reached the sea, being full in the weather, she was driven with great
force against the ship's side and stove in. She seemed to be brimming
over, but nevertheless the crew managed to shove her off, although by
this time she was so deep in the water that the wretched passengers
sitting on the thwarts were submerged from the waist downwards. It was
only the cork in her compartments that kept her barely afloat. There
were many faces still looking down from the steamer, and all on board
probably went down with her, or if the cutter was launched she must
have been swamped immediately, for a minute or two later the _Wizard
Queen_ rose forward in the air and sank stern first. Now one by one,
as the icy waves broke over them, the women and men in the lifeboat
dropped from exhaustion into the sea. Old James Taylor was among
the first to go, falling backward without a cry, without a word of
reproach, as silently as one of his own red apples might fall at home
in the first October gale.
"Did the Captain say where we was?" asked the man at the tiller.
"Abreast of Beachy Head," one shouted in reply, and as he spoke a wave
swept him and a woman and a child into the darkness.
"O God! he's dead. He's lying dead in my arms!" cried a miserable
father who was holding in his arms a little boy of five or six.
"Drop the body overboard," the man at the tiller shouted. "Every pound
tells. Lighten the boat," he roared angrily. "Lighten the boat!"
The wretched father, clasping his dead child more closely, turned away
in indignation at the brutal order; but as he turned a wave swept him
and the body overboard, and the boat was lightened a little more.
All this time Elizabeth said nothing; but she clung to her place with
one hand and with the other held the baby to her breast beneath her
cloak. All this time Edward said nothing; but he had somehow managed
to wedge his legs round a support, so that whenever Elizabeth trembled
in her seat he could put out two arms to save her from peril. Two
women died of exhaustion from the wash of the sea and the freezing
wind, and their bodies were at once flung overboard. On the other
side of Elizabeth, Mrs. Fawcus, who alone of the women appeared to be
completely dressed, was trying to get off her cloak to throw it round
the mother, and simultaneously making an effort to listen to the plans
of Mr. Fawcus for the future, should the lifeboat ever reach a harbor.
"I have given up my plan of educating the aborigines of Australia," he
bellowed above the gale, making a megaphone with his hands.
"Yes, dear, I'm sure I agree with you. Drat this hook! It's so bent I
can't get it out of the eye. And don't put up your hands and shout at
me, Mr. Fawcus. You'll be swept over if you do."
"What has occurred once," Mr. Fawcus bellowed, "may easily occur again.
I shall inquire for a suitable post in London. I always did execrate
the sea, as you know, my dear."
Mrs. Fawcus nodded.
"And I was right," he shouted. "I usually am." But his wife could not
applaud his wisdom, for at that moment Elizabeth, reeling, cried:
"Take my baby. Edward! My darling, my darling, I ought not to have
married you. It's all my fault."
As Mrs. Fawcus took the baby, Elizabeth fell, and Edward, throwing
himself backward in a last effort to save his wife, fell with her into
the sea.
At dawn a small steamer sighted the wreck of the lifeboat and launched
a boat to rescue the four who had survived that night. One was the
man at the tiller; the other three were Mr. and Mrs. Fawcus with Mary
Flower.
_Chapter Two_
THE GIRL
_Chapter Two: The Girl_
Mary Flower passed the first ten years of her life in the basement of a
publisher's office in Paternoster Row, where every floor as high as the
roof was loaded with the stock of years, so that the earliest defined
fear of her childhood was lest the old house should collapse one night
and bury herself and her uncle and aunt beneath a mountain of books.
This was the result of reading the story of an earthquake in Jamaica;
and the habit thus engendered of brooding upon seismic catastrophes
led Mary soon afterward to prefigure the vaster ruin of St. Paul's
Cathedral, the bulk of which obscured so much of the sky from her
childish vision.
"You've no right to fill her head with such notions, Uncle William,"
said Mrs. Fawcus sharply. "Why, there was no more than a tiny little
crack in the ceiling over her bed, and I'm sure the child regular
worried the life out of me about that blessed crack."
"That's where you're wrong, Aunt Lucy," replied Mr. Fawcus. "When a
child's interest is aroused in any natural phenomenon it is the duty
of the parent or of the guardian who stands _in loco parentis_ to
cultivate that interest by every means in his power. It is one of the
rudimentary principles of education. Fate directed her to the narrative
of an earthquake in the West Indies, rousing in her breast an ambition
to know more about terrestrial convulsions, to learn about such facts
as their comparative frequency and their geographical distribution.
