrs Ballard. The rooms were dirty and neglected. Pollie would maunder about with a broom, or stand idly staring out of the window. She was in love. At least, so I realize now. At the time I thought she was merely lumpish and stupid.
Only once in my recollection did Mrs Sheppey pay my own quarters a visit. I was kneeling on my balcony and out of sight, and could watch her unseen. She stood there--tub-shaped, a k.n.o.b of dingy hair sticking out from her head, her skirts suspended round her boots--pa.s.sively examining my bed, my wardrobe, and my other belongings. Her scrutiny over, she threw up her hands and the whites of her eyes as if in expostulation to heaven, turned about in her cloth boots, and waddled out again. Pollie told me, poor thing, that her children had been thorns in her side. I brooded over this. Had I not myself, however involuntarily, been a thorn in _my_ mother"s side? I despised and yet pitied Mrs Sheppey.
She was, if anything, frightened of me, and of my tongue, and would address me as "little lady" in a cringing, pursed-up fashion. But I am thankful to say she never attempted to touch me or to lift me from the floor. Her memory is inextricably bound up with a brown, round pudding with a slimy treacle sauce which she used to send to table every Tuesday, Thursday, and Sat.u.r.day. My father would look at it with his nose rather than with his eyes; and after perhaps its fiftieth appearance, he summoned Mrs Sheppey with a violent tug at the bell. She thrust her head in at the door. "Take it away," he said, "take it away.
Eat it. Devour it. Hide it from G.o.d"s sight, good woman. Don"t gibber.
Take it away!"
His tone frightened me out of my wits and Mrs Sheppey out of the house.
Then came the end. At the beginning of August in my twentieth year, my father, who had daily become stranger in appearance and habits, though steadfastly refusing to call in his old friend, Dr Grose, was found dead in his bed. He was like a boy who never can quite succeed in pleasing himself or his masters. He had gone to bed and shut his eyes, never in this world to open them again.
Chapter Five
Am I sorry that almost beside myself with this new affliction, and bewildered and frightened by the incessant coming and going of strangers in the house, I refused to be carried down to bid that unanswering face good-bye? No, I have no regret on that score. The older I grow the more closely I seem to understand him. If phantoms of memory have any reality--and it is wiser, I think, to remember the face of the living rather than the stony peace of the dead--he has not forgotten his only daughter.
Double-minded creature I was and ever shall be; now puffed up with arrogance at the differences between myself and gross, common-sized humanity; now stupidly sensitive to the pangs to which by reason of these differences I have to submit. At times I have been tempted to blame my parents for my shortcomings. What wicked folly--they did not choose their only child. After all, too, fellow creatures of any size seem much alike. They rarely have _nothing_ to blame Providence for--the length of their noses or the size of their feet, their bones or their corpulence, the imbecilities of their minds or their bodies, the "accidents" of birth, breeding, station, or circ.u.mstance. Yet how secure and perhaps wholesome is Man"s self-satisfaction. To what ideal does he compare himself but to a self-perfected abstraction of his own image?
Even his Venus and Apollo are mere flattering reflections of his own he- or she-shapes. And what of his anthropomorphic soul?
As for myself, Dame Nature may some day take a fancy to the dwarf. "What a pretty play it would be"--I have clean forgotten where I chanced on this amusing pa.s.sage--"What a pretty play it would be if, from the next generation onwards, the only humans born into the world should be of mere pygmy stature. Fifty years hence there would remain but few of the normal-sized in the land. Imagine these aged few, miserably stalking through the dwarfed streets, picking up a scanty livelihood in city or country-side, where their very boots would be a public danger, their very tread would set the bells in the steeples ringing, and their appet.i.tes would be a national incubus. House, shop, church, high road, furniture, vehicles abandoned or sunken to the pygmy size; wars and ceremonies, ambitions and enterprises, everything but prayers, dwindled to the petty. Would great-grandfather be venerated, cherished, admired, a welcome guest, a lamented emigrant? Would there be as many mourners as s.e.xtons at his funeral, as many wreaths as congratulations at his grave?" And so on and so forth--like Jonathan Swift.
But I must beware. Partly from fatigue and partly from dislike of the version of Miss M. that stared out of his picture at me, I had begun, I remember, to be a little fretful when old Mr Wagginhorne was painting my portrait. And I complained pertly that I thought there were far too many azaleas on the potted bush.
"Ah, little Miss Finical," he said, "take care, if you please. Once there was a Diogenes whom the G.o.ds shut up in a tub and fed on his own spleen. He died.... He died," he repeated, drawing his brush slowly along the canvas, "of dyspepsia."
He popped round, "Think of that."
I can think of that to better purpose now, and if there is one thing in the world whose company I shall deplore in my coffin, that thing is a Cynic. That is why I am trying as fast as I can to put down my experiences in black and white before the black predominates.
