I
“I am an orphan,” reflected Lydia Raymond, with immense satisfaction.
She was a very intelligent little girl of twelve years old, and she
remembered very well that when her father had died out in China, three
years ago, it was her mother who had been the centre of attention
and compassion. People had spoken about her poor dead father, and
had praised him and pitied him, but their real attention had all
been for the widow, who was there under their eyes, pathetic and
sorrow-stricken. Lydia herself had been “poor little thing,” but
Grandpapa and her aunts and uncle had all told her that it was her
mother who must be thought of now, and she knew that they kept on
saying to one another that “the child will be a comfort to poor Mary.”
Her own individuality, which she felt so strongly, did not seem to
count at all, and Lydia had, quite silently, resented that intensely,
ever since she could remember anything at all.
Once her mother had read her some extracts of old letters from her dead
father, letters which had once come so regularly every week in thin
blue envelopes with the Hong Kong postmark.
“Kiss our baby Lydia for me. I hope she is a good little thing always
... some day, when these years of hard work are over, you won’t have
to sacrifice yourself any more, my poor Mary....” And, later on, in the
last letter of all: “The child’s life is only a continuation of ours,
my Mary.”
Long afterwards, Lydia, who never forgot the words, came to see them
as the expression of man’s eternal wistful attempt to live on in the
generation supplanting his own, but when her mother read them aloud
to her, in a voice choked with tears, something in Lydia revolted
violently.
“My life is my own,” she thought stubbornly, “not just a continuation
of somebody else’s.”
With that acute clarity of vision that enabled her to analyze certain
aspects of her childhood’s world with such astonishing maturity, she
once told herself:
“They don’t love me for myself at all. Grandpapa doesn’t love me the
least bit--he doesn’t love anybody. And mother loves me because I’m
_her_ child, and the aunts love me because I’m father’s child, and they
think I’m a comfort to mother.”
She could hardly remember her father, and though at first she had shed
tears over his death, Lydia had quickly dried them.
“Now, dear, you must be a good little girl and not cry and make poor
mother more unhappy than she is already,” had said harassed-looking
Aunt Evelyn. “You know you must think of her now. You’ll have to be her
comfort.”
And almost immediately afterwards Aunt Evelyn had said to Lydia’s
mother:
“Do, do give way and cry, dearie. It will be so much better for you. I
know you’re wonderful, but you’ll suffer for it later on. You’re bound
to.”
After that it had not needed Aunt Evelyn’s further observation that
“poor little Lydia didn’t know what her loss meant” to dry Lydia’s
perfunctory tears with the sting of an inflexible pride.
She would not cry again until they were prepared to concede to her the
major right to affliction!
She did not love her mother very much. It is more common than is
generally allowed, for an intelligent child, still in bondage to her
natural instinct, reinforced by the tradition of allegiance to natural
authorities, to couple that allegiance with a perfectly distinct
antipathy to the personality of either or both parents. Lydia’s dislike
of her mother’s sentimentality, her constant vacillation of purpose,
and her incessant garrulity, was only unchildlike in her calm analysis
of it, and in the conscious restraint that she put upon it.
Mrs. Raymond had often said, sometimes in Lydia’s hearing, that she
would welcome death.
“But for little Lydia, I think I should have put an end to it all long
ago. But how can I leave her, when she only has me?”
Mrs. Raymond, however, without any intervention of her own, when Lydia
was twelve years old, reached the haven to which, since her husband’s
death, she had so often aspired.
“I am an orphan.”
Lydia, already a dignified and self-contained little girl, bore herself
with a new, pale composure.
It was for her that Aunt Evelyn, once more summoned from her shabby,
untidy house at Wimbledon, was now hastily ordering mourning, and
to whom the Wimbledon cousins had written brief, blotted letters of
compassion and sympathy, and it was her future that Aunt Evelyn and
Uncle George and Aunt Beryl had all been discussing under their breath
whenever they thought she was not listening.
This, at least, was Lydia’s complacent conviction, until she overheard
a few chance words about Grandpapa, and how best they could break it
to him, when he was old, and his heart was weak--and he had, besides,
never really got over the shock of poor Peter’s death, three years ago.
So it was Grandpapa they were thinking of now!
Lydia really felt very angry. Grandpapa, however, did not exact an
undue amount of attention, on the whole.
“Grandpapa is old,” said Aunt Beryl, with a hint of apology in her
voice. “Very old people don’t realize things quite in the same
way--they’re more familiar with grief, perhaps.”
“The real blow was poor Peter’s death,” said Aunt Evelyn, also
determined that Grandpapa should be accredited with his due meed of
afflictions.
Aunt Beryl, who lived with Grandpapa, took Lydia to stay with them.
