careful always to lock it up. _I don’t like religion._
“Miss Atkins says she loves God, and I asked her whether father
did. She was shocked, and said of course he did, because he was
a curate. I wish he loved _me_, but I don’t think he does. He
is nearly always cross, and I’m always being punished.”
Miss Page let the book fall on to her lap. Mechanically she turned
her face towards the meadows with their islands of motionless trees
emerging from the mists. But she did not see them. The childish words,
already considerably more than forty years old, already a little yellow
and faded, had brought into sight instead, the dreary house in Tufton
Street. With the clearness and precision of actual vision, she saw the
narrow staircase covered with oilcloth, which led up to the bedroom in
which she had spent so many hours of solitary confinement.
She saw the pattern on the shabby wall-paper. She saw her little iron
bedstead, covered with a counterpane of thick white material, with a
raised pattern upon its surface; the curtains of dingy drab rep on
either side of a red blind; the outlook across a leaden street, swept
by wind and rain.
She thought of her father, a morose, irritable man whose persistent bad
temper, condoned to himself under the guise of necessary chastisement,
had driven her brother from the house.
She remembered him in the clothes of his office, shabby and ill-cut,
going doggedly about the duties which in later years she knew had been
uncongenial.
Half reluctantly Anne took up the book again.
“I said that nothing ever happened to me. But one lovely thing
happened last year. I went to stay at Dymfield, with Mr. and
Mrs. Burbage. Mr. Burbage was some relation to my mother--a
cousin, I think. Anyhow they wrote to father, and asked him to
let me come. Their house is called Fairholme Court, and it is
a lovely house, only the furniture is ugly (except upstairs
in some of the bedrooms, where Mrs. Burbage can’t see it).
Mrs. Burbage is very funny. She was kind to me, and I liked
her rather, but not nearly so much as Mr. Burbage. I liked him
better than any one I ever saw, though he doesn’t talk much,
but reads all day long. Perhaps that’s what makes his eyes look
so tired and sad. He has a lovely study full of books, and he
let me read anything I liked. It was there that I read about
Charlotte and Emily and Anne Brontë. They are very interesting,
but I wish Emily had been called Anne, like me, instead of
the youngest one. I like Emily best. And I read Hans Andersen
too, and when I came away Mr. Burbage gave it to me. It is the
loveliest book in the world. My favourite story is ‘The Little
Sea Maid.’ Some day when I am grown up, I will go to places
where there are orange trees, and marble palaces, and the sea
is quite blue.
“My bedroom was so pretty. It was like a room in a fairy-tale. There
was furniture with spindly legs in it; the kind of furniture Mrs.
Burbage said was ugly and old-fashioned. But I thought it was very
pretty. There were white curtains to the bed, and the wall-paper had
pink rosebuds on it, and the window was like a little door with lots
of tiny panes, and it pushed outwards. There was clematis all round
the window, and white roses which tried to grow into the room. In the
morning I used to hear the birds chirping in their nests, and then I
used to jump out of bed, and see the sun rising over the fields. And
the garden was all shining with dew, and everything look _enchanted_.
“I was there a month, while Miss Atkins was away for her holiday,
and I was _too_ happy. But now I shall never go there again, because
father has had a quarrel with Mr. Burbage. It was something about me,
I think.”
Her eyes still fixed on the round handwriting, Anne’s memory was
working.
Years later she knew that her old friend had once loved her mother, his
cousin and playfellow. At her father’s death she had found, on going
through his papers, the letter in which he had offered to provide for
the child of the woman who would not be his wife. It was a letter full
of tact and delicate feeling, but it indicated how much of the little
girl’s loneliness he knew and understood.
He pointed out that companions of her own age were necessary for the
happy development of her temperament. He wanted to educate her with
some neighbour’s children, so that she might live at Fairholme Court,
in the country which she loved. She was not strong, he declared, and
London air obviously did not suit her. There would of course be no
attempt to separate her from her father. She could return to him during
the holidays, whenever he wished to see her.
It was a letter written from full knowledge of the circumstances.
He knew the atmosphere of struggling poverty in which Anne, as the
daughter of a curate with an income of little more than a hundred
a year, passed her existence. He knew also that the man had little
tenderness for his daughter, and he hoped that his suggestion might
come as a relief.
