So the baby hands threw their dice, and as the dice fell the game was played out. Life unfolded itself amid the fog or rain or thwarted sunlight of the staid Tyburnian square, which should have had for tutelary deity some sleepy god, yawning and stretching himself in the centre of its smoky grass plot. Before the opening consciousness, like figures in an enchanted frieze, such phenomena passed as are likely to haunt area railings: The muffin man, tinkling his bell down murky streets and terraces at the uplifting hour of tea-time; the policeman with his bull's-eye lantern, waking the rails to a good-night dance along blank stuccoed walls and shuttered windows; broad hipped Welsh milkwomen in plaid shawls, with shining pails clanking from their wooden yokes; the old blind Dalmatian dog that panted at the corner of the mews and drummed the hot pavement with his tail. Once a year for one blissful month the town baby became a sand baby, building castles, scooping moats with her wooden spade for the tide to crumble (oh, Nelly! there's a tide that knows all our castles are sand); racing with bare-legged chance companions along the purring lips of the treacherous sea. Child of suppressed love and of absolute surrender, she grew up straight, strong and ardent; fair of face, light of foot, and with a pitiful, generous heart that could not wait its time to love, but before the dimpled hands could reach or turn the stiff handle of the hall door, had made to itself friends of the world's wretchedness. The old Garibaldian accordion player, with the twisted leg, learned to look for the little signorina, beautiful as the sun of Naples, which he dreamed of at night in his cellar at Saffron Hill; the ancient mariner with snow-white hair and beard (a terrible case! says the Charity Organization Society) kept a bow of quite especial condescension for Missie's penny at Number Eleven; while it was fine to see with what a sweep of his great red hand to his battered hat old Paddy Crimmin, the drunken Delhi hero, would straighten his racked body of a cold Sunday morning as the little creature, her dark face aglow with newly discovered color against the white road and snow-burdened trees, stopped at his crossing to grope with mittened fingers for the penny, nestling in her pocket next a sixpence which I am sure she begrudged the cold impersonal offertory plate later on.
She possessed her mother's life as a single flame possesses a dark room, creating its light, its color, and its motion. The slave does not always make the tyrant, and to the homely woman who tended her, kissed her limbs fragrant from the bath, twisted her curls round fingers that thrilled with love and worship—who coaxed her from forbidden ways with toys and sweets, and whose voice was never once pitched in even the gentlest accent of authority, Fenella gave her heart in return. All the fairies, it seemed, were at her christening, even to the fairy Gratitude, who, I hear, is not often asked out nowadays.
For her child's sake, and spurred on by love, Mrs. Barbour toiled and schemed incessantly. Far less mercenary of soul than the aristocratic patrons who haggled over extras, inspected cold joints with a questioning eye and wanted their rooms "kept over" while they disported themselves at Homburg or Cannes—naturally credulous in fact, and inclined to believe the best of every one, the woman effected an actual change in her nature and under all her suave manner became distrustful, peremptory, and mercenary. The terms she wrung from the butcher, baker, and grocer before mentioned, with the bait of prompt payment in one hand and the threat of the big stores at Brompton and Bayswater in the other, were, perhaps, as unprecedented as those easy-going family purveyors one and all declared them to be. In bed at night while she should have been sleeping, in church on Sunday when she should have been harkening the sermon, her brain was busy with an endless double entry sum of receipts and outgoings, the profit of which she wrote off, variously, but always under the one heading, something after this fashion: "Fenella Account. To an amber satin eiderdown quilt, same as I saw at Hampton's on Friday; to plum-colored silk stockings such as the lady at the end of No. 6 just now is making no attempt to conceal; item, to a black fox stole and toque—the silver pointed ones are cheaper, but they say the hairs come out; item, to a silver manicure set like Miss Rigby's." And the poor woman, absorbed in her fond calculations, would scribble an imaginary total with one wrinkled, black-gloved finger across the gilt cross of her Book of Common Prayer, to the scandal of her left-hand pew-neighbor, and the no small mystification of Fenella on her right, wondering what mummy was "up to now."
She kept the girl from school until she was twelve years old, making shift with whatever deposit of a church school education stayed in her own head, eked out with the ministrations of various depressing and untrained governesses, and last but not least with lessons from Lady Anne Caslon, whose only fault was that they were necessarily irregular. Lady Anne was the first of two permanent lodgers who, about Fenella's sixth year, made their home at Number Eleven, and, for a number of years, almost lifted Mrs. Barbour's precarious venture to the dignified level of a settled income. The rooms had only just been given up, by "parties" with whom money seemed to be no object, amid indignant tears on the one side and a glow of respectable resolve on the other; but Mrs. Barbour had not yet signified the vacancy through the columns of the Morning Post, while we need hardly add that no window-card ever shocked the susceptibilities of Suffolk Square. I suspect myself that the Lulford connection were anxious to confine the collateral skeleton within limits that could be controlled by them, and kept a furtively watchful eye on the room-letting branch of the family.
Lady Anne appeared on a blustering March morning: a short, middle-aged woman, none the less active because she limped from an old hunting accident, with a long, white, bony face—the face of some great mystic abbess of old days—a distinct prognathous of the lower jaw, and a high, narrow forehead, from which her colorless fair hair was tightly drawn and twisted into an absurd little knob at the nape of the neck. On every feature, movement, and accent was stamped the indefinable cachet of the governing caste. She was wearing a frieze coat and skirt, a man's collar and tie, and a green Alpine hat, carried an ash stick, and was pulling against, rather than leading, a hideous and powerful white bull-terrier, bristlingly intent upon the feline possibilities of successive areas.
She stumped through the vacant floors on her low-heeled shoes, rapped the wainscot as though she rather suspected secret passages, gave a derogatory poke of her ashplant to the feather mattresses, turned on both taps in the bathroom, and concluded her tour with a sudden descent upon the kitchen, where three maids, busy upon a noontide lunch, rose and curtsied awkwardly.
"I'll take 'em," she said abruptly, turning suddenly in the hall upon the aggrieved proprietress. "The rooms will have to be repapered of course—and a hard mattress, and I have my own pictures; oh! and you'll turn those tufty, musty armchair things with ball fringes into some other room, won't you?—like a good soul. Any children? I thought I heard——Down, Rock! Down, sir!"
The bull-terrier, tied to the hall-stand, had lain, whining unhappily, sweating, and wrinkling his pink muzzle, while his mistress roamed up and down stairs. Now he was standing, tense and rigid, growling ominously, at a tiny hand that pushed a biscuit hospitably against his clenched, bared teeth. Lady Anne struck the threatening head aside and lifted the child in her strong arms.
"So this is your little girl? This is Fenella?"
"Yes, m' lady," said Mrs. Barbour, hasty and apologetic in manner for all her secret resentment. "But she's a good, quiet little thing, and I'll see she gives no trouble."