“Understand me once and for all, Evangeline, I absolutely forbid it.”
Head in the air the girl walked out of the room, slamming the door
behind her.
Lady Stableford, thoroughly upset by the discussion which had taken
place, sank into a low easy-chair and put her handkerchief to her
eyes. She had married her husband at an early age, and had passed
up the social ladder with him, as a rapidly developing business had
increasingly provided him with the wealth which had opened the doors
of Parliament to the successful merchant, and finally brought him the
baronetcy which he had been permitted to pay for, so that his political
and party services might be rewarded therewith. No child had blessed
their marriage; and as time drew on, and unlikelihood dissolved
itself into impossibility, the old lady yearned the more for the child
to mother and take care of which was denied to her. As parliamentary
duties appropriated an increasing portion of her husband’s time, Lady
Stableford, after much opposition, at length obtained Sir James’
consent to her adoption of a child. Finally she advertised under an
assumed name, stipulating that the child must be a girl, must be
completely and irrevocably transferred, and thereafter remain in
ignorance of her real parentage: and she required that the child must
be of gentle birth.
The advertisement was answered by a solicitor on behalf of a client.
Lady Stableford attempted to insist on a substantiated disclosure
of the parentage, and in consequence the negotiations terminated
with the refusal of the information and the consequent withdrawal of
Lady Stableford’s offer of adoption. Within a week Lady Stableford,
returning to the drawing-room after a solitary dinner, found that
during her absence from the room, a child, plainly only a few days
old, had been left upon the sofa. The flapping of the blind drew her
attention to the still open French window, the obvious means by which
access to the room had been obtained. At once summoning assistance,
Lady Stableford had her park and gardens carefully searched, but
without results. For some time the child slept, and Lady Stableford was
puzzled what course to adopt. She objected to an unknown child being
thrust upon her in that way and without her consent; but the tiny atom
of humanity woke with a plaintive cry, and Lady Stableford’s decision
was made at once. All the motherliness of her nature welled up, and
from that moment she regarded the child as her own and treated it
precisely as if it had been.
Assuming, rightly or wrongly, she never could determine, that this
must be the child concerning which she had been in communication, she
again wrote to the solicitor. After an interval the letter was returned
to her from the Dead Letter Office, marked “gone; address unknown.” An
appeal to her own solicitors to help her at once revealed the fact that
there was no solicitor of the name upon the roll.
Carefully Lady Stableford had examined the clothing the child had worn
and the shawl in which it had been wrapped. Everything was new and of
good quality, and every article was scrupulously clean; but there was
no tell-tale coronet upon the clothing to suggest romance, nothing
by which identity could be traced. Even the clever brains of her
solicitors could suggest no steps she might take to put an end to her
doubts. Of birth-marks the child had none.
The identity, as Lady Stableford, of the lady who had advertised
the offer of adoption she knew of course had been disclosed only to
the supposititious solicitor with whom her own advisers had been in
correspondence. There could be little if any doubt the child was the
same; but that gave her no further knowledge than the bare fact, if
her supposition were correct, that the baby girl for whom she had now
accepted the responsibility was born on the 18th of August, 1881. From
what her doctor could tell her there could be no doubt that if that
were not actually the child’s birthday, her birth must have occurred
within the margin of a day or two on either side of it.
The child, as she grew up, was not a lovable child; and long before
the fair-haired baby had reached that stage of lankiness, when, a few
days after they were new, her frocks always seemed to shrink above her
knees, emphasising the spindle legs which needed so little of that
emphasis, the girl was a dark-haired little fury, with a perfectly
ungovernable temper.
Increasing years, and the chronic irritability of a constant invalid,
had all helped to diminish the patience of Lady Stableford; and a
child of the temper and temperament of the wayward Evangeline needs an
endless patience in her bringing up, which patience Lady Stableford had
ceased to possess. The result was that as time went on the child was
left more and more under the care and control of servants, none too
wisely chosen, and such affection as Lady Stableford had originally had
for the lonesome little baby had degenerated into the loveless duty to
the child whose future she had taken into her own hands.