They had a house at the seaside, only two hours by train from London,
and Aunt Evelyn came with them, ostensibly to see how Grandpapa was,
but in reality, Lydia felt certain, in order to help them to decide
upon her own future.
The two aunts talked to one another in anxious undertones all through
the journey; their two, almost identical, black hats nodding so close
together that Aunt Beryl’s hard straw brim kept on knocking against
Aunt Evelyn’s stiff, upstanding bow of rigid crape. Although the
younger one was still unmarried, Lydia’s two aunts had never lost a
certain indefinable similarity of taste that always made them look as
though they were dressed alike.
Aunt Evelyn was Mrs. Senthoven.
“You can remember it because of Beethoven,” she always said, with a
nervous laugh. She had three children, and was several years older than
her sister.
Miss Raymond might have been handsome in a small, beaky way but for her
extreme thinness and the permanent anxiety in her light-brown eyes.
“Beryl is the youngest bird in the old home nest, and is always with
dear Grandpapa,” Aunt Evelyn and Uncle George were apt to say.
The youngest bird in the old home nest, growing yearly more pinched
and vulture-like, invariably acquiesced eagerly in the pious formula,
and thus enabled Aunt Evelyn to give her undivided attention to the
straitened, clamorous household at Wimbledon, and Uncle George to leave
his room in Grandpapa’s house untenanted during his fortnightly holiday
from the office.
Now, however, he was at home, having gone straight back after the
funeral. He met them at the station.
Uncle George was small and fair, with a habit of asking thoughtful
questions of the kind apt to provoke hasty and inaccurate replies,
which he then had the satisfaction of correcting.
He said, “Well, well, Lydia,” and gave her a little, awkward pat on the
shoulder, that she quite understood to be expressive of his pity and
sympathy.
“What about the ’bus?” said Aunt Beryl.
“No, no,” Aunt Evelyn protested quickly. “The walk would do us good. No
need to take the ’bus.”
This was one of the fundamental differences between the aunts and
Lydia’s mother. Mrs. Raymond had always taken a cab from the station,
whether she had brought any luggage or no, when she came down to see
Grandpapa. She had never seemed to be aware, as Lydia had privately
always been aware, that the household in Regency Terrace thought very
much the worse of her for the extravagance.
“The ’bus could take your bag, Evelyn. I know the man,” said Uncle
George. “It will be quite all right.” He put out his hand for the
small, dirty, brown suit-case that was weighing his sister down on one
side.
“Well--I don’t know,” she hesitated. “I suppose it will be sixpence or
more saved, if we carry it ourselves.” She laughed nervously.
“Better let the ’bus take it. I can say a word to the conductor,”
persisted Uncle George, now burdened with the bag.
“Oh, it isn’t far. I think I’d rather keep an eye on it.”
“Just as you like.”
Uncle George raised his eyebrows, and they trudged away down the dusty
station road.
Lydia was tired and hot in her new, fussy black clothes, and the
contrast between her present discomfort and those condemned,
self-indulgent ways of her mother, in the advantages of which she had
always shared, brought a genuine realization of loss to her mind with a
dull pang.
“What made your train late?” Uncle George inquired, patiently shifting
the suit-case into his other hand.
“Was it late?”
“Surely. Wasn’t it, Beryl?”
“I think it _was_. About five or ten minutes.”
Her brother immediately looked astonished.
“Five _or_ ten! The railway company would tell you that there is a
very great difference. As a matter of fact, your train came in exactly
seven-and-a-half minutes behind time.”
“Perhaps we started late,” wearily suggested Mrs. Senthoven. She was
beginning to limp a little in her tight, black boots.
“Not very likely to do that. Probably you lost time at the Junction.
The two-fifteen always has to wait about there. I’ve noticed it.”
“Probably that was it,” said Aunt Beryl, with tired acquiescence in the
masculine infallibility on the subject of time-tables.
“I expect it was that. Let me see--you would have stopped only once
before the Junction----”
The discussion, if it could be called one, when the only wish of the
aunts was obviously to agree with Uncle George, lasted all the way to
Regency Terrace.
Then Aunt Evelyn and Aunt Beryl both said, “Here we are!” and Uncle
George put the suit-case down upon the lowest step of the stone flight
that led to the front door as though by no possible feat of endurance
could he have sustained its weight further.
“There’s Grandpapa,” said Mrs. Senthoven, looking up at a first-floor
window, and nodding vigorously.
“George!” exclaimed Aunt Beryl reproachfully, “why is Grandpapa in the
drawing-room? You know he always sits in the dining-room on week-days.
With the parrot to keep him company and all.”
Her brother was spared the necessity of providing any explanation as
to Grandpapa’s disregard of his privileges by the opening of the front
door.
“Welcome, my dear child,” said Aunt Beryl very kindly to Lydia, and she
kissed her.