What has our little Mary learned? She has learned that nothing more
than slight shocks may be expected in the heart of London and that ..."
"Oh, how you do carry on, Uncle William! The poor child's learned
nothing of the kind. She goes to bed shaking in her shoes every night."
However, Mary soon forgot all about earthquakes, because a dancing bear
broke loose in St. Paul's Churchyard and created such a panic that for
several weeks she saw bears at the back of every cupboard, and Mrs.
Fawcus had to hide her favorite copy of _Red Riding Hood_ on account of
the tremors set up by the vivid illustrations. It must not be supposed
that she was a very nervous child or that her existence was unusually
spoilt by the incidental alarms of childhood. On the contrary, the
world beheld in the basement of that tall Georgian warehouse was a
placid and cozy world, her place in which she owed to the couple whom
she knew as Uncle William and Aunt Lucy.
When Mr. Fawcus walked down the gangway of the steamer that rescued him
from the wreck of that lifeboat and felt the terra-firma, as he called
it, of Dover Quay beneath his feet, he knelt down just outside the
Lord Warden Hotel and vowed that he would never attempt to leave his
native land again.
"I've been teaching all my life," he told Mrs. Fawcus. "But I can still
learn a lesson myself."
The problem of the future was a difficult one, and it was not
simplified by the responsibility of the baby.
"Though, mark you," said Mr. Fawcus gravely, "I consider that the
education of one English girl is of more importance than the education
of a thousand Australian aborigines. Unfortunately I have come to the
end of my capital, and in order to educate her it will be necessary for
me to find some kind of moderately remunerative employment."
"I'm glad to hear you speak so sensible, Mr. Fawcus," said his wife.
"Bly, my dear, bly. Sensi-bly. Don't let a shipwreck destroy in one
moment what I have spent years in teaching you: the distinction between
an adjective and an adverb."
During their short intercourse with the Flowers Mr. and Mrs. Fawcus,
or to be accurate Mrs. Fawcus, had elicited an account of the
circumstances which had led up to their emigrating; when it began to
look as if Mr. Fawcus was never going to find a suitable job, his wife
argued that they ought to communicate with the baby's grandfather.
"If we were going to say anything at all," Mr. Fawcus objected, "we
ought to have written the moment we found ourselves safe on shore.
Having left it so long, we may appear to the eyes of Sir Richard Flower
like kidnappers. She is such a good baby that I hate to give her up,
and besides I did want to try my hand at an education completely
independent of those obstinate and conservative creatures which we know
generically as 'parents.'"
Nevertheless, Mr. Fawcus, in dread of the uncertain future, was at last
driven by his wife's entreaties into communication with the grandfather
of the baby whose guardianship he had assumed in the presence of death.
101 Floral Street,
Near Covent Garden,
_March 3rd, 1860_.
_Honored Sir_,
_You have no doubt read with a father's grief, in which I beg leave
most respectfully to share, the melancholy news of the loss of the
emigrant ship, Wizard Queen, by collision off Beachy Head at 3 a.m.
on the morning of the 18th ult., and by this time you have no doubt
abandoned all hope of hearing that your son, Mr. Edward Flower, was
saved. I do not write to raise false hopes in your breast. Alas!
I had the melancholy satisfaction of seeing him in the lifeboat
to which we both clung (rather than in which we both sat) swept
overboard in a vain attempt to save his wife from a similar fate. It
may, however, be some mitigation of your sorrow to learn that he
left behind him in the care of myself and wife a baby girl, who is
at present sharing our humble room at the above address. We should
deeply feel parting with the engaging infant; but we respectfully
recognize the superior claims of her grandparents. I have the honor
to await your instructions with regard to her disposal. Will you send
a suitable nurse to convey the infant to your Seat? Or shall my good
wife take upon herself the responsibility of personally delivering
the infant at Barton Hall?_
_I must apologize for the delay in notifying you of your
granddaughter's fortunate survival; but I have recently been much
occupied in trying to recover for myself the small niche in England
which I so rashly abandoned in my ambition to put the glories of
education within reach of the aborigines of Australia. In expectation
of shortly hearing from you, I have the honor, Sir, to subscribe
myself_
_Your most obedient humble servant,
William Axworthy Fawcus._
_P. S.--I should add that I was formerly a schoolmaster, having been
the proud possessor of several private schools in turn. Now for
various reasons I find myself unable to devote myself any longer to
the education of the young idea, and I have this morning entered
into a contract with Messrs. Holland and Brown, the publishers of
Paternoster Row, to invigilate their stock._
_W.A. F._
To this the baronet replied as follows:
Barton Hall,
Barton Flowers, Hants,
_March 8, '60_.
