Produced by C.S. Beers, Suzanne Shell and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive/American Libraries.) MY LITTLE SISTER _BY THE SAME AUTHOR_ GEORGE MANDEVILLE'S HUSBAND THE NEW MOON THE OPEN QUESTION BELOW THE SALT THE MAGNETIC NORTH THE DARK LANTERN COME AND FIND ME (PUBLISHED BY WILLIAM HEINEMANN) THE CONVERT (METHUEN) VOTES FOR WOMEN: A Play in Three Acts (MILLS & BOON) THE FLORENTINE FRAME (JOHN MURRAY) WOMEN'S SECRET (WOMAN'S PRESS, LINCOLN'S INN HOUSE, KINGSWAY) WHY? (WOMAN'S PRESS, LINCOLN'S INN HOUSE, KINGSWAY) UNDER HIS ROOF (WOMAN WRITER'S LEAGUE, 12 HENRIETTA ST.) MY LITTLE SISTER BY ELIZABETH ROBINS [Decoration] NEW YORK DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY 1913 COPYRIGHT, 1912, 1913 BY DODD, MEAD & COMPANY PUBLISHED, JANUARY, 1913 CONTENTS CHAPTER PAGE I FIRST IMPRESSIONS 1 II LESSONS 6 III A THUNDER-STORM 13 IV NIMBUS 16 V THE MOTHER'S VOW 24 VI MARTHA'S GOING--YET REMAINING 33 VII A SHOCK 45 VIII ANNAN 51 IX ERIC 59 X THE BUNGALOW 68 XI AWAKENING 83 XII OUR FIRST BALL 94 XIII THE CLOUD AGAIN 108 XIV "WHERE IS BETTINA?" 120 XV MY SECRET 137 XVI THE YACHTING PARTY 150 XVII THE EMERALD PENDANT 161 XVIII RANNY 169 XIX ANOTHER GIRL 178 XX TWO INVITATIONS AND A CRISIS 186 XXI AUNT JOSEPHINE'S LETTER 198 XXII PLANTING THYME 209 XXIII ERIC'S SECRET 215 XXIV MADAME AURORE 224 XXV GOING TO LONDON 244 XXVI AUNT JOSEPHINE 253 XXVII THE DINNER PARTY 266 XXVIII THE GREY HAWK 287 XXIX WHERE? 303 XXX THE BLUNT LEAD-PENCIL 310 XXXI THE MAN WITH THE SWORD 322 XXXII DARKNESS 329 XXXIII A STRANGE STEP 336 XXXIV THE END WHICH WAS THE BEGINNING 341 MY LITTLE SISTER CHAPTER I FIRST IMPRESSIONS She is very fair, my little sister. I mean, not only she is good to look upon. I mean that she is white and golden, and always seemed to bring a shining where she went. * * * * * I have not been able, I see, to set down these few sentences without touching the quick. I have used the present and then fallen to the past. I say "is" and then, she "seemed." And I do not know whether I should have written "was" or "seems." And that, in sum, is my story. * * * * * We were both so young when we went to Duncombe that even I cannot clearly remember what life was like before. Whether there was really some image left upon my mind of India, or my father in a cocked hat, looking very grand on a horse, or whether these were a child's idea of what a cavalry officer's daughter must have seen, I cannot tell. I do not think I imagined the confused picture of dark faces and a ship. My first clear impression of the world is the same as Bettina's. A house, which we did not yet know as small, set in a place which still is wide and green. As far back as we remember it at all, we remember roaming this expanse; always, in the beginning, with our mother. A region where we played with the infinite possibilities of existence--from the discovery of a wheat-ear's hidden nest, to the apparition of a pack of hounds on the horizon, followed by men in red coats and ladies in sober habit, on horses that came galloping out of the vague, up over the green rim of the world, jumping the five-barred gate into Little Klaus's meadow, and vanishing in a pleasant fanfare of horn, of baying and hallooing, leaving us standing there in a stirred and wonderful stillness. We seldom met anyone afoot in those days except, now and then, the cottager who lived in a thatched hut down in one of the multitude of hollows. We called him "Kleiner Klaus," because he had one horse of his own, and because sometimes in the paddock four others grazed and kicked their heels. And he was little and shrewd-looking, and used to smile at Bettina. To be sure, everyone smiled at Bettina. And Bettina would show her dimple, and nod her shining curls, and pass by like a small Princess, scattering gold of gladness and goodwill. Though we children looked on Kleiner Klaus as a friend, years went by before we dared so much as say good-morning to him. Anyone else found at large in our green dominions was an enemy. So much we learned before we learned to speak our mother tongue, and all in that first lesson, so far as I was concerned. A lesson typified in the figure hurrying to the rescue down the flagged path toward the gate. My mother!... who had moved through all our days with changeless calm. And now she was running so fast that her thick hair was loosened. A lock blew across her face. Mélanie, our nurse, stood inside the gate with Bettina in her arms. A lady leaned over, asking the way to the Dew Pond. Mélanie could not even understand the question. But I knew all about the Dew Pond. I had been there with my mother to look for caddis flies. So I pointed to the knoll against the sky, and stammered a direction. Bettina was of no use to anyone looking for the Dew Pond. But she quickly took her place as the centre of interest. All that she did to make good her Divine Right was to show her dimple, and point a meaning finger at the jewelled watch pinned to the stranger's gown. The lady held out her hands to our baby. Bettina consented to be taken nearer to the sparkling toy. Then our mother, as I say, hurrying out of the house as though it were on fire, taking the baby and the nurse and me away in such haste, I had no time to finish telling the lady how to find the Dew Pond. I heard my mother, who was commonly so gentle, telling the nurse in stern staccato French if ever it happened again she would be sent away. Never, never was she to allow anyone to touch our baby. Had the strange woman kissed Bettina? The new nurse lied. And I said no word. But the