Louise was tasting happiness.
Happiness was a new and absorbing experience to Louise. The only child
of a former marriage, she had grown up among boisterous half-brothers
with whom she had little fellowship. Her father, a driving, thriving
merchant, was prouder of his second brood of apple-cheeked youngsters
than of his first-born, who fitted into the scheme of life as ill as her
mother had done. He had imagined himself in love with his first wife,
had married her, piqued by her elusive ways, charmed by her pale,
wood-sorrel beauty; and she, shy and unawakened, had taken his six feet
of bone and muscle for outward and visible sign of the matured spiritual
strength her nature needed. The disappointment was mutual as swift; it
had taken no longer than the honeymoon to convince the one that he had
burdened himself with a phantast, the other that she was tied to a
philistine. For a year they shared bed and board, severed and
inseparable as earth and moon; then the wife having passed on to a
daughter the heritage of a nature rare and impracticable as a sensitive
plant, died and was forgotten.
The widower's speedy re-marriage proved an unqualified success. Indeed,
the worthy man's after life was so uniformly and deservedly prosperous
(he was as shrewd and industrious in his business as he was genial and
domesticated in his home), that he might be forgiven if his affection
for his eldest child were tepid; for, apart from her likeness to his
first wife, she was, in existing, a constant reminder of the one mistake
of a prosperous career. He was kind to her, however, in his fashion;
gave her plenty of pocket-money (he was fond of giving); saw to it that
she had a sufficiency of toys and sweets, though it piqued him that she
had never been known to ask for any. Otherwise was content to leave her
to his wife.
The second Mrs. Denny, kindly, capable and unimaginative as her husband,
had her sense of duty to her step-daughter; but she was too much
occupied in bearing and rearing her own family, whose numbers were
augmented with Victorian regularity, to consider more than the physical
well-being of the child. Louise was well fed and warmly clad, her share
was accorded her in the pleasures of the nursery. What more could a busy
woman do!
Louise, docile and reserved, was not unhappy. Until she went to school,
however, her mental outlook resembled that of a person suffering from
myopia. Her elders, her half-brothers, all the persons of her small
world, were indefinite figures among whom she moved, confused and
blundering. She knew of their existence, but to focus them seemed as
impossible as to establish communication. She did not try over hard; she
was sensitive to ridicule; it was easier to retire within her childish
self, be her own confidante and questioner.
She had an intricate imagination and before she learned to read had
created for herself a fantastically complete inner world, in which she
moved, absorbed and satisfied. Indeed, her outward surroundings became
at last so dangerously shadowy that her manner began to show how entire
was her abstraction, and Mrs. Denny, sworn foe to "sulks" and "moping,"
saw fit to engage a governess as an antidote.
The governess, a colourless lady, achieved little, though she was useful
in taking the little boys for walks. But she taught Louise to read, and
thereafter the child assumed entire charge of her own education.
The mother's books, velvety with dust that had sifted down upon them
since the day, six years back, when they had been tumbled in piles on an
attic floor by busy maids preparing for the advent of the second Mrs.
Denny, were discovered, one rainy day, by a pinafored Siegfried, alert
for treasure. Contented years were passed in consuming the trove.
Her mother's choice of books was so completely to her taste that they
gave the lonely child her first experience of mental companionship;
suggesting to her that there might be other intelligences in the world
about her than the kindly, stolid folk who cherished her growing body
and ignored her growing mind. She was almost startled at times to
realise how completely this vague mother of hers would have understood
her. Each new volume, fanciful or quizzical or gracious, seemed a direct
gift from an invisible yet human personality, that concerned itself with
her as no other had ever done; that was never occupied with the
dustiness of the attic, or a forgotten tea-hour, but was astonishingly
sensitive to the needs of a little soul, struggling unaided to birth.
The pile of books, to her hungry affections, became the temple, the
veritable dwelling-place of her mother's spirit.
Seated on the sun-baked floor, book on knee, the noises of the high road
floating up to her, distance-dulled and soothing, she would shake her
thick hair across her face, and see through its veil a melting, shifting
shadow of a hand that helped to turn her pages. The warm floor was a
soft lap; the battered trunk a shoulder that supported; the faint breeze
a kiss upon her lips. The fantastic qualities the mother had bequeathed,
recreated her in the mind of her child, bringing vague comfort (who
knows?) alike to the dead and the living Louise.
