“Didn’t you know?” said Anita. “Her people emigrated. The father failed. It happened when Madala was eighteen, and she and her mother persuaded him, expecting him, literally, to make their fortunes. The mother seems to have been an erratic person. Irish, I believe. Beautiful. Extravagant. I have always imagined that it was her extravagance—but Madala and the husband seem to have adored her. I remember Madala saying once that her father had been born unlucky, ‘except when he married Mother!’ I suspect, myself, that that was the beginning of his ill-luck. Anyhow, when the crash came, they gathered together what they had and started off on some romantic notion of the mother’s to make their fortune farming. America. Steerage. The Sylvania.”
“Sylvania? That’s familiar. What was it? A collision, wasn’t it?”
“No, that was the Empress of Peru. The Sylvania caught fire in mid-ocean—a ghastly business. There were only about fifty survivors. Both her people were drowned.”
“Oh, that’s what she meant,” began Miss Howe, “that time at the Academy. We were looking at a storm-scape, and she said—‘People don’t know. It’s not like that. They wouldn’t try to paint it if they knew.’ She was quite white. Of course I never dreamed——Poor old Madala! Well, what happened?”
“Oh, she reached America in what she stood up in. There was a survivors’ fund, of course, but money melts in a city when you’re strange to it.”
“Couldn’t she have come back to England?”
“I believe she had relations over here, but her mother had quarrelled with them all in turn. They didn’t appreciate her mother and that was the unforgivable sin for Madala. She’d have starved sooner than ask them to help her. I shouldn’t wonder if she did, too!—half starve anyway. I shouldn’t wonder if those first bare months haven’t revenged themselves at last.”
“Oh, if one had known!” began the Baxter girl. “How is it that no one ever knows—or cares?”
“You? You were a schoolgirl. Who had heard of her in those days? But she made friends. There was a girl, a journalist, who had been sent to interview the survivors. She seems to have helped her in the beginning. She found her a lodging—oh, can’t you see how she uses that lodging in Eden Walls?—and gave her occasional hack jobs, typing, and now and then proof-reading. Then she got some work taken, advertisement work, little articles on soaps and scents and face-creams that she used to illustrate herself. She was comically proud of them. She kept them all.”
“I suppose in her spare time she was already working at Eden Walls?”