Since the disclosure made by Asquith to Ada Warren, the latter and Mrs.
Clarendon had continued to live on precisely the same terms as before;
no reference, however little explicit, had been made on either side to
the subject which naturally occupied the thoughts of both. Ada was not
in herself the same as before she understood her position; many
little indications which had been wrought in her showed themselves
involuntarily. But not in her behaviour to Mrs. Clarendon; that, as
hitherto, was cold and reserved, at most the familiarity which comes of
companionship in the external things of life.
It had always been so; there was a barrier between the two which only
united effort could remove, and, though there had been impulses on both
sides, a common emotion had never arisen to overthrow the obstacle. They
did not understand each other, and, after so many years, there was small
chance that they ever would.
Very clear in the memory of both was that day when Ada was first seen at
Knightswell. Mr. Clarendon died at the end of January; a fortnight later
the child was brought over from London by a member of the deceased man’s
firm of solicitors. She was poorly dressed, and her teeth chattered
after the cold journey. She was handed over to a servant to be attended
to, whilst Mrs. Clarendon held a conversation with the lawyer in the
library. When the legal gentleman had lunched, and was on his way back
to town, Ada was sent for to the boudoir.
An overgrown girl of seven years, with a bad figure, even for a child
of that age when grace is not a common attribute, with arms which seemed
too long, and certainly were so in relation to the sleeves which cased
them, with a thin neck, and a positively ugly face--that was what Isabel
saw when she raised her eyes in anticipation at the opening of the
door. A face decidedly ugly, and, for Isabel, with something in it
more repellent than mere ugliness, something for which she had at once
looked, and which she found only too unmistakably. The face regarded her
half in fear, half in defiance; there seemed no touch of shyness in the
gaze, and Isabel was not in a mood for perceiving that it was really
excess of shyness which formed the expression. The child had been washed
and warmed, but had not eaten yet; she had refused to eat. She and
Isabel looked at each other for a little space; then the latter summoned
the attendant maid by a gesture to her side.
“Have her properly clothed,” she said in a low voice, “and do what you
can to make her at home in the room upstairs. Her own maid will be here
to-morrow.”
“Yes, ma’am,” said the servant; adding, with a nervous cough, “must it
be mourning, ma’am?”
Mrs. Clarendon uttered a very clear “No,” and gave a few other
directions.
“Let her be put to bed at seven o’clock, and tell me to-morrow morning
how she has passed the night.”
All that was as living to-day in Ada’s memory as if but a week had
intervened. She saw the beautiful black-clad lady sitting by the fire,
holding a fan to guard her face against excessive heat, and she heard
several of the orders given. That night she had gone to bed hating the
beautiful lady with a precocious hatred.
Three days went by before the two met again. Ada was now neatly attired,
and her long hair, previously unkempt, had been done up and made
presentable. It only made her neck look the longer and thinner, and put
into relief the hard lines of her thin face. The probability was she
had hitherto been half-starved. She was brought to the boudoir, and Mrs.
Clarendon bade the servant go.
“Will you come and sit here by the fire?” Isabel said, speaking as
softly as she could.
A low seat had been put by the hearth-rug in readiness. The child
approached, swinging her long arms awkwardly, and seated herself on the
edge of it.
“Your name is Ada, isn’t it?”
“Yes.”
“You haven’t a father or mother, have you, Ada?”
“No.”
“That is why you are come to live with me. I haven’t a little girl of my
own, so I’m going to take care of you, and treat you like my own child.
Do you think you can be happy with me?”
“I don’t know.”
The child spoke with a detestable London working-class accent, which
made her voice grate on Isabel’s ears even more than it otherwise would
have done.
“I shall do my very best to be kind to you,” Isabel continued, after a
struggle with her feelings. “Have you been happy till now--I mean with
the other people in London?”
“No,” was the decided answer.
“Weren’t they kind to you?”
“I don’t know.”
Isabel rose and walked about the room. The little creature was loathsome
to her.
“Do you like the toys I’ve got for you?” was her next question from a
distance.
“I don’t care for toys.”
There was another silence.
“Would you rather sit here with me, or be up in your own room?”
“Rather be upstairs.”
“Then I’ll take you. Will you go hand-in-hand with me?”
She led the child back to the room which had been made into a nursery,
and where there were dolls, and bricks, and other things of the kind
supposed to be delightful to children.
“Wouldn’t you like to dress this nice doll?” Isabel asked, taking up one
of the unclad abortions.
“No.”
“Have you been to school yet, Ada?”
“Yes.”
“And can you read?”
“Yes.”
Isabel tested her, and found that the reply had been accurate; but for
the ear-jarring pronunciation, the reading was remarkable for a child of
seven.
