There were times when we had to go without puddings to pay John’s
uniform bills, and always I did the facings myself with a cloth-ball to
save getting new ones. I would have polished his sword, too, if I had
been allowed; I adored his sword. And once, I remember, we painted and
varnished our own dog-cart, and very smart it looked, to save fifty
rupees. We had nothing but our pay--John had his company when we were
married, but what is that?--and life was made up of small knowing
economies, much more amusing in recollection than in practise. We were
sodden poor, and that is a fact, poor and conscientious, which was
worse. A big fat spider of a money-lender came one day into the veranda
and tempted us--we lived in a hut, but it had a veranda--and John
threatened to report him to the police. Poor when everybody else had
enough to live in the open-handed Indian fashion, that was what made it
so hard; we were alone in our sordid little ways. When the expectation
of Cecily came to us we made out to be delighted, knowing that the whole
station pitied us, and when Cecily came herself, with a swamping burst
of expense, we kept up the pretense splendidly. She was peevish, poor
little thing, and she threatened convulsions from the beginning, but we
both knew that it was abnormal not to love her a great deal, more than
life, immediately and increasingly; and we applied ourselves honestly to
do it, with the thermometer at a hundred and two, and the nurse leaving
at the end of a fortnight because she discovered that I had only six
of everything for the table. To find out a husband’s virtues, you must
marry a poor man. The regiment was under-officered as usual, and John
had to take parade at daylight quite three times a week; but he walked
up and down the veranda with Cecily constantly till two in the morning,
when a little coolness came. I usually lay awake the rest of the
night in fear that a scorpion would drop from the ceiling on her.
Nevertheless, we were of excellent mind towards Cecily; we were in such
terror, not so much of failing in our duty towards her as towards the
ideal standard of mankind. We were very anxious indeed not to come
short. To be found too small for one’s place in nature would have been
odious. We would talk about her for an hour at a time, even when John’s
charger was threatening glanders and I could see his mind perpetually
wandering to the stable. I would say to John that she had brought a new
element into our lives--she had indeed!--and John would reply, ‘I know
what you mean,’ and go on to prophesy that she would ‘bind us together.’
We didn’t need binding together; we were more to each other, there in
the desolation of that arid frontier outpost, than most husbands and
wives; but it seemed a proper and hopeful thing to believe, so we
believed it. Of course, the real experience would have come, we weren’t
monsters; but fate curtailed the opportunity. She was just five
weeks old when the doctor told us that we must either pack her home
immediately or lose her, and the very next day John went down with
enteric. So Cecily was sent to England with a sergeant’s wife who had
lost her twins, and I settled down under the direction of a native
doctor, to fight for my husband’s life, without ice or proper food, or
sickroom comforts of any sort. Ah! Fort Samila, with the sun glaring up
from the sand!--however, it is a long time ago now. I trusted the baby
willingly to Mrs. Berry and to Providence, and did not fret; my capacity
for worry, I suppose, was completely absorbed. Mrs. Berry’s letter,
describing the child’s improvement on the voyage and safe arrival came,
I remember, the day on which John was allowed his first solid mouthful;
it had been a long siege. ‘Poor little wretch!’ he said when I read it
aloud; and after that Cecily became an episode.
She had gone to my husband’s people; it was the best arrangement. We
were lucky that it was possible; so many children had to be sent to
strangers and hirelings. Since an unfortunate infant must be brought
into the world and set adrift, the haven of its grandmother and its Aunt
Emma and its Aunt Alice certainly seemed providential. I had absolutely
no cause for anxiety, as I often told people, wondering that I did
not feel a little all the same. Nothing, I knew, could exceed the
conscientious devotion of all three Farnham ladies to the child. She
would appear upon their somewhat barren horizon as a new and interesting
duty, and the small additional income she also represented would be
almost nominal compensation for the care she would receive. They were
excellent persons of the kind that talk about matins and vespers, and
attend both. They helped little charities and gave little teas,
and wrote little notes, and made deprecating allowance for the
eccentricities of their titled or moneyed acquaintances. They were the
subdued, smiling, unimaginatively dressed women on a small definite
income that you meet at every rectory garden-party in the country, a
little snobbish, a little priggish, wholly conventional, but apart from
these weaknesses, sound and simple and dignified, managing their two
small servants with a display of the most exact traditions, and keeping
a somewhat vague and belated but constant eye upon the doings of their
country as chronicled in a bi-weekly paper. They were all immensely
interested in royalty, and would read paragraphs aloud to each other
about how the Princess Beatrice or the Princess Maud had opened a fancy
bazaar, looking remarkably well in plain grey poplin trimmed with Irish
lace--an industry which, as is well known, the Royal Family has set its
heart on rehabilitating. Upon which Mrs. Farnham’s comment invariably
would be, ‘How thoughtful of them, dear!’ and Alice would usually say,
‘Well, if I were a princess, I should like something nicer than plain
grey poplin.’ Alice, being the youngest, was not always expected to
think before she spoke. Alice painted in water-colours, but Emma was
supposed to have the most common sense.
