“I don’t know. There aren’t any other children. There’s just uncle and mamma and nurse. And when mamma is ill, I go to stay with nurse. And I only go out with uncle or mamma.”
“That is very nice,” said Emily, taking one of the small, slender hands and kissing it. But in reality she thought it was the reverse of nice, and very lonely and sad.
“I was going away across the ocean where there are lots of children waiting to play with me. But mamma—she hadn’t been sick for a long, long time—most two years, I think—and then she was sick again and I’m not to go. But I’m not sorry.”
“Why?”
“I’m a great comfort to uncle, and he wasn’t going along. And I’m glad to stay with him. He says I’m a great comfort to him. I sing to him when he is feeling bad. Would you like for me to sing to you? You look as if you felt bad.”
Emily did feel like tears. It was not what the child said, but her air of aloneness, of ignorance of the pleasures of childhood and its companionships. She seemed never to have been a child and at the same time to be far too much a child for her years—apparently the result of an attempt by grown persons to bring her up in a dignified way without destroying the innocence of infancy.
“Yes, I should like to hear you sing,” said Emily.
The child sat, folded her hands in her lap and began to sing in French—a slow, religious chant, low and with an intonation of ironic humour. As Emily heard the words, she looked at “Princess Pink-and-White” in amazement. It was a concert-hall song, such as is rarely heard outside the cafés chantants of the boulevards—a piece of subtle mockery with a double meaning. The child sang it through, then looked at her for approval.
“It’s in French,” was all Emily could say, and the child with quick intuition saw that something was wrong.
“You don’t like it,” she said, offended.