impression was stamped deep. No one outside the family at Duncombe was ever to kiss Bettina. Or even to kiss me--which I remember thinking a pity. Moreover, I perceived that if, through the ignorance or the wickedness of stranger-folk, this thing were to happen again, one would never dare confess it. For such a catastrophe the far-sighted Bon Dieu had provided the refuge of the lie. CHAPTER II LESSONS There was one lasting cloud upon a childhood spent as close to our mother as fledglings in a nest. Our mother was the most beautiful person we had ever seen. Even as quite young children we were dimly conscious of the touch of pathos in the beauty that is frail, as though we guessed it was never to grow old. But this was not the cloud. For the presentiment was too undefined, it came in a guise too gentle to give us present uneasiness. In the unquestioning way of children, we accepted the fact that one's mother should be too easily tried to join in active games. But she taught us how to play. She was as much a factor in our recreation as in our lessons--so much so that we were a long time in finding out the dividing line between work and play. I think that must have been because our mother had a genius for teaching. The hard things she made stimulating, and the easy things she made delight. No; there was an exception to this. Not even my mother could make me good at music. She was infinitely patient. She made allowances for me that she never made for my sister. Once, when I was dreadfully discouraged, I was allowed to leave my "Étude" and learn something that might be supposed to catch my fancy--a gay and foolish little waltz-tune called "The Emerald Isle." "Oh, but quicker, child!" I hear her now. "It is not a dirge." I began again--_allegro_, as I thought. But "Faster, faster!" my mother kept saying, till I dropped my hands. "How _can_ I? You expect me to be as quick as God!" I think this must have been after that act of His which gave us a sense of surpassing swiftness. For long I blamed my lack of skill upon my fingers; they were as stiff as Bettina's were elastic. She kept always the hand of a very young child--so soft and pliant that you wondered if there were any bones in it at all until you heard the firm tone in her playing, and saw the way in which, when she was stirred, she brought down the flying hands on some rich, resolving chord. Years after I was still able only to practise, Bettina "played." And better even than her playing was Bettina's singing. That began when she was quite a baby. I see her now, a small figure, all white except her green shoes and her hair of sunset gold, singing; singing a nursery rhyme to an ancient tune my mother had found in one of her collections of old English song: "_Where are you going to, my pretty maid?_" We thought this specially accomplished of Bettina, because it was the first thing she sang in English. I do not remember how we learned French. It must have been the first language that we spoke. Our mother, without apparent intention, kept us to the habit of talking French when we did the pleasantest things. All the phrases and verbal framework of our games were French; all the mythology stories were in French. And we seemed to fall into that tongue only by chance when we went collecting treasures for our herbarium, or the fresh-water aquarium. We found out by-and-by that the walks we thought so adventurously long were little walks. We also found that our world was less uninhabited than we thought. Duncombe, we discovered, stood midway between two large country houses. Besides the cottage of Kleiner Klaus, there were other small peasant holdings, dotted like islands in our sea of green--brave little enclosures made, as we heard later, by the few who refused to be wholly dispossessed when, in the eighteenth century, the open heath had been taken from the people. Our own Duncombe, which we thought very grand and spacious, had been only a superior sort of farmhouse. Everyone has marked the shrinkage in those nobler spaces we knew as children. In our case, not all imaginary, the difference between what we thought was "ours" and what, for the time being, was. We never doubted but the boundless heath belonged to us as much as our garden did. We were confirmed in our belief by the attitude of our mother towards those persons detected in daring to walk "our" paths, or touch our wildflowers, or, worst crime of all, disturb our birds. The proper thing to do, on catching sight of any stranger, was to start with an aversion suggested by our mother's, but improved upon--more pictorial. We would all three stare at the intruder, and then allow our eyes to travel to the nearer of the signs, "Trespassers," etc. If this pantomime did not convince the creature of the impropriety of his presence, we would look at one another with wide eyes, as though inquiring: "Can such things be? Are these, then, deliberate criminals? If so"--our looks agreed--"the company of outlaws is not for us." We turned our backs and went home. I was twelve before I realised that we ourselves were trespassers. The heath belonged to Lord Helmstone. That was a blow. Still worse, the later knowledge that Duncombe House and garden were not our own. The laying out of a golf course, and the cheapening of the motor-car, forced the facts upon our knowledge. But I am glad that as little children we did not know these things. We saw ourselves as heiresses to the prettiest house and garden in the world. And no whit less to those broad acres rolling away--with foam of gorse and broom on the crests of