III
Anhour after her friend had gone, Miss Page sat by the open window in her bedroom. The room was full of moonlight, for she had put out the candles and drawn back the curtains.
Somewhere in the garden, or near it, a nightingale was singing.
Deep shadows lay across the lawn, and all the trees were dreaming. Far out, the meadows covered with a light mist, were like a mystic silver-flooded sea.
For a long time Anne did not move. Her long talk had revived memories. They crowded so swiftly to her mind that she grew bewildered, and as though impelled by a sudden impulse to seek relief, she rose and crossed the room to a tall bureau opposite the window.
Its interior revealed a number of pigeonholes, and tiny cupboards with brass knobs. Pressing a spring under one of these, a deep drawer sprang open.
She felt in its recesses for a moment, andpresently drew out a book bound in a linen cover. Then lighting a candle and placing it on the table near the window, she resumed her seat.
In the quiet air the candle flame burnt clear and steady, and opening the book, Anne began to read a journal begun in her childhood. The volume was an ordinary thick exercise book such as schoolgirls use, and on the first page, in a large childish hand, was written—
“Anne Page,“Tufton Street,“Dalston,“London, 18—.“This is my birthday,” it began. “I am twelve to-day, and I have made up my mind to keep a diary like Charlotte and Emily and Anne Brontë. At least I think they didn’t exactly keep a diary. They wrote down what they were all doing at a certain time, and then four years afterwards, they opened their papers and compared notes. I think that was a good plan. But I shall write in my book once a year, on my birthday. So few things happen to me that I dare say that will be quite enough.“As I have never written a journal before, I will say all I can remember about myself before this birthday. Perhaps if I don’t, I shall have forgotten it by the time I’m old.“I live at Dalston, and father is one of the curates at St. Jude’s. Mother died when I was two years old, so I don’t remember her. She left me her watch and chain and two bracelets. I have one brother Hugh, but last year he ran away from home, and went to sea. He ran away because he wasn’t happy. Father was very strict with him. It is a good thing to be a boy, and be able to run away. I can’t, because girls can’t be sailors, and there’s nowhere to run to. I miss Hugh dreadfully. He was fourteen, and he was very nice to me. I still cry about him sometimes at night. But it’s no good.“Our house is very ugly. It’s in a street. It has a little back garden, but nothing will grow there because it’s full of cats.“I have a governess. Her name is Miss Atkins. She comes every day at half-past nine, and gives me lessons till twelve. Then we go for a walk. But there are no nice walks here. In the afternoon I do needlework, and learn my lessons for the next day, and Miss Atkins goes at six o’clock. She has corkscrew curls, and her hair is sandy like Thomas, our cat. She is cross every arithmetic day, because I can’t do arithmetic. But she says it’s because I won’t, but that is not true. I like history and poetry, and all about the poets and writers.And especially Shakespeare. Sometimes I read out of Lamb’s tales for my reading lesson. I should like to read out of Shakespeare, but Miss Atkins won’t let me. She says it isn’t fit. I don’t know why she says this, because I have found a Shakespeare in father’s study, and some of it is beautiful. I like the Midsummer-Night’s Dream, and Romeo and Juliet. The Shakespeare is the only nice book in the house. Most of them are sermons, and about religion.“I’m going to put a wicked thing in this book, so I must be careful always to lock it up.I don’t like religion.“Miss Atkins says she loves God, and I asked her whether father did. She was shocked, and said of course he did, because he was a curate. I wish he lovedme, but I don’t think he does. He is nearly always cross, and I’m always being punished.”
“Anne Page,“Tufton Street,“Dalston,“London, 18—.
“Anne Page,
“Tufton Street,
“Dalston,
“London, 18—.
“This is my birthday,” it began. “I am twelve to-day, and I have made up my mind to keep a diary like Charlotte and Emily and Anne Brontë. At least I think they didn’t exactly keep a diary. They wrote down what they were all doing at a certain time, and then four years afterwards, they opened their papers and compared notes. I think that was a good plan. But I shall write in my book once a year, on my birthday. So few things happen to me that I dare say that will be quite enough.
“As I have never written a journal before, I will say all I can remember about myself before this birthday. Perhaps if I don’t, I shall have forgotten it by the time I’m old.
“I live at Dalston, and father is one of the curates at St. Jude’s. Mother died when I was two years old, so I don’t remember her. She left me her watch and chain and two bracelets. I have one brother Hugh, but last year he ran away from home, and went to sea. He ran away because he wasn’t happy. Father was very strict with him. It is a good thing to be a boy, and be able to run away. I can’t, because girls can’t be sailors, and there’s nowhere to run to. I miss Hugh dreadfully. He was fourteen, and he was very nice to me. I still cry about him sometimes at night. But it’s no good.
