In Adeline's idiosyncrasy there was a subtle, elusive suggestion of
singularity, of unexpectedness, which Richard in spite of himself found
very alluring, and he correctly attributed it, in some degree, to the
peculiar circumstances of her early life, an account of which, with
characteristic quaintness, she had given him at their second meeting.
* * * * *
The posthumous child of Richard Aked's brother, Adeline, who had
no recollection of her mother, lived at first with her maternal
grandparents and two uncles. She slept alone at the top of the house,
and when she arose in the morning from the big bed with its red
curtains and yellow tassels, she always ran to the window. Immediately
below here were the leads which roofed the great projecting windows
of the shop. It was her practice at night to scatter crumbs on the
leads, and sometimes she would be early enough to watch the sparrows
pecking them; more often all the crumbs had vanished while she was
yet asleep. The Square never failed to interest her in the morning.
In the afternoon it seemed torpid and morose; but before dinner,
more especially on Saturdays and Mondays, it was gaily alert--full
of canvas-covered stalls, and horses and carts, and heaped piles of
vegetables, and pigs grunting amidst straw, and rough rosy-faced men,
their trousers tied at the knees with string, who walked about heavily,
cracking whips. These things arrived mysteriously, before the sun, and
in the afternoon they dwindled imperceptibly away; the stalls were
unthatched, the carts jolted off one by one, and the pigs departed
squeaking, until at five o'clock the littered Square was left deserted
and forlorn. Now and again a new stall, unfolding vivid white canvas,
stood out brightly amid its soiled companions; then Adeline would
run downstairs to her favourite uncle, who had breakfast at 7.30 so
that he might be in charge of the shop while the rest were at table:
"Uncle Mark, Uncle Mark, there is a new stall up at the top of the
Square, near the New Inn!" "Perhaps it is only an old one with its face
washed," Uncle Mark would say; and Adeline, raising her right shoulder,
would put her head on it and laugh, screwing up her eyes.
In those days she was like a little Puritan girl, with her plain
frocks and prim gait. Her black hair, confined by a semicircular comb
which stretched from ear to ear over the top of her head, was brushed
straight away from her forehead, and fell across the entire width
of her shoulders in glossy, wavy lines. Her grey eyes were rather
large, except when she laughed, and they surveyed people with a frank,
inquiring look which frightened some of the commercial travellers who
came into the shop and gave her threepenny bits; it seemed as if all
one's secret shames stood revealed to that artless gaze. Her nose was
short and flattened, but her mouth happened to be perfect, of exactly
the classic form and size, with delectable lips half hiding the small
white teeth.
To her the house appeared to be of immense proportions; she had been
told that once, before she was born, it was three houses. Certainly it
possessed more than the usual number of staircases, and one of these,
with the single room to which it gave access, was always closed. From
the Square, the window of the disused chamber, obscured and bare,
contrasted strangely with the clear panes, white blinds, and red pads
of the others. This room was next to her own, the two staircases
running parallel; and the thought of its dread emptiness awed her at
nights. One Saturday night in bed she discovered that grandma, who had
been plaiting her hair for Sunday, had left a comb sticking in it. She
called aloud to grandma, to Uncle Mark, to Uncle Luke, in vain. None
of them came to her; but she distinctly heard an answering cry from the
shut room. She ceased to call, and lay fearfully quiet for a while;
then it was morning, and the comb had slipped out of her hair and down
into the bed.
Beneath the house were many cellars. One served for kitchen, and
Adeline had a swing there, hung from a beam; two others were larders;
a fourth held coal, and in a fifth ashes were thrown. There were yet
two more under the shop, to be reached by a separate flight of stone
steps. Uncle Mark went down those steps every afternoon to turn on the
gas, but he would never allow Adeline to go with him. Grandma, indeed,
was very cross if, when the door leading to the steps happened to be
open, Adeline approached within a yard of it. Often, chattering to the
shop-girls, who at quiet times of the day clustered round the stove
with their sewing, she would suddenly think of the cellars below, and
her heart would seem to stop.
If the shutters were up, the shop was even more terribly mysterious
than either the cellars or the disused room. On Sunday afternoons,
when grandpa snored behind a red and yellow handkerchief in the
breakfast-room, it was necessary for Adeline to go through the shop
and up the show-room staircase, in order to reach the drawing-room,
because to get to the house staircase would involve disturbing the
sleeper. How strange the shop looked as she hurried timorously across!
A dim twilight, worse than total darkness, filtered through the cracks
of the shutters, showing faintly the sallow dust-sheets which covered
the merinos and the chairs on the counters, and she always reached
the show-room, which had two large, unobstructed windows, with a sob
of relief. Very few customers were asked into the show-room; Adeline
employed it on weekdays as a nursery; here she nursed her dolls, flew
kites, and read "Little Wideawake," a book given to her by a commercial
traveller; there was a cheval glass near the front window in which she
contemplated herself long and seriously.
