Читать книгу Creeping Jenny - Winifred Ashton - Страница 5

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He had gone indeed to take stock of his property. “What now?” he too asked himself. He was angry and perplexed, yet, looking down at the pretty sleepy creature in its cradle, he found that he had a pleasure in being a father. The child, though unwanted, was now at least undividedly his.

He saw in it, too, a certain protection. He was not disturbed by any fear of a slur upon his morality: he surmised rather that his legend would be enhanced by a scandal so virtuously concluded, and he was right. It was not long before the mothers of the marriageable returned to hunt him: and the hunt continued until his increasing age and preoccupation with his farm and his child made it clear to all that the gipsy would be the last scandal at Riverhayes, unless indeed it were a scandal that a man should be so taken up with a mere natural daughter. For Robert’s curt references to ‘my brat,’ ‘my young one,’ mellowed as the years passed into tales of ‘the little miss,’ ‘the young madam,’ and after a chance talk with a travelled crony, into ‘Princess.’ For the crony had seen the little heir to the throne at Tunbridge Wells, and reported her to be “own sister to little miss here, but for her clothes.” What had she worn? “Oh, a black hat tied with blue ribbons, a muslin dress, and a black silk pelisse over it. Ay, the wife said it was a pelisse!” Next market-day Robert, on his way home, turned aside to his sister’s house to leave a parcel for his daughter: out fell a roll of ribbons and one of these new-fangled pelisses. “Nay, black’s not mourning, ’tis the fashion.” And while his sister exclaimed at his extravagance, he called noisily to his small daughter to come down and try on her present.

“Bring her down! Bring down the little princess to say good-day to her father! Dress her up, sister! See, child, the Duke o’ Kent’s daughter has no better.” Then, behind his hand, “And they’re as like as two peas, they tell me the young princess and missy here.” And so went off to his bachelor home, rubbing his hands and chuckling, quite sure that he was a happy man and a wise one.

Indeed, the mistress and mother had, in five years, so died from his memory that he could plume himself on his sagacity in discarding the dross while retaining the gold. Why, he had seen in its cradle what a little madam it was and had not let it go! He had known how to order his house. He had not been jockeyed into sharing with a clamouring, feckless woman—not he! but he had kept his daughter: he had kept his flesh and blood. Here would be something of his own to have in the house to serve him when he was old.

And he was likely to be proud of her, he told himself. The good old burgher strain was coming out in her already, the strain of merchant princes who lived softer than kings. The arched foot, the light walk, the small head and finely modelled features, the widely set eyes, so mild a blue yet so arrogantly browed—all these good points in his daughter he recognised with delight, thinking it but natural that the long-historied blood which she inherited from him should obliterate the raggle-taggle in her. Her guinea-golden hair and fair cheeks confirmed his title-deeds. Let his sister then take care that missy had what she wanted. He could pay for frocks and ribbons and what-not. And his daughter was not to run with the village children neither! Later there should be a school, a young ladies’ school. Time enough for that! Meanwhile let his sister look to his daughter!

Mrs. Drax looked to her.

Mrs. Drax, Robert’s sister, was his feminine shadow, thinner in mind and body, hard cider to his port; for with five daughters to rear she had not been able to mellow her nature as he had done in the pleasures of saving, gaining, and enjoying money. But she was honest. Robert paid her handsomely to bring up his daughter, and she reared the child with scrupulous care. It was her pride to do so: she honoured her own virtue when she ringed in the youngster with particular observance, gave it an egg for breakfast while her true-begotten children ate their porridge, sashed and shoed and combed it while they paddled barefoot in the river or ran shouting against the wind in the tousled fields of spring, let them run hatless while Mary Anne wore a fine Leghorn straw. Mrs. Drax took a bitter pleasure in this pampering of the cuckoo in the nest, this niece by courtesy, not law. If everybody were in his true place, Mary Anne would be dragging at a trollop’s heels, binding brooms or plucking berries on the moor: instead of which, let the world see her waited on by her betters! Let Thistledallow’s whim be obeyed! She would do her duty by her charity niece and see that moneys destined for the come-by-chance should be spent solely upon the come-by-chance. All the cream should be hers for which her father paid, and her cousins humbly should drink the skim she left, never forgetting that though they were poor and their cousin rich, they were the daughters of a married woman and had surnames to show.