“Our house is very ugly. It’s in a street. It has a little back garden, but nothing will grow there because it’s full of cats.
“I have a governess. Her name is Miss Atkins. She comes every day at half-past nine, and gives me lessons till twelve. Then we go for a walk. But there are no nice walks here. In the afternoon I do needlework, and learn my lessons for the next day, and Miss Atkins goes at six o’clock. She has corkscrew curls, and her hair is sandy like Thomas, our cat. She is cross every arithmetic day, because I can’t do arithmetic. But she says it’s because I won’t, but that is not true. I like history and poetry, and all about the poets and writers.And especially Shakespeare. Sometimes I read out of Lamb’s tales for my reading lesson. I should like to read out of Shakespeare, but Miss Atkins won’t let me. She says it isn’t fit. I don’t know why she says this, because I have found a Shakespeare in father’s study, and some of it is beautiful. I like the Midsummer-Night’s Dream, and Romeo and Juliet. The Shakespeare is the only nice book in the house. Most of them are sermons, and about religion.
“I’m going to put a wicked thing in this book, so I must be careful always to lock it up.I don’t like religion.
“Miss Atkins says she loves God, and I asked her whether father did. She was shocked, and said of course he did, because he was a curate. I wish he lovedme, but I don’t think he does. He is nearly always cross, and I’m always being punished.”
Miss Page let the book fall on to her lap. Mechanically she turned her face towards the meadows with their islands of motionless trees emerging from the mists. But she did not see them. The childish words, already considerably more than forty years old, already a little yellow and faded, had brought into sight instead, the dreary house in Tufton Street.With the clearness and precision of actual vision, she saw the narrow staircase covered with oilcloth, which led up to the bedroom in which she had spent so many hours of solitary confinement.
She saw the pattern on the shabby wall-paper. She saw her little iron bedstead, covered with a counterpane of thick white material, with a raised pattern upon its surface; the curtains of dingy drab rep on either side of a red blind; the outlook across a leaden street, swept by wind and rain.
She thought of her father, a morose, irritable man whose persistent bad temper, condoned to himself under the guise of necessary chastisement, had driven her brother from the house.
She remembered him in the clothes of his office, shabby and ill-cut, going doggedly about the duties which in later years she knew had been uncongenial.
Half reluctantly Anne took up the book again.
“I said that nothing ever happened to me. But one lovely thing happened last year. I went to stay at Dymfield, with Mr. and Mrs. Burbage. Mr. Burbage was some relation to my mother—a cousin, I think. Anyhow they wrote to father, and asked him to let me come.Their house is called Fairholme Court, and it is a lovely house, only the furniture is ugly (except upstairs in some of the bedrooms, where Mrs. Burbage can’t see it). Mrs. Burbage is very funny. She was kind to me, and I liked her rather, but not nearly so much as Mr. Burbage. I liked him better than any one I ever saw, though he doesn’t talk much, but reads all day long. Perhaps that’s what makes his eyes look so tired and sad. He has a lovely study full of books, and he let me read anything I liked. It was there that I read about Charlotte and Emily and Anne Brontë. They are very interesting, but I wish Emily had been called Anne, like me, instead of the youngest one. I like Emily best. And I read Hans Andersen too, and when I came away Mr. Burbage gave it to me. It is the loveliest book in the world. My favourite story is ‘The Little Sea Maid.’ Some day when I am grown up, I will go to places where there are orange trees, and marble palaces, and the sea is quite blue.“My bedroom was so pretty. It was like a room in a fairy-tale. There was furniture with spindly legs in it; the kind of furniture Mrs. Burbage said was ugly and old-fashioned. But I thought it was very pretty. There were white curtains to the bed, and the wall-paperhad pink rosebuds on it, and the window was like a little door with lots of tiny panes, and it pushed outwards. There was clematis all round the window, and white roses which tried to grow into the room. In the morning I used to hear the birds chirping in their nests, and then I used to jump out of bed, and see the sun rising over the fields. And the garden was all shining with dew, and everything lookenchanted.“I was there a month, while Miss Atkins was away for her holiday, and I wastoohappy. But now I shall never go there again, because father has had a quarrel with Mr. Burbage. It was something about me, I think.”