A person answering to the description of nursery-governess had been
found for the child, and to her care Ada was for a long time almost
exclusively left. Isabel went into the nursery daily and spoke a few
words. More than this she could not do, her soul was in revolt.
She did not quit Knightswell throughout the summer, but in September she
went with friends to the south coast. On her return she paid an early
visit to the nursery. It was afternoon, and darkness was gathering. Ada
was lying on the floor asleep, a book which she had been reading lying
beside her. Isabel knelt down and looked at the child, whose face was
still almost haggard, and had an expression of suffering beyond her
years.
“You poor, poor thing!” she said to herself, pitying at last, though she
could not do more. “I will try hard to do my duty by you. You will never
love me, and will think meanly enough of me some day.”
As Ada grew older, the extreme sullenness, which seemed to be her
disposition, wore off a little. She was outwardly civilised, she learned
to speak the English of refinement, she made for herself all manner
of interests, none of them very childlike; and to Mrs. Clarendon she
assumed the demeanour which was to persist, with very slight alteration,
from that time onwards. When she was ten years old Isabel engaged a
better governess for her. It became evident that the girl had brains.
She showed, too, a pronounced faculty for drawing; a teacher accordingly
came over once a week from the nearest town. At the age of fourteen she
for the first time accompanied Mrs. Clarendon to London, and stayed with
her there for the couple of months which were all that Isabel permitted
herself that year. Ada had her own rooms, and only saw Isabel’s most
intimate acquaintances; her time was chiefly devoted to lessons of
various kinds.
Isabel took this step in consequence of troublous symptoms in the girl’s
life. Ada had always been a perfectly tractable child and had given as
little trouble as a child could. She never cried; her way of expressing
indignation or misery was to hide herself in the remotest corner she
could find, and there remain till she was discovered, when she suffered
herself to be led away in silence. Only once had Isabel, softly
approaching the half-open door of Ada’s bedroom at night, believed that
she heard a sob. She entered and spoke; Ada was awake, but indignantly
protested that she had not been crying. Isabel felt that there was not
a little obscure suffering in the child’s existence, and once or twice,
overcome by her compassionate instincts, tried to speak warmly, if
perchance she might find a means of winning the confidence which she had
not felt able to seek; but the result was not encouraging. At length
it seemed that the hidden misery was taking a form which could not be
disregarded, which demanded sympathy and motherly tenderness. Hitherto
Ada had shown no objection to meet and speak with the visitors or
guests at Knightswell; all at once she refused to see any stranger, and
resolutely kept her own rooms whenever Mrs. Clarendon had company.
She would give no explanation; her eyes flashed passionately, as if in
irrepressible irritation, when she was appealed to. And, for the first
time in her life, she suffered from ill-health; severe headache racked
her for days in succession.
The attempt which Isabel made to draw near to her in this crisis was the
occasion of a scene entirely new in their relations, and not thereafter
to be repeated. There were guests at Knightswell, and Ada did not
appear. Isabel went to the girl’s room, and obtained admission.
“Have you a headache, Ada?” she asked.
The reply was a short negative.
“Then, why don’t you come down? I very much wish you would. Will you
come down to please me?”
The girl was sitting at a table, seemingly engaged with her books. In
reality she had been motionless and unemployed for a couple of hours.
She was pale and her eyes bloodshot.
“No, Mrs. Clarendon,” she exclaimed; “I cannot come down to please you!
Why should I torture myself to give you pleasure?”
She had risen, and stood with a face of passionate anguish.
“Torture yourself?” Isabel repeated, almost in fear.
“Yes; it is torture, and you might know it. You ask me to meet your
friends because you think it, I suppose, a duty to do so; in truth,
you are ashamed of me, you had far rather not see me downstairs. I know
myself well enough, and I have glasses in my room. I know what these
people say and think of me. I can bear it no longer; I want to leave
you! I cannot live with you!”
Isabel could not find words to reply. There was a horrible element of
truth in the girls suspicions, though Ada did not and could not know its
meaning. It was, indeed, out of mere consideration for her feelings that
Isabel was pressing her to show herself.
“You can’t live with me, Ada?” she said at length, in despair that she
could not speak with the utterance of true feeling. “Am I unkind to
you?”
“You are nothing to me!” was the passionate reply. “Neither kind nor
unkind--you are nothing to me, and I am nothing to you! Why did you take
me into your house? What interest had you in me? Who am I?”
“Ada, you are the child of a friend of Mr. Clarendon’s. Mr. Clarendon
desired that I should take you and bring you up, as you had lost your
own parents. That is all I know of you--all.”
“Then you have done your best, and now let me go. We shall never like
each other. You took me from a poor home, and I suppose my parents were
poor people. It is not in my blood to like you, or to live your life.