Thus Mrs. Drax, in season and out of season. The first fact which the little Mary Anne learnt about herself was that she had no name. She hunted for it among the primroses and celandines of the hedges one spring, saw it blooming on the far side of the ditch, a solitary bloom bigger and paler than a cowslip, fell in as she reached to pluck it, and came home with muddied pantalettes but the flower in her hand, and was punished in moderation—Mrs. Drax had no intention of being shown unkind—for running away from home, dirtying her clothes and talking nonsense. Next year she found the oxslip plant again, but by then she was six and knew well enough that the flower was not her missing name. Children were seen and not heard in Mrs. Drax’s parlour and Mrs. Drax’s kitchen, but be sure they saw and heard.

It is not to be said that she was treated with unkindness. It would indeed have taken a cruel woman to be unkind to the willing, obedient child: and Mrs. Drax was not a cruel woman. Strife was breath to her: her brother’s energy was in her, but, hampered as she was by her sex, her widowhood, her poverty, her children, she could only rule by hectoring. She hectored her farm into prosperity and her girls, who were too much like her to fear her, into fine free-tongued, impudent young women, of whom she was proud as a cat is proud of the kittens it cuffs when they claw her too sharply. But there was no need to cuff Mary Anne. Mrs. Drax found the little Mary Anne of more use to her than her own robuster daughters. The child liked to knit, to sew, to sit quietly in the grandfather-chair by the window darning Mrs. Drax’s tablecloths, or in the best kitchen to run over her cousins’ muslins with the smoothing-iron or gauffer her aunt’s caps and pillow-frills. She was always ready to take the heavy earthen colander and sit in the triangular cottage garden shelling peas and stalking strawberries, watching sideways the while from under her golden lashes the bees scuffling in the canterbury bells at her elbow. And when she was seven she was trusted to make the butter, carrying it out at five in the morning to stand on the cool brick mouth of the well that was frilled with hart’s tongue and shaded by the blossoming elder: and there she churned the scald cream round and round with her bare hand, softly and patiently, liking the movement and the quiet and the scent of flowers and dew, in no hurry whatever for the butter to come. Indeed any quiet piece of work was to Mary Anne’s taste, any small job that nobody wanted to do, that needed no discussion and drew upon her no notice. “A quiet little thing!” was Mrs. Drax’s praise of her at Mrs. Drax’s most amiable; but it was always coolly said. Mrs. Drax liked spirit.

As for her cousins, Georgina and Bessie, they called her Creeping Jenny. Mary Anne was so pleased at the name when she first heard it that she was actually betrayed into a confidence: she, too, had seen that her long plait of hair matched the amber flower. But her Cousin Georgina soon put her right about the reason for her nickname. She was a Creeping Jenny because she slipped about the house as if butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth; you never knew when she was in the room with you. Georgina supposed that Mary Anne wanted to overhear Georgina’s secrets. Was that it? Wasn’t that it? Bessie had caught her listening, hadn’t she now, only last week? Why didn’t she answer? Look how red she was getting! Oh, the quiet little thing! the good little thing! Oh, it was mean to be as good as Mary Anne! Georgina did hate a Creeping Jenny!

Mary Anne, in a scarlet-cheeked agony, crept away; for it never occurred to her to defend herself. She could not have done it. She was a dumb-souled creature, shy in grain—shy, not like the colt who will one day nuzzle in your coat for sugar and stand to be saddled, but shy with the alien shyness of a butterfly. “Yes, Aunt Drax! No, Aunt Drax!” Mrs. Drax got no more from her at any time and resented it, and told her twenty times a week that there was many a lawful orphan who would be grateful for a kind aunt and a good home, and be ready to say so too. Let Mary Anne consider what it meant to be a beggar tramping the commons on a wet night, with no Aunt Drax to mix a posset or pack a naughty girl off to her warm bed. Let Mary Anne pray to God Almighty to make her grateful to her auntie, who made no difference, for all there was a difference, between Mary Anne and Mrs. Drax’s own Georgina and Bessie. Let Mary Anne pray for a grateful heart! “Do you hear me, Mary?”

“Yes, Aunt Drax,” quoth Mary Anne.