their green waves--rolling northward towards London and the future. Two miles to the south was our village--source of such supplies as did not come direct from Big Klaus, or from Little Klaus. We knew the village, because when we were little we went to church there. Big Klaus, the red-faced farmer, who had a great many collie dogs and nearly as many sons, drove us to church in a dog-cart. The moment the squat tower came in view Bettina and I would lean out to see who would be the first to catch sight of Colonel Dover. He was nearly always waiting near the lych-gate to help my mother out of the cart. One or two other people would stop to speak as we came or went. Often they asked, Would she come to a garden-party? Would she play bridge? Would she help with a children's school-treat? And she never did any of these things. Bettina and I liked Colonel Dover till we overheard something Martha Loring said to the cook. Both women seemed to think my mother was going to marry him! Bettina was too young to mind much. Besides, he had beguiled Bettina with chocolate. I was furious and miserable. I said to myself that, of course, my mother would never dream.... But the servants' gossip poisoned all the time of primroses that year. I thought about little else in our walks. Once we met him. Something began that day to whisper in the back of my head: "If he asks her enough she might give in. She does to me when I persist." Out of my first great anxiety was born the beginning of my knowledge of my mother's character. I could see that she, too, was afraid of giving in. But afraid of contest quite as much. Afraid of--I knew not what. But I knew she stayed away from church, because she was afraid. I knew our walks were different, because we were always thinking we might meet him. I prayed God to give my mother strength--for Christ's sake not to let it happen. Morning and night I prayed that prayer for half a summer. Dreadful as the issue was, I was thankful afterwards that I had taken the matter in hand. CHAPTER III A THUNDER-STORM Two Sundays in succession we had not been to church. As we were going out, after lessons, on Monday morning, a thunder-storm came on. So Bettina and I played in the upstairs passage. I remember how dark it grew, although there was a skylight overhead, and a window opening on the staircase. We groped for our playthings in the twilight, till quite suddenly the _croisée_ of the casement showed as ink-black lines crossing a square of blue-white fire. The shadowy stair was fiercely lit; our toys, too, and our faces. The moment after, we sat in blackness, waiting for the thunder. Far off it seemed to fall clattering down some vast incline. Then the rain. Thudding torrents that threatened to batter in the skylight. Our mother came out of her room in time to receive the next flash full upon her face. I see the light now, making her eyes glitter and her paleness ghostlike. She drew back from the window. Before the lightning died I had seen that she was frightened. I had been frightened, too, till I saw that she was. In the impulse to reassure her, my own fear left me. I went to her in that second blackness and put my hand in hers. When I could see again I looked through the streaming window-pane, as we stood there, and I saw a man sheltering under the chestnut-tree at our gate. He lifted his umbrella, and seemed to make a sign: "May I come in?" "Why, there is Colonel Dover!" I said, and could have bitten my tongue. My mother had moved away. She seemed not to hear, not to have seen. I stood, half behind the curtain, praying God to keep him out. I prayed so hard I felt my temples prick with heat, and a moisture in my hair. A blinding flash made us start back. Almost simultaneously came a shock of sound like a cannon shot off in the house. We three were clinging together. "That struck near by," my mother said, to our relief, for we had thought the house must tumble to pieces. The storm slackened after that, and daylight struggled back. We went on with our playing. I noticed, as my mother went downstairs, that she kept her head turned away from the window. Presently we heard unaccustomed sounds in the hall. The tramping and scraping of heavy feet. We looked over the banisters and saw a man being carried in by Kleiner Klaus and our gardener. The man's clothes were wet, so were his face and hair. It was Colonel Dover, staring with fixed, reproachful eyes at the lady of Duncombe House. And my mother, with a look I had never seen on her face, stood holding open the drawing-room door for the bearers to pass. Their feet left muddy marks in the hall.... We did not go downstairs till late that afternoon, when the body had been taken away. People said the steel ferule of the umbrella had attracted the electric current. I knew God had heard my prayer. But in striking down my enemy he had struck the chestnut-tree. It was riven from foot to crotch. That was the day I had in mind when I excused my laboured playing: "You expect me to be as quick as God." CHAPTER IV NIMBUS I see I have given the impression that Colonel Dover was the cloud. No. He was only a roll of thunder behind the cloud. I have put off saying more about the cloud because of the difficulty in making anyone else understand the larger, vaguer threat on our horizon. Those early days, as I have said, were happy and warmly sheltered. Yet there was all about us, or hovering near ready to swoop down, a sense of fear. I hardly know how we came first to feel it as a factor in life. A thousand impressions stamped the consciousness deep and deeper