Chaste as Ice, Pure as Snow: A Novel

by C. Despard

"Mamma is crying because they told her little daughter such dreadful things," said Margaret as quietly as she could. "Listen, my child: you must never believe them. I love my Laura more than I can say. You are all that is left me, dear. It was for you I went to London, that you might grow up wise and good, and learn like other little girls; and I was going to such a wretched, miserable place or I would have taken my child with me; but I will never leave her behind again, wherever I may go."

Perfectly satisfied and with a little sigh of full content, Laura put down her head again, and so they went back to the house, the child in her mother's arms.

Jane Rodgers met them on the threshold of the front door. She had looked forward to something like this when the boy had arrived with the carpet-bag, notifying that the mistress was to follow, and she blamed herself severely for her short-sightedness, which had arisen in this way.

She had been shrewd enough to see that although Mrs. Grey never neglected her daughter, yet there was none of that warm devotion which mothers so often cherish for an only child; in fact, that the very presence of her little one was sometimes a burden to her. The circumstances of her lodger being peculiar and utterly unknown, so far as she could learn, to any of her neighbors, Jane had come to certain conclusions not very creditable to her ordinary good sense or knowledge of human nature. When, therefore, for three weeks Mrs. Grey had remained absent from her daughter, although her rent was fully paid up, and amply sufficient had been left for the little Laura's maintenance, Jane Rodgers, acting on her previous supposition, had come to this conclusion: "The mother had left her child altogether. It would fall to her" (Jane Rodgers's) "lot to take care of her and bring her up."

Now, Jane was by no means a cruel woman. Had any one told her that even under such untoward circumstances she could have been absolutely unkind to any child of seven years old, she would have indignantly repelled the accusation. But Jane was a scrupulously conscientious woman (that is, she thought herself so); she was unmarried, and hard by nature. She had been a fine-looking girl in her youth—had been disappointed in love, and as a domestic servant had perhaps had her full share of the temptations incident to her position. She had preserved her respectability, saved her money, and some years before the time when my story opens had returned to her native village, the owner of a small furnished house. Her living she was given in return for the service she rendered, and the rent of the house was ample to keep her in clothes and pocket-money, with a small sum accumulating year by year at the savings bank.

Jane was a highly respectable person, and in this consisted her pride. How people could ever be brought into the world the wrong way, or how the hundred and one wicked actions so common in all societies, high and low, could ever come to be committed, she professed herself wholly unable to understand. She had no sympathy for the tempted: her theory was, that if they suffered in consequence of error, so much the better—it served them right.

When, therefore, the little Laura was left on her hands—for Mrs. Grey had scarcely been gone a week before Jane had made up her mind that she would never return—a strict and stern course of education was begun. That evil was very specially rooted in the heart of her self-imposed charge was Jane's theory—that no indulgence should ever be permitted her was the fit corrective. Laura very naturally resented this treatment. She had been allowed to wander about as she liked; she had never in her life been struck, and seldom punished. When she found herself watched, corrected and snapped-up—her little sayings, that had been admired and thought clever, snubbed and reproved—Laura became first very angry, and then very miserable. The anger was punished by whipping and bed—such perfectly new experiences to the lonely child that her little heart throbbed with the agony of humiliation; the misery was treated as sulkiness, and at last poor little Laura began to think it was all true. As she plaintively said to her mother, she was always naughty.

Jane had done it in good faith. She thought she was acting well, taking a mother's part with the child—that when the evil in her heart had been rooted out by strict discipline, she might in spite of her pretty face and form, and the bad precedent of a mother whose antecedents were not precisely known, turn out a good woman and a useful member of society.

In the mean time she took the child into her own part of the house, cleaned out Mrs. Grey's apartments, and was ready to offer them in the summer time on moderate terms to that portion of the bathing public who might find Middlethorpe a desirable watering-place.