Even at the age of twelve, Anne could have undeceived him.
Already, unable as yet to put her knowledge into definite form, she
knew her father well.
Gloomy and morose, a man of narrow intelligence and invincible
obstinacy, he resented any overtures which to his mind savoured of
patronage.
In later years Anne knew the bitterness of his life.
The son of a rich stockbroker, he had just finished his course at
Cambridge when the financial ruin, which killed his father, struck the
death-blow to his own ambitions also.
He had been reading for the Church, with dreams, easy as it then seemed
to be realized, of a splendid living, and a possible bishopric.
The girl to whom he was engaged, the daughter of an impoverished Irish
landlord, was penniless.
She refused to give him up, and he married her, after taking orders,
and entering the Church as a miserably paid curate. Together they
settled in the dingy little house near the Church of St. Jude, at
Dalston, to prove that love in poverty was a different matter from the
same emotion experienced in affluence.
Henry Page was not strong enough to bear misfortune well.
His temper, naturally irrational and impatient of hardship--a temper
which it would have required much material prosperity to soften, became
soured and exacting under the stress of daily anxious necessity. Five
years after their marriage, his young wife, crushed and saddened, gave
up the struggle and died, leaving her two children in no very gentle
hands.
The boy, determined to call his life his own, had cut the knot of
uncongenial family existence by flight.
Anne was left.
* * * * *
Miss Page turned over the leaves of the exercise book slowly.
On the whole, the child she remembered had kept her resolution fairly
well.
“_To-day is my birthday. I am thirteen. I am fifteen. I am seventeen._”
The words marking another year met her eyes constantly as she fluttered
the pages. Several times there was a mention of Hugh. She had heard
from him. He was getting on. He hoped some day to be captain of a
trading vessel. He had sent her some funny writing-paper from Japan.
Another time it was a pressed flower, or some curious seeds from the
South Sea Islands.
Once--this was recorded after her seventeenth birthday--he had come
home for a week.
“He is nineteen, and so brown and handsome and strong,” was the
remark in the journal. “He did not get on well with father. He told
him that I ought to go away--that I had no friends, and that my life
was very dull. Father was terribly angry. Now Hugh has gone, and I’m
wretched--_wretched_. The house is so quiet. I can hear the clock in
the hall ticking even when I’m upstairs in my bedroom. It is raining,
and the sky is like lead.”
* * * * *
Anne still turned the leaves. There were big gaps in the journal, but
if they had been filled, the word across the page would have been the
classic _nothing_ of the diary of Louis XVI.
In thought Anne went back over the long, dreary years--the incredibly
empty years of a woman whom lack of means as well as lack of
opportunity cuts off from the world.
A woman moreover, whose youth was spent under conditions less elastic,
less favourable to development than those of modern days.
The cold bare nave of St. Jude’s rose vividly in her mind. She saw the
pews full of women in frowsy faded bonnets--the bonnets of Dalston.
She saw the parish room lighted by unshaded gas-burners, in which, shy
as she was, she had held classes for work-girls. Again she watched them
bending over their desks, giggling and nudging one another when she
entered the room.
She remembered the look of the street when after the appointed hour for
her class, she emerged from the stuffy room into the night air.
There was a butcher’s shop opposite, with a row of flaring lights, and
the butcher in a greasy apron used to stand upon the pavement shouting
his wares to the hurrying passers-by.
Then there was the return to the dingy house. A hurried lighting of the
gas in the entrance passage, the glare of which revealed the oil-cloth
on the floor, growing more worn and shabby every year. How well Anne
remembered what was left of the pattern of that oil-cloth!
A descent into the kitchen followed, where she prepared the supper, and
directed the clumsy movements of Harriet, the little maid-of-all-work.
Supper then with her father, who sometimes scarcely raised his head
from his plate, and seldom spoke a word.
Anne remembered one or two of the curates who had tried to make friends
with her.
One of them who sometimes insisted upon walking back with her from
her evening class, had hovered upon the verge of a mild flirtation.
But to Anne, desperately shy and unused to the society of her
fellow-creatures, his words were meaningless and embarrassing.
