“And though you laugh at poor Mr. Linthicum,” she said, “it’s thanks to him you’ve got this chocolate so quick, for he talked to the servant himself.”
With this Mrs. Gainsborough left the room in high good humor at the successful rehabilitation of the informative widower.
The girl, whose name was Concetta, had long ceased to lament, but she was still very shy, and Sylvia found it extremely difficult at first to reach any clear comprehension of her present trouble. Gradually, however, by letting her talk in her own breathless way, and in an odd mixture of English, French, German, and Italian, she was able to put together the facts into a kind of consecutiveness.
Her father had been an Italian, who for some reason that was not at all clear had lived at Aix-la-Chapelle. Her mother, to whom he had apparently never been married, had been a Fleming. This mother had died when Concetta was about four, and her father had married a German woman who had beaten her, particularly after her father had either died or abandoned his child to the stepmother—it was not clear which. At this point an elder brother appeared in the tale, who at the age of eleven had managed to steal some money and run away. Of this brother Concetta had made an ideal hero. She dreamed of him even now and never came to any town but that she expected to meet him there. Sylvia had asked her how she expected to recognize somebody who had disappeared from her life when she was only six years old, but Concetta insisted that she should know him again. When she said this, she looked round her with an expression of fear and asked if anybody could overhear them. Sylvia assured her that they were quite alone, and Concetta said in a whisper:
“Once in Milano I saw Francesco. Hush! he passed in the street, and I said, ‘Francesco,’ and he said, ‘Concettina,’ but we could not speak together more longer.”
Sylvia would not contest this assertion, though she made up her mind that it must have been a dream.
“It was a pity you could not speak,” she said.
“Yes, nothing but Francesco and Concettina before he was gone. Peccato! Peccato!”
Francesco’s example had illuminated his sister’s life with the hope of escaping from the stepmother, and she had hoarded pennies month after month for three years. She would not speak in detail of the cruelty of her stepmother; the memory of it even at this distance of time was too much charged with horror. It was evident to Sylvia that she had suffered exceptional things and that this was no case of ordinary unkindness. There was still in Concetta’s eyes the look of an animal in a trap, and Sylvia felt a rage at human cruelty hammering upon her brain. One read of these things with an idle shudder, but, oh, to behold before one a child whose very soul was scarred. There was more for the imagination to feed upon, because Concetta said that not only was her stepmother cruel, but also her school-teachers and schoolmates.
“Everybody was liking to beat me. I don’t know why, but they was liking to beat me; no, really, they was liking it.”