She was. She was put into the lowest class and she hated every one. Exile, of the body or of the mind, always roused, and always will rouse in her, I think, a bitter, ardent devil, that, when she was a child, was completely beyond her comprehension or control. She, who was all for peace and pleasantry and quiet life, found herself involved in wars and rumours of wars, in quarrels and injustice and defiances, that stamped themselves heavily, like a blind pattern, upon a solid background of nostalgia, so that she spent her days, like any cat, fighting and dreaming.
She endured for a full term: packed, in spite of protests, all her property at the end of it: bade a polite and final farewell to a bewildered head-mistress, and then came home again. Once there, she refused to budge.
She needed a whipping, of course. Brackenhurst, deeply interested, urged it upon Aunt Adela. But somehow it was difficult to inflict upon the soft-eyed, mouse-like creature that was Laura—until you roused her. And Laura never let Aunt Adela rouse her now-a-days, was a good little girl and an obedient, with her Aunt Adela. As Adela admitted to Brackenhurst, she was, in daily life, docile enough. Aunt Adela, who could not understand her contradictions, never realized that you might prune as you pleased—if you left her roots alone.
But Laura had it out with a grimly smiling grandfather, who did not appear surprised. He heard what she had to say, discussed the matter with her as he never did with Adela, and, to every one’s horror, let her have her way. Possibly Laura’s challenge to her aunt—“Why can’t Gran’papa teach me? He knows tons more than Miss Massingberd”—tickled him.
At any rate Laura stayed at home, and her education, as it achieved itself between the two of them, with occasional help from Justin, was, if irregular, at least essentially satisfying. She was, of course, if you contrast her provision with the full fare of the schools, fed and clad but scantily; but her scraps fell at least from ambrosial tables and her rags were cloth-of-golden. And she throve. That is certain.
Aunt Adela’s next move, naturally, was to demand a governess. But even her assiduity had not been able to discover any one whom Gran’papa could endure for more than a month. A week was usually enough for them both. With visitors, half-hour visitors, he found it hard enough to be uncritical; but to have a stranger, and a feminine stranger at that, with an inevitable mannerism to jar his fidgety niceness, definitely established in his household, drove him into a fever of nervous irritation. His patient daughter did her best, but it required more nerve than she possessed to say, however sweetly, to an efficient young woman with certificates and a silk petticoat: “Oh, by the way, Miss—er—, you don’t blow your nose at meals, do you?” and after the rout of Miss Runciman with her nervous little giggle, of Miss Sandys who would talk to Papa while he was eating, and of Miss Jenkins who used slang and dropped her g’s, Aunt Adela decided that an English girl without an affectation was beyond discovery, and that Papa must look after Laura’s education by himself. Can you hear her sotto-voce indignation? Can you see her washing her long, twitching hands of the whole affair? There is no doubt but that Papa was exceedingly trying. All Brackenhurst knew it and pitied the poor lady. But neither Brackenhurst nor she herself ever had the moral courage to tell him so.
Laura, however, was none the worse off. She could read and write, had the run of two houses in the matter of books, and Justin—never again so divinely discerning—Justin had given her a paint-box. Thus equipped, she was left to potter at her own pace along the road to knowledge of those inner and outer worlds in which, for the next fifty years or so, she was to stage her eternal comedy of existence.
And she enjoyed herself. At ten—twelve—fourteen—she enjoyed herself, æsthetically at least, as keenly and painfully as at any later period, blissfully absorbed in words and colours and sounds, in discovering that the sky is awfully blue and the earth so green, so green; but that if she said big words to herself from Gran’papa’s dictionary, ‘azure,’ ‘translucent,’ ‘emerald,’ ‘lapis-lazuli,’ sky and earth would deepen and glow till she was dazzled, and that, although she could not get what she saw on to paper, juicy as Winsor and Newtons were, at least she could always try. And there the sable paint-brush was certainly a help, though expensive!
And though in these, as in all her adventures, she was unescorted, she was not lonely. She was always aware that there were guiding hands to right and left of her if she chose to stretch out her own. Hands, indeed, that were inclined to tug in opposite directions, and so, perhaps, held her the steadier between extreme and extreme; for an intelligent young man convinced that he understands everything, and a wise old one, still more sure that he knows nothing, are no bad teachers for an imaginative child, who worships the one and honours the others.
Justin, because she saw less of him; because he was young; because he made her laugh; because he forgot her for months and then remembered her again; because he let her play in his room and learn her geography from his stamp album, and put her in charge, in his absence, of his innumerable collections; because he had white teeth and delightful crinkles at the corners of his eyes when he put back his head and laughed at her; because, in short, he was God—Justin, naturally, influenced her development more than old Mr. Valentine, though he, in his cold way, was less unconscious of responsibility than Aunt Adela would have you believe. Yet the amazing, amusing contrast in the two men’s attitudes to life and Books (the choice of capital is Laura’s) developed in her, all unconsciously, a sense of humour, which is a sense of proportion, that never withered, though she is to starve it ruthlessly in the years that are labelled discreet.