In the midst of my eighteenth year fortune began to darken. My mother
had told me little of the world, its chances and changes, cares and
troubles. What I had learned of these came chiefly from books and my own
speculations. We had few visitors and from all but the most familiar I
was quickly packed away. My mother was sensitive of me, for both our
sakes. But I think in this she was mistaken, for when my time came, Life
found me raw, and it rubbed in the salt rather vigorously.
My father had other views. He argued for facing the facts, though
perhaps those relating to fruit and paper are not very intimidating. But
he seldom made his way against my mother, except in matters that
concerned his own comfort. He loved me fondly but throughout my
childhood seems to have regarded me as a kind of animated marionette.
When he came out from his Mills and Pockets it amused him to find me
nibbling a raspberry beside his plate. He'd rub his round stubbly head,
and say, "Well, mamma, and how's Trot done this morning?" or he would
stoop and draw ever so heedfully his left little finger down my nose to
its uttermost tip, and whisper: "And so to Land's End, my love." Now and
then I would find his eyes fixed on me as if in stupefaction that I was
actually his daughter.
But now that I was getting to be a young woman and had put up my hair,
and the future frowned near, this domestic problem began seriously to
concern him. My mother paled at the very mention of it. I remember I had
climbed up on to his writing desk one morning, in search of a pair of
high boots which I had taken off in his study the evening before. We had
been fishing for sticklebacks. Concealed from view, while the wind
whined at the window, I heard a quarrel between my father and mother
about me which I will never repeat to mortal ear. It darkened my mind
for days, and if ... but better not.
At this time anxiety about money matters must have begun its gnawing in
my poor father's brains. And I know what _that_ means. He had
recommended to others and speculated himself in some experiment in the
cultivation of the trees from which the Chinese first made paper, and
had not only been grossly cheated, but laughed at in the press. _The
Kentish Courier_--I see his ears burning now--had referred to him as
"the ingenious Mr Tapa"; and my mother's commiseration had hardly
solaced him: "But, my dear, you couldn't have gone to Canton by
yourself. We must just draw in our horns a little." The ingenious Mr
Tapa patted the hand on his shoulder, but his ears burned on.
"Besides," my mother added, with a long, sighing breath, as she seated
herself again, "there are the books." He plucked his spectacles off, and
gazed vaguely in her direction: "Oh, yes, yes, there are the books."
Nor was he long daunted by this attack. He fell in love with some notion
of so pickling hop-poles that they would last for ever. But the press
was no kinder to his poles than to his mulberries.
And then befell the blackest misfortune of my life. I had been ill; and
for a few days had been sleeping in one of the spare bedrooms in a cot
beside my mother, so that she should be near me if I needed her. This
particular evening, however, I had gone back to my own room. We cannot
change the past, or foresee the future. But if only Pollie had not been
a heavy sleeper; if only I had escaped that trivial ailment--how tangled
is life's skein! It was the May after my eighteenth birthday and full
moonlight.
Troubled in mind by my illness and other worries and mortifications, my
mother, not fully aroused perhaps, got up in the small hours and mounted
the stone staircase in order to look in on me. I was awake, and heard
the rustling of her nightdress and the faint touch of her slippered feet
ascending from stone to stone. I guessed her errand, and in my folly
thought I would pretend to be asleep and give her a "surprise." I drew
my curtains and lay motionless on my back as if I were dead. With eyes
closed, listening, I smilingly waited.
Then suddenly I heard a muffled, gasping cry; and all was utterly,
icily still. I flung aside the silk curtains and leapt out of bed.
The moonlight was streaming in a lean ray across the floor of my room. I
ran down this luminous pathway into the dusk at the open door. At the
stair-head beyond, still and silent, I saw my poor dear. On through the
cold dark air I ran, and stood in her loosened hair beside her head. It
lay unstirring, her cheek colourless, her hand stretched out, palm
upward, on the stone. I called into her ear, first gently and
pleadingly, then loud and shrill. I ran and chafed her fingers, then
back again, and stooped, listening with my cheek to her lips. She
exhaled a trembling sigh. I called and called; but my shrillness was
utterly swallowed up in the vast night-hung house. Then softly in the
silence her lids unsealed and her eyes, as if wonderful with a remote
dream, looked up into my face. "My dear," she whispered, wakefulness
gathering faintly into her gaze, "my dear, is it you?" There was an
accent in her voice that I had never heard before. Perhaps her tranceful
eyes had magnified me. Then once more the lids closed down and I was
alone. I fell on my knees beside her and crouched, praying into her
heedless ear.