But I must get back to my story. My poor father had left his affairs in the utmost disorder. His chief mourners were his creditors. Apart from these, one or two old country friends and distant relatives, I believe, attended his funeral, but none even of them can have been profoundly interested in the Hop, the Oyster, or the Cherry, at least in the abstract. Dr Grose, owing to ill-health, had given up his practice and was gone abroad. But though possibly inquiry was made after the small creature that had been left behind, I stubbornly shut myself away in my room under the roof, listening in a fever of apprehension to every sinister movement in the house beneath.
Yet if a friend in need is a friend indeed, then I must confess that my treatment of Miss Fenne was the height of ingrat.i.tude.
In my grief and desolation, the future seemed to be only a veil beyond the immediate present, which I had neither the wish nor the power to withdraw. Miss Fenne had no such illusions. I begged Pollie to make any excuse she could think of to prevent her from seeing me. But at last she pushed her way up, and doubtless, the news and the advice she brought were the best tonic that could have been prescribed for me.
As a child I had always a.s.sociated my G.o.dmother with the crocodile (though not with Mr Bosch"s charming conception of it, in his picture of the Creation). Yet there were no tears in her faded eyes when she explained that of my father"s modest fortune not a pittance remained. In a few days the house, with everything in it except my own small sticks of furniture, was to be sold by auction. I must keep my door locked against intruders. All that would be left to me was a small income of about 110 per annum, derived from money bequeathed to me by a relative of my mother"s whom I had never seen.
"I fancy your father knew nothing about it," she concluded, "at least so your dear _mother_ seemed to imply. But there! it"s a sad business, a sad business. And that Tapa scandal; a lamentable affair." Having thus prepared the way, my G.o.dmother proposed that I should take up my residence in her house, and commit my future entirely to her charge.
"You cannot be an expensive guest," she explained, "and I am sure you will try to be a grateful one. No truly _conscientious_ G.o.dparent, my dear child, _ever_ relinquishes the soul committed to her care. I sometimes wonder whether your poor dear mother realized this."
But it was my soul, if that is brother to the spirit and can be neighbour to pride, that revolted against her proposition. I had to shut my eyes at the very remembrance of Miss Fenne"s prim and musty drawing-room. Every intimation, every jerk of her trembling head, every pounce of her jewelled fingers only hardened my heart. Poor Miss Fenne.
Her resentment at my refusal seemed to increase her shortness of sight.
Looking in on her from my balcony, I had the advantage of her, as she faced me in the full light in her chair, dressed up in her old lady"s clothes like a kind of human Alp among my pygmy belongings. I tried to be polite, but this only increased her vexation. One smart tap of the ivory ball that topped her umbrella would have been my _coup de grace_.
She eyed me, but never administered it.
At last she drew in her lips and fell silent. Then, as may happen at such moments, her ill-temper and chagrin, even the sense of her own dignity drooped away, and for a while in the quietness we were simply two ill-a.s.sorted human beings, helpless in the coils of circ.u.mstance.
She composed her mouth, adjusted her bonnet strings, peered a moment from dim old eyes out of the window, then once more looked at me.
"It must be, then, as G.o.d wills," she said in a trembling voice. "The spirit of your poor dear mother must be judge between us. She has, we may trust, gone to a better world."
For a moment my resolution seemed to flow away like water, and I all but surrendered. But a rook cawed close overhead, and I bit my lip. Little more was said, except that she would consider it her duty to find me a comfortable and G.o.d-fearing home. But she admonished me of the future, warned me that the world was a network of temptations, and a.s.sured me of her prayers. So we parted. I bowed her out of my domain. It was the last time we met. Two days afterwards I received her promised letter:--
"MY DEAR G.o.dCHILD,--Mr Ambrose Pellew, an old _clergyman_ friend of mine, in whose discretion and knowledge of the world I have every confidence, has spoken for you to an old married, respectable servant of his now living a few miles from London--a Mrs Bowater.
For the charge of thirty shillings a week she has consented to give you board, lodging, and _reasonable_ attendance. In all the circ.u.mstances this seems to me to be a moderate sum. Mr Pellew a.s.sures me that Mrs B. is clean, honest, and a _practising_ Christian. When this dreadful Sale is over, I have arranged that Pollie shall conduct you safely to what will in future be your _home_. I trust that you will be as happy there as Providence permits, though I cannot doubt that your poor dear mother and your poor father, too, for that matter, would have wished otherwise--that the roof of her old friend who was present at your Baptism and _insisted_ on your Confirmation, should have been your refuge and asylum now that you are absolutely alone in the world.
"However, you have rejected this proposal, and have _chosen your own path_. I am not your legal guardian, and I am too deeply _pained_ to refer again to your obstinacy and ingrat.i.tude. Rest a.s.sured that, in spite of all, I shall remember you in my prayers, and I trust, D. V., that you will escape the temptations of this wicked world--a world in which it has pleased G.o.d, in spite of self-sacrificing and anxious friends, to place you at so distressing a disadvantage. But in His Sight all men are equal. Let that be your continual consolation. See Amos vii. 2; Prov. x.x.xi.
24-28; Eccles. xii. 1.