It appeared on explanation that the notice on the outside door of the
‘studio’ was a common ruse of Mr. Marmaduke White whenever he desired
perfect solitude, and when the visits of even friends and acquaintances,
not to speak of ambassadors from certain adamantine creditors, would be
considered irksome.
Although White dwelt in a studio, he was not an artist--not, that is to
say, an artist by profession, though he could paint a little, and had a
very pretty feeling for colour. By profession he was a man of letters;
by special taste and habit, a writer for the theatre. Some of his less
ambitious plays had been acted with no little _éclat_, and everybody
had thriven through them except the author. Others had failed, and
these failures constituted his glory. They were really productions of
considerable literary merit. In literary circles White was spoken of as
a man of genius whose mission it was to revive ‘the poetical drama,’ but
who had fallen on dark days, when the Muses, having discarded classic
drapery altogether, had taken to fleshings and the _can-can_.
He was a gentle creature, with as soft a heart as ever throbbed in
human bosom, and as little power of managing his worldly affairs as
of creating a profitable taste for dramas in ‘five acts and in
blank verse.’ He lived in a studio, with one artist or another for a
companion, not because the place was necessary for his vocation, but
because he was naturally a Bohemian, and a studio was a thoroughly
Bohemian sort of abode. He was forty years of age, unmarried, and
unlikely to marry. The number of his follies could only have been
measured by the number of his good deeds, and those were legion. To see
him was to like him; to know him was to love him well.
For years past he had paid a small stipend--not much, but a sharp pinch
sometimes to him--for the maintenance of Madeline. The way in which he
had contracted this responsibility was characteristic, and may at once
be explained. A friend of his who was a ‘genius’--that is to say, an
individual who promised prodigies, and on the strength of his promises,
which were never fulfilled, discarded all conventional morality and
lived the life of a shabby Don Juan--had become entangled with a country
girl. Dying penitent, as well as penniless, he confided to White, who
watched by his sick bed like a woman, that he had betrayed the girl,
and that she had given birth to a child, then about one year old. White
promised that he would seek both mother and child, and help them if
possible. So after putting his poor friend into the ground, and moving
heaven and earth to get a few tender things about him inserted in the
newspapers, White betook himself to the lonely seaside village where
the widow dwelt. He found a comely but ignorant girl in a state of
comparative destitution, and, to make matters worse, in the last stage
of consumption, brought on by exposure and neglect, In the course of
the interviews which ensued, he learned such things of his dead friend’s
treacherous and selfish conduct as would have shaken his faith in genius
altogether had he been less simple-hearted. A little later the girl
died in his arms, giving him her last blessing and consigning her little
daughter to his care.
After considerable reflection, he decided that the best course he could
adopt with the little one was to find some good motherly soul, in the
mother’s sphere of life, who would rear her kindly. During an artistic
excursion to Grayfleet he discovered Mrs. Peartree, and, after certain
pecuniary preliminaries were arranged, committed the child to her care.
What had been originally only a temporary arrangement presently became
fixed and habitual. Years passed away. Madeline remained with the
Peartrees, who were childless. White, in a very irregular manner, sent
them small sums from time to time; but it had never occurred to him to
take any more serious responsibility in the matter. He meant the girl to
grow up happy in the sphere to which her mother belonged. Though he had
beheld her once or twice in infancy, he had for years afterwards seen
nothing of her, only hearing of her existence through correspondence
from time to time.
When, therefore, Uncle Luke turned up in St. John’s Wood, with Madeline
under his charge, and explained that sad events had broken up the little
home and left Madeline helpless on their hands, White was staggered. It
was clear that the Peartrees thought him her natural guardian, and could
not comprehend that he stood in no closer relationship to her than they
did themselves.
He looked at Madeline, and was astonished to see her so fair and
elf-like, with a touch in her eyes of his poor dead friend, the literary
Bohemian. Somehow or other he had always pictured her as a fat little
country cherub, with very hard cheeks, a pug nose, and ugly feet. As she
gazed at him with her great blue eyes, he felt troubled more and more.
‘You don’t remember poor Fred Hazelmere?’ he said to Cheveley. ‘No, he
was gone before your time. But you’ve read his “Ballads of Bohemia”--by
Jove, sir, some of them are worthy of the “Buch der Lieder.”’ And he
added in a whisper, ‘That’s his child.’
He had led Cheveley aside, and was conversing with him apart, while
Madeline and Uncle Luke sat waiting in the centre of the studio. ‘Look
at her face,’ he proceeded. ‘Never saw such a likeness in my life--it
quite turns me over. She looks a wild little thing, don’t she? The man
with her is a sort of natural. It was absurd to think of sending her
to me, for what on earth can I do with her? _I’m_ not her father, after
all. Upon my soul, I’m in a dilemma. I must persuade him to take her
back.’
