MAUD.
Nature said, 'A lovelier flower
On earth was never sown:
This child I to myself will take;
She shall be mine, and I will make
A lady of my own.'
When Vernon was appointed Under-Secretary to the Salt Board, he no doubt
imagined that it was in connection with that august body that he would
be known to fame and (as Strutt would grandiloquently have put it) leave
his mark on his epoch. He was destined, however, as the reader of these
pages will presently perceive, to become remarkable on the less unusual
ground of relationship to an extremely pretty girl. His cousin Maud, of
whom years before, in a rash moment of benevolence, he had consented to
become guardian and trustee, had been suddenly thrown upon his hands.
She was no longer a remote anxiety which could be disposed of by
cheques, letters to governesses, and instructions to solicitors, but an
immediate, living reality, with a highly effective pair of eyes, good
looks--as to which women might cavil, but every man would be a firm
believer--the manner of an eager child, and a joyousness which Vernon
was obliged to admit was at once deliciously infectious to the world at
large, and a very agreeable alternative to the state of mind produced by
Indian summers, salt statistics, letters polished by Whisp or
commonplaces enunciated by Fotheringham. With the timidity of indolence
he shuddered to think of the social entanglements and disturbances which
so new an element in his household was calculated to produce.
Maud, on the other hand, had come out to India with a very low opinion
of herself and of her claims upon the good-will of society. At Miss
Goodenough's establishment for young ladies, where her education had
been completed, her shortcomings had been impressed upon her in a manner
wholesome, perhaps, and necessary, but decidedly depressing. She had
been haunted by the awful consciousness that she was a 'Tomboy.' Her
general demeanour, her mode of expressing herself, her ignorance of many
things with which no one ought to be unfamiliar, had been the object of
the most unflattering comment. The elder Miss Goodenough--between whom
and Maud there existed a real though somewhat fitful attachment--used to
have her into a solemn little chamber and administer the most awful
lectures on her sins of commission and omission, and the disgrace and
suffering which they would justly entail. These interviews were
generally tearful and tender; for Miss Goodenough, to whom Maud had been
consigned as a child on her first arrival from India, loved her with a
sort of rapture which made itself felt amid all the vehement
fault-finding which Maud's delinquencies necessitated. Maud had always
regarded the old lady in something of a maternal light, and never could
be brought to abandon the familiar abbreviation of 'Goody,' by which she
had been allowed, as a child, to address her instructress. She accepted
her instructress's sentences accordingly with unquestioning faith and
submission. The two used to weep together over Maud's shortcomings. She
looked upon Miss Goodenough as a friend whose heart it was her unlucky
fate to lacerate. Miss Goodenough regarded Maud as a creature whose
alarming impulses and irregularities justified the darkest forebodings
as to her future, and succeeded in infecting her pupil with some of her
own apprehensions. Some judgment must, so both agreed, sooner or later
overtake one whose shoulders seemed guided by a hidden law to unequal
altitudes, whose toes defied every endeavour to keep them pointed in the
conventional direction, and whose impetuous behaviour was constantly
producing a scandal of more or less gravity.
'Dearest child,' Miss Goodenough would say, with an air of profound
commiseration, 'if you could see how you look, with one shoulder up to
your ears and the other near to what should be your waist!'
This taunt particularly grieved Maud, for she felt bitterly that her
form was unromantically plump, and not at all of the refined tenuity of
several of her companions.
'My shoulders!' she would exclaim, with the tears in her eyes; 'I wish
they were both at Jericho. I am sure I am made wrong, dearest Goody,
indeed I am.'
'Then, my dear,' Miss Goodenough would say, not encouragingly, 'we
should try all the more to remedy natural defects; at any rate, you
might know your Bible. Now, dear Maud, your ignorance is, you know,
simply shocking.'
'Yes I know,' said Maud, 'but I can't help it. Those horrid kings of
Israel and Judah! They made Israel to sin, they make me to sin, indeed
they do. Jehoshaphat, Jehoiakim, Jonadab, Jehu--all wicked--all
beginning with J--how can any one remember them?'
'Then, my dear,' her inexorable monitress would reply, 'you can never
know what every well-educated young lady, what every mere school-child,
is acquainted with. How can you be fit to go into the world?'