Moreover, her father was unpopular. Frequently embroiled with his
colleagues, none of them sought his society, and none ventured to a
house to which they were never invited.
In retrospect, she scarcely needed aid from the journal, Anne saw the
years pass in grey procession. There was no note of revolt in the
record of her girlhood’s days, and the reading was the sadder for its
absence. No revolt, no bitterness. Only a sad acquiescence with fate, a
gradual numbing of sensation, a sort of mental and moral apathy, grey,
leaden, hopeless.
She paused at the words which followed the announcement of her
twenty-seventh birthday.
“Last week father was taken suddenly very ill. The doctor is afraid it
is paralysis.”
For three years there was no further word in the book, but Anne knew
those three years by heart.
They were passed chiefly between the sick-room and the kitchen, in
which she prepared invalid food, and directed the little maid in the
management of the housework. Helpless as a child, her father required
constant unremitting attendance, and when on the eve of her thirtieth
birthday he died, Anne found herself literally penniless. The long
illness had swallowed up his scanty earnings, and, unprepared for any
work in the world, his daughter was left to face starvation.
Fastened inside the book was the letter which saved her.
It was written in the thin, quavering handwriting of an old woman even
then ill and feeble. She opened and read it.
“Fairholme Court,
“February, 18--
“_My dear Anne_,
“_The news of your loss has just reached me. Before he died, my
husband made me promise that if you were ever free, I would ask
you to come to me. Will you come now? I am an old woman, and an
invalid. In any case, before long I must have had a companion
who would look after me, and nurse me when necessary. I cannot
offer you a very cheerful home, but if you come you will be
welcome._
“_With sincere sympathy for the grief you have sustained_,
“_Believe me_,
“_Sincerely yours_,
“_JANE BURBAGE_.”
On the next page, the last written page in the book, Anne read these
words:--
“To-morrow I go to Fairholme Court. It is eighteen years since
I saw it. I am now thirty years old, and what I said as a
child is still true. Nothing has ever happened to me. Nothing
will ever happen now. It is not surprising. I am very plain,
and nothing happens to a plain woman who is also poor. I ought
to be very grateful to Mrs. Burbage. She has probably saved
me from starving. I _am_ very grateful. But to-night I can’t
feel anything except that I don’t care to go on living. If I
were a religious woman I should think this sinful, but what I
said as a child is still true. I don’t like religion. I mean
that it has never affected me. Never made me happy. Perhaps I
have never yet found the religion to suit me. I don’t know.
To-morrow I begin a new life, but it will be again a life of
nursing.
“I try to be grateful for a home. I try to feel cheerful. But
all feeling seems to have gone. I remember my thoughts as a
child. I was often very eager then, and hopeful. I was often
sure in my heart that something delightful would happen to me.
But now nothing seems worth while, and I am only very tired.
Perhaps when I feel better I shall be glad that Fairholme Court
is beautiful and in the country. To-night even that doesn’t
matter.
“Hugh wrote to me after father’s death. He has saved a little
money, and with another man, a friend, he is going to start
a sheep farm in New Zealand. He is engaged to be married to a
girl he met on one of his voyages. She has since returned to
England, and they will have to wait till he has made a home for
her before they can marry. But he seems full of hope, and is
very happy.
“I am chiefly thankful for Mrs. Burbage’s invitation, because
now I need not be a burden to him. As it is, he has sent me
money which he can ill afford, though without it I could
not have existed during the past few months. He wanted my
photograph, and, to please him, I had it taken. The other
copies will be wasted. There’s no one else in the world who
wants my picture. All my things are packed. This is the end of
my life here. I wish it were the end altogether.”
A photograph, one of the wasted copies, was placed between the leaves,
at the last written page.
Anne took it up, and examined it by the light of the expiring candle.
She saw a sad quiet face, with thick hair parted smoothly on either
side of the forehead. It was a face which looked older than the one now
bent over it. A disfiguring gown, fastened with a little tucker at the
neck, concealed the long line of the throat. Except for the indication
of a clear cut chin, and a mouth sweet, despite its sadness, there was
no beauty, not even a suggestion of grace or charm in the picture.
Anne replaced the photograph, and slowly shut the book.
There was a look of terror on her face. She had called up a ghost--the
ghost of her past self.
