"My father was a solicitor," she said, "in Lincoln's Inn, and we lived in Russell Street. It's a boarding-house now. I went past it the other day on my way to the Tube, and it brought it all back so clearly! My mother died when I was a child, and one of my aunts brought me up. She was very old-fashioned, and rather an invalid, so as a child I saw hardly anyone but her and my nurse, and once in a long while my father. For years I never read anything but Miss Yonge's books, and Edna Lyall's, and The Girl's Own Paper. My aunt was very particular about my books."
"She must have been," growled the young man, trying to eat his toast silently, so that he could hear.
"I never went to school, but had a series of governesses, all very sad women. Most governesses seem to be sad, don't they? And all oldish, and not in very good health. I was allowed to read Sir Walter Scott's poems, and one or two of Dickens as I grew older. But I never liked Dickens; he writes about such common people. I loved Bulwer, and my aunt allowed me to read several of his. My aunt died when I was sixteen, and six months after her death my father went to Mexico on business, which would have made him a very rich man if it had turned out as he hoped. One of my old governesses came to stay in the house while he was gone. Her name was Miss Sweet, and I liked her because she was sentimental and had a soft voice, and wasn't at all particular about dates. Then it was that I wrote my first book—or not quite then, for I was nearly eighteen, but my father was still away."
She hesitated for a moment. She was allowing her voice more scope since the gloom had thickened in the quiet room. The young man did not move, for he feared to disturb her.
"It was a caretaker in the next house which had long been empty that put the idea into my head. She was an old woman with a niece, who lived with her, and the niece was very pretty. The story was a dreadful one—a tragedy, and the girl committed suicide. I can't quite tell you," the quiet voice went on, "what it meant to an ignorant girl, sheltered as I was, to be plunged into the midst of such horrors. Poor old Mrs. Bell waked us up in the middle of the night when it happened, and I went alone, as Miss Sweet had a bad attack of asthma."
She shuddered, and reaching to the back of a chair, took from it and wrapped round her shoulders a little old red shawl. On and on went the quiet voice, telling the story with a kind of neat dexterity and absence of the overburdening adjectives common to such narration.
Wick was amazed and filled with pity at the thought of what life had been to this woman to reduce her powers to the deadly level of the tales that she poured out regularly every autumn.
"It was a dreadful business, as you see, but somehow after the first it didn't frighten or upset me much, though it made poor Miss Sweet quite ill. Afterwards we went down to Lulworth Cove for a change, and it was while we were down there that I wrote the book. I was very happy then. Your work," she added, with a touch of innocent vanity, "not being creative, you may not realise what writing a book really is, but it's very wonderful. I used to sit on the rocks and scribble away by the hour. I think it was very good too, and I was proud of it. And the day after we got home, in the autumn—we had been called back by a telegram saying that my father had reached Liverpool—I packed up the manuscript on the dining-room table and addressed it to Mr. Murray. Someone had spilt a little black currant jam on the tablecloth, and as I arranged the pages I managed to smear a little of it across the title, and I remember getting cold water and a bit of cotton-wool and washing it off, and then drying it before the kitchen fire, and mending the spoilt letters with a very fine pen, so that it would look nice. 'Hannah' was the name of it. Not a very good title, but that was the way it came to me," she added softly, and her voice trailed away into silence.
The darkness increased suddenly, and the firelight made a lake of colour on the hearthrug, the only colour left in the room.
"Well," Wick asked hoarsely, "did John Murray publish it?"