When I was a child it didn’t matter; but, now I see and understand, I
know the difference between us. I will _never_ meet people who look on
me with contempt! Let me go. I will be a servant; it is what I am suited
for. You can’t keep me against my will, and I wish to leave you!”
For more than an hour Isabel strove against this resolve. Her task was
a hard one. By mere cold reasoning she had to face the outburst of a
nature which was all at once proving itself so deep and vehement. Could
she but have called emotion to her aid! Her own impassiveness was her
despair. That Ada should leave her was out of the question, yet by what
means could she restrain the girl if the latter proved persistent? She
could not tell her the truth; that was something she had put off to an
indefinite future, it was beyond her strength to face it as a present
necessity. The only appeal she could make was one which it cost her
unspeakable self-contempt to utter. To tell Ada that it would be gross
ingratitude to make this return to her mother by adoption. Well, what
else could be said? The misery of degradation brought the first tears to
her eyes.
“You don’t care whether I am grateful or not,” Ada replied, calmer at
length, because weak from nervous overstrain. “You care for me less than
for your servants. No soul cares for me.”
It was this feeling of desolation which had suddenly taken hold of the
developed girl. A heart craving for warmth had come to life within her;
her senses had awakened to desperate hunger. The pathos in her last
utterance was infinite; it touched Isabel to the core.
“It shall not be so, Ada,” was her answer to the cry. “We will be more
to each other; you shall not suffer from loneliness, poor child! I will
never ask you to see people you do not wish to, and I will give you all
I can of my own life. Be kind and childlike with me. My heart is not
hard, dear.”
Not hard, the heart of Isabel Clarendon, but very human, very womanly.
It could not throw open its gates unreservedly to this child who had
been forced upon her. The tears she shed at Ada’s side were bitter and
choking; they brought no solace of moved tenderness.
It was the first and the last of such scenes. A couple of years later
Ada looked back upon her part in it with that brain-scorching shame
to which an intense nature is so subject in recalling immature
impulsiveness. For a week or two at most it made anything of sensible
difference in her own or Mrs. Clarendon’s behaviour, then the
unconquerable coldness returned, with an appearance of finality. Their
conversation limited itself to superficial matters, and even here
occasions of difference not seldom offered, exacting self-control
on both sides. Lacking conscious spiritual life, and all but void of
intellectual interests, Isabel Clarendon could hardly be credited with
principles, but for that reason her prejudices were the stronger. As
Ada grew in mental stature, she found it difficult at all times to avoid
involuntary collision with these prejudices, or even to refrain from
impatient comment of a kind very irritating to Isabel. Small points of
social observance first began to excite the girl’s indignant or
ironical remark, then graver matters of tradition arose between
them--stumbling-blocks for the one, to the other accepted sign-posts.
Ada read much, and procured books from very various sources; even had
Isabel been sufficiently familiar with the characteristics of authors
to judge from their outsides the books she saw lying about, she did
not feel strong enough to attempt to impose restrictions on her ward’s
reading; such a step would assuredly have led to conflicts, and from
this Isabel shrank. Ada’s tastes seemed to her deplorably masculine; it
was very likely, she said to herself, that no positive harm would
result to such a nature from literature poisonous to ordinary girls.
Fortunately Mrs. Clarendon’s conception of responsibility was not
that ever-besieging consciousness which leaves some women no rest in a
position of superintendence. The instinct of procrastination was strong
in her; a thought which troubled her she could, without much difficulty,
set aside for entertainment on the morrow. Promising herself that some
day she would have a long and very serious talk with Ada on the grave
matters which she ordinarily shunned, for the present she allowed the
girl to take her course, and the opportunity to which she often mentally
referred never seemed to present itself.
Had Mrs. Clarendon understood the progress of Ada’s development
she would have been greatly struck with the girl’s moderation and
self-restraint, instead of being, to her own distress, repelled and
hardened by each new manifestation of independence. Regarding Ada’s
expressions of revolt as mere disconnected phenomena, she was puzzled to
account for such evil features in a girl who had been well taught,
held apart from the contamination of low associates, and trained in the
habits of a refined and wealthy home. One explanation alone occurred to
her--the base blood in the child’s veins manifested itself in spite of
education to a different social sphere. Such a thought was natural and
characteristic. Isabel called herself a Conservative in politics; in
social matters she reconciled maxims of intolerance with practical
virtues such as we are apt to call divine, because we find them so
seldom in humanity. What is called the spirit of the times had access
to her only in frivolous babble or inimical caricature. Living on the
surface, she had never been instructed to think for herself in any
matter of grave concern; the criminality of doubt and the obligation
of social conformity were formulae which served her sufficiently for
guidance whenever she might feel herself in danger of going astray. With
pretty extensive knowledge of the world, her acquaintance with human
nature was elementary; to be forced upon the study of a typical case
of divergence from the broad characteristics of respectable upper-class
mankind was to have demanded of her an exercise of intellectual charity
of which she was incapable.
