I would think of Mrs. Cheese's friend, poor old Robinson Crewjoe. I invented many desert islands of my own on which I was duly shipwrecked, was for ever drawing new maps of them, showing streams, creeks, bays and hills, position of my principal residence, summer bower, landing-spot of savages, position of wreck, etc., etc. I devised walks, expeditions, explorations; I varied my menu with a feminine skill unknown to old Robinson; and always, as befitted our morally-minded race, I would do good in my islands. I would justify my joy by works. I would convert the savages, and build a Meeting Room of clay and wattles. I would raid their Great God Benamuckee in his mountain fastness, burn him with ceremonial state, and thus atone for my own memorable blasphemy. But the chief joy, alas, of my twenty years' sojourning was never so much in what I did as in announcing to the world that I had done it; not in the good I wrought, but in the praise I should earn. Those twenty years of playing the shipwrecked sea-woman must be lit up by the glare of fame with which I should burst upon the world when at last some well-timed passing schooner restored me to the world. Horrible thought: suppose I, died there? It was not, for the moment, the idea of death that chilled me—for He chills everywhere—but the thought of the glory I should lose by dying before my adventures had astonished the world. And the sex trouble again. Would trousers (if I wore them) however masculine, however bifurcative, enable me to build huts, to shoot, fish, hunt and to fight savages as well as a man? My inability to do these manly things, however, deterred me little in my dreams. The castle-in-the-air-builder may build beyond her bricks.
At this time Uncle Simeon was naturally my most frequent actor. I fashioned a dozen different things I should discover about him and his attic, and a dozen different ways I should discover them. Sweetest of all were visions of revenge. He was a papist in disguise; I had him handed over to a kind of Protestant Holy Office, set up for his own peculiar benefit, of which I was Grand Inquisitress; I was not stingy with my bolts and nuts and prongs and screws; my soul spared not for his crying. A great pitched battle between Aunt Jael and Uncle Simeon was my pièce de résistance. Their hatred for each other was the fiery basis of the vision, my hatred for both of them the fuel. He would swish and she would bang. I let both of them be hurt, while I grudged to each of them the joy of hurting. If anybody won the battle it would be Aunt Jael; for my hatred of her was comparatively a mild thing, a healthy human thing, just as she was a healthy, cruel, humanly bad old woman, a mere wild beast in comparison to this Greeber reptile. I preferred a long long struggle of evenly matched sneers, retorts, cuts and blows, which went on hour after hour until both were bleeding, bruised and utterly exhausted: grimmest of drawn battles. Then I would step in as lofty mediator with the blessed aureole of peace-maker about my head, the pain and weakening of both my enemies for reward. (The same dream the Third Napoleon dreamt a few years later with Austria and Prussia in the rôles of Uncle Simeon and Aunt Jael: rudely shattered, was it not, by that swift Sadowa? But the Saviour of Society could not work his dream figures at will.)
In most of my picturings either I was alone, or dealing with enemies, some of whom, like Eternity, got the better of me, and others, like Uncle Simeon and Aunt Jael, over whom I triumphed. I shared no castle with a friend. A friend! Aunt Martha, Albert, Uncle Simeon?—I saw no one else. No visitor ever came to the house.
I was astonished therefore when the portents announced one. One afternoon I heard a noise of shifting in one of the unoccupied bedrooms. I looked in, and saw all the disarray of cleaning, with Aunt Martha and the charwoman, Miss Woe, getting the room into order. Was it merely an autumn spring-cleaning, or was somebody coming to stay? I peeped in again next morning. There were clean sheets, the bed was turned down, there was water in the ewer. Grandmother or Aunt Jael? No; I heard from Tawborough every week. Prolonged visit of Mr. Nicodemus Shufflebottom? No: it would wring Uncle Simeon's heart to revive the possibility of that nightmare breakfast of egg and bacon Aunt Martha had dared to put before him. After the day's walk, I looked in at the bedroom again on my way down to tea. Oh mystery, there was a long black trunk, studded with brass nails and bearing in new white paint the superscription: R.P.G. A small cap and overcoat thrown on the bed revealed the age and sex of the new comer. I went down to the dining-room, and found him seated at the tea-table.
"Master Robert," said Uncle Simeon; introducing us in the honeyed voice he used before you knew him, "this is Mary. You may come forward, little one. This is Master Robert."
Handshake was followed by the furtive silence during which children stare at each other while vainly pretending to look elsewhere. Master Robert being the shyer, pretended more than he stared: I, being even more curious than shy, stared more than I pretended. I saw a healthy boy's face with big brown eyes, a head of chestnut coloured hair and a brown velvet suit, the last very impressive. I guessed he was about my own age, though he was taller and bigger. All through tea I stared at him with merest snatches of polite pretence. This was the first time I had ever sat at the same table with any boy, except Albert. The latter did not appear to share his father's obsequious delight in the new-comer, over whom Uncle Simeon sat fawning.
I know now that he was a handsome little boy, but doubt if I thought so then. If I did, I was too jealous to admit it to myself. I felt I was an odd drab little object by the side of this healthy, well-dressed and superior being, as far above me as I above Susan Durgles. His rich velvet suit, my old grey merino; his laughing, tan-coloured face and brown happy eyes; my pinched white face and cat-green eyes: he was something better and richer and finer and happier than I was, and I did not like him. Little girls, they say, are never never jealous of little boys' good looks, and the only people whose looks they envy are the other little girls with whom they are competing for the favour of the good-looking little boys. It may be so. I was pitiably ignorant of the proper sentiments. My world was divided not into sexes but into two classes divided far more deeply: myself and other people. The second class was mostly cruel and unkind, so every new-comer was suspect. Master Robert's fine poise, his colour, his health, the curve of his mouth, the velvet suit (I could not take my eyes from it, what wealth, what prestige, it betokened!) were all against him, and more so the favour with which he was regarded by Uncle Simeon. He was shy; I could stare him out easily. I fell to wondering who he was and why he was here.
Robert Grove was the younger brother of Aunt Martha's old pupil (who had died some years back) and the orphan heir to a fine house and estate the other side of Tiverton. Nearly all his relatives were dead except a bachelor uncle, Vivian Grove, Esquire, with whom he lived at the latter's house near Exeter. Uncle Vivian was travelling abroad for a few months and had put Robert here in his absence. Aunt Martha was known to and respected by Mr. Grove as the old governess of his elder nephew, though if he had known the kind of house she lived in now he would have hardly sent Master Robert there with so light a heart. The arrangements must have been made through friends or by correspondence, as Mr. Grove never entered our house and Aunt Martha never went away to see him.