VI
A CHILD SPEAKS THE TRUTH
Fenella Barbour is the daughter of a clergyman of the Church of England, who remained unbeneficed to the end of his life. Younger son of a noble family, Scotch in origin but long settled in the Midlands, handsome, intellectual, and much yearned upon, the Honorable Nigel let opportunities for advantageous matrimony pass him one by one, to marry, comparatively late in his life and outside of his own class, a young parishioner with whose name the gossip of a small Cornish country town had spitefully and quite unjustifiably coupled his. To the day of her death Minnie Trevail never quite got over the surprise with which she received her pastor's offer of an honorable share in board and bed, and, whether it was gratitude or an uneasy sense that principles which do not often make for a man's happiness had played her hand for her, the fact remains, that to the end of his brief married life the Reverend Nigel Barbour continued to be a sort of married bachelor, free to come or go unquestioned, with a fine gift for silence and without obvious enthusiasms, unless it were for the girl baby who would sit for hours by his study fire, as he wrote his sermons, scolding her doll in whispers, and to whose round cheek and fine dark curls his eyes strayed oftener and oftener during the last year of his life.
Similarly circumstanced, other women by study, by observation, by an endless self-correction, have lifted themselves in time to something like a mental level with the men who have perversely chosen them. Not necessarily from a sense of her own limitations, Mrs. Barbour never tried. It is possible that she never, deliberately measuring the sacrifice which the man had made for her good name, determined the first sacrifice should be the last, but at least the unformed idea governed all her conduct. She kept the ideals, the accents—inside the house even the dress—of her class. For the spiritual companionship which she could never give she substituted the silent and tireless service of Martha. When her baby was born, she would have had the pain and peril tenfold; pain and peril so dimly comprehended by the man who smoothed her moist hair with an awkward hand, blinked his scholarly eyes at this crude and rather unseemly mystery, and, once assured the danger was past, went back to his weaving of words with a relief that even his kindness failed to conceal.
Nigel Barbour was one of the killed in the terrible Clee Level accident. He was returning from a New Year family gathering, the first he had attended since his marriage, and it is typical of their married relations that his wife never even "wondered" why she wasn't asked too. If reconciliation which should include her was on its way, his death disposed of the idea. Denied recognition during his lifetime his widow refrained, with what all her friends considered great lack of spirit, from attempting to win it after his death. He was uninsured, and, of the slender inheritance that devolved upon her, a great part consisted of house property at the "unfashionable" but expensive side of the Park. One of the houses, a great stuccoed mansion in a secluded square, happening to be empty at the time of her tragic bereavement, she assumed the tenancy, furnished it, and, reserving for herself only the basement and top floor, advertised discreetly but judiciously for lodgers.
Although the business is one that seldom shows a profit, and although in order to furnish the one house adequately she had been compelled to mortgage the freehold of the other, yet, if happiness be revenue, it is hard to see how she could have made a better investment. For the first time in her life she tasted liberty. She had her great house, her establishment, the direction of her three maids, and the intense respect of family butchers, family bakers, and family candlestick-makers in staid contiguous streets. On spring or autumn afternoons the champing and clashing of bits and hoofs outside her door, the murmurs of joyous life that floated along the hall and up the wide stairs, sounded no less sweetly in her ears because it was Miss Rigby or Lady Anne Caslon and not the Honorable Mrs. Barbour who was at home to all the fine company. The "Honorable Mrs. Barbour!" Often, in passing through the big bedrooms of the second floor, with clean pillowcases or window blinds over her arm, she would stop and look at her homely reflection in the long cheval glasses, with a little inward smile at the incongruity. And yet in her heart, so sensitive to the duties, so blind to the rights, of her equivocal position, the obligations which the barren title involved were tacitly acknowledged. If it conferred no privileges, it at least restrained her judgment upon the caste, a corner of whose ermine rested, however grudgingly, upon her own shoulder. She grew indisposed to gossip. Such of her relatives and friends as called upon her while upon "day-trips" to London found themselves cut short in their pursuit of one special branch of knowledge. They went home to Cornwall declaring that Minnie had grown "stuck-up."