still. A fear, older than the fear of Colonel Dover, and apart from any danger with a name. A thing as close to life as the flesh to our bones. We were safe there, on our island in the heathery sea, only as people are safe who never trust themselves to the treachery of ships. My mother seemed to hug the thought of home as those in old days who heard a wolf howl gave thanks for the stout stockade. More times than I can count I have seen her coming home from one of our walks with that look, half dreaming, half vague apprehension. I have seen her turn that look back on Bettina, lagging: "Soon home, now, little girl. Soon safe in our dear home." I remember the look of the heath, at dusk, on winter days. The forbidding grey of the sky. The clammy chill. A white fog coming out of the hollows--a level mist; not rising high at first, but rolling nearer, nearer, like the ghost of an inundating sea. All the familiar things taking on an unreal look. A silence, and a shivering. Sometimes the dull oppression broken by a birds' note. Harsh and sudden. A danger signal. I see us linking arms and, with our mother between us, so mend the pace that she would reach home almost breathless. Nevertheless, we would hurry indoors and shoot the bolt behind us like people who knew themselves pursued. Perhaps my mother's fear had grounds we children never knew. But we knew that the sound of a door shut, and a bolt shot, was music in her ears. Her changed "home" face was like summer come again. She would help us to strip off our wraps, and, all in a glow, we would go flying to the haven of our pretty fire-bright room with its gay chintzes, its lamps and flowers. One of us would ring for tea; another would draw chairs about the blaze. My mother's part was to close the heavy inside shutters, to let down across the panels the iron bar, and draw the curtains. "_Now_ we are safe and sound!" she would say. I do not pretend to explain, for I do not know how it was that, though we loved our walks, Bettina and I came to share her sense of danger. In the beginning we may have felt the flight home to be merely a kind of game. A playing at Prisoner's Base with the threshold of Duncombe House for goal. When we reached there (and only in the nick of time!) we had escaped our enemy, whether Colonel Dover or another. We had won. We had barred him out. That feeling lasted warm, triumphant, until bed-time. Then, heavy wooden shutters, even with iron all across, were no avail. Another enemy, craftier, deadlier than any that might haunt the heath at dusk, had got into the house. He was in hiding all the cheerful part of evening, when lights and voices were about. At bed-time, in dim passages, you felt his breath on the back of your neck. He never faced you. Always he was behind you. But he was never at his deadliest while you had your shoes and stockings on. He waited behind curtains or under the bed, to clutch at your bare feet as you jumped in. I try not to read into the influences about our childhood more than was there. Perhaps our fears had no obscurer origin than the humble domestic fact that my mother never trusted the servants with the locking-up of the house. We saw her go the rounds each night, holding a candle high to bolts, or low to locks and catches. I believe now she may have had only some natural fear, in that lonely place, of robbery. But for us children the Dread was harder to fight against, being bodyless. As everyone knows, except those most in need of knowing--I mean children--every old house is an orchestra of ghostly sound. One room at Duncombe, in particular, was an eerie place to sit in when the winds were out. You heard a kind of unearthly music played there on winter evenings. Sounds so remote from any whistling, moaning, or other wind instrumentality, that Bettina and I spoke of it in whispers: "Now the organ's playing." Our mother heard it, too. At the first note she would lift her eyes and listen. We had an obscure feeling that she heard more than we--a something behind the music. Something which we strained to catch, and often seemed upon the verge of understanding. There is no more characteristic picture of my mother in my mind than that which shows her to me with needle arrested over work slipping off her knee, or holding a page half-turned, her lifted face wearing that look, listening, foreboding. There is something more expressive in the white of certain eyes than in the iris. The white of my mother's eyes was a crystalline blue-white. It caught the light and glistened. It seemed to respond more sensitively, to have more "seeing" in it than was in the pale blue iris. The contrast of heavy dark lashes may have lent the eye that almost startling look when the fringe of shadow lifted suddenly, and the eyeball answered to the light. There was nothing the least tragic about my mother's usual looks or moods. She was merely gentle and aloof. She helped us to be very happy children; and if she made us sometimes most unhappy, she did so unconsciously. And she did so only at times when she must have been unhappy, too. She played for us to dance. And she played for us to sing. But after Bettina and I had gone through our gay little action songs, and after we had sung all together our glees and catches, we would be sent upstairs to do lessons in the morning-room--which was our schoolroom under the cheerfuller name. Then, sitting alone, between daylight and dark, our mother would sing for herself songs of such sadness as youth could hardly bear. I think we were not expected to hear them. We would open the windows on