A LONELY CHILD.
Mrs. Rushton having adopted Hetty, set about extracting the utmost
amount of amusement possible from the presence of the child in her home.
She soon grew anxious to get away from her brother's "unpleasantly
sensible remarks," and Isabel's gentle excuses for her conduct, which
annoyed her even more, as they always suggested motives for her actions
which were far beyond her ken, and seemed far-fetched, over-strained,
and absurd. So she took the child to London, where she introduced her
to her friends as her latest plaything.
Hetty had frocks of all the colours of the rainbow, and learned to make
saucy speeches which entertained Mrs. Rushton's visitors.
She sat beside her new mamma as she drove in her victoria in the park;
and on Mrs. Rushton's "at home" days was noticed and petted by
fashionable ladies and gentlemen, her beauty praised openly to her face,
her pretty clothes remarked upon, and her childish prattle laughed at
and applauded as the wittiest talk in the world.
Certainly there were many days when Hetty's presence was wearisome and
intolerable to her benefactress, and then she was banished to a large
gloomy room at the top of the London house, and left to the tender
mercies of a maid, who did not at all forget that she was only Mrs.
Kane's little girl from the village of Wavertree, and treated her
accordingly. She was often left alone for hours, amusing herself as best
she could, crying when she felt very lonely, or leaning far out of the
window to feel nearer to the people in the street. The consequence of
all this was to spoil the child's naturally sweet temper, to teach her
to crave for excitement, and to suffer keenly, when, after a full feast
of pleasure, she was suddenly snubbed, scolded, deserted, and forgotten.
She began to hate the sight of the bare silent nursery upstairs, where
there were no pretty pictures to bear her company, no pleasant little
adornments, no diversions such as a mother places in the room where her
darlings pass many of their baby hours. It was a motherless, blank,
nursery, where the only nurse was the maid, who came and went, and
looked upon Hetty as a nuisance; an extra trouble for which she had not
been prepared when she engaged to live with Mrs. Rushton.
"Sit down there and behave yourself properly, if you can, till I come
back," she would say, and seat Hetty roughly in a chair and go away and
leave her there, shutting the door. At first Hetty used to weep
dolefully, and sometimes cried herself to sleep; but after a time she
became used to her lonely life, and only thought of how she could amuse
herself during her imprisonment. She counted the carriages passing the
window till she was tired, and watched the little children playing in
the garden of the square beyond; but at last she would get bolder,
sometimes, and venture out of her nursery to take a peep at the other
rooms of the house. One day she made her way down to Mrs. Rushton's
bed-room; that lady had gone out and the servants were all downstairs.
Hetty contrived to pull out several drawers and played with ribbons and
trinkets. At last she opened a case in which was her foster-mother's
watch, and as this ticking bit of gold was like a living companion,
Hetty pounced upon it at once.
She played all sorts of tricks with the watch, dressed it up in a towel
and called it a baby; and making up her mind that baby wanted a bath,
popped the watch into a basin of water and set about washing it
thoroughly.
Just as she was working away with great energy the door opened and Mrs.
Rushton came in. Seeing what the child was doing she flew at her,
snatched the watch from her hands, and slapped her violently on the arms
and neck. Hetty screamed, beat Mrs. Rushton on the face with both her
little palms, and then was whirled away shrieking into the hands of the
negligent maid, who shook her roughly as she carried her off to the
miscalled "nursery."
The little girl, who had never been instructed or talked to sensibly by
any one, was quite unconscious of the mischief she had done; and only
felt that big people were hateful to-day, as she lay kicking and
screaming on the floor upstairs.
The end of it all was, however, that, upon reflection, Mrs. Rushton
found she did not care so much after all about the destruction of her
watch, and that the whole occurrence would make a capital story to tell
to her friends; and so she sent for Hetty, who was then making a dismal
play for herself in the twilight with two chairs turned upside down and
a pinafore hung from one to another for a curtain. The child was seized
by Grant, the maid, dressed in one of her prettiest costumes, and taken
down to the drawing-room to Mrs. Rushton, who had quite recovered her
temper and forgotten both the beating she had given Hetty and the
beating Hetty had given her. The culprit was overwhelmed with kisses,
and praises of her pretty eyes; and soon found herself the centre of a
brilliant little crowd who were listening with smiles to the story of
Hetty's ill-treatment of the watch.
Each year Mrs. Rushton went abroad for amusement and Hetty was taken
with her, and in foreign hotels was even more shown about, flattered and
snubbed, petted and neglected, than she had been when at home in London.
Everything that could be done was done to make her vain, wilful,
ill-tempered; and the little creature came to know that she might have
anything she pleased if only she could make Mrs. Rushton laugh.
Four or five years passed in this way, during which time Mrs. Rushton
had very little intercourse with her brother's family at Wavertree. Her
country house had been shut up and her time had been spent between
London, Brighton, and fashionable resorts on the Continent. In the
meantime the education which she had promised Mrs. Kane should be given
to her nursling had not been even begun. Mrs. Rushton had had no leisure
to think of it. She looked upon Hetty as still only a babe, a marmoset
born to amuse her own hours of ennui. In her brother's occasional
letters he sometimes devoted a line to Hetty. "I hope you are not
spoiling the little girl," he would add as a postscript; or, "I hope the
child is learning something besides monkey-tricks." These insinuations
always annoyed Mrs. Rushton, and she never condescended to answer them.
The suggestion that she had incurred a great responsibility by adopting
Hetty was highly disagreeable to her.
It is hard to say how long this state of things might have gone on had
not Mrs. Rushton's health become delicate. She suddenly found herself
unable to enjoy the gay life which was so much to her natural taste. The
doctors recommended her a quiet sojourn in her native air, and warned
her that she ought to live near friends who felt a real interest in her.
Of what these hints might mean Mrs Rushton did not choose to think, but
physical weakness made her long for the rest of her own country home.