It was my first acquaintance with calamity, and physically powerless to
aid her, I could think of nothing for a moment but to persuade her to
speak to me again. Then my senses returned to me. To descend that flight
of stairs--down which hitherto I had always been carried--would waste
more precious time than I could spare. There seemed to be but one
alternative--to waken Pollie. I ran back into my bedroom and tugged
violently at the slack of her bedclothes. A mouse might as well have
striven to ring Great Paul. She breathed on with open mouth, flat on her
back, like a log. Then a thought came to me.
There was a brass-bound box under my bed, a full fifteen inches long,
though shallow, in which my grandfather had lately sent me some gowns
and finery from Paris. With some little difficulty I lugged and pushed
this all across the room, and out on to the staircase. My strength
seemed to be superhuman. One moment I flew to my mother, but now she lay
in a profound sleep indeed, her cheek like marble. With a last effort I
edged my box on its side between the balusters, and at some risk of
falling after it, shoved it over into the moon-silvered dusk below. The
house echoed with its resounding brazen clatter as it pitched from stair
to stair. Then quiet. Clutching with either hand the baluster I leaned
over, listening. Then a voice cried sleepily: "Hah!" then a call,
"Caroline!" and a moment afterwards I discerned my father ascending the
staircase....
For weeks I lay desperately ill. The chill, the anguish, and horror of
that night had come upon a frame already weakened. Life was nothing but
an evil dream, a world of terrifying shadows and phantoms. But our old
friend Dr Grose was familiar with my constitution, and at last I began
to mend. Pollie, stricken with remorse, nursed me night and day, giving
my small bed every hour she could spare in a house stricken and
disordered. I was never told in so many words that my mother was dead.
In my extreme weakness I learned it of the air around me, of every
secret sound and movement in the house.
Morning and evening appeared my father's great face in the doorway, his
eyebrows lifted high above his spectacles. To see his misery I almost
wished that I might die to spare him more. When Dr Grose gave him
permission, he sat down beside my bed and stooping low, told me that my
mother had remembered our last speech together on the staircase, and he
gave me her last message. A thousand and one remembrances of her
patience and impulsiveness, of our long hours of solitude together, of
her fits of new life as if she were a tree blossoming in the Spring, of
her voice, her dignified silence with Miss Fenne, her sallies with my
grandfather, her absent musings--these all return to me.
Alas, that it was never in my power, except perhaps at that last moment,
to be to her a true comfort and companion, anything much better, in
fact, than a familiar and tragic playmate. Worse beyond words; how
little I had done for her that I might have done!
But regret must not lead me into extremes. That is not the whole truth.
There were occasions, I think, when she almost forgot my disabilities,
when we were just two quiet, equal spirits in the world and conversed
together gravely and simply, not as children, but as fellow-women. It is
these I treasure dearest, while thanking her for all. Why, in the
whirligig of time, if my authorities are trustworthy, and my life had
fallen out differently, the problem might now have been reversed! I
myself might have had natural-sized children and they a pygmy mother.
The strangeness of the world.
Out of the listlessness of convalescence my interests began to renew
themselves. Across the gulf that separated us I could still commune with
my mother's quiet spirit. Her peace and the peace of her forgiveness
began to descend on me; and her grave in my imagination has now no more
sorrow than the anticipation of my own. From my windowsill loggia I
could command a full "Hundred" of Kent. Up there on the barrowed
hill-top it was said that on fine days a keen eye could descry the sea
to north and south; though Dr Grose dismissed it as a piece of local
presumption. Now that my mother was gone the clouds were stranger, the
birds more sweetly melancholy, the flowers more fleeting. Something of
youth had passed away to return no more.
Half my thoughts were wasted in futile resentment at my incapacities.
Yet it was a helplessness that in part was forced on me from without.
Still less now could my father take me seriously. We shared our silent
meals together. He would sit moping, pushing his hand over his whitening
hair, or staring over his spectacles out of the window to the low
whistling of some endless, monotonous tune that would haunt him for days
together and fret me to distraction. Now and again he would favour me
with a serious speech, and then, with a glance, perhaps hurry away to
his study before I could answer. To his half-completed dissertations on
Hop, Cherry, and Paper, I learned he had added another, on the Oyster.