Was it not an aggravating child? But then God Almighty never did deal justly by Mrs. Drax. Was it not the usual ill-fortune that undeservedly dogs a deserving woman, that Georgina should be abed that autumn with the scarlet fever just as the early berry, the king fruit of each bramble-head, was bursting ripe? There was Bessie to send blackberry picking; but Mrs. Drax knew her duty and had put Bessie to bed with her sister that she might catch the fever too and be done with it. She would have packed Mary Anne also into the double bed with her cousins, but Georgina fell ill on a Saturday, and on Sunday Mary Anne was bound to go to church that she might say good morning to her father. This was too formal an arrangement for Mrs. Drax to break; and when Robert, meeting his sister and his daughter in the churchyard after service, missed his nieces and heard of their plight, and heard too his sister’s practical plans for his own young madam, he humm’d and hah’d and looked down at Mary Anne—

“H’m! D’you want the fever, child?”

Mary Anne was instantly in her usual flush at being addressed and she had no words, but she shook her head. He watched her.

“Scarlet fever? She looks as if she had caught it already. Well, child, do you want it?”

“No,” she managed. Her little heart was beating as fast as a caught sparrow’s under her starched muslin; but how was her father to deduce from that whisper the frenzy of distaste that was upon her? To be three in a bed with Georgina and Bessie, to toss and talk and be watched and made to answer, not to have the cool night to herself—this was a future of nightmare: her eyes were saucer wide with the fear of it. It lent her strength to repeat her “No!” and look imploringly at her father.

“Mary Anne will have what’s good for her,” said her aunt. “I can’t be nursing first one child and then the other all autumn. Let her catch it and get it over.”

“No!” said Mary Anne a third time.

“You be quiet, miss!” Mrs. Drax gave her niece’s arm a shake. The sharp possessive movement annoyed Robert.

“Will you come home with me, Princess, eh? Pay Papa a visit?”

“Now, brother, don’t tease her!”

“Will you come, Mary?”

Mary Anne’s eyes wandered from the strange father to the familiar aunt. Which was the more terrifying? To be three in a bed with Bessie and Georgina, or to face the unknown? Slowly, once and for all she decided: thus, her life long, she made her decisions: and being made, nothing changed them.

“Yes, Papa, please.”

“Robert, she’ll do no such thing! Who’s to look after her?”

“There’s old Judy,” said he.

“And you so particular! What, let your own daughter (after all, she is your daughter, Robert!) be a month with none but old Judy to keep her clean and tidy! You’re out of your mind, brother! Come now, Mary Anne, kiss your Papa good-bye and come home! He’s had a joke with you.”

Robert hesitated, half convinced.

“Maybe you’d better,” he was beginning. But the look on his daughter’s face stopped him, though he was not an observant man. The firm red lips were trembling, the eyes were no longer blue skies but blue lakes. In silence, under the eyes of her father and aunt, Mary Anne fought her disappointment and so won the first round against unfriendly fate. For Robert was flattered. The child wanted to come home with him! She preferred him to her aunt! He picked her up, the small creature, and swung her, while she gasped with terror, into his waiting curricle, and jumped after her, bending down good-humouredly to his sister as he gathered up the reins:

“You send along her traps, Selina! Judy’ll do for her well enough. Why shouldn’t she pay me a visit? ’Twill save you the nursing.”

“Such goings-on!” Mrs. Drax pressed her lips together as she thought of it. Two children abed and no one to pick the blackberries! “What will the parish think—me letting you take Mary Anne from me at the church door like, as if I were no better’n a hired nurse to be rid of!”

“Come now, sister, don’t scold!”

“Or a mother to be rid of! Well, the girl’s used to it, that’s one comfort!”

Robert’s face grew black.

“Stay your tongue, can’t you, before the child!”

“I? I’ve no cause to hold it. It’s well the girl should know her place, Robert Thistledallow, though it suits you to pamper her like a prize rabbit. But I’m her own aunt by nature though not by church, and I have my duty to her. She shall hear the truth from me while she’s young enough to profit, little as she likes it or you like it. What, is she not to know the difference between her state in life and a girl’s like my Georgina? Now listen to me, Robert Thistledallow! If you take Mary Anne from me now when I’m ready to continue in duty——”

