"It's not true. I'm ten years old. Can't I open my own letters from my own Grandmother? She's my only friend in the world. It's not true."
"Have a care what you say, young miss, have a care. There is another little friend for you in the drawing-room. You shall be introduced at once."
I followed him upstairs, rabbit-like, not knowing what to expect. He locked the door. "Here is the Little Friend," he said, fetching from a corner a ribbed yellow cane. He gave me a cruel thrashing, clawing my left shoulder and whirling me round and round. The room was enormous; a spacious thrashing place. He hurt me as much as Aunt Jael on a field-day with the ship's rope, but I bawled less; no pain could draw from me the shrieks I knew he longed to hear.
Never more than four or five days passed without his thrashing me. I could review impartially the modes and methods of the two tyrants I knew: Aunt Jael with her stout thorned stick, Uncle Simeon with his lithe ribbed cane. Aunt Jael dealt hard brutal blows, Uncle Simeon sly mean strokes. She hit and banged and bruised. He swished and stung and cut. Hers was the Thud and his the Whirr. Both of them would have been prosecuted nowadays; there was no N.S.P.C.C. then to violate the sacred right of the individual to maltreat his human chattels. Both Great-Aunt and Uncle always left me bruised, and sometimes-bleeding. Yet of the two I dreaded his canings more; because he seemed so much the viler. Not that the dust of the Torribridge beatings formed as it were a halo round the Tawborough ones, not that Aunt Jael's grim masterpieces were becoming a winsome memory, not that a safe distance lent any enchantment to my mental view of her strong right arm. But with a child's instinctive perspicuity, I felt, though I could not have put my feelings into words, that there was some notion with my Great-Aunt beyond mere brutality; some sense of duty, of loyalty to her own Draconian creed. Her Proverbs counselled her thus. Chasten thy son while there is hope, and let not thy soul spare for his crying—little she spared for mine;—I found it needed loud houseful of crying for briefest moment of sparing. He that spareth his rod hateth his son, but he that loveth him chasteneth him betimes—then indeed was her love for me exceeding great, out-measuring far the love of Paris for Helen for whose sake terrific war was made and Ilion's plains shook with thunder of armed hosts and Troy town fell, or King Solomon's for his Beloved in the garden of lilies and pomegranates. She thought she was doing her duty.
I knew that Uncle Simeon had no such excuse, and that he was something much worse than Aunt Jael: a coward. He was craven, creeping, caddish. He liked to flog me because I was weak and small and defenceless. His pale face sweated, his eyes lit up with a loathsome triumph, his lips were wet with joy. His cold clammy hands—like wet claws—gripped my shoulder. As evil breeds always evil, his hate bred hate in me: a physical, unhealthy hate I feel to this day, though he is long since gone to his judgment.
I had no friend, no affection, to protect me from this creature or compensate me for his presence. Aunt Martha, in whom her mother's gentleness ran to feebleness, was sometimes petulant, often kind (if she dared), and always null. With Albert, except on walks, I had little to do. Sometimes he bullied me, or spat or cursed at me, when there was nobody about. At times he was bearable, because too idle to be anything else. I missed my Grandmother terribly, whom I saw through this dark atmosphere as a very angel of kindness.
Life was even now more monotonous than at Bear Lawn, except for the daily walks: there were no changes, no variety, no visitors. Once indeed Mr. Nicodemus Shufflebottom, who had been ministering on Lord's Day to the Torribridge Exclusive Saints, and had missed the last conveyance back to Tawborough, was reluctantly put up for the night by Uncle Simeon. The ill-concealed tortures the latter endured at beholding the egg and bacon Aunt Martha had the temerity to put before Mr. Nicodemus for his breakfast, was a delight that stands fresh in my memory today.
On Sundays the week's monotony was hardly broken by the Meeting, a dull funereal affair, with none of the godly enthusiasm of our Great Meeting. Some ten dull or consumptive-looking creatures attended. Uncle Simeon was the one High Priest: he did fifty per cent of the praying, seventy-five per cent of the exposition, chose and called out almost all the hymns, and always took and "apportioned" the offertory. Nobody else counted for anything. I can just recall one Brother Atonement Gelder, who sniffled richly throughout the service in away that reminded me of oysters. I see, vaguely, a Brother Berry; and, more vaguely, a Brother Smith. They are shadows; the Meeting never filled a place in my life as at Tawborough. I remember more clearly Uncle Simeon's long sticky half-whispered supplications to the Lord, and one particular hymn we droned out every Lord's Day:
Come to the ark! come to the ark!
Oh come, oh come away!
The pestilence walks forth by night
The arrow flies by day.