If they had only told her that her mother was dead!
Death, Laura understood. There had been Ben, the beloved mongrel who was
poisoned, and Grandmamma, and birds, and once a kitten. Her mother had
explained it all to her at the time. Remembering, she would still have
had, in the shock, her mother to lean upon. And, especially to a child,
death’s finality is its own anodyne. But nobody, with that anxious
English substitution of euphemism for tact, ever used the bald word
‘death.’ Mother, she was told, was alive and well and happy. She was
living in heaven with Jesus and Our Father. She knew everything that
Laura did, and one day, if Laura were good, she would see her again.
Conceive the effect on a homesick baby with a superfluity of
imagination, and a knowledge of life that would have amused a London
sparrow!
It was simplicity itself to Laura. Mother might come at any moment, and
she would come, of course, from the station, along the dusty high-road
that swept past the end of the lane and that you could see from the
window of the inviolate spareroom. Therefore, till her aunt, in
desperation, locked the door and hid the key, neither persuasion,
scolding, disgrace nor docked puddings, could, on rainy days, keep a
mulish Laura from curling up in the forbidden window-seat to watch the
distant strip with an air of expectancy that would have made that
awaited mother’s heart ache.
The fine days were a more doubtful good. True, boundaries were enlarged,
and from the end of the lane a wider vista was under her observation, a
white river on which black, far-away specks were for ever swimming
boat-like into ken, to swell and lengthen and lighten, at last, into
figures of men and women—women in tweedy skirts and blue ribbons and
little straw hats, that were always Mother until they were near. What
mad terrier-rushes that high-road saw, helter-skelter down the last
hundred yards, and what drag-foot returns and hot tears blinked away.
But fine weather brought worse things than disappointment. It brought
the long daily walks, and picnics, sometimes, when an aunt who was doing
her duty by roly-poly nephews and a taciturn niece, thought it time for
a treat. And then would come the scenes, delays, excuses, direct
petition, and the final ‘temper,’ the white-hot rebellion that exhausted
alike the bored nursemaid and bewildered aunt, and did indeed at first
accomplish Laura’s object of being left behind. For, locked in the
night-nursery to consider its sins, the ha’porth of misery, perched on
its high chair like a tousled bird, would be fiercely rejoicing that
once more it had staved off catastrophe—a mother arriving and departing
again while her little girl was out for a walk.
But such a reason could not be explained to Aunt Adela, Who Smelt of
Lanoline.
Laura hated Aunt Adela as she hated every one in those first
interminable months in that alien household. Her all-satisfying intimacy
with her mother had created in her a habit of indifference to the rest
of even her own tiny world, and now, stranded among semi-strangers, she
was at first so shy and so fastidious that, in the happiest
circumstances, it would have taken time before she learned how to make
or receive advances. But it is not easy to be polite with a hidden
trouble gnawing, like a fox, at one’s vitals: and Laura did not try over
hard. For Laura, fighting for her memories like a dog for its bones,
with a more insidious foe than honest Aunt Adela, had lost already much
of her treasure, dropping one by one as she struggled the pretty ways
her mother had taught her, and growing, in her bitter loneliness, into a
very wild apple of a small girl, over whom aunt and household and
visitors shook their heads in despair.
She became, of course, as the months went by, outwardly more
amenable—was tamed as a wolf-cub can be tamed, into a semblance of
domesticity. There came, at least, an end to the flinging of a frantic
body from side to side of its cage. She bruised herself at last into a
state of acquiescence, and even learned to do tricks. But she never
forgot that she was trapped. Aunt Adela, taking Wilfred and James to her
well-meaning heart, would wonder why it was so much more difficult to do
her duty by Laura. Laura had been naughty at first, but under her,
Adela’s, wise management she was certainly settling down. Yet there was
something about her that Adela found, she hardly knew why,
disturbing—distressing even. Why couldn’t Laura be more like other
children? Why, for instance, would she not make friends with the
playfellows of Adela’s anxious choice? A conscientious aunt might well
plume herself on the advantages she could confer—advantages that her
late lamented, yet (between you and her) eccentric sister-in-law had
never troubled to procure for an excessively spoiled daughter. There
were the Vicar’s daughters—such well-behaved children. There were the
two nieces of Brackenhurst’s great man, old Timothy Cloud, thrice Mayor
of the neighbouring market town before he died and had a stained glass
window in Brackenhurst parish church. And there was the son himself,
young Justin Cloud, though he was at school of course, and older, but
nominally at least an ornament of a most select little circle.
