“And she had better be described as my niece, from, let us say, Oldham. You will buy her clothes to-morrow. Her name is Mary. We will call her Mary Pate.”
“It’s a good name to take risks with,” she warned him.
“Wait till I’ve taught her how to sing.”
“Oh, aye,” she said, with seeming skepticism; but she was not skeptical. She accepted Mary, she believed in her because Walter believed in her and because his belief was so strong that he bestowed on her the name of Pate. That settled, for Mrs. Butterworth, that Mary was remarkable.
Walter himself was doubtful if he was justified in sharing his name with her. It was an honored name in Staith-ley, but when Mary Ellen soared she would cast luster on the name she bore, and he questioned if he were not highhandedly appropriating that luster to his name. But on other grounds, of convenience, of propriety (a singing master had to be circumspect), of cover from the possible quest of bereft parents, he decided she had better be Pate.
Why, it Italianized into Patti! He hadn’t thought of that before, but it seemed a good omen and before he went to bed that night he had planned in full his scheme for the education of a pupil who did not merely come to him for lessons while spending the rest of her time out of his control, but of one who from her uprising to her retiring should be ordered by him to the single end that she should be a great singer.
No one but a bachelor, and a Mrs. Butterworth-spoiled bachelor at that, would have imagined that a system so drastic, and so monastic, would prove workable, but at first Mary Ellen was docile. She had gone without creature comforts for too long not to appreciate them when she had them, and she was docile through her fear of losing them, of being sent back to Jackman’s Buildings or of being dragged back by her parents. Their beat, certainly, was not her beat now, and the almost suburban street in which she had been singing when Walter heard her was well away from the Staithley Beggar’s Mile. But there were always off-chances (such as her own coming there), and perhaps she knew or perhaps she did not know that she was one of those people who can be seen across a wide road by the short-sighted: a quality she had of which there is no particular explanation except that it is one of the Almighty’s conjuring tricks, performed for the ugly as compensation for their ugliness and for the beautiful because to them that hath shall be given.
At any rate, so long as she feared the clutch of her past she subdued her rebelliousness to the discipline of study, and all too soon he was treating her companionably, he was letting her into the secret of the ambition he had for her, he was assuming that because he knew the necessity of a long, arduous training, she would reasonably submit to it.
But her submissiveness to his regimen passed with the passing of her fears. She trusted the disguise of clothes, of the manner she acquired and of speech, which was no longer that of Jackman’s Buildings, to confound the Bradshaws even if she met them face to face and as confidence grew her motive for acquiescence in much that his system implied was weakened. It implied, especially, the secreting of her talent until he deemed it ripe for exhibition, and Mary Ellen grew impatient.
Perhaps he had not clearly stated his ambition or perhaps she had not clearly understood, but while he expected her to be a pupil long after her Staithley days were past, she was not looking beyond Staithley, she was not seeing why work should be continuous now that it had ceased to be a new sensation. She was avid of results and grew sullen at her labor which seemed to lead nowhere but to more labor.