VII
MOSTLY LADY ANNE
So the baby hands threw their dice, and as the dice fell the game was played out. Life unfolded itself amid the fog or rain or thwarted sunlight of the staid Tyburnian square, which should have had for tutelary deity some sleepy god, yawning and stretching himself in the centre of its smoky grass plot. Before the opening consciousness, like figures in an enchanted frieze, such phenomena passed as are likely to haunt area railings: The muffin man, tinkling his bell down murky streets and terraces at the uplifting hour of tea-time; the policeman with his bull's-eye lantern, waking the rails to a good-night dance along blank stuccoed walls and shuttered windows; broad hipped Welsh milkwomen in plaid shawls, with shining pails clanking from their wooden yokes; the old blind Dalmatian dog that panted at the corner of the mews and drummed the hot pavement with his tail. Once a year for one blissful month the town baby became a sand baby, building castles, scooping moats with her wooden spade for the tide to crumble (oh, Nelly! there's a tide that knows all our castles are sand); racing with bare-legged chance companions along the purring lips of the treacherous sea. Child of suppressed love and of absolute surrender, she grew up straight, strong and ardent; fair of face, light of foot, and with a pitiful, generous heart that could not wait its time to love, but before the dimpled hands could reach or turn the stiff handle of the hall door, had made to itself friends of the world's wretchedness. The old Garibaldian accordion player, with the twisted leg, learned to look for the littlesignorina, beautiful as the sun of Naples, which he dreamed of at night in his cellar at Saffron Hill; the ancient mariner with snow-white hair and beard (a terrible case! says the Charity Organization Society) kept a bow of quite especial condescension for Missie's penny at Number Eleven; while it was fine to see with what a sweep of his great red hand to his battered hat old Paddy Crimmin, the drunken Delhi hero, would straighten his racked body of a cold Sunday morning as the little creature, her dark face aglow with newly discovered color against the white road and snow-burdened trees, stopped at his crossing to grope with mittened fingers for the penny, nestling in her pocket next a sixpence which I am sure she begrudged the cold impersonal offertory plate later on.
She possessed her mother's life as a single flame possesses a dark room, creating its light, its color, and its motion. The slave does not always make the tyrant, and to the homely woman who tended her, kissed her limbs fragrant from the bath, twisted her curls round fingers that thrilled with love and worship—who coaxed her from forbidden ways with toys and sweets, and whose voice was never once pitched in even the gentlest accent of authority, Fenella gave her heart in return. All the fairies, it seemed, were at her christening, even to the fairy Gratitude, who, I hear, is not often asked out nowadays.
For her child's sake, and spurred on by love, Mrs. Barbour toiled and schemed incessantly. Far less mercenary of soul than the aristocratic patrons who haggled over extras, inspected cold joints with a questioning eye and wanted their rooms "kept over" while they disported themselves at Homburg or Cannes—naturally credulous in fact, and inclined to believe the best of every one, the woman effected an actual change in her nature and under all her suave manner became distrustful, peremptory, and mercenary. The terms she wrung from the butcher, baker, and grocer before mentioned, with the bait of prompt payment in one hand and the threat of the big stores at Brompton and Bayswater in the other, were, perhaps, as unprecedented as those easy-going family purveyors one and all declared them to be. In bed at night while she should have been sleeping, in church on Sunday when she should have been harkening the sermon, her brain was busy with an endless double entry sum of receipts and outgoings, the profit of which she wrote off, variously, but always under the one heading, something after this fashion: "Fenella Account. To an amber satin eiderdown quilt, same as I saw at Hampton's on Friday; to plum-colored silk stockings such as the lady at the end of No. 6 just now is making no attempt to conceal; item, to a black fox stole and toque—the silver pointed ones are cheaper, but they say the hairs come out; item, to a silver manicure set like Miss Rigby's." And the poor woman, absorbed in her fond calculations, would scribble an imaginary total with one wrinkled, black-gloved finger across the gilt cross of her Book of Common Prayer, to the scandal of her left-hand pew-neighbor, and the no small mystification of Fenella on her right, wondering what mummy was "up to now."