that side in mild weather to hear the better. But the songs were sadder when we heard them faintly. Have you ever noticed that? I would sit trying to fix my mind on lessons, listening to that music she never made for us. And I would look across at Bettina's face, all changed and overcast. Then I would shut the window. Bettina ought never to hear such music. For myself I wondered uneasily what there could be in the beautiful world to inspire a song like that, and to make a lady sit singing it "between the lights." As I say, when the sound was fainter the sadness of it pierced us deeper still. As we two sat there, formless fears crept in and crouched in the shadowy places. Oh, we were glad when Martha Loring's face appeared, with the lamp and consolatory suggestions of supper. Better still, the blessed times when the music was too sad even for our mother--when she would break off and come to find us--help us to hurry through our task, and then for reward (hers, or ours?... I never quite knew) open the satinwood cabinet, and take out the treasures and let us see and handle them. All but two. We had been allowed to hold our father's order and his watch. We had turned over the pretty things he had given her; we knew that I was to have the diamond star, when I grew up, and Betty was to have the pearl and emerald pendant. Only the two brass buttons we might never touch. We never knew why the brass buttons were so precious. She held them wonderfully--as though they were alive. And we, too--we were always happier after we had seen them. We knew that she felt, somehow, safer. So did we. CHAPTER V THE MOTHER'S VOW We had no knowledge at first hand, of any family life except our own. But we imagined that we made up for any loss in that direction by following the outward fortunes of one other family, from a reverent distance, but with a closeness of devotion. In that mysterious world beyond the heath, we divined two exhaustless springs of enthusiasm: the Army and the Royal Family. The reason for the first is clear. As for the second, we never guessed that our varied knowledge and intimate concern about the persons of the reigning house was a commonplace in English family life of the not very strenuous sort. Royal personages presented themselves to our imagination, partly as the Fairy Tale element in life, partly as an ideal of mortal splendour, partly as symbols of our national greatness. From fairy queens and princes no great step to the sea-king's daughter, or to her sailor-son, the Prince of Wales. His wife, that Princess of Wales, who even before her marriage had been the idol of England was our idol too--apart from her high destiny as mother of the future King, (the little Prince born in the same year as Bettina)--and mother of that fascinating figure in the story, the solitary Princess of her house, three years younger than the youngest of our family. Our interest in them all received a fresh accession at the birth of Prince Henry; we hailed the advent of Prince George; we felt the succession trebly sure in the fortunate arrival of Prince John. We saw them safely christened; we consulted the bulletins in the _Standard_ and the _Queen_ about their health; we followed their august comings and goings with an enthusiasm undampened by hearing how well they were all being brought up on the incomparable "White Lodge" system, which had been so successfully applied to the little royalties' mamma. Apart from these Shining Ones, a sense of the variety, the unexpectedness of life to lesser folk, reached us through the changing fortunes of one of the country-houses that abutted on the heath. It was let to different people, from time to time, for the hunting. If the people had children, they were of palpitating interest to us, even though we never saw much of the children. Sometimes the fathers and mothers scraped acquaintance with our mother. If they had seen the Brighton doctor driving up to our door, they would stop to ask how my mother was. The doctor was a grim man with a stiff grey beard. He said my mother ought to have a nurse. She said she had me. That was the proudest moment of my childhood. I had to try very hard not to be glad when she was ill. It was such delight to nurse her. And after all, the only thing she herself seemed to mind about being ill was not having Bettina always with her. Bettina was too little to understand that one must be quiet in a sick room. In any case Bettina never wanted to stay indoors. So she would escape, and run about the garden, singing. My mother made us wheel her bed to the window that she might look out. She would lie there, watching Bettina play at church-choir with all our dolls in a row, and tiny home-made hymn-books in their laps. When a butterfly detached the leader of the choir, and Bettina went in chase to the other side of the garden, my mother would say anxiously: "Someone must go down and bring Bettina back." I could not bear to see Loring, or Mélanie, doing anything for my mother. I think they humoured me, and that Mélanie performed her service chiefly by stealth. I know I felt it to be all my doing when the invalid was able to come downstairs. She sat very near the fire though the day was hot. When she held up her hand to shade her eyes, her hand was different. Not only thin. Different. * * * * * Bettina and I were sorry she would never see the one or two kind people who "called to inquire." We had come early to know that her refusal to take any part in such meagre "life" as the scattered community offered was indeed founded upon "indisposition," as we had