_Sir_,
_I have no interest in my son's daughter. At the same time, I am not
anxious to be under an obligation to strangers for her maintenance.
If you insist on giving up your care of the baby, I must find some
other worthy couple to look after her. If, on the other hand, you are
willing to accept that responsibility and will let me hear that you
are prepared to do so, I will instruct my lawyers, Messrs. Hepper and
Philcox, to remit you the sum of £100 a year in quarterly instalments
payable in advance until she reaches the age of ten years, when I
shall communicate fresh proposals._
_Yours truly,
Richard Flower._
Thus it befell that Mary continued to live with Mr. and Mrs. Fawcus,
calling them Uncle William and Aunt Lucy, and indirectly being the
cause of Mrs. Fawcus's getting nearer to an intimate mode of addressing
her husband than she had ever reached before. The contract into which
Mr. Fawcus had entered with Messrs. Holland and Brown might have been
less grandly described as an engagement to be caretaker of their
premises, for which he was paid the sum of eighteen shillings a week
and allotted the basement of kitchen, scullery, two rooms, a cellar,
and a backyard.
"The task is in some respects a menial task," he told his wife. "But it
is redeemed by the fact that I am a warden of books. Had I been invited
to guard bales of dry goods, I should have declined the offer. I am
ready in the cause of literature and learning to sacrifice what remains
to me of scholastic dignity by exposing myself in the _toga virilis_ of
service, in other words, a green baize apron, punctually at 6.30 a.m.
to the public eye, and if the public eye chooses to regard my daily
renovation of the brass, my _quotidian lustration_ of the steps, as
menial, I merely say with what's his _nomen_ '_per aspera ad astra_.'"
"Well, all I beg is, Mr. Fawcus"--he had not become Uncle William
yet--"all I beg is," said his wife, "you won't go preaching about St.
Paul's Churchyard of a Sunday morning."
"In, my love, not about. On, my dear, not of. Your allusion was to the
locality and date, not the subject of my discourse."
"Don't be so pernickety, Mr. Fawcus. You know quite well what I meant
to say."
"The Queen's English, my dear, should share with the Queen's Person the
privilege of inviolability. But set your mind at rest. Preserve the
_mens sana in corpore sano_. Now that we have been intrusted with the
nonage of that cherub," he pointed to Mary asleep in her cot, "I do
not intend to jeopardize the material comforts of this basement. _Tu
Marcellus eris!_ In other words, I intend to devote all my persuasive
energy to Mary."
Mr. Fawcus kept his word. To be sure, he might say to his wife:
"Holland and Brown are going too far. They are impinging upon my
pride. I felt very much inclined last night to utter a stern _noli me
tangere_. But I thought of Mary, and I refrained. Yes, I thought of our
Mary and I agreed to give the disposal of the day's waste-paper, the
_disjecta membra_ of their correspondence, my personal supervision."
Mr. Fawcus might complain of the advantage his employers took of his
reduced circumstances; but he never did fail to remember what was owed
to Mary. She was indeed the pivot of that basement in Paternoster
Row, a little household goddess to whom the two old people accorded
divine honors and through whom, brought close together by their common
worship, they grew closer and closer to each other as the years went
by. She was not a spoilt child, or at least she was not spoilt by
anything except such humble treats and toys as her guardians could
afford. Mrs. Fawcus was not a woman to give way out of laziness or
weakness or fond affection to the exactions of childhood. She treated
Mary in the same fashion as she had always treated her husband, that
is to say, she loved and admired her as a superior being to herself,
but she never allowed her to suppose that her behavior could not be
criticized and corrected.
Mary herself at ten years old was a beautiful child, so beautiful that
the degraded clothes of the period were incapable of concealing her
beauty. From her mother she had inherited that auburn hair with all its
texture of silk and all its abundance, but instead of brown eyes hers
were deep blue, pellucid and round as speedwells. Sir Richard had such
eyes once; and the painter who came to Barton Hall in the summer of
1810, without being afraid of the comparison, had painted him with a
posy of cornflowers, his eyes following the flight of blue butterflies.