“I said that nothing ever happened to me. But one lovely thing happened last year. I went to stay at Dymfield, with Mr. and Mrs. Burbage. Mr. Burbage was some relation to my mother—a cousin, I think. Anyhow they wrote to father, and asked him to let me come.Their house is called Fairholme Court, and it is a lovely house, only the furniture is ugly (except upstairs in some of the bedrooms, where Mrs. Burbage can’t see it). Mrs. Burbage is very funny. She was kind to me, and I liked her rather, but not nearly so much as Mr. Burbage. I liked him better than any one I ever saw, though he doesn’t talk much, but reads all day long. Perhaps that’s what makes his eyes look so tired and sad. He has a lovely study full of books, and he let me read anything I liked. It was there that I read about Charlotte and Emily and Anne Brontë. They are very interesting, but I wish Emily had been called Anne, like me, instead of the youngest one. I like Emily best. And I read Hans Andersen too, and when I came away Mr. Burbage gave it to me. It is the loveliest book in the world. My favourite story is ‘The Little Sea Maid.’ Some day when I am grown up, I will go to places where there are orange trees, and marble palaces, and the sea is quite blue.
“My bedroom was so pretty. It was like a room in a fairy-tale. There was furniture with spindly legs in it; the kind of furniture Mrs. Burbage said was ugly and old-fashioned. But I thought it was very pretty. There were white curtains to the bed, and the wall-paperhad pink rosebuds on it, and the window was like a little door with lots of tiny panes, and it pushed outwards. There was clematis all round the window, and white roses which tried to grow into the room. In the morning I used to hear the birds chirping in their nests, and then I used to jump out of bed, and see the sun rising over the fields. And the garden was all shining with dew, and everything lookenchanted.
“I was there a month, while Miss Atkins was away for her holiday, and I wastoohappy. But now I shall never go there again, because father has had a quarrel with Mr. Burbage. It was something about me, I think.”
Her eyes still fixed on the round handwriting, Anne’s memory was working.
Years later she knew that her old friend had once loved her mother, his cousin and playfellow. At her father’s death she had found, on going through his papers, the letter in which he had offered to provide for the child of the woman who would not be his wife. It was a letter full of tact and delicate feeling, but it indicated how much of the little girl’s loneliness he knew and understood.
He pointed out that companions of her own age were necessary for the happy developmentof her temperament. He wanted to educate her with some neighbour’s children, so that she might live at Fairholme Court, in the country which she loved. She was not strong, he declared, and London air obviously did not suit her. There would of course be no attempt to separate her from her father. She could return to him during the holidays, whenever he wished to see her.
It was a letter written from full knowledge of the circumstances.
He knew the atmosphere of struggling poverty in which Anne, as the daughter of a curate with an income of little more than a hundred a year, passed her existence. He knew also that the man had little tenderness for his daughter, and he hoped that his suggestion might come as a relief.
Even at the age of twelve, Anne could have undeceived him.
Already, unable as yet to put her knowledge into definite form, she knew her father well.
Gloomy and morose, a man of narrow intelligence and invincible obstinacy, he resented any overtures which to his mind savoured of patronage.
In later years Anne knew the bitterness of his life.
The son of a rich stockbroker, he had just finished his course at Cambridge when the financial ruin, which killed his father, struck the death-blow to his own ambitions also.
He had been reading for the Church, with dreams, easy as it then seemed to be realized, of a splendid living, and a possible bishopric.
The girl to whom he was engaged, the daughter of an impoverished Irish landlord, was penniless.
She refused to give him up, and he married her, after taking orders, and entering the Church as a miserably paid curate. Together they settled in the dingy little house near the Church of St. Jude, at Dalston, to prove that love in poverty was a different matter from the same emotion experienced in affluence.
Henry Page was not strong enough to bear misfortune well.
His temper, naturally irrational and impatient of hardship—a temper which it would have required much material prosperity to soften, became soured and exacting under the stress of daily anxious necessity. Five years after their marriage, his young wife, crushed and saddened, gave up the struggle and died, leaving her two children in no very gentle hands.
The boy, determined to call his life hisown, had cut the knot of uncongenial family existence by flight.
Anne was left.
Miss Page turned over the leaves of the exercise book slowly.
On the whole, the child she remembered had kept her resolution fairly well.
“To-day is my birthday. I am thirteen. I am fifteen. I am seventeen.” The words marking another year met her eyes constantly as she fluttered the pages. Several times there was a mention of Hugh. She had heard from him. He was getting on. He hoped some day to be captain of a trading vessel. He had sent her some funny writing-paper from Japan. Another time it was a pressed flower, or some curious seeds from the South Sea Islands.
Once—this was recorded after her seventeenth birthday—he had come home for a week.