From one friend alone did she derive assistance in the practical details
of her task. This friend was Mr. Thomas Meres, of whom we have already
heard as Rhoda’s father. His acquaintance she had made in the earliest
days of her married life; he acted as secretary to Mr. Clarendon. Thomas
Meres was then a man of thirty; he had attempted literature, and failed
to get a living by it, and had gladly accepted a position which for a
time brought means of support for himself and others dependent upon
him. These others--Isabel only discovered it after Mr. Clarendon’s
death--were a wife and two children. One day, when Isabel had been six
months a widow, she received from the late secretary a letter of appeal
for aid in desperate circumstances; a letter which she answered by at
once summoning to Knightswell the writer and his two children, girls
of four and six respectively. She had always regarded Mr. Meres with
favour; without information as to his private life, she felt that some
hidden misery weighed upon him, and that he was a man of much capability
and goodness sadly at odds with fortune. At Knightswell she won his
confidence, and heard from him a dismal tale of domestic wretchedness.
Happily, the main cause of his sufferings had at length abandoned the
home she had made no home, and the only present difficulty was to find
a means of livelihood. The man himself was starving; the children were
sad-looking little creatures, victims of cruelty and a hard lot. The
three remained at Knightswell for several weeks, being of course on the
footing of visitors, and receiving kindness which put poor Tom Meres
into spiritual bondage for life, bondage he would not have cast off for
any luxurious freedom the world could offer him. Eventually a position
was found for him, and he returned with his children to London.
Having made Ada’s acquaintance in those early days of her rescue from
savagery, Meres continued to regard her with living interest, often
prophesying to her guardian that she would grow into a remarkable woman.
At least once a year he was at Knightswell, and he followed the course
of the child’s education with attentive scrutiny. Ada came to like him;
she displayed no childlike fondness for him, any more than for any one
else, but she listened with pleasure to his talk, and in turn spoke to
him of things of which to all others she kept silence. If Tom did not
positively encourage her critical propensities, he was at all events at
no pains to check them, and it was from his library that she received
books which set her on the track of modern literature, which otherwise
she would have discovered much later. Isabel, when her troubles of
conscience began, taxed her friend with this.
“It is true,” Tom admitted, “I have advised her to read books which I
shouldn’t give to ordinary girls. Ada is not an ordinary girl. Do not
distress yourself, dear lady; no ill will come of it. It is only making
smooth for her a path which would otherwise be intolerably rough.”
“But isn’t it leading her where she wouldn’t otherwise be tempted to
go?” asked Isabel.
“I can assure you, no. Rough or smooth, she will take this direction.
But would you rather I did no more? Your wish is supreme.”
“You are a vastly better judge in these matters than I am,” said Isabel
modestly (meaning what she said, though not perhaps quite feeling it),
“and I know you will be careful. I myself am helpless with Ada; my
guardianship is nominal, I am sorry to say.”
To this friend it was that Ada had now of late been in the habit of
going when she wished to have the change of London life, and now
that she no longer accompanied Mrs. Clarendon during the season. The
arrangement was a good one. Isabel had in the first place protested,
trying to point out to the girl the advantage of making acquaintances in
London other than those which Mr. Meres could offer her. Ada smiled in
her least pleasant way, and Isabel surrendered the point, not in her
heart sorry to be free when she took her own recreation.
“What do you think of Mr. Kingcote?” Isabel asked Ada, as they drank tea
together after the visitor had left.
“I can’t judge him on so slight an acquaintance,” the girl answered. “I
like his voice.”
“Strange that I was going to say the same thing. You shouldn’t have gone
out whilst we were talking. He, at all events, will not drive you away
with--what do you call it?--imbecile chatter.”
“He seems to be a man of some culture. I don’t know that he will find us
very attractive.”
“My poor self, certainly not. But it would be pleasant if he and you
found some interest in common, wouldn’t it? We must have him with the
Vissians to dine.”
“Your social instincts are really remarkable.” It was a noteworthy point
that Ada had never learnt to address Mrs. Clarendon by any name save the
formal one. “Do you think Mr. Kingcote is prepared for formal dining?”
“By-the-bye, most likely not,” said Isabel, laughing. “But it will be a
charity to persuade him to come here sometimes. However, I don’t think
he’ll live there through the winter.”
“Doesn’t it occur to you that he may have gone there because he finds a
difficulty in living in ordinary ways?”
“Yes, very likely.”
She reflected, adding presently:
“He has a nice voice.”