Old James Taylor had such eyes to the end; but he was never painted
in tight pantaloons and a frilled collar. If a little girl has auburn
hair, and big deep blue eyes, and a complexion like a malmaison, she
has no need to bother about her features. Actually Mary showed promise
of fine features emerging one day from her dimples, and her hands were
as fine and delicate as her grandmother's.
From being without the companionship of other children, Mary had
acquired what were called old-fashioned ways, which meant that she
would always join in the conversation of her uncle and aunt, pay much
attention to the deportment of her dolls, and spend a great deal of
time reading fairy tales by the kitchen fire. The basement of a city
warehouse may seem a dreary place for a little girl to spend most
of her time; but Mary found it as full of romance as one of her own
picture books, and apart from such fleeting alarms as the threat of
earthquakes or the dread of sudden and violent robbery, echoes of
which occasionally reached her when Mr. and Mrs. Fawcus discussed
events that near bedtime little girls ought not to overhear, Mary found
her home safe and cosy. The small yard at the back was not so much
overshadowed by the tall houses round as to keep the sun from shining
down upon it in summer; here Mary had several green boxes in which she
grew pansies and creeping jenny, mignonette and red and white double
daisies. Here too in a wicker cage outside the kitchen door lived
Mary's thrush, who sang his country song while Mary sat gazing up at
the golden cross on the dome of St. Paul's and wondering if the thrush
would like to be sitting there and if it would be kinder to set him
free. It was a very small yard; yet it seemed illimitable to Mary, and
every brick in the wall was to her as large and interesting as a field.
But if the yard seemed vast, how much vaster appeared the upper
portions of the house! Sometimes when work was over Mr. Fawcus would
let Mary accompany him on his tour of inspection round the deserted
premises. She was allowed to climb up ladders and read the names of
books stacked away on the highest shelves, dusty books with titles that
sounded most uninteresting, although the recitation of them evidently
gave great pleasure to Uncle William. And then one day in an attic
she discovered hundreds of picture books, nearly all fairy stories.
When she announced her discovery, Uncle William shook his head and
muttered, "Old stock! Old stock!"
"But, Uncle William, they're not old. They're quite new. Really they
are--quite bright and not a bit torn. I found _The Three Bears_ and a
story about a mother pig who frightened away a wolf when he came to
gobble up her little pigs. And how do you think she did it? You'll
never guess, Uncle William. Why, she rolled down the hill in a churn.
What is a churn, Uncle William?"
This was exactly the kind of question dear to the heart of Mr.
Fawcus, and before Mary went to bed that night she had been given an
exhaustive discourse on dairy-farming, so that if she had listened as
attentively as her aunt kept bidding her listen, she would have learned
the difference between curds and whey, and all about rennet, and all
about Stilton cheeses and Devonshire cream, and why butter won't come
sometimes ... but alas! Mary did not listen, because her mind was far
away upstairs in that attic.
It happened that the very next day she was sent on a message to one
of the offices and that the gentleman to whom she gave the message, a
dried-up gentleman with bright shining spectacles, asked her if she
would like a penny to buy some lollipops.
"No, thank you, sir," said Mary, curtseying. "I'd like to go upstairs
and look at those picture books at the top of the house."
Whereupon the dried-up gentleman mysteriously muttered, "Old stock!
Old stock!" just like Uncle William yesterday.
"Why, you may go there whenever you like, my little maid," he told her.
"Fancy that!" exclaimed Mrs. Fawcus when she was informed of this by
Mary. "Well, did you ever? I'm sure I never did. I never did know such
an old-fashioned child in my life, Uncle William. Never! Fancy her
asking such a thing of Mr. Bristowe."
"It's old stock," said Mr. Fawcus.
And Mary when she had been given leave by her uncle and aunt to avail
herself of Mr. Bristowe's kind offer whispered "old stock" when she
opened the door of that dusty attic, for she felt that it was an
enchanted phrase like Open Sesame. The attic window looked down into
the backyard of the basement, and Mary could not resist opening the
window, for although she felt sure that she ought not to lean out of a
window, inasmuch as she lived in a basement she had never actually been
forbidden to lean out of windows. Yes, there were her flowers, such
tiny specks of color, down below, and there was the dustbin looking
more than ever like a knight in armor, and there was her thrush's cage.