They took turns in writing to us with the greatest regularity about
Cecily; only once, I think, did they miss the weekly mail, and that was
when she threatened diphtheria and they thought we had better be kept
in ignorance. The kind and affectionate terms of these letters never
altered except with the facts they described--teething, creeping,
measles, cheeks growing round and rosy, all were conveyed in the same
smooth, pat, and proper phrases, so absolutely empty of any glimpse
of the child’s personality that after the first few months it was like
reading about a somewhat uninteresting infant in a book. I was sure
Cecily was not uninteresting, but her chroniclers were. We used to wade
through the long, thin sheets and saw how much more satisfactory it
would be when Cecily could write to us herself. Meanwhile we noted her
weekly progress with much the feeling one would have about a far-away
little bit of property that was giving no trouble and coming on
exceedingly well. We would take possession of Cecily at our convenience;
till then, it was gratifying to hear of our unearned increment in dear
little dimples and sweet little curls.
She was nearly four when I saw her again. We were home on three months’
leave; John had just got his first brevet for doing something which he
does not allow me to talk about in the Black Mountain country; and we
were fearfully pleased with ourselves. I remember that excitement lasted
well up to Port Said. As far as the Canal, Cecily was only one of the
pleasures and interests we were going home to: John’s majority was
the thing that really gave savour to life. But the first faint line of
Europe brought my child to my horizon; and all the rest of the way she
kept her place, holding out her little arms to me, beckoning me on. Her
four motherless years brought compunction to my heart and tears to my
eyes; she should have all the compensation that could be. I suddenly
realized how ready I was--how ready!--to have her back. I rebelled
fiercely against John’s decision that we must not take her with us on
our return to the frontier; privately, I resolved to dispute it, and, if
necessary, I saw myself abducting the child--my own child. My days and
nights as the ship crept on were full of a long ache to possess her; the
defrauded tenderness of the last four years rose up in me and sometimes
caught at my throat. I could think and talk and dream of nothing else.
John indulged me as much as was reasonable, and only once betrayed by a
yawn that the subject was not for him endlessly absorbing. Then I cried
and he apologized. ‘You know,’ he said, ‘it isn’t exactly the same
thing. I’m not her mother.’ At which I dried my tears and expanded,
proud and pacified. I was her mother!
Then the rainy little station and Alice, all-embracing in a damp
waterproof, and the drive in the fly, and John’s mother at the gate and
a necessary pause while I kissed John’s mother. Dear thing, she wanted
to hold our hands and look into our faces and tell us how little we had
changed for all our hardships; and on the way to the house she actually
stopped to point out some alterations in the flower-borders. At last the
drawing-room door and the smiling housemaid turning the handle and the
unforgettable picture of a little girl, a little girl unlike anything we
had imagined, starting bravely to trot across the room with the little
speech that had been taught her. Half-way she came; I suppose our
regards were too fixed, too absorbed, for there she stopped with a
wail of terror at the strange faces, and ran straight back to the
outstretched arms of her Aunt Emma. The most natural thing in the
world, no doubt. I walked over to a chair opposite with my hand-bag and
umbrella and sat down--a spectator, aloof and silent. Aunt Emma fondled
and quieted the child, apologizing for her to me, coaxing her to look
up, but the little figure still shook with sobs, hiding its face in
the bosom that it knew. I smiled politely, like any other stranger,
at Emma’s deprecations, and sat impassive, looking at my alleged baby
breaking her heart at the sight of her mother. It is not amusing even
now to remember the anger that I felt. I did not touch her or speak to
her; I simply sat observing my alien possession, in the frock I had
not made and the sash I had not chosen, being coaxed and kissed and
protected and petted by its Aunt Emma. Presently I asked to be taken to
my room, and there I locked myself in for two atrocious hours. Just once
my heart beat high, when a tiny knock came and a timid, docile little
voice said that tea was ready. But I heard the rustle of a skirt, and
guessed the directing angel in Aunt Emma, and responded, ‘Thank you,
dear, run away and say that I am coming,’ with a pleasant visitor’s
inflection which I was able to sustain for the rest of afternoon.
‘She goes to bed at seven,’ said Emma.
‘Oh, does she?’ said I. ‘A very good hour, I should think.’
‘She sleeps in my room,’ said Mrs. Farnham.
‘We give her mutton broth very often, but seldom stock soup,’ said Aunt
Emma. ‘Mamma thinks it is too stimulating.’
‘Indeed?’ said I, to all of it.