She never had the companionship of other children, nor did she desire
it. Other children, she understood, were rude and dirty; although
Uncle Mark and Uncle Luke taught in the Sunday-school, and grandpa
had once actually been superintendent, she was not allowed to go
there, simply because the children were rude and dirty. But she went
to morning chapel, sitting alone with grandpa on the red cushions of
the broad pew, that creaked every time she moved; Uncle Mark and Uncle
Luke sat away up in the gallery with the rude and dirty Sunday-school
children; grandma seldom went to chapel; the ministers called to see
her instead. Once to her amazement Uncle Luke had ascended the pulpit
stairs, looking just as if he was walking in his sleep, and preached.
It seemed so strange, and afterwards the religious truths which she had
been taught somehow lost their awfulness and some of their reality. On
Sunday evenings she celebrated her own private service, in which she
was preacher, choir, organist, and congregation. Her extempore prayers
were the secret admiration of grandma, who alone heard them. Adeline
stayed up for supper on Sundays. When the meal was over, grandpa opened
the big Bible, and in his rich, heavy voice read that Shem begat
Arphaxad and Arphaxad begat Salah and Salah begat Eber and Eber begat
Pelag, and about the Ammonites and the Jebusites and the Canaanites and
the Moabites; and then they knelt, and he prayed for them that rule
over us, and widows and orphans; and at the word "orphans," grandma,
who didn't kneel like the others but sat upright in her rocking-chair
with one hand over her eyes, would say "Amen, Amen," under her breath.
And after it was all over Adeline would choose whether Uncle Mark or
Uncle Luke should carry her to bed.
Grandpa died, and then grandma, and Aunt Grace (who was not an aunt
at all, but a cousin) came to stay with Adeline and her uncles, and
one day the shutters of the shop were put up and not taken down again.
Adeline learnt that Uncle Mark and Uncle Luke were going a long way
off, to America, and that she was to live in future with Aunt Grace in
a large and splendid house full of coloured pictures and statues and
books. It seemed odd that Aunt Grace, whose dresses were rather shabby,
should have a finer house than grandpa's, until Uncle Mark explained
that the house did not really belong to Aunt Grace; Aunt Grace merely
kept it in order for a rich young gentleman who had fifteen servants.
* * * * *
When she had recovered from the parting with her uncles, Adeline
accepted the change with docility. Long inured as she was to spiritual
solitude (for the closest friendship that can exist between a child and
an adult comprises little more than an affectionate tolerance on either
side, and certainly knows nothing of those intimate psychic affinities
which attract child to child or man to man), she could not, indeed,
have easily found much hardship in the conditions of her new life. One
matter troubled her at first, namely, that Aunt Grace never prayed or
read the Bible or went to chapel; nor, so far as Adeline knew, did
anyone else at the Abbey. But she soon became reconciled to this state
of things. For a time she continued to repeat her prayers; then the
habit ceased.
The picture-gallery, of which she had heard a great deal, fascinated
her at once. It was a long but not very lofty apartment, receiving
daylight from a hidden source, hung with the finest examples of the
four great Italian schools which flourished during the first half of
the sixteenth century: the Venetian, a revel of colour; the Roman,
dignified and even sedate; the Florentine, nobly grandiose; and the
school of Parma, mysteriously delicate. Opportunity serving, she spent
much of her time here, talking busily to the madonnas, the Christs,
the martyred saints, the monarchs, the knights, the lovely ladies,
and all the naïve mediæval crowd, giving each of them a part in her
own infantile romances. When she grew older, she copied--who shall
say whether consciously or unconsciously?--the attitudes and gestures
of the women; and perhaps in time there passed into Adeline, by some
ineffable channel, at least a portion of their demure grace and
contented quietude. There were pictures also in the square library,
examples of quite modern English and French work, sagaciously chosen
by one whose critical faculty had descended to him through four
generations of collectors; but Adeline had no eyes for these. The
books, however, gorgeous prisoners in glass, were her good friends,
though she might never touch them, and though the narrow, conventional
girl's education assiduously bestowed upon her by her aunt in person,
stifled rather than fostered curiosity with regard to their contents.
When Adeline was about nineteen, her guardian became engaged to be
married to a middle-aged farmer, a tenant of the Abbey, who made it
clear that in espousing Aunt Grace he was not eager to espouse Aunt
Grace's _protégée_ also. A serious question arose as to her future. She
had only one other relative in England, Mr. Aked, and she passively
accepted his timely suggestion that she should go to London and keep
house for him.