Hark! he was singing. She could hear his song above the thunder of the
London streets. The attic window had a window-seat where Mary spent
long lovely mornings in April reading those dusty picture books one
after another, face to face with the clouds while the golden cross
upon the dome of St. Paul's glittered in the sun. On the sill were the
remains of a battered window-box still half full of earth. In this Mary
sowed nasturtium seeds which grew miraculously, so that soon when Mary
was in the yard she could look up and see the orange and yellow flowers
waving in the wind against the dingy bricks of the warehouse.
"Rapunzel, Rapunzel," she called. "Let down your golden hair."
"What are you talking about?" Mrs. Fawcus exclaimed.
"I'm being the witch," Mary told her.
"Which what?"
"The witch. The witch who climbed up to the tower by Rapunzel's golden
hair."
"Did anybody ever hear anything like it?"
And when Mrs. Fawcus came out into the yard at Mary's invitation and
looking up saw the nasturtiums, she was more exclamatory than ever.
"Well, it give me quite a turn," she vowed to Uncle William. "The like
of that child was never known."
Nearly all the clerks in the office came up to look at Mary's
nasturtiums; and Mr. Bristowe was so much delighted that he gave her a
small red watering-can.
"It's a wonder the sparrows don't peck them to pieces," said Mr.
Fawcus, when Mary's triumph was being discussed in the basement.
"If they did, they'd burn their tongues," said Mary.
"Well, now, did you ever hear a more old-fashioned remark?"
"_Passer deliciæ meæ puellæ_," boomed Mr. Fawcus.
Until Mary discovered that new world in the roof, her chief pleasure
apart from the backyard had been a cellar in front of the basement
which was lighted from a square of opaque glass set in the pavement
of the street. She was willing to spend hours here, sitting on an old
footstool, surrounded by her dolls and pretending to be a sea-nymph.
A wet day, and it was chiefly on wet days that Mary frequented this
cellar, heightened the illusion of being under the sea, because the
skylight, if such an aperture may be called a skylight, when blurred
with rain was more than usually aqueous, and the shadows of people
passing overhead were more than usually like fish. Mrs. Fawcus,
when she first heard of Mary's pastime, was moved to utter dark
interpretations of it.
"Depend upon it, Uncle William, that child's life is going to be mixed
up with deep water. Mark my words, she'll cross the sea many a time
before she goes down to the grave."
"Do not vaticinate, my dear," her husband commanded. "Absit omen!"
"I don't know what you're talking about, but when any one thinks of
that night ten years ago and when any one sees that dear innocent
sitting out there and staring up at the fishes, as she calls them,
well, any one may be forgiven for doing what any one's told by their
husband they mustn't do."
"Ten years ago," Mr. Fawcus repeated. "So it is. I wish you'd keep your
thoughts to yourself sometimes, Aunt Lucy. Ten years ago!"
She shuddered, for he was thinking of those fresh proposals to be made
in ten years.
"Here's the money from the lawyers," said Mrs. Fawcus one morning in
March, handing her husband the familiar envelope which had arrived
regularly every quarter-day.
Mr. Fawcus, on whose countenance a decade of looking after the stock
of Messrs. Holland and Brown had not left a mark, became suddenly old
and flabby when he read through that letter. In that moment even his
Latinity deserted him. The dreadful fact could not be evaded like so
many other facts in his life by ponderous rhetoric and polysyllabic
euphemisms.
"We've got to give her up," he groaned.
His wife snatched the letter from him.
"Where's Mary?" she asked, quickly looking round before she said
anything Mary ought not to hear.
"She's gone up to her attic to sow the seeds I bought her yesterday.
She wanted to try sweet sultans this year. She's up in the attic sowing
sweet sultans."
Mr. Fawcus buried his face in his hands and bent low in unutterable
despair, while his wife read the lawyer's letter.
151 Lamb's Conduit Street, W.C.,
_March 24, 1870_.
_Dear Sir_,
_We are instructed by our Client, Lady Flower of Barton Hall, Barton
Flowers, to say that she has decided to receive into her house her
granddaughter, Miss Mary Flower. We beg to enclose in addition to the
usual quarterly allowance of £25 a check for £50, in order that Miss
Mary Flower may be suitably equipped for the journey to Paris, where
Lady Flower is now living and where she wishes her granddaughter to
join her. If you will give us a call at your earliest convenience,
we shall be happy to provide you with any advice you may require in
respect of the journey. Lady Flower desires us to thank you for the
care you have taken of Miss Mary Flower and begs that if you have not
already explained to her the peculiar circumstances in which you took
charge of her you will do so now._