Like a woman whose one idea is flight, she half rose, and for a moment
glanced with frightened eyes about the room.
Dawn was breaking. The eerie, grey light showed her the embroidered
linen coverlet on her bed, the spindle-legged dressing-table which had
once stood in the little white bedroom upstairs, the flowered curtains
at the window, the bowl of sweet peas on the table at which she had
been sitting.
She drew a deep breath, and moved close to the window.
The air thrilled with the voices of the birds. The trees were still
motionless, as though waiting for the sun; and grey with dew, the
meadows stretched away towards the dim horizon. In the rose-garden on
the right, beneath the sheltering wall, the sun-dial glimmered white as
pearl in the dawn-light.
The candle flared up, and went out with a flicker.
Anne turned, and groping her way in the half light, replaced the book
in the drawer, and touched the spring which closed it.
IV
At four o’clock, Sylvia Carfax swung the gate of the Vicarage garden
behind her, and stepped into the dusty road.
It was nearly a mile to Fairholme Court, and the sun blazed in a sky of
cloudless blue, and beat upon her shoulders protected only by a blouse
of thin muslin.
Sylvia was just twenty, tall slim, and, as Miss Page suggested very
pretty.
In her own mind Anne often wondered when she looked at the girl’s rich
black hair, which made such a striking contrast to eyes blue as the
sky, that from the shelter of the Vicarage and all it represented such
a southern, opulent type of beauty should have emerged.
To reach her destination Sylvia had to walk through the village, past
the blacksmith’s, and past the baker’s shop, with its quaint carving
over the entrance porch.
Dymfield was an ideally beautiful village, to which even the doctor’s
motor-car scarcely brought more than a hint of the rush and hurry and
ugliness of much of modern life.
In the gardens of the thatched cottages, summer flowers made a blaze of
colour. Roses and honeysuckle clambered over porch and roof.
The church, resting peacefully in the green sea of the churchyard,
was like some great rock, stained with lichen, crumbling with age,
beautiful in its decay.
Near it, under the shade of mighty elms, was a row of almshouses, fine
specimens of black-and-white work, and at the end of the rambling
street stood the old well, with its canopy of wrought iron, and its
ancient moss-grown steps.
As she passed through the village in which from babyhood she had lived,
Sylvia recognized its beauty and its peace. It seemed a place where
it was always afternoon, and for that reason, to the girl who yearned
for the morning, herself in the glad confident morning of life, it was
intolerable.
She gave herself an impatient little shake, and hurried on.
Now, across the green, the beeches of Fairholme Court were in sight.
In summer they almost completely screened the house, and made deep
shadows in the drive. Thankfully Sylvia plunged into the shade and
quickened her steps.
The hall door was wide open, revealing the coolness of the
white-panelled hall, and as she entered, the air was sweet with the
scent of flowers.
She stopped a moment to bend over a great bowl of sweet peas.
“Everything is peaceful here too,” she thought. “But it’s interesting
as well. I wonder why?”
The appearance of Burks, immaculate as usual in snowy cap and apron,
interrupted her vague musing.
“Mistress is upstairs in her sitting-room. I’ll tell her you’re here,
miss.”
“Thank you Burks, she expects me. I’ll go up.”
The maid disappeared, and Sylvia ran up the shallow stairs to the first
floor, and knocked at a door on the right.
“Ah! my dear child!”
Anne half rose from a couch which was placed close to the window.
The matting blinds outside were half drawn to keep out the glare of the
sun, and the room was filled with a light soft and green, as though it
had filtered through a canopy of leaves. Beneath the blinds one caught
a glimpse of one of the rose-gardens. Protected by a yew hedge, roses
of all colours lifted their sweet, hot faces to the sun. A grass path
running down the middle of the garden ended at a white seat, in a bower
of white blossom.
Sylvia drew a deep breath. “I believe all the delicious scents in the
world are here!” she exclaimed.
“That’s why I like this room in the afternoon,” said Anne. “The sun
draws all the sweetness out of the roses, and sends it up here. Take
off your hat, my child. You’ve had a tiring walk, I’m afraid.”
“I’d walk twenty miles in the sun to find you at the end of them,”
declared Sylvia, vehemently.