Then she looked round sharply at the servant who had opened the door.
Her face relaxed at the immaculate cap and apron that met her gaze, and
she said graciously:
“Good afternoon, Gertrude.”
As they went into the dining-room, of which the door already stood
open, Lydia heard Aunt Beryl say in tones of satisfaction:
“The girl really is improving at last. I’ve had such a time with her!”
“I wish I could get our girl at home to look half so smart,” said Aunt
Evelyn, shaking her head. “But she’s got more than she can manage,
with the house in the morning, and then the waiting at meals--Robert
absolutely insists on that--and half her time she doesn’t dress in the
afternoons at all, and I really can’t blame her. Just goes to the door
with her arms all turned up, anyhow. Not that we have many callers,”
sighed Aunt Evelyn. “I’ve had to give over social life altogether,
practically; the children take such a lot of seeing to. Don’t ever
marry a poor man, Beryl.”
The fiction still prevailed between the sisters that a choice of
matrimonial projects lay ever before Miss Raymond.
“If you ladies have finished talking secrets----” said Uncle George, in
reproachful reference to the rapid undertones employed by Lydia’s aunts.
“Yes, now what about Grandpapa?”
“He’ll want to see our little Lydia.”
“Poor child! Get her a little wine and a biscuit first, George.”
Lydia sat complacently at the square dining-room table, whilst Uncle
George slowly unlocked the lower half of the sideboard and brought
out a decanter with a very little red liquid in it, and Aunt Beryl
produced, also from a locked receptacle, a small glass barrel
containing three or four Albert biscuits.
“You sit here quietly, dear. Aunt Evelyn and I will go up to Grandpapa
first.”
The aunts left the room together, and Lydia and Uncle George remained
solemnly facing one another across the dining-room table. Lydia was
much too self-possessed a little girl ever to feel any necessity for
making conversation, and as her uncle remained silent, she occupied
herself in gazing round the dining-room, familiar though it was to
her already. The table was still covered with rather worn red baize;
Grandpapa’s arm-chair, in which Grandpapa should by rights have been
sitting now, still stood in the bay window, flanked by the small, round
table which supported the parrot’s cage. The cage was covered with an
old piece of green stuff now, and Lydia was glad of it. She was not
at all fond of the parrot. Over the mantelpiece hung “The Monarch of
the Glen,” and over the writing-table, at which no one ever wrote, but
where Aunt Beryl did a good deal of sewing, was “Derby Day.” Lydia had
heard Aunt Evelyn say that the detail in that picture always struck her
as being quite wonderful.
The sideboard was the largest piece of furniture in the room, and
it occupied almost the whole of one end of it. Lydia had often been
told the story of the sideboard’s arrival at Regency Terrace--the
impossibility of getting it in at the front door--Uncle George’s
humorous suggestion that the roof of the house should be taken off--and
finally its lengthy and strenuous entrance through a window, assisted
by a large crane. It was a matter of everlasting regret to Lydia that
this sensational progress should have taken place some twenty years
before her own arrival into the world. In front of the empty grate
stood a faded worked screen, its spiral legs embedded in the fluffy
black hearth-rug.
“Oh,” said Lydia, suddenly reminded, “where is Shamrock?”
“Out, I suppose,” said Uncle George simply. Shamrock was Grandpapa’s
dog, and Uncle George had good reason to disclaim all responsibility
for Shamrock’s in-comings and out-goings.
“A seaside town, or, in fact, any town, is no place for a dog, in my
opinion,” said Uncle George.
“Of course they have more fun in the country,” glibly returned his
niece, who had never spent more than three consecutive days in the
country anywhere, nor owned a dog in her life. “They can run after
chickens and lambs, I suppose,” she added innocently.
“They can indeed!” ejaculated Uncle George. “But why lambs, Lydia?”
“I thought I’d seen pictures of dogs running after sheep, and barking
at them to make them go the right way.”
“Sheep-dog! That’s another matter. Sheep are not lambs, child--nor is
this the season for lambs.”
Uncle George looked happier, having found an opportunity for the
bestowal of information.
Lydia secretly thought him very like Mr. Barlow in “Sandford and
Merton,” and had no idea that her comparison was anything but
complimentary.
“Have you ever read ‘Sandford and Merton,’ Uncle George?” she inquired
conversationally. She had no idea of simulating a conventional grief
for her mother with Uncle George, knowing instinctively that any
such display would merely embarrass him. Uncle George liked one to
be intelligent and very attentive to everything he said. Lydia had
often asked him questions, the answers to which left her profoundly
indifferent, merely for the sake of pleasing him. Her unconsciously
cynical acknowledgment to herself of her own motives at least saved her
from the charge of insincerity.