“He is nineteen, and so brown and handsome and strong,” was the remark in the journal. “He did not get on well with father. He told him that I ought to go away—that I had no friends, and that my life was very dull. Father was terribly angry. Now Hugh has gone, and I’m wretched—wretched. The house is so quiet. I can hear the clock inthe hall ticking even when I’m upstairs in my bedroom. It is raining, and the sky is like lead.”
Anne still turned the leaves. There were big gaps in the journal, but if they had been filled, the word across the page would have been the classicnothingof the diary of Louis XVI.
In thought Anne went back over the long, dreary years—the incredibly empty years of a woman whom lack of means as well as lack of opportunity cuts off from the world.
A woman moreover, whose youth was spent under conditions less elastic, less favourable to development than those of modern days.
The cold bare nave of St. Jude’s rose vividly in her mind. She saw the pews full of women in frowsy faded bonnets—the bonnets of Dalston.
She saw the parish room lighted by unshaded gas-burners, in which, shy as she was, she had held classes for work-girls. Again she watched them bending over their desks, giggling and nudging one another when she entered the room.
She remembered the look of the street when after the appointed hour for her class, she emerged from the stuffy room into the night air.
There was a butcher’s shop opposite, with a row of flaring lights, and the butcher in a greasy apron used to stand upon the pavement shouting his wares to the hurrying passers-by.
Then there was the return to the dingy house. A hurried lighting of the gas in the entrance passage, the glare of which revealed the oil-cloth on the floor, growing more worn and shabby every year. How well Anne remembered what was left of the pattern of that oil-cloth!
A descent into the kitchen followed, where she prepared the supper, and directed the clumsy movements of Harriet, the little maid-of-all-work.
Supper then with her father, who sometimes scarcely raised his head from his plate, and seldom spoke a word.
Anne remembered one or two of the curates who had tried to make friends with her.
One of them who sometimes insisted upon walking back with her from her evening class, had hovered upon the verge of a mild flirtation. But to Anne, desperately shy and unused to the society of her fellow-creatures, his words were meaningless and embarrassing. Moreover, her father was unpopular. Frequently embroiled with his colleagues, none of themsought his society, and none ventured to a house to which they were never invited.
In retrospect, she scarcely needed aid from the journal, Anne saw the years pass in grey procession. There was no note of revolt in the record of her girlhood’s days, and the reading was the sadder for its absence. No revolt, no bitterness. Only a sad acquiescence with fate, a gradual numbing of sensation, a sort of mental and moral apathy, grey, leaden, hopeless.
She paused at the words which followed the announcement of her twenty-seventh birthday.
“Last week father was taken suddenly very ill. The doctor is afraid it is paralysis.”
For three years there was no further word in the book, but Anne knew those three years by heart.
They were passed chiefly between the sick-room and the kitchen, in which she prepared invalid food, and directed the little maid in the management of the housework. Helpless as a child, her father required constant unremitting attendance, and when on the eve of her thirtieth birthday he died, Anne found herself literally penniless. The long illness had swallowed up his scanty earnings, and, unprepared for any work in the world, his daughter was left to face starvation.
Fastened inside the book was the letter which saved her.
It was written in the thin, quavering handwriting of an old woman even then ill and feeble. She opened and read it.
“Fairholme Court,“February, 18—“My dear Anne,“The news of your loss has just reached me. Before he died, my husband made me promise that if you were ever free, I would ask you to come to me. Will you come now? I am an old woman, and an invalid. In any case, before long Imust havehada companionwho would look after me, and nurse me when necessary. I cannot offer you a very cheerful home, but if you come you will be welcome.“With sincere sympathy for the grief you have sustained,“Believe me,“Sincerely yours,“Jane Burbage.”
“Fairholme Court,“February, 18—
“Fairholme Court,
“February, 18—
“My dear Anne,
“The news of your loss has just reached me. Before he died, my husband made me promise that if you were ever free, I would ask you to come to me. Will you come now? I am an old woman, and an invalid. In any case, before long Imust havehada companionwho would look after me, and nurse me when necessary. I cannot offer you a very cheerful home, but if you come you will be welcome.
“With sincere sympathy for the grief you have sustained,
“Believe me,“Sincerely yours,“Jane Burbage.”
“Believe me,
“Sincerely yours,
“Jane Burbage.”