Yet the impalpable intercourse, compact of make-believe and yearnings,
was, at its sweetest, no safe substitute for the human companionships
that were lacking in the life of Louise. Half consciously she desired an
elder sister, a friend, on whom to lavish the stores of her ardent,
reticent nature.
At twelve she was sent to school. At first it did little for her. She
was unaccustomed to companions of her own age and sex and, quite simply,
did not know how to make friends with many who would have been willing
enough, if she could have contributed her share, the small change of
joke and quarrel and confidence, towards intimacy. But Louise was too
inured to the solitude of crowds to be troubled by her continued
loneliness. She met the complaints of Mrs. Denny, that she made no
friends like other children, with a shrug of resignation. What could she
do? She supposed that she was not nice enough; people didn't like her.
Secretly her step-mother agreed. She was kind to Louise, but she, too,
did not like her. She found her irritating. Her dreamy, absent manner,
her very docility and absence of self-assertion were annoying to a
hearty woman who was braced rather than distressed by an occasional
battle of wills. She thought her shyness foolish, doubted the
insincerity of her humility, and looked upon her shrinking from
publicity, noise and rough caresses, her love of books and solitude, as
a morbid pose. Yet she was just a woman and did not let the child guess
at her dislike, though she made no pretence of actual affection. She
knew perfectly well that Louise's mother (they had been schoolgirls
together), had irritated her in exactly the same way.
Educationally, too, the first year at school affected Louise but
slightly. Her brothers' governesses had done their best for the shy,
intelligent girl, and her wide reading had trained, her awkwardness and
childish appearance obscured, a personality in some respects dangerously
matured. But her dreaminess and total ignorance of the routine of
lesson-learning hampered her curiously; she learnt mechanically, using
her brain but little for her easy tasks, and she was not considered
particularly promising.
With Clare's intervention the world was changed for Louise; she had her
first taste of active pleasure.
It is difficult to realise what an effect a woman of Clare's temperament
must have had on the impressionable child. In her knowledge, her
enthusiasms, her delicate intuition and her keen intellectual sympathy,
she must have seemed the embodiment of all dreams, the fulfilment of
every longing, the ideal made flesh. A wanderer in an alien land,
homesick, hungry, for whom, after weary days, a queen descends from her
throne, speaking his language, supplying his unvoiced wants, might feel
something of the adoring gratitude that possessed Louise. She rejoiced
in Clare as a vault-bred flower in sunlight.
On all human beings, child or adult, emotional adventure entails, sooner
or later, physical exhaustion; the deeper, the more novel the
experience, the greater the drain on the bodily strength. To Louise,
involved in the first passionate experience of her short life, in an
affection as violent and undisciplined as a child's must be, an
affection in itself completely occupying her mind and exhausting her
energies, the amount of work made necessary by the position to which
Clare and her own ambition had assigned her, was more of a burden than
either realised. Only Alwynne, sympathetic coach (for Louise had two
years' back work to condense and assimilate), guessed how great were the
efforts the child was making. Clare, who always affected unconsciousness
of her own effect on the ambitions of the children, had persuaded
herself that Louise was entirely in her right place; and Louise herself
was too young, and too feverishly happy, to consider the occasional
headaches, fits of lassitude and nights cinematographed with dreams, as
anything but irritating pebbles in her path to success--and Clare.
The weeks in her new class had been spread with happiness--a happiness
that had grown like Elijah's cloud, till, on the day of the Browning
lesson, as she listened to the beloved voice making music of her halting
sentences, to the words of praise, of affection even, that followed, it
stretched from horizon to horizon.
As she sat in the deserted class-room, her neat packet of sandwiches
untasted in the satchel at her elbow, she re-lived that golden hour,
dwelling on its incidents as a miser counts money. There was the stormy
beginning; Agatha's mockery; her own raging helplessness; Clare's
entrance; the exquisite thrill she had felt at her touch, that was not
only gratitude for championship.... Never before had Clare been so near
to her, so gentle, so protecting.... And afterwards, facing Louise at
the foot of the table, how beautiful she had been.... Yet some of the
girls could not see it.... They were fools.... Her head had been framed
in the small, square window, so darkened and cobwebbed by crimson vines
that only the merest blur of white clouds and blue hills was visible....