Her schooldays over, Evangeline came back to her home--a tall,
aristocratic-looking beauty; and, in the hope of companionship, Lady
Stableford turned again to the girl. But it was then too late. Of duty
the girl knew nothing, and the keen memory of her youthful mind matched
against any present show of affection which was made to her, the vivid
recollections of the scoldings and punishments of her nursery days. The
two women were out of sympathy. The old lady ceased her efforts, the
girl never attempted to make any.
The pair lived together in the same house. The girl’s life was one
constant rebellion against the irritable, irritated, and irritating
attempts at her own control made by the elder woman.
Bored to extinction by the life she was apparently expected to
lead, exasperated by the querulous exactions of the irritable old
lady, driven inexorably by the exuberance of youth and the nervous
restlessness of her own excitable temperament, Evangeline had made
up her mind that it was a necessity to her that she should find
occupation in a working career. The girl was probably right, but it by
no means followed that her choice had been made in the right direction.
That choice had fallen upon the stage--had been expressed to Lady
Stableford--and the interview had terminated with an emphatic refusal
of consent and an emphatic forbidding of further thoughts in that
direction.
Sir James, now long since deceased, had been a stalwart among
Nonconformists. Lady Stableford, always despising in her heart
the social position of Nonconformity, had nevertheless lacked the
moral courage to adopt a change of religious persuasion, and, until
increasing years relieved her from the necessity of the great mental
effort involved in the framing of plausible excuses for absence,
continued, Sunday by Sunday, to “sit under” the long succession of
electro-plated divines who held forth in the building which her
husband had built, endowed, and opened. To say that Lady Stableford
was religious would not be accurate, because all that a lifetime of
Nonconformity had endowed her with was a restriction of her mental
aspect to the intolerant narrowness of the bigoted orthodoxy of her
own particular brand. Hatred of the theatre, which she regarded as a
forcing house of sin, was one of those fixed ideas she had absorbed
and accepted. Degradation in this world and damnation in the next she
believed to be the foreordained and inevitably resulting consequence of
any association with things theatrical.
To the inherent inclination of Evangeline towards a theatrical career
was now added not only the attraction of the forbidden thing, but also
the fascination of that which has been declared to be wicked. To this
composite and powerful temptation the girl succumbed. The thing was
inevitable--probably would have happened in any case; the happening
was in all likelihood no more than precipitated by Lady Stableford’s
attitude and prohibition. But these affected the relations of the two
when the separation came, and caused the elder woman many a long month
of pain and unhappiness, of stubborn anger, which step by step had
mellowed into regret, forgiveness, and then into comprehension and keen
remorse. Drilled by her loneliness the old lady at last swallowed her
pride and wrote asking the girl to come back to her.
Lady Stableford had waited too long. There had been occasions, many
and oft indeed, when Evangeline, cowed by the pitiful hardships in
the poverty-stricken existence of the provincial travelling company
in which she was striving to master her profession, would have jumped
at the invitation. There had even once or twice come times when,
heartbroken by illness, by lack of employment, and utter weariness of
spirit, the girl’s pride had been broken, and she had penned piteous
appeals to be allowed to return home; but the letters had never been
sent, and at last had come success. The girl’s reviving spirit soaked
up like a sponge the adulation that success brought in its train,
and her parched soul again expanded into the proud, high-spirited
temperament which had been her inheritance. But hardship bravely borne
had chastened her, taught her forbearance and charity of thought and
had given her some control of her hot temper.
The invitation when it reached her was not refused, but was accepted
only for a visit. A tentative suggestion to settle a suitable income,
and in return that Evangeline should leave the stage, was gently but
firmly put on one side, and Lady Stableford perforce had to content
herself with the consent of the girl to make her old home her
headquarters, living there whenever her profession did not require her
presence elsewhere, and with the acceptance of a liberal allowance.
Once again the old lady altered her will, and once more the name of
Evangeline Stableford stood as chief beneficiary and residuary legatee.