“And one real name,” said Jennie.
“And shall you mind,” continued Jackie seriously, “about not being grand? You’re not Lady anything, you see, but just ‘Betty.’”
“I don’t want to be grand any more,” said Mary earnestly, “and I don’t mind anything else one bit, now I don’t belong to the gypsies.”
“How glad your last mother—no, I mean your first mother—must be,” said Agatha, “that someone made you that Pair of Clogs.”
This was only one of many and many a conversation amongst the children on the same subject during several following weeks. And what a wonderful subject it was! Surely never had such a strange thing happened in a quiet village as this discovery of Mary’s mother, and as to Mary herself, she was now surrounded by an air of romance which was more interesting than any story-book. If she could only have remembered a little about that time she passed with the gypsies! But none of Jackie’s earnest appeals to “try hard” produced any results, for all that part of her life was wiped as clean out of her memory as when one washes marks off a slate with a sponge. It was all gone, and when she looked back it was not Seraminta and Perrin and the donkey-cart she saw, but the kind faces of Mr and Mrs Vallance and her happy, pleasant home at the vicarage. And yet, though her earliest recollections were of these, she did not in truth belong to them; they were not her people, and sunny Wensdale was not her place; Maggie was her mother, and cold, grey Haworth on the hillside was her real home. It was, as Jackie had said, a most puzzling thing, and the important question arose—would Mary have to go away? It was wildly irritating to be shut out from all the talks and conferences which were always going on now between Mary’s two mothers and Mrs Chelwood. The children felt that it was more their concern than anyone’s, but they were told nothing, and the air of the school-room was so full of excitement and curiosity that Fraulein was in despair. The slightest noises in the house during lesson time now seemed to carry deep meaning—perhaps only a bell ringing, or some one shutting the door of mother’s sitting-room, but it was enough to make Jackie put down his slate-pencil and look at Mary with an awestruck and impressive gaze. She would give an answering nod of intelligence, and Patrick and Jennie, not to be left out in the cold, would at once begin to nod rapidly at each other, as much as to say, “We understand too.” It was only Agatha who took her placid way undisturbed. But the day came when, matters being at last arranged, the children were told all about it, and this is what they heard:
Mary was to spend a year with her real mother at Haworth, and a year with Mrs Vallance at Wensdale, alternately, until she was eighteen years old. On her eighteenth birthday she might choose at which of these two homes she would live altogether.
“If you could choose,” Jackie had once said to her in jest, “whose daughter would you be?”
And now, in years to come, the choice would really have to be made—the choice between Haworth and Wensdale, hard work and idleness, poverty and riches. Which would it be?
“Of course,” was Jackie’s first remark, “you’ll choose Wensdale, won’t you?”
But so many strange things had happened lately to Mary that she did not just now feel as if anything was “of course.”