She kept the girl from school until she was twelve years old, making shift with whatever deposit of a church school education stayed in her own head, eked out with the ministrations of various depressing and untrained governesses, and last but not least with lessons from Lady Anne Caslon, whose only fault was that they were necessarily irregular. Lady Anne was the first of two permanent lodgers who, about Fenella's sixth year, made their home at Number Eleven, and, for a number of years, almost lifted Mrs. Barbour's precarious venture to the dignified level of a settled income. The rooms had only just been given up, by "parties" with whom money seemed to be no object, amid indignant tears on the one side and a glow of respectable resolve on the other; but Mrs. Barbour had not yet signified the vacancy through the columns of theMorning Post, while we need hardly add that no window-card ever shocked the susceptibilities of Suffolk Square. I suspect myself that the Lulford connection were anxious to confine the collateral skeleton within limits that could be controlled by them, and kept a furtively watchful eye on the room-letting branch of the family.
Lady Anne appeared on a blustering March morning: a short, middle-aged woman, none the less active because she limped from an old hunting accident, with a long, white, bony face—the face of some great mystic abbess of old days—a distinct prognathous of the lower jaw, and a high, narrow forehead, from which her colorless fair hair was tightly drawn and twisted into an absurd little knob at the nape of the neck. On every feature, movement, and accent was stamped the indefinablecachetof the governing caste. She was wearing a frieze coat and skirt, a man's collar and tie, and a green Alpine hat, carried an ash stick, and was pulling against, rather than leading, a hideous and powerful white bull-terrier, bristlingly intent upon the feline possibilities of successive areas.
She stumped through the vacant floors on her low-heeled shoes, rapped the wainscot as though she rather suspected secret passages, gave a derogatory poke of her ashplant to the feather mattresses, turned on both taps in the bathroom, and concluded her tour with a sudden descent upon the kitchen, where three maids, busy upon a noontide lunch, rose and curtsied awkwardly.
"I'll take 'em," she said abruptly, turning suddenly in the hall upon the aggrieved proprietress. "The rooms will have to be repapered of course—and a hard mattress, and I have my own pictures; oh! and you'll turn those tufty, musty armchair things with ball fringes into some other room, won't you?—like a good soul. Any children? I thought I heard——Down, Rock!Down, sir!"
The bull-terrier, tied to the hall-stand, had lain, whining unhappily, sweating, and wrinkling his pink muzzle, while his mistress roamed up and down stairs. Now he was standing, tense and rigid, growling ominously, at a tiny hand that pushed a biscuit hospitably against his clenched, bared teeth. Lady Anne struck the threatening head aside and lifted the child in her strong arms.
"So this is your little girl? This is Fenella?"
"Yes, m' lady," said Mrs. Barbour, hasty and apologetic in manner for all her secret resentment. "But she's a good, quiet little thing, and I'll see she gives no trouble."
Lady Anne did not answer. She had pushed back those rebellious curls and was brooding the flower-like face.
"Dear heart!" was all she said aloud, and the rest was murmured under her breath.
She set the child on the floor and held out the little nerveless hand, still clenched on the biscuit, toward the bull-terrier.
"You must be careful with strange dogs, baby, particularly this breed. They aren't like any other sort of dog. Take it, Rock!"
Rock crunched the biscuit wastefully between his powerful jaws.
"No crumbs, sir!"
He sniffed up about a third of the biscuit, which he had let fall on the tiled floor.
"Say 'Thank you.'"
The animal gave the small fist that was tendered him three enormous licks, and glanced at his mistress out of his savage pink eyes.
"That's right! Mustn't ever bite this one, Rock! She isn't a cat, and never going to be one either, I know."
"I hope the child will be no obstacle, m' lady," put in Mrs. Barbour, stiffly.
"Obstacle!" Lady Anne repeated. "God bless me, no. Why should she be? You must have your baby, I suppose, same as I have my dog. What's her name?"
"Fenella, m' lady."
"Very well. You be good to Rock—I'll be good to Fenella. I'll send a postcard when I've arranged things," she said. "Come on, Rock!"
"Why was the lady c'yin', mummy?" asked Fenella, whose accent still left much to be desired.
Mrs. Barbour could not enlighten her. She was wondering herself why the woman had first called her child Fenella and then asked her name. A conversation in the corner of the dining-room at the Palmyra Club half an hour later might have carried her mystification a little further.
"I don't think I'll do amatinéewith you this afternoon, Brenda," Lady Anne was saying to her dearest friend. "Seeing Nigel's baby has rather upset me. I think I'll go to my room and howl for a bit."
