the altar.
The father, one of those retired officers of the selfish, disreputable, hard-up, red-nosed class, being well entangled in Mr. Grimm's toils, had handed over his daughter to him in discharge of an old debt connected with bill-discounting.
The attractions of the said daughter consisted of an absolute reversion that would some day fall into her possession.
To recite the main points of the transaction, in consideration of the tearing up of the captain's bit of paper, the marriage settlement, which referred solely to the reversion, was drawn up in a way satisfactory to Mr. Grimm, and the aforesaid virgin was duly conveyed to the aforesaid Mr. Grimm, according to the forms which are sanctioned by the Church and the Law.
One daughter, Mary, was the sole child of this marriage.
The unfortunate mother, after a two years' not very agreeable experience of married life, died off, in the quiet uncomplaining manner which had characterised her life, before anyone even realised that she was seriously ill.
From very early youth the life of poor little Mary was rendered miserable. It seemed that her father was incapable of any touch of parental affection; such characters are rare, but his character was a rare one for its unredeemable meanness.
He looked on his child as a nuisance—an expensive interloper in his house that the law obliged him to clothe and feed. He did feed her—badly, and clothed her somewhat better, for the sake of appearances, having a regard for his respectability.
He was cruel as well as mean. When he went down to the city he would lock up his infant child, keeping her a pallid prisoner within doors, all through the long summer day.
But meanness as well as cruelty prompted this treatment. He would not go to the expense of engaging a nurse for his daughter, and the little maid-of-all-work, as she said herself, had "quite enough to do without lugging that child out for an airing." Again it would not at all do for the child of respectable Mr. Grimm to be seen by the neighbours playing about the streets by herself like any little street arab—the street arabs whom she so soon learned to envy; for though starved, cold, beaten by drunken parents, they were free, free to romp about the gutters with other children, having luckily parents who had no respectability to keep up.
I do not know how Mary learned to read and write: in after years she could not say herself; but, at any rate, before she was seven, her father found that he could make his daughter useful. Her small hands, far whiter and thinner, alas! than they should have been, were employed all day in copying deeds and legal documents for him, in the round hand of a solicitor's clerk.
In the bright summer afternoons, while other children played, her little brown head was bowed over the dismal folios of chicanery.
When Mary was about ten years old a stepmother was introduced into the establishment. Why Grimm married her, what pecuniary or other inducement was present on this occasion, I do not know.
But now it came to pass that he—the mean, cowardly, foxy, little man with the red hair and the shifty eyes—met his match. The second Mrs. Grimm was a big woman with a purple face, a loud voice, and an almost Papuan mop of faded-straw coloured hair, a woman who ever overawed the solicitor. In this couple the offensive qualities of the two sexes were reversed. She was the more masculine of the two. The little man's readiest weapon was the feminine needle of nagging; hers the male bludgeon of blustering brutality.
Mrs. Grimm number two, without delay, conceived a violent dislike for her husband's little girl.
It was on this second marriage that the highly respectable family moved to No. 22 in the genteel street in Brixton.
And now the child's position was a more unhappy one than ever; and her inner life became one of hate, a terrible hate—and children can hate even more bitterly than their elders—against her father and step-mother, a hate ever aggravated by the abominable treatment she received at the hands of both.
Hers indeed was a miserable childhood, made up of blows, imprisonment, hard work, no play, no sunshine, no companion, and worse than all, taunts and insults that made her writhe—hasty words of that description which rankle deeply in an infant's heart, and are remembered through life in some cases: a fact some parents do not seem to realize.
So it was that all childishness was being driven out of the child and all womanliness out of the woman.
Before her father's second marriage she had sometimes made friends of the maids-of-all-work of the house, but now this was no longer to be. The stepmother not approving of such association was ever on the watch for it, and on any signs of intimacy between the daughter and the drudge declaring themselves, the latter was immediately packed off and some stern and quite unsympathetic person substituted.
The little girl toiled on at the law-copying and the domestic work, silent, moody, with a stern expression gathering on her face that made it look so old for her age. She became—who would not?—a liar and a hater. But she was brave, she could hate, she could not fear; she gave up crying before she was twelve years old.
Her only pleasure, her sole consolation after the blows and insults, was to lie awake at night and brood revenge. Child-like, she would build castles in the air, complicated little stories of which she herself was the central figure; but not the castles in the air of other children, dreams of fairy-land and happy adventure. No; the plot of all her fancies was revenge, punishment of her father and stepmother.
These were her day-dreams too when she sat mechanically copying the deeds—dreams always of hatred, of torturing her torturers; and at times she would smile, oh! so strange a smile for a child! when some more ingeniously terrible mode of repaying that debt of ill would occur to her infant mind.
Hate, suppressed but intense HATE! such was the education of Mary Grimm; so things went on until the period at which this story opens, when Mary was sixteen.
She looked a few years older than her age. In spite of her unwholesome training she was beautiful. She was tall and graceful. Her small head was well-set on her shoulders. Her features were regular—too regular perhaps if anything.
When she went out on an errand, wrapped in her faded shawl, walking fast, looking neither to the right nor to the left, meeting with cold and impassive glance, the stare of the passing stranger, how many men, and women too, would turn and look after the girl, struck by her pale quiet face.
It was a face that haunted one. There was something in it that puzzled, something mysterious in the expression that one could not explain at first, something inconsistent.
Inconsistent—that was it. For in the first place her brown hair was out in a fringe over her forehead. The vulgar boldness of that objectionable fashion, though it could not make her ugly, was singularly inappropriate to that Grecian face and head.
But that was not all: even had her hair been tied up, as it should have been, in the classic knot, the something inconsistent would still have been present. It lay in the strange difference of expression between the eyes and mouth. Looking into her eyes, those large violet long-lashed eyes that are perhaps the most beautiful of all, one could read in them delightful possibilities of love, womanly tenderness, the desire for sympathy, indeed the look that attracts man to woman.
But looking from the eyes to the mouth a chill would come over the observer, a disappointment, a feeling as if a barrier were set up between him and her, an obstacle that kept off love and sympathy.
For that mouth, beautiful in its moulding, was yet so firm,