heard; but an indisposition deeper than her malady. We never knew her to say: these card-playing, fox-hunting people are our inferiors. But she might as well. We read her thought. When the Marley children went by on ponies, when the Reuters bought their third motor-car, Bettina and I stifled longing and curiosity with the puerilities of infant arrogance: Our mother doesn't mean to return your visit. She doesn't want us to 'sociate with your children. In our hearts we longed for the society specially of Dora Marley. Betty used to slip out and show Alexandra to Dora. Alexandra was Betty's most glorious doll. When the others couldn't find Betty I knew where to look. I went secretly, a roundabout way through the shrubberies, to bring Betty in, reluctant and looking back at Dora: "Come again to-morrow?" One day Dora shook her head. "Why not?" She was going back to school. "Aren't _you_ going back to school?" she asked. "Oh, no," I said, "we don't go to school." Dora seemed not only surprised, but inclined to pity us. "You _like_ having to go to school!" I said. She loved it. "So would you." "I should hate it!" I said with a passion of conviction. She couldn't think why. Neither could I--beyond the fact that my mother couldn't go with me. And that she had said of the Marley children, with that high air of pity--"They have the manners of girls who have not been brought up at home." Dora asked if we didn't hate our governess. She was still more mystified to hear we had never had one. Even then we did not associate that lack with poverty. Rather with the riches of our mother's personal accomplishments, and her devotion for her children. And indeed we may have been partly right. I think if she had been a millionaire she would not willingly have shared with a strange woman those hours she spent with us. We read a great deal aloud. My mother and I took turns. Bettina used to sit over the embroidery she was so good at, and I so hopeless. Or she would sit under the wild broom in Cæsar's Camp watching the birds; or lie curled up on the sofa stroking Abdul, the blue Persian. Indoors or out, I don't think Bettina often listened to the reading. Perhaps that was because we read a good deal of history. Poetry was "for pleasure," our mother said. But it had to be translated into singing to be any pleasure to Bettina. I loved it all. Betty was two years younger than I, but nobody would believe I was not the elder by five years, or even six. I was proud of this, seeing in the circumstance my sole but sufficient advantage over a sister excelling in all things else. I am not to be understood as having been envious of Bettina. For I recognised her accomplishments as among our best family assets--reflecting glory on us all; ranking in honour after the respect shown to our mother, and the V. C. our father won in the Soudan. But my thoughtfulness and gravity as a child, my being cast in a larger, soberer mould, lent validity to my assumption of the right to take care of Bettina. Even to harry her now and then, when her feet outstrayed the paths appointed. Bettina was not only younger, she was delicate; she had to be protected against colds, against fatigue. There is, in almost every house, one main concern. When I look back, I see that in ours the main concern was Bettina. If she had been less sweet-natured, she would have been made intolerable. But the great need of being loved kept Bettina lovable. I cannot remember that we ever spent half a day away from each other, or away from our mother, until--but that is to come later. I feel still the panic that fell on us after the excitement of seeing the good-natured Mrs. Reuter drive up in her motor-car--the first we had encountered at close quarters--a jarring, uncanny, evil-smelling apparition in our peaceful court. Mrs. Reuter leaned out and unfolded her dreadful errand--to invite us children to come and stay at her house in Brighton from Friday to Monday! We stood there, blank, speechless. Our mother, with a presence of mind for which we blessed her, said she could not spare us; she was not well; I was a famous little nurse. Relief and pride rushed together. I could have kissed my mother's feet. My own could hardly keep from dancing. "Let me take the little one, then," said this brutal visitor. The little one burst into large, heart-rending sobs. Twenty times that afternoon the little one made my mother say: "I will not let anyone take you away--no, never. Very well, you shall not pay visits." And Betty, suspicious, insistent: "Not _never_?" "Not never." Oh, mother! mother! would you had kept your word! CHAPTER VI MARTHA'S GOING--YET REMAINING When I was thirteen years old we lost our ally, Martha Loring. She had been with us since she was fifteen--at first a little scullery-maid. Later, she was promoted, and became a person much trusted, in spite of her youth and her love of fun. We had all sorts of games and private understandings with Martha. She was a genius at furnishing a dolls' house. She got another friend of ours to make us a dresser for Alexandra's kitchen. This other gifted person was Peter, one of Big Klaus's sons. He was almost twenty, and he used to bring the vegetables. We did not know why he could never bring us our presents at the same time--perhaps out of fear of the cook, who held strict views upon the wickedness of eating between meals. She was elderly, and very easily annoyed. She never knew that that clever Peter circumvented her by climbing over the orchard wall with our red apples and with pockets full of the hazelnuts we loved. Martha Loring