“Oh, hold your noise, sister, before the neighbours and all!” quoth Robert: and lifting his whip, he flicked off his irritation on the fine young mare between the shafts as he bowled away. They were light blows, but, to his little daughter watching him, he was an awful figure as he beat the mare—red, hairy, immense, Samson with the jawbone in morning lesson. When he turned to ask her how she did, and whether she was pleased to be going home with him, he got no reply, only the sight of drooped eyelids and hands that clasped and unclasped. But it was her luck to be so pretty that silence did not matter, and to have a father who hated talking unless he had a mind to be garrulous. So she came back without mishap to Riverhayes and old Judith, who remembered the gipper seven years banished, and told the gipper’s daughter tales of her: while foolish Ellen, the help, had coral beads to show, and her own version, picked up from farm talk and a grandmother who knew everybody’s business. Ellen was the daughter’s daughter of Clemency, the wise woman and gate-keeper up to Babyon Lodge: and Ellen’s mother would have been no better than she should be, but that she was dead: and Ellen’s father, as Ellen confided to her young mistress with an awe-struck giggle, was the Black Man, they did say. But that Ellen was the best hand at butter in the valley, while her grandmother was known to bewitch the churn against those who flouted her granddaughter, Ellen would never have shown her nose inside the farm gates, said Judy—“and you remember that, Miss Mary!”

Mary Anne, listening as was her wont in silence, was nevertheless friendly to Ellen, and Judy, her duty done in the warning given, made no further objection to their companionship. Pale-eyed, clumsy Ellen, grateful for good words, resigned to harsh ones, adored the pretty little girl, and with this sorrowful, silly Ellen, Mary Anne was quite at ease. It was as if the older girl’s weakness called into action a latent strength in the younger. She was kind and masterful with Ellen, saved her from the follies of her clumsy hands and feet, taught her her own mature neat ways and her own prim speech; for, with Ellen, Mary Anne found her tongue. Judy, seeing in the older girl’s slavish devotion a relief from service, saw to it that Ellen had neat print dresses in which to attend upon the young mistress, turned her from kitchen-maid into nursery-girl and maid to the young mistress.

For Mary Anne definitely had become the young mistress of the farm. She so pleased her father, sat so demurely at meals at the other end of the long table, was so meek a butt for his humour, so curious an ornament to his parlour when his cronies visited him, that when Georgina’s fever was cured (but Bessie died), and Mrs. Drax in tears and in mourning visited her brother to demand the return of her charge, Robert refused to part with the little girl. He said bluntly that she did not cost him a tenth of the thirty pound a year that he had paid Mrs. Drax, that she was well enough where she was and had better stay there. Mrs. Drax asked indignantly what sort of an upbringing was this for a girl in a bachelor’s house? Robert said that old Judy saw to her, that she had a maid already, the little madam, and that he had in mind to let her go in a year or two to the young ladies’ seminary in Exeter.

What! where the Miss Eypes went and Lady Stockland’s granddaughter?

Ay, that place! Did she know aught against it? Wouldn’t it be good enough for Robert Thistledallow’s daughter?

Mrs. Drax tittered herself into a speechless fury at that, and the brother and sister parted without compliments. Presently the news went round the parish that old Bob Thistledallow was set on making that brat of his into a lady: and the farmers’ wives who had not married him were very sure that, fine school or no, the girl should never set foot in their parlours, to delude their sons with finicking gentility and bring the bad gipsy blood into an honest family. Was virtue to go for nothing? Let Bob Thistledallow be shown his place, and the girl hers, money or no money!

Thus did Mrs. Drax, though she avoided open quarrel with her brother, avenge the death of her daughter, the failure of her bramble jelly, and the loss of thirty pounds a year.

Of the feeling against him and his, Robert was unconscious. But his daughter knew it in the cold-shoulderings of the boys and girls of the village dame-school, through the giggles of Georgina as she repeated the gossip of her mother’s kitchen. The child’s defencelessness invited attack: and it came one day to stone-throwing. Judy heard of it through Ellen at last and kept the child at home on the score of a cold. The cold passed; but Mary Anne stayed at home. The school-mistress, in slow Devon fashion, planned to talk to Robert Thistledallow when she met him, and did not meet him, and in time forgot about her missing pupil. The days, weeks, months, the years went by and no-one sent to fetch her back to school. Mary Anne, having got her letters, spelled over books now and then on wet afternoons, but not often. She liked better to knit and sew and make butter, and wander on the common with Ellen, listening to the strange stories that Ellen could tell of fairies and the Black Man and the Babyons.