Above all there were the five little Mouldes, models of deportment, with
neat pinafores, and straight fair hair, and white eyelashes, and noses
moistly pink, like puppies. Laura was expected to invite or to go to tea
with them at least once a week, though it soon appeared that the visits
needed Aunt Adela’s eye to be even superficially successful. Only Aunt
Adela’s eye could prevent Laura from retiring under the nearest bed with
a book, and refusing to budge till it was time for herself or her
visitors to depart. It enraged Laura that the accident of age should
mark her down for friendship with Annabel Moulde, a sly, skinny child to
whom Aunt Adela invariably referred as “A little mother. So good to all
her brothers and sisters.” As if Laura didn’t try to be good to Wilfred
and James—when Aunt Adela wasn’t looking!... Because it was for Mother
... because she had promised ... not to please Aunt Adela ... not to
show off like Annabel.... Laura despised Annabel for her ostentatious
virtue and her meagre bookshelf—_Queechy_, _Ministering Children_,
_Melbourne House_, _Jessica’s First Prayer_.... She was expected to be
friends with a little girl who enjoyed—yes, enjoyed—reading _Jessica’s
First Prayer_! Yet Annabel, unconsciously, had done her a good turn; for
Laura, bursting with the humorous horror of that discovery, had been
impelled to break her habit of silence to impart the joke, tentatively,
to Gran’papa Valentine—and Gran’papa, over his spectacles and his
_Boswell_, had been surprised into a chuckle, and a stirring of interest
in a granddaughter to whose credit he had heard little, and,
conversation developing, had ended, to their mutual amazement, in
bestowing upon her the freedom of his sitting-room and his biscuit tin,
and certain of his unlocked bookshelves. After which there was, at
least, always Gran’papa!
Gran’papa’s room was the pleasantest in the house—small, square and
cosy. The furniture was of some yellowish wood, glassy with polish, and
there was a chequered crimson tablecloth and, summer and winter, a
dancing yellow fire. The window was always open, and the fresh warmed
air smelt faintly of biscuits and tobacco and old bindings. The pictures
on the walls hung orderly, in couples, Landseer engravings and framed
coloured casts of trout; for Gran’papa was a fisherman. He was a fiddler
too, though here zeal outran discretion. His violin was wrapped away in
silk and velvet, like a lady, and Laura was never quite sure that it was
not, say—first cousin? to the fairy fiddle in _Grimm’s_. She longed to
experiment. There was the big desk with ink and seals and wax, and neat
papers innumerable, and a pot with marigolds or mignonette, and always
there was sunshine and the bad-tempered canary, that would dash at you
from its open cage, with peckings and shrill squeaks of jealous rage,
till Gran’papa whistled, when it would perch upon his finger or his
skull-cap, and slowly condense from a passionate puff-ball into an
elegant little gentleman in lemon yellow breeches and snuff-coloured
swallow-tails, with an eye so fixed and bright that you could swear it
wore a monocle.
A memory to bring a lump into a grandchild’s throat, the picture of
stern old Gran’papa, with his whole edifice of dignity built up so
solidly, from his square-toed boots and speckless broadcloth and his
grey satin tie with its pearl pin, to his curly beard and cold blue
eyes, and the unnecessary skull-cap upon his splendid white head,
fantastically topped by a scolding bull-canary. A grown-up Laura,
looking back, a long way back, might begin, belatedly, to miss a
half-forgotten Gran’papa, might wonder whether, after all, she had
sufficiently appreciated him, realize with a sigh that she had learned
in those young years to love him as sincerely and coldly and faithfully
as he had loved her; though ‘love’ was not a word that Laura could
imagine Gran’papa using, any more than she could hear him saying,
‘pretty girl’ when he meant, he emphatically meant, ‘an elegant young
female.’ Even ‘young woman’ would have been a concession for Gran’papa’s
nice ear. Just so, Laura’s phrase would have been tempered by Gran’papa
to ‘affection,’ ‘esteem,’ ‘respect.’ And there she would have agreed
with him again, for she certainly respected him profoundly. And he,
secretly, respected her, because in her he could recognize his own keen,
fastidious spirit. Emotionally, they were at opposite poles, but
intellectually they were allies with kindred tastes and kindred minds.
Not kindred souls—there they parted company; for where Laura’s affection
could invariably be trusted to blind her to the most obvious flaws, the
testing tool of her grandfather’s hypercritical taste had left him, at
the end of a long life, with no object worth loving at all—save Laura.
That Laura, his flesh and blood, had something of his own grey matter in
her head too, was a secret delight to him: and by the time he was eighty
and she eighteen, Laura had discovered that secret and how, in
consequence, to wind him, for all his tetchiness, round her finger. But
that is at yet eight or nine years ahead, and Laura only beginning to
discover that in Gran’papa’s room, at Gran’papa’s lowest bookshelf, she
could sometimes forget to wonder if Mother would come this afternoon.