But the rights which she abdicated so whole-heartedly for herself she claimed with an added fierceness for Fenella. The child was a miracle from the first. Even while it lay, a few pounds of pink flesh, in a corner of one arm and drained her breast, she was worshipping it, humbly and afar off. It is difficult to find words that adequately convey her state of mind toward her daughter without entrenching on a parallel that is sacred and therefore forbidden; but this much is certain: had the legal quibble which can prove a child to be no blood relation to its mother been propounded to Mrs. Barbour, it would have found in her a tearful and reluctant but convinced witness to its truth. For two successive nights before her baby's birth the same dream had visited her. The great house of her brother-in-law, which she had never seen, which her husband had never even thought of describing for her, had appeared to her, wrapped in flame. Pushing her way through the crowd that surrounded it and was watching it burn, after the inconsequent manner of dream people, with quiet satisfaction, she had run up tottering staircases and along choking passages, had reached a splendid room of state upon whose canopied bed a little naked infant lay, and, clasping it to her breast, had carried it out, smiling and unharmed. Fenella was no more truly her child than she was the child of the dream.
The little girl was four and still wore a black hair ribbon and a black sash over her pinafore, when one afternoon in October a big shallow barouche drove up to the door of No. 11 Suffolk Square. The springs were very high, the harness was very brightly plated, the chestnut horses, their heads held in by a torturing bearing rein, very shiny and soapy. A faded, artificial woman, with a tall osprey in her black bonnet, lolled back against the buff cloth cushions and regarded the world through a tortoise-shell lorgnette. A girl, quite young, with fair hair cut in a straight fringe across her forehead, sat up demurely at her side.
Fenella was taking tea in great state and composure on the window-seat of her nursery under the slates when the carriage drove up. A mug, on which Puss-in-Boots brushed back his bristling whiskers with one spirited paw, stood at her elbow, filled with a faintly tinted decoction of warm milk and sugar. A bun, delicately nibbled all round its lustrous circumference, was in her right hand, and a large over-dressed doll, with a vacant blue-eyed face, rested insecurely in the hollow of her left arm. From this household treasure her attention was just beginning to stray. James, the coachman, had pulled across the roadway, and was driving his fretful over-heated charges up and down along the railings of the Square. Fenella pressed her forehead against the cold window-pane.
"Gee-gees; gee-gees!" she soliloquized.
To her enter, without cue or warning, Druce the parlor-maid—also a little the nursemaid—in great excitement, and breathless after a non-stop run from the bottom of the house. The bun was snatched from the chubby fingers, Marianne saved, timely, from a headlong course to the floor, the Marquis of Carabas pushed unconstitutionally on one side, and the napkin whisked off, all in four brisk movements.
"Company for my little lady!" the excited girl exclaimed. "She is to have her pretty hair curled, and her best frock put on, and to go downstairs to see mamma's fine friends."
Nelly took the outrage with the docility that was one of her charms.
"Gee-gees, Drucie," she said, pointing over her shoulder as she was borne away. "Gee-gees in the Thquare."
The warm-hearted maid gave her a tight and quite unauthorized hug.
"Gee-gees, indeed! Well, they maytrot! trot! trot!until their feet drop off, before they find anything finer than we're going to show them."
The carriage folk were in the front part of the big tastelessly furnished drawing-room, which ran the whole depth of the house, and which happened to be unlet at the time. A fire, just lit, was crackling and smoking sullenly. The elder lady sat, with a transient air, as much on the edge of a little gilt chair as is compatible with a seat at all. I am not quite certain whether vinegar can be frozen at certain temperatures or not. If so, her smile recalled the experiment. The young girl sat back in a velvet rocking chair, her slender black-stockinged legs reaching the ground from time to time as it oscillated. She had a little pale round face; her lank, whitey-gold hair was cut as straight at her waist as it was at her forehead. She had taken off her gloves, and the bony over-manicured fingers were interlocked in her lap with a sort of feeble repression. Near a table, covered with tea-things, but from which no hospitality had been dispensed, Mrs. Barbour was sitting, no less upright than her visitor. She was flushed and there was the fullness of suppressed tears round her eyelids, but there was as little sign of defeat in her face and attitude as in the other woman's unpleasant smile. The fine lady raised her lorgnette as the child was carried in. She turned languidly to her daughter.