They took me up to see her in her crib, and pointed out, as she lay
asleep, that though she had ‘a general look’ of me, her features were
distinctively Farnham.
‘Won’t you kiss her?’ asked Alice. ‘You haven’t kissed her yet, and she
is used to so much affection.’
‘I don’t think I could take such an advantage of her,’ I said.
They looked at each other, and Mrs. Farnham said that I was plainly worn
out. I mustn’t sit up to prayers.
If I had been given anything like reasonable time I might have made
a fight for it, but four weeks--it took a month each way in those
days--was too absurdly little; I could do nothing. But I would not
stay at mamma’s. It was more than I would ask of myself, that daily
disappointment under the mask of gratified discovery, for long.
I spent an approving, unnatural week, in my farcical character, bridling
my resentment and hiding my mortification with pretty phrases; and then
I went up to town and drowned my sorrows in the summer sales. I took
John with me. I may have been Cecily’s mother in theory, but I was
John’s wife in fact.
We went back to the frontier, and the regiment saw a lot of service.
That meant medals and fun for my husband, but economy and anxiety for
me, though I managed to be allowed as close to the firing line as any
woman.
Once the Colonel’s wife and I, sitting in Fort Samila, actually heard
the rifles of a punitive expedition cracking on the other side of
the river--that was a bad moment. My man came in after fifteen hours’
fighting, and went sound asleep, sitting before his food with his knife
and fork in his hands. But service makes heavy demands besides those
on your wife’s nerves. We had saved two thousand rupees, I remember,
against another run home, and it all went like powder, in the Mirzai
expedition; and the run home diminished to a month in a boarding-house
in the hills.
Meanwhile, however, we had begun to correspond with our daughter, in
large round words of one syllable, behind which, of course, was
plain the patient guiding hand of Aunt Emma. One could hear Aunt Emma
suggesting what would be nice to say, trying to instil a little pale
affection for the far-off papa and mamma. There was so little Cecily and
so much Emma--of course, it could not be otherwise--that I used to take,
I fear, but a perfunctory joy in these letters. When we went home again
I stipulated absolutely that she was to write to us without any sort of
supervision--the child was ten.
‘But the spelling!’ cried Aunt Emma, with lifted eyebrows.
‘Her letters aren’t exercises,’ I was obliged to retort; ‘she will do
the best she can.’
We found her a docile little girl, with nice manners, a thoroughly
unobjectionable child. I saw quite clearly that I could not have brought
her up so well; indeed, there were moments when I fancied that Cecily,
contrasting me with her aunts, wondered a little what my bringing up
could have been like. With this reserve of criticism on Cecily’s part,
however, we got on very tolerably, largely because I found it impossible
to assume any responsibility towards her, and in moments of doubt or
discipline referred her to her aunts. We spent a pleasant summer with
a little girl in the house whose interest in us was amusing, and whose
outings it was gratifying to arrange; but when we went back, I had no
desire to take her with us. I thought her very much better where she
was.
Then came the period which is filled, in a subordinate degree, with
Cecily’s letters. I do not wish to claim more than I ought; they were
not my only or even my principal interest in life. It was a long
period; it lasted till she was twenty-one. John had had promotion in the
meantime, and there was rather more money, but he had earned his second
brevet with a bullet through one lung, and the doctors ordered our leave
to be spent in South Africa. We had photographs, we knew she had
grown tall and athletic and comely, and the letters were always very
creditable. I had the unusual and qualified privilege of watching my
daughter’s development from ten to twenty-one, at a distance of
four thousand miles, by means of the written word. I wrote myself as
provocatively as possible; I sought for every string, but the vibration
that came back across the seas to me was always other than the one I
looked for, and sometimes there was none. Nevertheless, Mrs. Farnham
wrote me that Cecily very much valued my communications. Once when I had
described an unusual excursion in a native state, I learned that she
had read my letter aloud to the sewing circle. After that I abandoned
description, and confined myself to such intimate personal details as no
sewing circle could find amusing. The child’s own letters were simply
a mirror of the ideas of the Farnham ladies; that must have been so,
it was not altogether my jaundiced eye. Alice and Emma and grandmamma
paraded the pages in turn. I very early gave up hope of discoveries
in my daughter, though as much of the original as I could detect was
satisfactorily simple and sturdy. I found little things to criticize,
of course, tendencies to correct; and by return post I criticized and
corrected, but the distance and the deliberation seemed to touch my
maxims with a kind of arid frivolity, and sometimes I tore them up. One
quick, warm-blooded scolding would have been worth a sheaf of them. My
studied little phrases could only inoculate her with a dislike for me
without protecting her from anything under the sun.
However, I found she didn’t dislike me, when John and I went home at
last to bring her out. She received me with just a hint of kindness,
perhaps, but on the whole very well.