On the next page, the last written page in the book, Anne read these words:—
“To-morrow I go to Fairholme Court. It is eighteen years since I saw it. I am now thirty years old, and what I said as a childis still true. Nothing has ever happened to me. Nothing will ever happen now. It is not surprising. I am very plain, and nothing happens to a plain woman who is also poor. I ought to be very grateful to Mrs. Burbage. She has probably saved me from starving. Iamvery grateful. But to-night I can’t feel anything except that I don’t care to go on living. If I were a religious woman I should think this sinful, but what I said as a child is still true. I don’t like religion. I mean that it has never affected me. Never made me happy. Perhaps I have never yet found the religion to suit me. I don’t know. To-morrow I begin a new life, but it will be again a life of nursing.“I try to be grateful for a home. I try to feel cheerful. But all feeling seems to have gone. I remember my thoughts as a child. I was often very eager then, and hopeful. I was often sure in my heart that something delightful would happen to me. But now nothing seems worth while, and I am only very tired. Perhaps when I feel better I shall be glad that Fairholme Court is beautiful and in the country. To-night even that doesn’t matter.“Hugh wrote to me after father’s death. He has saved a little money, and withanother man, a friend, he is going to start a sheep farm in New Zealand. He is engaged to be married to a girl he met on one of his voyages. She has since returned to England, and they will have to wait till he has made a home for her before they can marry. But he seems full of hope, and is very happy.“I am chiefly thankful for Mrs. Burbage’s invitation, because now I need not be a burden to him. As it is, he has sent me money which he can ill afford, though without it I could not have existed during the past few months. He wanted my photograph, and, to please him, I had it taken. The other copies will be wasted. There’s no one else in the world who wants my picture. All my things are packed. This is the end of my life here. I wish it were the end altogether.”
“To-morrow I go to Fairholme Court. It is eighteen years since I saw it. I am now thirty years old, and what I said as a childis still true. Nothing has ever happened to me. Nothing will ever happen now. It is not surprising. I am very plain, and nothing happens to a plain woman who is also poor. I ought to be very grateful to Mrs. Burbage. She has probably saved me from starving. Iamvery grateful. But to-night I can’t feel anything except that I don’t care to go on living. If I were a religious woman I should think this sinful, but what I said as a child is still true. I don’t like religion. I mean that it has never affected me. Never made me happy. Perhaps I have never yet found the religion to suit me. I don’t know. To-morrow I begin a new life, but it will be again a life of nursing.
“I try to be grateful for a home. I try to feel cheerful. But all feeling seems to have gone. I remember my thoughts as a child. I was often very eager then, and hopeful. I was often sure in my heart that something delightful would happen to me. But now nothing seems worth while, and I am only very tired. Perhaps when I feel better I shall be glad that Fairholme Court is beautiful and in the country. To-night even that doesn’t matter.
“Hugh wrote to me after father’s death. He has saved a little money, and withanother man, a friend, he is going to start a sheep farm in New Zealand. He is engaged to be married to a girl he met on one of his voyages. She has since returned to England, and they will have to wait till he has made a home for her before they can marry. But he seems full of hope, and is very happy.
“I am chiefly thankful for Mrs. Burbage’s invitation, because now I need not be a burden to him. As it is, he has sent me money which he can ill afford, though without it I could not have existed during the past few months. He wanted my photograph, and, to please him, I had it taken. The other copies will be wasted. There’s no one else in the world who wants my picture. All my things are packed. This is the end of my life here. I wish it were the end altogether.”
A photograph, one of the wasted copies, was placed between the leaves, at the last written page.
Anne took it up, and examined it by the light of the expiring candle.
She saw a sad quiet face, with thick hair parted smoothly on either side of the forehead. It was a face which looked older than the one now bent over it. A disfiguring gown, fastened with a little tucker at the neck, concealed thelong line of the throat. Except for the indication of a clear cut chin, and a mouth sweet, despite its sadness, there was no beauty, not even a suggestion of grace or charm in the picture.
Anne replaced the photograph, and slowly shut the book.
There was a look of terror on her face. She had called up a ghost—the ghost of her past self.
Like a woman whose one idea is flight, she half rose, and for a moment glanced with frightened eyes about the room.
Dawn was breaking. The eerie, grey light showed her the embroidered linen coverlet on her bed, the spindle-legged dressing-table which had once stood in the little white bedroom upstairs, the flowered curtains at the window, the bowl of sweet peas on the table at which she had been sitting.
She drew a deep breath, and moved close to the window.
The air thrilled with the voices of the birds. The trees were still motionless, as though waiting for the sun; and grey with dew, the meadows stretched away towards the dim horizon. In the rose-garden on the right, beneath the sheltering wall, the sun-dial glimmered white as pearl in the dawn-light.
The candle flared up, and went out with a flicker.
Anne turned, and groping her way in the half light, replaced the book in the drawer, and touched the spring which closed it.