"Your poor uncle's face. Oh, the very image!" she exclaimed, with an emphasis that extinguished any lingering idea poor Mrs. Barbour may have kept of a share in the matter.
Set upon the ground, the child beauty gravitated instantly to mother's skirts, and from this coign of vantage surveyed her visitors. Mrs. Barbour put the curls back from her forehead and stooped to her ear.
"Nelly," said she, "this is your aunt, Lady Lulford, your Aunty Hortense, come to see poor father's little girl. Won't you go and give her a kiss?"
The grasp tightened upon her skirt.
"Oh, shame!" the mother murmured, with a reproach in her voice that the glistening eyes belied. "Is this my kind little Nelly? Come over, then, with mother."
With a sidelong glance at the tea-table, Fenella was led, obliquely, across the thick new pile carpet, and received a kiss upon her forehead that was not much warmer than the window against which it had just been pressed.
"And now your cousin. Cousin——"
"Leslie," said Lady Lulford, covering a slight yawn with her golden card-case, and glancing out of the window toward her horses.
The girl's face seemed to yearn and melt as the reluctant little feet were guided to her. She pursed her pale lips and held out her thin arms. Fenella was to remember it years afterwards with a spasm of pity and indignation. But she was only a baby now, and struggled in the weak embrace. Once back at her mother's side, a violent reaction of shyness set in, and she buried her face in the maternal lap.
"Impressionable, too; like poor Nigel," the peeress remarked to her daughter in the same icy voice.
"Come," the mother coaxed, "hasn't Nelly a word to say? Her aunty"—Lady Lulford winched—"her aunty and cousin will think they've got a little dumb girl for a niece."
Fenella raised her face. "I weally——" she began, and, not finding encouragement to proceed, down went the black head again.
Mother lifts it gently.
"——was——" Nelly's finger went to her mouth. Her glance wavered, wandered tortuously along the floor, and finally and suddenly focussed the tea equipage.
"——in the middle of my tea." Louder and with sudden confidence as the full nature of the outrage was realized, "Weally was in the middle of my tea."
Lady Lulford smiled abstractedly. Leslie's lips moved. The mother drew her little girl closer.
"You shall have your tea presently, dear," she said, "but I want you to listen to me first. Now, tell me," she seemed to steady her voice, "how would you like to go into the country with your aunt and Cousin Leslie?"
Nelly's eyes grew big and round. "And mother?" added she, joining the palms of her hands, baby-wise, with stiff outspread fingers.
"No, dear. Mother must stay in London, because she has so much to do."
There was an agitation of the black curls, and from under them a most decided negative evolved itself.
"Oh, but my precious," the mother pleaded, as that other mother may have pleaded before the judgment seat of the great wise king; "just for a while; to see the green trees, and the moo-cows, and the bunnies, and, and——"
"The deer," said Lady Lulford, raising the conversation to a higher and, shall we say, ancestral level.
"Great—big—stags, baby," the cousin broke in, with her eager, unsteady voice, "great big stags with horns like this," and she made a pair with fingers that were almost as fleshless.
Fenella refused to weigh the catalogue of attractions a moment. The head shook faster and faster till the dark curls whipped first one cheek and then another.
"Not for a little while? Not for a few weeks?" Mrs. Barbour urged, almost roughly.
At this persistence in a quarter where it was so little to be looked for, two fat tears distilled themselves in Fenella's eyes and rolled down her cheeks. She opened her mouth, and I regret to say her face lost, temporarily, its attractive power. Mrs. Barbour snatched her up and sprang to her feet.