Lydia had seen so little of her grandfather during the last three years
that she could not remember what he liked from little girls, although
she retained a vivid impression, mostly gathered from her mother, that
Aunt Evelyn’s noisy, slangy, hockey-playing Beatrice and Olive were not
approved of by him.
Lydia, the precocious little only child of a mother half-enviously and
half-contemptuously acknowledged to be “rather a fine lady” by the
Raymonds and the Senthovens, was not likely to transgress in the same
directions as Beatrice and Olive.
When Aunt Evelyn appeared at the dining-room door with her summons,
Lydia followed her demurely upstairs. She remembered the steep, rather
narrow staircase, with a blue carpet that gave place abruptly on the
second flight to yellow oilcloth, and the ugly blue paper on the walls,
quite well.
The drawing-room seemed altogether strange to her, but she was given no
time to examine it.
“Here is little Lydia, Grandpapa,” said Aunt Beryl, who stood as though
on guard behind the arm-chair in the bow window, that looked out on to
a distant strip of grey sea.
How _tiny_ Grandpapa was!
It quite shocked Lydia to see the minute proportions of the stiff
little figure that sat back rigidly in the depths of the arm-chair.
Grandpapa’s hand was like a claw, and his eyes looked out of a network
of wrinkles such as Lydia had never seen or imagined on a human
countenance.
She half expected his voice to be in proportion, but it was in very
sharp, incisive tones that he addressed her:
“How d’y do, my dear? You are very young to know grief.”
“Lydia has been very good and brave, and given us no trouble at all,
Grandpapa,” said Aunt Beryl.
“That’s right. That’s quite right. How old are you, Lyddie?”
Lydia suddenly remembered that her grandfather had always called her
“Lyddie,” although no one else ever did so.
“Twelve and a half, Grandpapa.”
“Can you read?”
“Oh, yes,” said Lydia, astonished.
“There is reading _and_ reading,” said the old man rather grimly. “If
yours is very good you can read to me in the mornings, and save your
Aunt Beryl.”
“We shall have to see about some lessons for her in the mornings,” said
Aunt Beryl rather repressively.
“Eh, what’s that? You don’t want to go to school, do you, my dear?”
Lydia wanted to go to school very much, and had always resented her
mother’s refusal to send her there, and the irregular, desultory
lessons at home, from which she knew that she learnt nothing useful.
But already she felt certain that to say so would not advance her cause
with Grandpapa.
“I have never been to school,” she said at last.
“A very good thing too. I don’t like all this business of girls trying
to be like boys, and learning all sorts of rough ways.”
Old Raymond cast a malicious glance at his daughter Evelyn, whose two
girls attended a high school.
“You’re tired, Grandpapa,” she said gently and unresentfully, although
she coloured.
“What made you sit in the drawing-room to-day?” asked Aunt Beryl. “You
know you always stay in the dining-room until six o’clock.”
Grandpapa’s perfectly alert old face suddenly assumed a blank
expression.
“Eh, my dear?” he said vacantly.
Aunt Beryl repeated the observation in a higher key.
“I can’t hear you,” said Grandpapa obstinately.
Aunt Evelyn and Aunt Beryl exchanged glances.
“Don’t do that, my dears, it’s very ill-bred. Even little Lyddie here
can tell you that. Very bad manners to exchange glances. I suppose you
thought I couldn’t see you, but I’ve got very good eyes yet.”
The old man chuckled gaily at the discomfiture on the faces of the two
women.
“You must come downstairs now, Grandpapa. It’s tea-time,” said Aunt
Beryl firmly.
Lydia wondered how anyone so very old and frail could ever be taken
downstairs. Did Uncle George carry him? She saw with horror that
neither of her aunts made any move to assist him as he leant forward
and gripped a stout stick that stood against the arm-chair.
Then he began to slide down the seat of the deep chair, his old frame
quite rigid, one hand clutching the arm of the chair, the other the
stick.
“Oh!” cried Lydia involuntarily.
Grandpapa, his face tense and his breathing very loud, never looked at
her, but both the aunts said, “Hush!”
So she stood quite silent, very much interested and rather frightened,
while the tiny, taut old frame twisted itself to the perpendicular,
and at last stood erect. Then, and then only, Grandpapa accepted the
support of Aunt Beryl’s arm to supplement that of the stick as he went
very, very slowly downstairs, one step at a time.
Aunt Evelyn, following behind with Lydia, explained to her that
Grandpapa never allowed anyone to help him out of his chair.
“You will learn all the little ways of the house in time,” said Aunt
Evelyn kindly. “You know we hope that this is to be your home.”
“Yes, auntie,” said Lydia submissively.
A dim, resentful consciousness was slowly creeping over her that “to
learn all the little ways of the house” is the endless and often
uncongenial concomitant to that orphaned state to which she had proudly
laid claim.