She had worn a gown of duller blue that lay in stiff folds: the bowl of
Christmas roses, that mirrored themselves on the dark, polished table,
had hidden the papers and the smeared ink-pot. Suddenly Louise
remembered some austere Dutch Madonnas over whom delightful, but erratic
Miss Durand had lingered, on their last visit to a picture gallery. She
called them beautiful. Louise, with fascinated eyes sidling past a
wallful of riotous Rubens, to fix on the soap and gentian of a
Sasseferato, had wondered if Miss Durand were trying to be funny. She
remembered, too, how some of the younger girls, comparing favourites,
had called Miss Hartill ugly. She had raged loyally--yet, secretly, all
but agreed. With her child's love of pink and white prettiness she had
had no eyes for Clare's irregular features. But to-day something in
Clare's pose had recalled the Dutch pictures, and in a flash she had
understood, and wondered at her blindness. Miss Durand was right: the
drawn, grey faces and rigid outlines had beauty, had charm--the charm of
her stern smile.... The saints were hedged with lilies, and she, too,
had had white flowers before her, that filled the air with the smell of
the marvellous Roman church at Westminster.... The painted ladies were
Madonnas--mothers--and Miss Hartill, too, had worn for a moment their
protective look, half fierce, half tender....
Why was it? What has made her so kind? Not only to-day, but always? The
girls feared her, some of them; those that she did not like talked of
her temper and her tongue; Rose Levy hated her; even Agatha and Marion,
and all of them, were a little frightened, though they adored....
Louise was never frightened.... How could one be frightened of one so
kind and wonderful? She could say what she liked to Miss Hartill, and be
sure that she would understand.... It was like being in the attic,
talking aloud.... Mother would have been like that.... If it could
be....
Louise, her chin in her doubled fists, launched out upon her sea of
make-believe.
If it could be.... If it were possible, that Mother--not Mamma, cheery,
obtuse Mamma of nursery and parlour--but Mother, the shadow of the
attic--had come back? All things are possible to him that believeth: and
Mr. Chesterton had said there was no real reason why tulips should not
grow on oaks.... Heaps of people--all India--believed in reincarnation,
and there was _The Gateless Barrier_ and _The Dead Leman_ for proof....
Might it not be?
The idea was intoxicating. She did not actually believe in it, but she
played with it, wistfully, letting her imagination run riot. She wove
fantastic variations on the themes "why not," "perhaps," "who knows."
She was but thirteen and very lonely.
She was in far too exalted a mood to have an appetite for her
sandwiches, or time for the books beside her. She was due for extra work
with Alwynne at three, and the intervening hour should have been used
for preparation. Wasting her time meant sitting up at night, as Louise
was well aware, and a tussle with Mrs. Denny, concerned for the waste of
gas. But for all that, she would not and could not rouse herself from
the trance of pleasure that was upon her. Her mind was contemplating
Clare as a mystic contemplates his divinity; rapt in an ecstasy of
adoration, oblivious alike of place and time. She did not hear the
luncheon gong, or the gong for afternoon school, or a door, opening and
shutting behind her. Yet it did not startle her, when, turning dreamily
to tap on her shoulder, she found herself facing Miss Hartill herself.
Miss Hartill should have left the school before lunch, she knew, but it
was all in order. What could surprise one on this miraculous day? She
did not even rise, as etiquette demanded; but she smiled up at Clare
with an expression of welcoming delight that disarmed comment.
Clare, too, could ignore conventions. She was merely touched and amused
by the child's expression.
"Well, Louise? Very busy?"
Louise glanced vaguely at her books.
"Yes. I ought to be, I mean. I don't believe I've touched anything. I
was thinking----"
"Two hours on end? Do you know the time? I heard Miss Durand clamouring
for you just now." Clare looked mischievous. She could forgive
forgetfulness of other people's classes.
Louise was serene.
"I'm sorry. I'm very sorry. I'd forgotten. I must go."
But she made no movement. She sat looking at Miss Hartill as if nothing
else existed for her. The intent, fearless adoration in her eyes was
very pleasant to Clare; novel, too, after the more sophisticated glances
of the older girls.
With an odd little impulse of motherliness she picked up Louise's books,
stacked them neatly and fitted them into the satchel. Louise watched
her. Miss Hartill buckled the strap and handed her the bundle.
"There you are, Louise! Run along, my child, I'm afraid you'll get a
scolding." She stooped to her, bright-eyed, laughing. "And what were you
thinking of, Louise, for two long hours?"
"You," said Louise simply.
A touch of colour stole into Clare's thin cheeks. She took the small
face between her hands and kissed it lightly.
"Silly child!" said Miss Hartill.