"What'sshelike, Nanno?" asked the dearest, narrowing her eyes through the smoke of her cigarette.
"Nice, comfy, child-bearing sort of person. She has no airs. That was a lie of the Lulford woman."
"I believe," said Brenda Newcombe slowly, as if the opinion were the fruit of some thought and a little disillusion, "that's the sort most men like Nigel like in their hearts."
"Men like Nigel——!"
"Philosophers—I mean. Over-educated, ultra-refined. They divorce their intellect and their instincts so thoroughly that the result is——"
Lady Anne raised her shapely white hand deprecatingly.
"I know what you're going to say quite well, Brenda. You needn't finish it."
"To give one instance," went on the irrepressible Brenda; "did you never hear that Don Hinchey's wife has to wear print dresses and, oh! everything very plain when they're alone in Northumberland."
"Pshaw! Brenda;quel conte!"
"Nanno, it's gospel. She told Lady Carphilly, and Lady Carphilly told me. She wore them once to a fancy dress, and looked so well that now when Donny's bored he makes her put them on. She hates it, but he says it's the only way she can keep his love."
Lady Anne moved in as soon as the alterations that her austere soul demanded had been made; the walls hung with a paper that Mrs. Barbour compared scornfully but exactly to a dry mustard plaster, and various ebullient studies of still life removed to make way for old-wood engraved portraits and Alken sporting prints. She began the morning, violently, with a cold bath at seven; breakfasted—continentally—on dry bread and coffee at eight, and wrote nearly all the morning at a roll-topped Sheraton desk, whose drawers slid in and out on brass rails as smoothly as the oiled pistons of a machine. It was at this desk that Fenella stammered through her letters. Seated upon the highest chair the room afforded, made higher still by an Italian gilt leather cushion, the little girl spelled out the adventures of Tom and Dick, Nat and Ned, and other monosyllabic heroes of childhood. Nelly's attention wandered very easily. Her voice would die away to a murmur—her head fall lower and lower until the dark curls quite covered the heavy type and wood cuts, along which a very neatly pointed cedar pencil, held in a firm white hand, moved with such exasperating deliberation. Then she would begin to suck her thumb, and, finding no encouragement to relaxation of effort in the lowered lids and compressed mouth above her shoulder, would let her eyes wander round the room. Under the high white mantelpiece the fire burned cheerily, with little bubbles of gas and spurts of flame: above it, a silver clock set in a horseshoe ticked so quickly that the slow passage of the hands across its face was one mystery the more for the child brain to puzzle out. The room smelt like a man's, of morocco leather and boot cream, and the vague but piercing scent of naked steel in between. Under a curtain to the right of the fireplace, which did not quite reach the stained floor, Lady Anne's long boots, on high wooden trees, stood, an orderly row of eight polished toes, like booted eavesdroppers behind an arras. Over the "Melton Hunt Breakfast," between crossed hunting crops, a fox's mask still wore the grin with which it was twitching one December afternoon years and years ago when the mangled pelt smoked upon the raw Leinster air and little, ugly, hard-riding Lady Anne, in long bottle-green habit and flaxen pig-tail, was held up amid the yelping red muzzled pack and blooded to the hunt; while—most interesting and distracting of all—close to the fire, with his nose between his paws, deliciously unemployed, lay Roquelaure, blinking friendly eyes which seemed to say, in the secret language that children and animals share for a few short years—
"Oh! I say, baby, ain't lessons over yet?"
Three times a week, when her correspondence was done, and a wire basket full of square, rough envelopes with scarlet seals awaited the afternoon post, Lady Anne would go riding in the Park. She stumped through the hall in a short habit and wide-brimmed billycock hat, under whose elastic band the uses of the yellow-white knot of hair became suddenly obvious, looking more than ever like an abbess: a hunting, not a praying, abbess this time. Outside a stable lad from the mews held a tall, nervous horse by the head. Lady Anne would hold the child up to pat the hairy, quivering nose, bid her have no fear of the sliding eyes; would run her fingers down the horse's flanks and legs, maybe pick up and inspect a hoof cunningly; at last, jumping into her saddle out of the groom's hand, would straighten the sidling beast with one blow of her riding crop on his buttock, and be off, her right knee almost in line with the maned neck, and holding in the caitiff head with hands that were a proverb in the shires. Fenella always watched her out of sight, her eyes shining—the palms of her hands pressed hard together.