'I wish,' said Maud, passionately, in despair at the difficulties of
existence, 'that when the tribes got lost they had taken their histories
with them, and lost them too. Darling Goody, let me learn texts, hymns,
all the Sermon on the Mount, as much poetry as you please, only not
those dreadful Chronicles!' Maud used on these occasions to throw her
arms round Goody's neck in an outbreak of affectionate repentance, in a
way that the elder lady, who was absurdly impressionable, found it
difficult to resist.
But Miss Goodenough's kindness made Maud's conscience all the less at
ease. Calmness, self-restraint, composure, a well-stocked mind, and
sensible judgment were, Miss Goodenough told her, the great excellencies
of character to be aimed at. Maud looked into herself, and felt, with
agonies of self-reproach, that in every particular she fell miserably
short; that she was the very reverse of calm; the least thing roused her
into passion, or sent her spinning from the summit of serene high
spirits to the lowest depths of despair; as for self-restraint, Maud
felt she was just as capable of it as of flying to the moon.
From time to time she made violent efforts to be diligent, and set to
work with sudden zeal upon books which her instructress assured her were
most interesting and improving. These attempts, for the most part,
collapsed in grievous failure. Improvement, Maud felt ruefully, there
might be, though unbeknown to herself; interest, she was certain, there
was none. On the other hand, a chance novel, which had somehow or other
passed scatheless through the rigid blockade which Miss Goodenough
established around her young ladies, had filled her with a sort of
ecstacy of excitement; and no amount of poetry--no such amount, at any
rate, as came within the narrow limits of her mistress's literary
horizon--seemed capable of fatiguing or even of satisfying her.
Displaying the most complete inaptitude for every other form of
diligence, she was ready enough to learn any amount that any one liked
to give her. She even signalised her zeal by the spasmodic transcription
of her favourite passages into a precious volume marked with a solemn
'Private,' protected from profane eyes by a golden padlock and destined
by its proprietress to be the depository of all her intellectual
treasures.
Miss Goodenough, however, though admitting perforce the merits of the
great masters of English song, regarded the claims of poetry as
generally subordinate to those of history, geography, arithmetic, and
various other branches of useful and ornamental learning, and treated
Maud's passion for Sir Walter Scott as but another alarming symptom of
an excitable disposition and ill-regulated mind.
A crisis came at last. It happened at church, where Miss Goodenough's
young ladies used to sit just under the gallery, while the boys of 'The
Crescent House Academy' performed their devotions overhead. One fatal
Sunday in February, just as the Service was over, and the two Misses
Goodenough had already turned their backs to lead the way out, and the
young ladies were preparing to follow, a little missive came fluttering
down and fell almost into Maud's hands; at any rate, she slipped it into
her Prayer-book; and all would have gone well but for that horrid
Mademoiselle de Vert, who, turning sharply round, detected the
occurrence, and the moment Maud was outside the church demanded her
Prayer-book.
Maud turned fiery red in an instant, and surrendered her book.
'And the note,' said Mademoiselle de Vert.
'What note?' said Maud. But alas! her telltale cheeks rendered the
question useless, and made all evasion impossible. Maud was speedily
driven to open resistance.
'No, thank you,' she said, with an air that told Mademoiselle de Vert
that further attempts at coercion would be labour thrown away; 'it was
not intended for you; it was a valentine.'
After this appalling disclosure there was, of course, when they got
home, an explanation to be had with Miss Goodenough, who professed
herself, and probably really was, terrified at so new a phase of human
depravity.
Maud was presently in floods of tears, and was obliged to confess that
she and the offending culprit had on more than one occasion let each
other's eyes meet, had in fact exchanged looks, and even smiles; so
that, perhaps, she was the real occasion for this unhallowed act of
temerity.
'Forgive me, forgive me!' she cried; 'it was nothing wrong; it was only
a heart with an arrow and a Cupid!'
'A Cupid!' cried Miss Goodenough, in horror at each new revelation, 'and
some writing too, I suppose?'
'Yes,' said Maud, whose pleasure in the valentine was rapidly
surmounting the disgrace into which it had got her; 'really pretty
verses. Here it is!' And thereupon she produced the offending billet,
and proceeded to read with effusion:--
I would thou wert a summer rose,
And I a bird to hover o'er thee;
And from the dawn to evening's close
To warble only, 'I adore thee!'
