CHAPTER II
“Understandme once and for all, Evangeline, I absolutely forbid it.”
Head in the air the girl walked out of the room, slamming the door behind her.
Lady Stableford, thoroughly upset by the discussion which had taken place, sank into a low easy-chair and put her handkerchief to her eyes. She had married her husband at an early age, and had passed up the social ladder with him, as a rapidly developing business had increasingly provided him with the wealth which had opened the doors of Parliament to the successful merchant, and finally brought him the baronetcy which he had been permitted to pay for, so that his political and party services might be rewarded therewith. No child had blessed their marriage; and as time drew on, and unlikelihood dissolveditself into impossibility, the old lady yearned the more for the child to mother and take care of which was denied to her. As parliamentary duties appropriated an increasing portion of her husband’s time, Lady Stableford, after much opposition, at length obtained Sir James’ consent to her adoption of a child. Finally she advertised under an assumed name, stipulating that the child must be a girl, must be completely and irrevocably transferred, and thereafter remain in ignorance of her real parentage: and she required that the child must be of gentle birth.
The advertisement was answered by a solicitor on behalf of a client. Lady Stableford attempted to insist on a substantiated disclosure of the parentage, and in consequence the negotiations terminated with the refusal of the information and the consequent withdrawal of Lady Stableford’s offer of adoption. Within a week LadyStableford, returning to the drawing-room after a solitary dinner, found that during her absence from the room, a child, plainly only a few days old, had been left upon the sofa. The flapping of the blind drew her attention to the still open French window, the obvious means by which access to the room had been obtained. At once summoning assistance, Lady Stableford had her park and gardens carefully searched, but without results. For some time the child slept, and Lady Stableford was puzzled what course to adopt. She objected to an unknown child being thrust upon her in that way and without her consent; but the tiny atom of humanity woke with a plaintive cry, and Lady Stableford’s decision was made at once. All the motherliness of her nature welled up, and from that moment she regarded the child as her own and treated it precisely as if it had been.
Assuming, rightly or wrongly, she nevercould determine, that this must be the child concerning which she had been in communication, she again wrote to the solicitor. After an interval the letter was returned to her from the Dead Letter Office, marked “gone; address unknown.” An appeal to her own solicitors to help her at once revealed the fact that there was no solicitor of the name upon the roll.
Carefully Lady Stableford had examined the clothing the child had worn and the shawl in which it had been wrapped. Everything was new and of good quality, and every article was scrupulously clean; but there was no tell-tale coronet upon the clothing to suggest romance, nothing by which identity could be traced. Even the clever brains of her solicitors could suggest no steps she might take to put an end to her doubts. Of birth-marks the child had none.
The identity, as Lady Stableford, of thelady who had advertised the offer of adoption she knew of course had been disclosed only to the supposititious solicitor with whom her own advisers had been in correspondence. There could be little if any doubt the child was the same; but that gave her no further knowledge than the bare fact, if her supposition were correct, that the baby girl for whom she had now accepted the responsibility was born on the 18th of August, 1881. From what her doctor could tell her there could be no doubt that if that were not actually the child’s birthday, her birth must have occurred within the margin of a day or two on either side of it.
The child, as she grew up, was not a lovable child; and long before the fair-haired baby had reached that stage of lankiness, when, a few days after they were new, her frocks always seemed to shrink above her knees, emphasising the spindle legs whichneeded so little of that emphasis, the girl was a dark-haired little fury, with a perfectly ungovernable temper.
Increasing years, and the chronic irritability of a constant invalid, had all helped to diminish the patience of Lady Stableford; and a child of the temper and temperament of the wayward Evangeline needs an endless patience in her bringing up, which patience Lady Stableford had ceased to possess. The result was that as time went on the child was left more and more under the care and control of servants, none too wisely chosen, and such affection as Lady Stableford had originally had for the lonesome little baby had degenerated into the loveless duty to the child whose future she had taken into her own hands.
Her schooldays over, Evangeline came back to her home—a tall, aristocratic-looking beauty; and, in the hope of companionship, Lady Stableford turned again to thegirl. But it was then too late. Of duty the girl knew nothing, and the keen memory of her youthful mind matched against any present show of affection which was made to her, the vivid recollections of the scoldings and punishments of her nursery days. The two women were out of sympathy. The old lady ceased her efforts, the girl never attempted to make any.
The pair lived together in the same house. The girl’s life was one constant rebellion against the irritable, irritated, and irritating attempts at her own control made by the elder woman.
Bored to extinction by the life she was apparently expected to lead, exasperated by the querulous exactions of the irritable old lady, driven inexorably by the exuberance of youth and the nervous restlessness of her own excitable temperament, Evangeline had made up her mind that it was a necessity to her that she should find occupationin a working career. The girl was probably right, but it by no means followed that her choice had been made in the right direction. That choice had fallen upon the stage—had been expressed to Lady Stableford—and the interview had terminated with an emphatic refusal of consent and an emphatic forbidding of further thoughts in that direction.
Sir James, now long since deceased, had been a stalwart among Nonconformists. Lady Stableford, always despising in her heart the social position of Nonconformity, had nevertheless lacked the moral courage to adopt a change of religious persuasion, and, until increasing years relieved her from the necessity of the great mental effort involved in the framing of plausible excuses for absence, continued, Sunday by Sunday, to “sit under” the long succession of electro-plated divines who held forth in the building which her husband had built,endowed, and opened. To say that Lady Stableford was religious would not be accurate, because all that a lifetime of Nonconformity had endowed her with was a restriction of her mental aspect to the intolerant narrowness of the bigoted orthodoxy of her own particular brand. Hatred of the theatre, which she regarded as a forcing house of sin, was one of those fixed ideas she had absorbed and accepted. Degradation in this world and damnation in the next she believed to be the foreordained and inevitably resulting consequence of any association with things theatrical.
To the inherent inclination of Evangeline towards a theatrical career was now added not only the attraction of the forbidden thing, but also the fascination of that which has been declared to be wicked. To this composite and powerful temptation the girl succumbed. The thing was inevitable—probablywould have happened in any case; the happening was in all likelihood no more than precipitated by Lady Stableford’s attitude and prohibition. But these affected the relations of the two when the separation came, and caused the elder woman many a long month of pain and unhappiness, of stubborn anger, which step by step had mellowed into regret, forgiveness, and then into comprehension and keen remorse. Drilled by her loneliness the old lady at last swallowed her pride and wrote asking the girl to come back to her.
Lady Stableford had waited too long. There had been occasions, many and oft indeed, when Evangeline, cowed by the pitiful hardships in the poverty-stricken existence of the provincial travelling company in which she was striving to master her profession, would have jumped at the invitation. There had even once or twice come times when, heartbroken by illness,by lack of employment, and utter weariness of spirit, the girl’s pride had been broken, and she had penned piteous appeals to be allowed to return home; but the letters had never been sent, and at last had come success. The girl’s reviving spirit soaked up like a sponge the adulation that success brought in its train, and her parched soul again expanded into the proud, high-spirited temperament which had been her inheritance. But hardship bravely borne had chastened her, taught her forbearance and charity of thought and had given her some control of her hot temper.
The invitation when it reached her was not refused, but was accepted only for a visit. A tentative suggestion to settle a suitable income, and in return that Evangeline should leave the stage, was gently but firmly put on one side, and Lady Stableford perforce had to content herself with the consent of the girl to make her oldhome her headquarters, living there whenever her profession did not require her presence elsewhere, and with the acceptance of a liberal allowance. Once again the old lady altered her will, and once more the name of Evangeline Stableford stood as chief beneficiary and residuary legatee.