And it was upon this gentle, solitary household that suddenly Mánya
Petrovski descended with her presence of wonder and of magic. Out of
a clear blue sky she dropped upon him and made herself deliciously at
home. Only daughter of his widowed sister, married to a Russian, she
was fourteen at the time of her mother’s death; and the duty seemed
forced upon him with a conviction that admitted of no denial. He had
never seen the child in his life, for she was born in the year that
he returned to England, family relations simply non-existent; but he
had heard of her, partly from Mrs. Coove, his housekeeper, and partly
from tentative letters his sister wrote from time to time, aiming
at reconciliation. He only knew that she was backward to the verge
of being stupid, that she ‘loved Nature and life out of doors,’ and
that she shared with her strange father a certain sulking moodiness
that seemed to have been so strong in his own half-civilised Slav
temperament. He also remembered that her mother, a curious mixture of
puritanism and weakly dread of living, had brought her up strictly in
the manufacturing city of the midlands where they dwelt ‘wealthily,’
surrounded by an atmosphere of artificiality that he deemed almost
criminal. For his sister, fostering old-fashioned religious
tendencies, believed that a visible Satan haunted the frontiers of
her narrow orthodoxy, and would devour Mánya as soon as look at her
once she strayed outside. She too had claimed, he remembered, to love
Nature, though her love of it consisted solely in looking cleverly
out of windows at passing scenery she need never bother herself to
reach. Her husband’s violent tempers she had likewise ascribed to
his possession by a devil, if not by _the_--her own personal--devil
himself. And when this letter, written on her death-bed, came begging
him, as the only possible relative, to take charge of the child, he
accepted it, as his character was, unflinchingly, yet with the greatest
possible reluctance. Significant, too, of his character was the detail
that, out of many others surely far more important, first haunted him:
‘She’ll love Nature (by which he meant the Place) in the way her mother
did--artificially. We shan’t get on a bit!’--thus, instinctively,
betraying what lay nearest to his heart.
None the less, he accepted the position without hesitation. There was
no money; his sister’s property was found to be mortgaged several times
above its realisable value, and the child would come to him without
a penny. He went headlong at the problem, as at so many other duties
that had faced him--puzzling, awkward duties--with a kind of blundering
delicacy native to his blood. ‘Got to be done, no good dreaming about
it,’ he said to himself within a few hours of receiving the letter; and
when a little later the telegram came announcing his sister’s death,
he added shortly with a grim expression, ‘Here goes, then!’ In this
plucky, yet not really impulsive decisiveness, the layer of character
acquired in Arizona asserted itself. Action ousted dreaming.
And in due course the preparations for the girl’s reception were
concluded. She would make the journey south alone, and Mrs. Coove would
meet her. Moreover, evidence to himself at least of true welcome, Mánya
should have the bedroom which had been for years unoccupied--his wife’s.
For all that, he dreaded her arrival unspeakably. ‘She’ll be bored
here. She’ll dislike the Place--perhaps hate it. And I shall dislike
her too.’