'Stop!' cried Miss Goodenough, with great decision, and white with
indignation; 'do you know what you are reading? Do you know that that
vulgar rubbish is the sort of odious impertinence that shop-boys send to
their sweethearts, but which it is an insult to let a lady even see, and
which, transmitted in a church, is little less than sacrilege?'
So saying, Miss Goodenough took the offending letter and consigned it to
the flames, and poor Maud stood ruefully by, watching the conflagration
of the silver Cupid, mourning over Miss Goodenough's hard-heartedness,
and consoling herself with the reflection that at any rate she
remembered the verses.
'I must write to your aunt Felicia to remove you. What an example for
other girls!'
'Well,' said Maud resignedly, and blushing in anticipation at the
thought of such an exposure; 'do not, at any rate, tell her about the
valentine. Dear Goody, did you never have one sent to you when you were
my age?'
Miss Goodenough quite declined to gratify this audacious inquiry, and
made up her mind that it was high time for Maud to be under more
masterful guidance than her own. The result was that in the following
November Maud was a passenger on the P. & O. steamship 'Cockatrice,'
from Southampton to Calcutta, where her cousin Vernon was to meet her
and escort her to her new home in Dustypore.
She had been, it must be acknowledged, to a certain degree reassured by
the experience of her voyage. She found that the kings of Israel and
Judah did not occupy a prominent place in general conversation; that a
precise acquaintance with the queens of England was not expected of her;
and that nobody resented the impetuosity of her movements or her want of
self-restraint. On the contrary, several of her fellow-voyagers had
evinced the liveliest sympathy and interest in her, and had devoted
themselves successfully to keeping her amused. Maud, in fact, had gone
down to her cabin on more occasions than one during the voyage and shed
some tears at the approaching separation from friends, whom even those
few weeks of chance companionship had carried close to her heart. It had
been in truth a happy time. The captain, to whose special care she was
committed, had watched over her with a more than paternal interest. The
doctor insisted on her having champagne. The purser set all his occult
influences at work to increase her comfort. The stewards conspired to
spoil her. Maud felt that nothing she could do would at all adequately
express her feelings to all these good people who had ministered to her
wants and tried, with so much success, to please her. There are people,
no doubt, to whom a voyage to India is the height of boredom; but there
are other happier natures to whom it presents a continuous series of
excitements, interests, and joys. Maud, at any rate, enjoyed it with a
sort of rapture, and trembled to think how faintly Miss Goodenough's
admonitions even now began to fall upon her conscience's ear.
Then there had been some very charming fellow-passengers on board, with
whom she had formed the warmest friendship. There was a certain Mr.
Mowbray, for instance--a comely, curly-headed, beardless boy, on his way
to join his regiment--whom she found extremely interesting, and who lost
no time in becoming confidential. It was very pleasant to sit on deck
through long lazy mornings and play bésique with Mr. Mowbray; and
pleasant too, when the day was done, to sit with him in the moonlight
and watch the Southern Cross slowly wheeling up and the waves all ablaze
with phosphoric splendour, and to talk about home and Mr. Mowbray's
sisters, and the stations to which each of them were bound, never,
probably, to meet again. There was something mysterious about it, Maud
felt, and impressive, and very, very charming.
And then, on some evenings, the stewardess would declare that Maud
looked pale, or had a headache, and that she should have a little
dinner on deck; 'Just a bit of chicken, miss,' this benevolent being
would say, 'and a slice of ham, and the doctor will give you a glass of
champagne. The cabin is a deal too hot for you.' And then, by some happy
fatality, Mr. Mowbray would also have a headache that very afternoon,
and nothing but dining on deck would do for him; and so there would be a
very pleasant little repast going on over the heads of the hot, noisy
crowd who were gobbling up their food below; and the two invalids would
forget their maladies, fancied or real, in the innocent excitement of a
congenial _tête-à-tête_. On the whole, Maud had arrived at Dustypore
with the conviction that existence, though beset with almost innumerable
difficulties and dangers, was replete with enjoyments, which made it,
despite every drawback, most thoroughly well worth while to be alive.