Anne laughed, as she got up and rang the bell for tea.
Her white wrapper of cambric and lace trailed after her as she moved.
Sylvia touched it with reverent fingers.
“You look so sweet in these things,” she said.
“I ought to have changed my gown properly to receive you. But I was
reading, and too lazy to move.”
Sylvia picked up the book which lay on the sofa.
“French, I see by the yellow cover.” She began to turn over the
leaves, and suddenly laughed.
“How like you to have a rose-leaf for a book-marker! _I_ should put
in a hairpin, or something equally ugly. I wish I could read French
easily, then you would lend me all your books, wouldn’t you, Miss Page?”
“Not all of them,” returned Anne, smiling.
“Why not? I’m sure _you_ haven’t got stupid ideas about proper reading
for young girls, and all that sort of thing,” declared Sylvia,
petulantly.
“I’ve got ideas on the subject, stupid or otherwise. Tea, please Burks.
We’ll have it up here. And bring the pink tea-service. It goes so
nicely with this room,” she explained to Sylvia in parenthesis.
“Do tell me why you wouldn’t lend me all your novels?” the girl
persisted.
“Because certain books, my dear, are of no use to us till life makes
them intelligible. And life can only be learnt by living it.”
“I wish I’d lived it then,” protested Sylvia.
“Oh Sylvia, there’s time enough. Don’t wish that,” returned Miss Page,
quickly. She bent forward and took the girl’s hand. “Don’t wish your
youth away. It goes so fast in any case. And it should be the most
beautiful part of one’s life.”
“_Should be!_” replied Sylvia, passionately. “But is it? What’s the
good of my youth to me, here in this dull little hole? I’d give
the world to be like you, Miss Page. You’re not--not quite young,
perhaps----”
“My dear, I’m almost an old woman.”
Her smile was wistful, though it was touched with amusement.
“You’ll never be that!” returned Sylvia, vehemently. “And anyhow,
you’re lovely, and every one adores you. And you lead your own life
and make it beautiful. And I’m perfectly certain that you _have_ had
everything I want. Except that you’re not married. I suppose I shall
want to be married some time or other. But, then, as you didn’t marry
it must have been because you didn’t want to. Hundreds of men must have
been dying to marry you. I’m sure hundreds are dying now----”
“What an awful picture of carnage!” interrupted Anne, laughing, as
Burks appeared with the tea.
“What a _lovely_ tea-service!” Sylvia exclaimed, taking up one of the
Sèvres cups gently to examine it. “But then everything of yours is
lovely. This room is as perfect as the drawing-room, and I think I like
it almost better. I love the white matting on the floor, and these
green-and-white chair-covers and curtains. And I love a room lined with
books. What a lot!”
She began to walk round examining them. “But heaps of them are French
ones, so you needn’t be afraid,” she added mischievously. “Oh, and
Italian too! Do you read Italian, Miss Page? Really? I ought to be
afraid of you. You’re so awfully clever. I believe you keep everything
you love best up here, don’t you? The pictures now--I don’t understand
pictures, but I like the colour of these. This room seems more _you_
than all the rest of the house. Though it’s all like you in a way.”
“I only receive my _special_ visitors up here.”
Anne’s smile flattered and touched the girl.
She slipped down on to the sofa beside her friend, and moved close to
her with a caressing movement, as she took the tea-cup from her hand.
“These cakes were baked expressly for you, so you must do them justice.
Really cook makes them very prettily, doesn’t she? They’re rather like
the cakes in _Goblin Market_. Do you remember how the sisters
‘_Kneaded cakes of whitest wheat,
Cakes for dainty mouths to eat?_’”
She passed them to Sylvia in their silver basket, over the rim of which
fell a d’oyley of fine lace and linen.
Sylvia shook her head. “I don’t know anything!” she exclaimed. “I shall
never know anything if I stay here. Oh Miss Page, _do_ help me to get
away! You can do anything with father. Please persuade him that I ought
to go. You know how it is at home. I’m not really wanted. We’re quite
comfortably off, and there are enough servants to do the work without
_making_ work for me, to try to keep me quiet when I’m aching to go and
make my own life!”
She pushed her cup away from her with an impatient movement.
Anne waited a moment. “It’s still the music, I suppose?”