But when White took Uncle Luke aside and tried to explain matters to
him, the little man only began to cry. The home was broken up, he said;
Aunt Jane’s only means of subsistence was to go out as a monthly nurse;
and he himself was going to join a distant relation on the coast of
Kent.
‘It ain’t that we want to lose her,’ he asseverated; ‘but oh, Master
White, there be no home for Madlin now. Our hearts be broke, sir,
to part wi’ her; but we know you’re next door to her father, and a
gentleman born.
She’ll be a heap better off here than ever she was along of us.’
‘Here?’ gasped the dramatist.
‘She’s your’n, sir, more than our’n, bless her heart. We couldn’t feed
her no more, let alone clothe her, now Mark’s gone to glory; but you’re
a gentleman born, and can bring her up well-nigh like a lady. I brung
her, Master White,’ he continued, reverting to his first fear; ‘but I
dustn’t let her know I’m a-going to leave her--I dustn’t, indeed. She
thinks she’s a-going back with me.’
‘But I can’t take her!’ exclaimed White. ‘This is no place for a child,
and even if it were she needs a woman’s care. I really can’t think of
it; the very idea’s absurd.’
Uncle Luke looked astonished. In his simple judgment, the power of a
‘gentleman born,’ like Mr. White, was unlimited, and he could not fathom
the significance of his refusal.
‘She’s that good,’ he explained gently, ‘that she’d be no manner o’
trouble to any, ’cept when she’s in her tantrums, and they’re gone as
soon as come. And she’s clever, Master White. I’ve heerd schoolmaster
say that she can spell like a good ’un, and her writin’s as clear as
print. I see her write out the Lord’s Prayer on a piece of paper, and
she guv it to her Uncle Mark, and if he’d ha’ lived, he was a-going to
get it framed like a pictur’ and hung up on the cabin of the barge.’
This special pleading had little or no effect on White. He was puzzling
his brain what to do. Once or twice he thought of repudiating the
responsibility altogether, but he was far too good-natured for that.
Then he suggested that Luke should take the child back and leave him
to think it over, but he soon discovered that such a delay was
impracticable.
‘Mother said,’ explained Uncle Luke, firmly (his sister-in-law, it will
be remembered, had always been addressed as ‘mother’ by her husband, and
by all the house)--‘mother said I was to leave her along o’ you, cause
you was her best friend; and mother said you’d never grudge her the
wittles what she eat, for you were a gentleman born. Them were her own
words. You’d never grudge her the wittles what she eat, for you was a
gentleman born.’
‘How old is she?’ asked White, desperately, not that he had any special
reason for asking, but because, in his perplexity, he hardly knew what
to say.
Uncle Luke cocked his eye, calculating, and after due deliberation
replied--
‘Mother says it be just eight year come Whit-Monday since you brung her
to us. She remembers the year well, mother does, ’cause ’twas the
year when her cousin Jim he was drowned off Woolwich Pier, after he had
deserted and was running away for his precious life; and they held a
’quest upon him, and said he was drownded accidental, and had hisself
to blame.’
‘Between eight and nine years old,’ muttered White, pursuing his own
feeble reflections. ‘Is there no place where she could be put? No person
who, for a small consideration, would take her in?’
Uncle Luke shook his head dolefully. He had never questioned for a
moment but that White would give the child a welcome, and he was quite
incapable of conceiving the manifold objections there might be to her
immediate adoption.
Things were at this juncture when Madame de Bemy, who occupied the
adjoining house, and from whom White rented the studio, came in smiling.
She was a stout little old lady, with a very profound respect for her
tenant, who had been useful to her in many ways, as indeed he was almost
invariably to everybody with whom he came in close contact. To his
surprise she cut the Gordian knot by offering to take care of the child
on White’s behalf.
All this time Madeline had been listening with growing suspicion. At
last the whole truth dawned upon her, and she burst into lamentation.
Clinging to Uncle Luke, she cried that she would never leave him, and
that she would return to Grayfleet in his company.
It was an exciting scene, over which we have no intention to linger.
Uncle Luke did not depart that night. They made him up a bed in the
corner of the studio, where he lay awake till morning, weeping and
wondering, but still firm in his desire to see Madeline made into a
little lady. The child herself was taken care of by Madame de Berny.
But she would not depart from the studio until Uncle Luke had avowed
positively that he would be there, waiting for her, in the morning. His
simple promise satisfied her, for never in all her life had she known
him to break his word.