"She sha'n't be teased," she cried passionately, clasping the child to her breast. Then, turning quickly first to Lady Lulford and afterward to her daughter, "Don't you see she's too young now? She's only a baby, really. Perhaps later——"
The Viscountess turned upon her own offspring the cold ceremonial eye that on company nights lifted the ladies at Freres Lulford to their feet and up into the drawing-room.
"We must really go now, Leslie," she said, with a little explanatory wave of the card-case. "So many calls, you know. Well, Mrs. Barbour," turning to her hostess with an evident effort, "I suppose we mustn't expect you to decide such a matter in a hurry. For the present I think I may say our offer, Myles's and mine, stands open. I still think it is what poor Nigel would most have wished. And even if you should decide not to accept it now, remember, if at any time—at any time——" and in this golden air of good intentions Lady Lulford's visit ended.
"That is an ordeal well over, Leslie," she said, a few moments later, leaning back and closing her eyes slightly, as the carriage door slammed and the tall footman with a crook from the waist still in his long straight back, swung himself to his perch.
"Mother," said Leslie, nervously, pulling at her gloves, "we could hardly—could hardly——"
"Could hardlywhat, my dear? You are so disjointed at times."
"——expect her to give upsuch a pet," the girl said impulsively, with a gush of feeling that seemed to leave her colder and weaker than ever.
Her mother lifted the frozen gloved hand that seemed to blight like frost, and gave a little tinkling laugh.
"My dear, when you are my age you will not rate so highly what is a mere animal passion.Truelove would consider the child's material interests first. I still hope," with a little hostile back glance as the barouche rolled out of Suffolk Square, "that Nigel's daughter may not have to grow up in the basement of a lodging-house."
"Thebasement? Mother!"
"My dear, foolish girl, you surely don't think the room we were in to-day (atrocious taste!) is used by them. No, my dear! They live at the bottom of the area, eat and gossip with the servants; sometimes, I have no doubt, the policeman drops in to tea. TheHonorableMrs. Barbour!" And Lady Lulford gave her unpleasant laugh again.
"Mamma!" cried Leslie, really shocked now, "you don't suppose she usesthat?"
"Why not, my dear? She's either very foolish or has more delicacy than I give her credit for if she doesn't. Why, she could have her house full of rich vulgar Americans all the year round. Are we at Lady Dunsmuir's already? Thank heavens, Leslie, we're not calling on the servants' hall this time."
Meanwhile, at the house they had left, an aggrieved small person sat on a cushion and comforted the ache at her heart very much after the fashion of older and presumably wiser people, with mother's rejected dainties. Stretched on a wolf-skin rug, in an attitude that had been a common one with her in days when, the Cornish sun dappling her back and making illuminating splashes on the novelettes that were her mental food, she had dreamed away whole summer afternoons thus in her father's orchard, the farmer's daughter watched the busy, sticky mouth at work, her face wholly given up to the animal affection that Lady Lulford was at that very moment reprehending.
"Why didn't you want to kiss your Aunty Hortense?" she asked presently.
No answer, but much sucking, as the sugary bottom of the cup was reached. The mother loosened the little fingers and put it aside.
"Come, Nelly," she urged; "answer mother!" Who has not coveted a child's thought at times?
This one seemed to consider.
"Be-tos," she said at last, cryptically, like some little Chinese oracle.
"Be-tos, of what? That's not any answer. And, oh, law! child, how backward you do speak for a great girl of four!"
Hard pressed, Nelly struggled to her feet. She clenched her little hands, puckered her forehead. The mother held her breath as she waited.
"Be-tos——Oh! be-tos she didn'tsmellnice!"
And, as the woman rolled back, shaking unrestrainedly with laughter.
"——like you do, mummy; like you do, mummy," the child cried, flinging her arms round her mother's neck and burying her flushed face in the soft shoulder.