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 godmother 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 godparent, 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 grâce. 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-assorted human beings, helpless in the coils of circumstance. 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 God 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 God-fearing home. But she admonished me of the future, warned me that the world was a network of temptations, and assured 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 Godchild,—
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 circumstances this seems to me to be a moderate sum. Mr Pellew assures 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 ingratitude. Rest assured 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 God, 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. xxxi. 24-28; Eccles. xii. 1.
I remain, your affectionate godmother,
Emma E. Fenne.
PS.—I reopen this letter to explain that your financial affairs are in the hands of Messrs Harris, Harris, and Harris, respectable solicitors of Gray’s Inn. They will remit you on every quarter day—Christmas Day, Lady Day, June 25th and September 29th—the sum of £28 10s. 0d. Of this you will pay £19 10s. at once to Mrs Bowater, who, I have no doubt, will advise you on the expenditure of what remains on wearing apparel, self-improvement, missions, charity, and so on. It grieves me that from the wreckage of your father’s affairs you must not anticipate a further straw of assistance. All his money and property will be swallowed up in the dreadful storm that has broken over what we can only trust is a tranquil resting place. R. I. P.—E. E. F.”
So sprawling and straggling was my godmother’s penmanship that I spelled her letter out at last with a minifying glass, though rather for forlorn amusement’s sake than by necessity. Not that this diminishment of her handwriting in any sense lessened the effect upon me of the sentiments it conveyed. They at once daunted me and gave me courage. For a little I hesitated, then at last I thought out in my heart that God might be kinder to me than Miss Fenne wished. Indeed I was so invigorated by the anticipation of the “wicked world,” that I all but called her a crocodile to her phantasmal face. Couldn’t I—didn’t I—myself “mean well” too? What pictures and prospects of the future, of my journey, of Mrs Bowater and the “network” pursued each other through my brain. And what a darkness oppressed me when a voice kept repeating over in my mind—Harris and Harris and Harris, as if it were a refrain to one of my grandfather’s chansons. Messrs Harris and Harris and Harris—I saw all three of them (dark men with whiskers), but trusted profoundly they would never come to see me.
Nor from that day to this, through all my giddying “ups” and sobering “downs” have I ever for a moment regretted my decision—though I might have conveyed it with a little better grace. My body, perhaps also my soul, would have been safer in the seclusion of my godmother’s house. But my spirit? I think it would have beaten itself to death there like a wasp on a window-pane. Whereas—well, here I am.
Chapter Six
Those last few days of August dragged on—days of a burning, windless heat. Yet, as days, I enjoyed them. On some upper branch of my family tree must have flourished the salamander. Indeed I think I should have been a denizen of Venus rather than of this colder, darker planet. I sat on my balcony, basking in the hot sunshine, my thoughts darting hither and thither like flies under a ceiling—those strange, winged creatures that ever seem to be attempting to trace out in their flittings the starry “Square of Pegasus.” In spite of my troubles and forebodings, and fleeting panics, my inward mind was calm. I carefully packed away my few little valuables. The very notion of food gave me nausea, but that I determined to conquer, since of course to become, at either extreme, a slave to one’s stomach, is a folly.
The noise and tramplings of the men in the rooms beneath never ceased, until Night brought quiet. The Sale lasted for two days. A stale and clouded air ascended even into my locked bedroom from the human beings (with their dust and tobacco and perfumes and natural presences) collected together in the heat of the great dining-room. A hum, a murmur, the scuffling of feet toiling downstairs with some heavy and cumbrous burden, the cries of the auctioneer, the coarse voices and laughter, the tinkle of glass—the stretching hours seemed endless; and every minute of them knelled the fate of some beloved and familiar object. I was glad my father couldn’t hear the bidding, and sorry that perhaps he did not know that the most valuable of his curios—how valuable I was to learn later—was safely hidden away in an upper room. So passed my birthday—the twentieth—nor tapped me on the shoulder with, “Ah, but, my dear, just you wait till I come again!”
None the less I thought a good deal about birthdays that afternoon, and wondered