Gran’papa’s bookshelf was crammed with volumes so tall and heavy that to
pull one out was breathless work, and to lift it a greater feat than
lifting the coal-scuttle or Wilfred who weighed three stone. They had to
be read by a literary Laura reposing on her stomach, her legs waving
airily, her elbows so chafed and reddened by the harsh carpet and her
own weight, that they are to this day her worst point. Which is the
reason, Collaborator, if the matter has bothered you, that Laura, even
at that dinner-party we shall attend sooner or later, never wore really
short sleeves.
But the books were worth it, even to the later Laura at her most
feminine hour when Justin, unprompted, had admired her frock and said,
not joking, that he liked red hair. (Truly—he said so!) For the books
were an education, and an education is more useful than pretty elbows
when one has a Justin for whom to stand tiptoe.
But to the early Laura, with her mother half lost and Justin not yet
found, they were not education but Nepenthe—Nepenthe and the Fields.
There was _Herodotus_, and _The Swiss Family Robinson_, and _Gulliver’s
Travels_; _Pamela_, and a first edition of _Alice_ (Gran’papa approved
of Tenniel) and three or four single poems, each a book to itself, with
a profusion of bright-coloured illustrations—_Gilpin_, _The Elegy on a
Mad Dog_, _The Three Jovial Hunstmen_, and Laura’s favourite, _So She
went into the Garden to get a Cabbage Leaf_. There was the _Churchman’s
Family Bible_, with Adam in voluminous goatskin draperies, and Eve with
hair like Mother, and square capital letters at the beginning of
chapters with tiny pictures filled into them. There were the
Cruikshanks—huge albums into which Gran’papa had pasted every print or
drawing of his favourite artist that he had come across in fifty magpie
years. And there was _Mr. Punch_, immortal _Mr. Punch_, endless volumes
of him, inexhaustible, a mine of delight, and the true explanation of
the singular and detailed acquaintance with Victorian politics with
which Laura of the tenacious memory could, on occasion, confound an
opponent. Pouring over the cartoons, devouring the antiquated
letter-press as only a small child can, she had bewildered Aunt Adela
one day on a visit to Madame Tussaud, by her delighted recognition of
group after group of Her Majesty’s Ministers who had died before she was
born. She adored Lord Salisbury, for instance, and pitied him deeply for
losing his wife, for she had him thoroughly entangled with _The Lord of
Burleigh_. But her favourites were naughty Randolph, the mustachioed
schoolboy, being very rude to Mr. Gladstone, and ‘Joey,’ whose speeches
in that last tragic tour she cut out and kept and learned by heart, and
would declaim unweariedly to the looking-glass and the indifferent
twins, and who was nevertheless inextricably confused in her teeming,
unfocussed mind with her one delirious pantomime and Mr. Alfred Jingle.
Worship was even then, I suppose, a necessity of her nature, and, her
chief altar veiled, her mind was in process of becoming a pantheon, in
which _Jane Eyre_ and Jephthah’s daughter, Mary Stuart and Napoleon (it
shocked her intensely that Gran’papa could refer to him familiarly as
‘Boney’) shared incense with _Wamba son of Witless_, and Admiral Byng,
and poor Arachne, who _did_ sew better than Minerva anyhow! For Laura’s
gods were generally selected for their misfortunes’ sake. She had the
instinct for lost causes: would always be the loyalest of rebels. Indeed
her early and equal passion for John Milton and Marie Corelli was
occasioned by the fact that here, at least, were two who could
appreciate a poor devil’s good points. If Laura could have had
Providence under her orders for but one busy hour, how topsy-turvily
perfect the world would have rolled on again, with never a discrowned
king nor a carrotless donkey nor a motherless eight-year-old in all its
boundaries. Her baby sorrows had intensified her inborn sympathy with
any ill-treated thing, and, as the leaves began to fall in that first
lonely autumn, she would fling small, motherly arms round the shivering
poplar on the lawn as she passed it, and hug it and warm it, with
defiant glances at the comfortable fir trees and well-dressed laurels:
would rescue dying flowers from the bonfire, and worms from the birds,
and birds from the pussy-cat: and when she found a tell-tale hole and a
nibbled book in Gran’papa’s bookshelf she was quite as anxious as the
mouse to preserve the secret. Can you see Laura, Collaborator, breathing
heavily with excitement, eye and ear cocked against detection, guiltily
dropping stolen cheese down that mouse’s tunnel before she corked it up
and turned with equally eager sympathy to the smoothing of the poor torn
book, and so, incidentally, to her reward? For in that brown, ancient
book, with its long s’s and its wood-cuts and its map, she found the
information that neither Gran’papa nor Nurse nor Aunt Adela would give
her, nothing more or less than a definite description of her mother’s
new home, and full directions as to how Laura was to get there.
She and the mouse had happened, in short, upon an early edition of _The
Pilgrim’s Progress_.
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