‘Auntie! No, no, no! I will be good. Oh, I will!’ The little weak voice came from the other side of the locked attic door.
‘You should have thought of that before,’ said the strong, sharp voice outside.
‘I didn’t mean to be naughty. I didn’t, truly.’
‘It’s not what you mean, miss, it’s what you do. I’ll teach you not to mean, my lady.’
The bitter irony of the last words dried the child’s tears. ‘Very well, then,’ she screamed, ‘I won’t be good; I won’t try to be good. I thought you’d like your nasty old garden weeded. I only did it to please you. How was I to know it was turnips? It looked just like weeds.’ Then came a pause, then another shriek. ‘Oh, Auntie, don’t! Oh, let me out—let me out!’
‘I’ll not let you out till I’ve broken your spirit, my girl; you may rely on that.’
[p186]
The sharp voice stopped abruptly on a high note; determined feet in strong boots sounded on the stairs—fainter, fainter; a door slammed below with a dreadful definiteness, and Elsie was left alone, to wonder how soon her spirit would break—for at no less a price, it appeared, could freedom be bought.
The outlook seemed hopeless. The martyrs and heroines, with whom Elsie usually identified herself, their spirit had never been broken; not chains nor the rack nor the fiery stake itself had even weakened them. Imprisonment in an attic would to them have been luxury compared with the boiling oil and the smoking faggots and all the intimate cruelties of mysterious instruments of steel and leather, in cold dungeons, lit only by the dull flare of torches and the bright, watchful eyes of inquisitors.
A month in the house of ‘Auntie’ self-styled, and really only an unrelated Mrs. Staines, paid to take care of the child, had held but one interest—Foxe’s Book of Martyrs. It was a horrible book—the thick oleographs, their guarding sheets of tissue paper sticking to the prints like bandages to a wound…. Elsie knew all about wounds: she had had one herself. Only a scalded hand, it is true, but a wound is a wound, all the world over. It was [p187 a book that made you afraid to go to bed; but it was a book you could not help reading. And now it seemed as though it might at last help, and not merely sicken and terrify. But the help was frail, and broke almost instantly on the thought—‘They were brave because they were good: how can I be brave when there’s nothing to be brave about except me not knowing the difference between turnips and weeds?’
She sank down, a huddled black bunch on the bare attic floor, and called wildly to some one who could not answer her. Her frock was black because the one who always used to answer could not answer any more. And her father was in India, where you cannot answer, or even hear, your little girl, however much she cries in England.