Many of his letters were now postmarked Whitstable. He even advertised
in his old enemy, the _Courier_, for information: and would break out
into furious abuse at the stupidity of his correspondents. Meanwhile his
appetite increased; he would nod in his chair; his clothes grew shabby;
his appearance neglected. Poor dear, he missed my mother.
But I made a struggle to take her place. Every morning Pollie would
carry me off to the kitchen for a discussion with Mrs Ballard over the
household affairs of the day. With her fat, floury hand, she would hide
her mouth and gravely nod her head at my instructions. But I knew she
was concealing her amusement. "Oh, these men!" she once exclaimed at
some new caprice of "the master's," "they are never happy unless they
can be where they bain't." With my own hand I printed out for her a list
of my father's favourite dishes. I left off my black and wore bright
colours again, so that he might not be constantly reminded of the past.
But when after long debate I took courage one day to propose myself as
his housekeeper--I shall never forget the facial expression which he
quickly rubbed off with his hand.
He fetched out of his trousers pocket a great bunch of keys, and jangled
them almost ferociously in the air at me for a full minute together with
tears of amusement in his eyes. Then he tossed down the last gulp or two
of his port and went off. A moment after he must have realized how cruel
a blow he had dealt my vanity and my love. He returned, seated himself
heavily in his chair, and looked at me. Then stretching out his hand he
dropped his face on to his arm. A horrible quietness spread over the
room. For the first time I looked with a kind of terror at the hairy
fingers and whitening head, and could not stir.
How oddly chance repeats itself. The door opened and once more,
unannounced, Miss Fenne appeared in our midst. My father hastily rose to
greet her, pretending that nothing was amiss. But when she held out her
clawlike hand to me to be kissed, I merely stared at her. She screwed up
her countenance into a smile; mumbled that I was looking pale and peaked
again; and, with difficulty keeping her eyes from mine, explained that
she had come for a business talk with my father.
A few days afterwards I was standing up at the window of my mother's
little sewing-room--always a favourite refuge of mine, for there the
afternoon sun and the colours of evening used to beat into the corner.
And I saw a small-sized woman with a large black bonnet come waddling up
the drive. She was followed by a boy wheeling a square box on a
two-wheeled trolley. It was Mrs Sheppey come to be housekeeper to the
widower and his daughter.
Mrs Sheppey proved to be a harassed and muddling woman, and she came to
a harassed home. My father's affairs had gone from bad to worse. He was
gloomy and morose. A hunted look sometimes gleamed in his eyes, and the
spectacled nose seemed to grow the smaller the more solemn its
surroundings were. He spent most of the day in his dressing-gown now,
had quarrelled with Dr Grose, and dismissed Mrs Ballard. The rooms were
dirty and neglected. Pollie would maunder about with a broom, or stand
idly staring out of the window. She was in love. At least, so I realize
now. At the time I thought she was merely lumpish and stupid.
Only once in my recollection did Mrs Sheppey pay my own quarters a
visit. I was kneeling on my balcony and out of sight, and could watch
her unseen. She stood there--tub-shaped, a knob of dingy hair sticking
out from her head, her skirts suspended round her boots--passively
examining my bed, my wardrobe, and my other belongings. Her scrutiny
over, she threw up her hands and the whites of her eyes as if in
expostulation to heaven, turned about in her cloth boots, and waddled
out again. Pollie told me, poor thing, that her children had been thorns
in her side. I brooded over this. Had I not myself, however
involuntarily, been a thorn in _my_ mother's side? I despised and yet
pitied Mrs Sheppey.
She was, if anything, frightened of me, and of my tongue, and would
address me as "little lady" in a cringing, pursed-up fashion. But I am
thankful to say she never attempted to touch me or to lift me from the
floor. Her memory is inextricably bound up with a brown, round pudding
with a slimy treacle sauce which she used to send to table every
Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday. My father would look at it with his
nose rather than with his eyes; and after perhaps its fiftieth
appearance, he summoned Mrs Sheppey with a violent tug at the bell. She
thrust her head in at the door. "Take it away," he said, "take it away.
Eat it. Devour it. Hide it from God's sight, good woman. Don't gibber.
Take it away!"
His tone frightened me out of my wits and Mrs Sheppey out of the house.
Then came the end. At the beginning of August in my twentieth year, my
father, who had daily become stranger in appearance and habits, though
steadfastly refusing to call in his old friend, Dr Grose, was found dead
in his bed. He was like a boy who never can quite succeed in pleasing
himself or his masters. He had gone to bed and shut his eyes, never in
this world to open them again.