told us that, if ever we spoke of these gifts, they would be forbidden, and Peter would never come any more. So we were most careful. So was Peter. So careful that he brought his gifts after dark. Martha used to have to go down the garden and wait for them--wait so long, sometimes, that we fell asleep, and only got Peter's presents in the morning. Martha had laughing brown eyes and full scarlet lips. No wonder we were impressed by the transformation of this cheerful and familiar presence into something heavy-eyed and secret. One morning she came out of our mother's room sobbing, and went away without saying good-bye--though she wasn't ever coming back, the cook said. Our mother was so unwell that day she did not want even me in the room. In the evening Bettina and I went into the kitchen to ask Mrs. Ransom what had become of Martha. Mrs. Ransom was in a bad temper. She said roughly that Martha had gone under. "Under? Under what?" Mrs. Ransom said, "Sh!" I went back to the kitchen alone, and begged the cook to tell me what had happened. She was angrier than ever, and said the young ladies where she lived before never asked questions, and would never have fashed themselves about a housemaid who was a horrid person. I was angry, too, at that, and told her she was jealous of Martha. She chased me out with a hot frying-pan. We felt justified in disbelieving all Mrs. Ransom had said when we found out that Martha had not "gone under" at all. She had gone to stay with the family of Little Klaus. But our mother said Little Klaus's wife ought not to have taken Martha in. And she wrote Mrs. Klaus a letter. As for us, we were never to speak to Martha again. And we were not to go near Little Klaus's cottage as long as Martha stayed there. Very soon she went away. We were reminded of Martha whenever a beggar came to the back-door, or a dusty man on the heath-road asked us for his fare to Brighton. Martha would have told the beggar to go and wait in the first clump of gorse. And she would have smuggled food out to him. She used to borrow our threepenny-bits to make up the dusty man's fare. But she always paid us back. I knew quite well why Mrs. Klaus had been kind to Martha. For a whole year the Klauses had been having bad luck. One of the children died. And, what seemed to be much more serious, something happened to the horse. He died, too. So the Klauses had no horse at all now, but they had four little children left. And one or other of the children was always cutting or bruising himself, or else falling ill. Martha would tell me about them. She and I would collect pieces of flannel or linen for bandages; and Martha would take mustard over to the cottage for plasters, and bread and milk for poultices. The little Klauses needed a fearful lot of poultices. Martha was sure of my sympathy in these ministrations, because of a peculiarity of mine. When I was still quite a little girl my mother had admitted my skill in making compresses. I could take temperatures, too, and I learned how to prepare invalid foods. I found a fascinating book thrust away behind Gibbon's "Decline and Fall." The book was called "Household Medicine." I read it a great deal--especially when one of the little Klauses had a new symptom. If I refrained from hoping my mother and sister might have more and worse maladies, that I might nurse them back to health, I would willingly have sacrificed the servants. So that the diseases that attacked the little Klauses were a godsend to me. I glanced at those unfortunates, as I passed, with the eye of the specialist. Yet often, to my shame, I could detect no sign of their sufferings. One day I heard wailing as Betty and I went by. I told Betty to walk on slowly and wait by the Dew Pond. And I made my first visit to Mrs. Klaus. She was in bed in the tiny inner room, nursing the new baby. Mr. Klaus was sitting by the kitchen fire, with his back to the door. He had Jimmy in his arms. Jimmy had been the baby. His little face, all crumpled with crying, looked at me over his father's shoulder. He had been like this for two days. "Just pining," they said, with the resignation of the poor. We parted upon the understanding that the thing for them to do was to give Jimmy a warm bath, and no tea or bacon for supper; and the thing for me to do was to send him some proper food--all of which was done in collusion with Martha. I was not a secretive person, but I had learned years before that my mother was unwilling that we should ever go into any of the cottages. Not even for shelter in a storm were we to cross one of those thresholds. I felt sure that this precaution was on Betty's account. I never let Bettina go into the cottage. Indeed, she never wished to. That instinctive shrinking from ugliness and suffering seemed quite natural in a rose-leaf creature like Bettina. But I was made of commoner clay. And long after she had left us I missed that other piece of common clay, Martha Loring. The thought of Martha was specially vivid in my mind on one occasion two years or more after she "went under." Bettina caught one of her dreadful colds. But we had made her well again--so well that she insisted on going for a walk. My mother wrapped her warmly, and I knelt down and put on her leggings and overshoes. But, after all, we only stayed out about ten minutes. My mother said the air was raw, and "not safe." At luncheon Bettina was urged to eat more. Though, as I say, she seemed quite well again, she had not recovered her appetite. Her normal appetite was small and fastidious. Often special dainties had to be prepared to tempt Bettina. And I remember, for a reason that will be obvious later--I remember we had delicious things to eat that day. Unluckily, Bettina wasn't hungry, and she grew rather fretful at being urged to eat more than she wanted. My mother remembered a tonic that she sometimes made Bettina take. When she had helped us to pudding, she went upstairs to find the tonic, because she was the only one who knew where it was. The moment she had gone, Bettina sprang up and scraped her favourite pudding into the fire. We laughed together, and recalled her evil ways as a baby. Always there had been this trouble to make Bettina eat--specially breakfast. My mother and I used to be tired out waiting while my sister, sitting in her high-chair, nibbled toast a crumb at a time, and let her bacon grow cold. So a punishment had to be invented. Bettina, who dearly loved society, must be left alone to finish breakfast--a plan that seemed to work, for when one of us went back in a few minutes, Bettina's plate would be bare. Then the awful discovery one day, in cleaning out a seldom-opened part of the side-board--a great collection of toast and bits of mouldy bacon, pushed quite to the back of the capacious drawer. While we sat laughing over the old misdeed, feeling very grown up now and superior, a face looked in at the window--a pinched, unhappy face, with hungry eyes. A woman stood out there, holding a baby wrapped in a shawl. The window was shut, for the rain had begun as we sat down--heavy leaden drops out of a leaden sky. I ran and opened the window. "What is it?" I said, quite unnecessarily. The woman told us she had started for the hop-fields that morning. She had no money to pay a railway fare, but a man had given her a lift as far as the village. She did not know how she was going to reach the hop-fields. At that moment I heard my mother's voice. "What _are_ you doing? Shut the window instantly!" And as I was not quick about it, she came behind me and shut the window sharply. What was I thinking of? Had I no regard for my little sister, sitting there in the current of raw air? Really, she had thought me old enough by now to be trusted! Seldom had I been so scolded. I forgot for a moment about the woman. I remembered her only when I saw my mother make a gesture over my head. "Go away!" "Oh, but she is tired and wet," I said, and I tried to tell her story. My mother interrupted me. Hop-pickers were a very low class. They were dirty and verminous, and spread infectious diseases. "Go away!" she said. And again that gesture. I felt myself choking. "She is hungry," I whispered. My mother measured out the tonic. My first misgiving about her shook the foundations of existence. Other, lesser instances, came back to me--strange lapses into hardness on the part of so tender a being. What did they mean? If I scratched my arm, she would fly for a soothing lotion, and help healing with soft words. If Bettina pinched her finger, the whole house would be stirred up to sympathise. No smallest ache or ailing of ours but our mother's sensitiveness shared. And yet.... The woman with her burden had moved away--a draggled figure in the rain. A horrible feeling sprang up in my heart--an impulse of actual hatred towards my mother--as the hop-picker disappeared. Hatred of Bettina, too. I kept thinking of the pudding in the fire. And of Martha Loring. If Martha Loring had been in the kitchen, she would somehow have got food to the woman, and a few pence. The image of Martha Loring shone bright above the greyness of that wretched time. Looking back, I say to myself: "Not all in vain, perhaps, the life of the little servant who had been turned out of doors." At Duncombe, where she had had her time of happiness, where she had served and suffered, something of her spirit still survived. Martha Loring sat that day in judgment on my mother. And I was torn with the misery of having to admit the sentence just. I became critical of matters never questioned before. I fell foul of Bettina. She was selfish. She was vain. And her hair was turning pink. It was true that the paler gold of early childhood was warming to a sort of apricot shade, infinitely lovely. But "pink hair" was accounted libellous. And, anyhow, it was a crime to tease Bettina. Wasn't it worse, I demanded, groping among the new perceptions dawning--wasn't it worse for Bettina to tease a dumb animal? The "worse," I was shrewd to note, was not admitted. But "Of course, Bettina must not tease the cat." With unloving eyes I watched my mother lift an ugly black spider very gently in a handkerchief, and put the creature out to safety. But that haggard hop-picker--no, I couldn't understand it. The hop-picker haunted me. Then I made a compact with her. For her sake I would contrive, somehow, to give bread to any hungry man or woman who should go by. "And so," I addressed the hop-picker in my thoughts, "though you had no bread for yourself, you will be the means of giving bread to others." The hop-picker accepted the arrangement. Peace came back. In the vague pagan fashion of the young I thought, too, that by kind deeds I might pay off my mother's score. Her fears for us somehow prevented her from feeling for other people's children. Something I didn't know about had made her like that. In my struggle to resolve the discord between a nagging conscience, and my adoration for my mother, I seemed to leave childhood behind. Still, very dimly, if at all, could I have realised there was
{'title': 'My Little Sister by Elizabeth Robins', 'source': 'Project Gutenberg', 'lang': 'en'}