"My own Dearest.
I was so very glad to get your letter and I know you are looking forward to have one from me but I am so sorry Dearest you have had such a bad cold. My Dear I hope to sit on your knees and have my arm around your neck some day. I do love you you are my only sweetheart now and I hope I am only yours. Many thanks for sending me your photo which I should be very sorry to part with it. It makes me feel delighted as I am looking forward to be in your Dear arms some day. I am waiting for the time to pass so we shall be together for ever. I sit by the fire cold nights and have my thoughts in you my Dearest. I knit lace when I have no sewing to do. It was very miserable last Sunday but I went to church in the evening but I much rather would like to have been with you. I wish I could reach you to give you a nice kiss. I am always dreaming about you my Love and it is such miserable weather now I will stop in haste with my best love and kisses to my Dear Boy from your loving and true Minnie."
There was a fat bundle of such letters, written by the same illiterate hand nearly fifty years before, and the foolish old man had kept the rubbish, which had no doubt a sort of wild-flower fragrance once, and had left them at his death. Minnie was evidently a servant girl, hardly Miss Fitzalan of the amazing story, and if the young Weevil of those days had meant it, and had not been indulging in a little back-stairs flirtation, his birth was more humble than Boodles had supposed. He must have meant it, she reasoned, or he would hardly have kept that sentimental rubbish all his life.
Another drawer came open, and the child breathed quickly. It was filled with a parcel of books, and a label upon the topmost one bore the word "Boodles." The truth was in that secret drawer, there could be no romancing there, the question of her birth was to be settled once and for all, she could read it in those books, then go and tell Mr. Bellamie who she was. The girl's sad eyes softened when she perceived that the heap of diaries was well thumbed. She did not know that the old man had often read himself to sleep with one of them.
The straw, by which she had been, mentally at least, supporting herself since Weevil's death, was quickly snatched away. She saw then, what Mr. Bellamie had seen at once, how that the simple old creature had sought to secure her happiness with lies. The story of the diaries told her little more. It was true she was a bastard; that she had been wrapped in fern, and placed in the porch of the cottage, with a label round her neck like a parcel from the grocer's; that the old man had known as much about her parents as she knew herself. "She cannot be a commoner's child," was written in one of the diaries. "I think she must be the daughter of some domestic servant and a man of gentle birth. She would not be what she is had her father been a labourer or a farmer."
Then followed a list of the girls whom Weevil had suspected; but that was of no interest to Boodles. The old man had nursed her himself. There was a little book, Hints to Mothers, in the pile, and at the bottom of the drawer was a scrap of the fern in which she had been wrapped, and the horrible label which had been round her baby neck. She gazed, dry-eyed and fascinated, forgetting her loneliness, her sorrow, forgetting everything except that one overmastering thing, the awful injury which had been done to her innocent little self. Now that she knew the truth she would face it. The wind was playing a funeral march just then.
"I am an illegitimate child," said Boodles. She stepped before the glass, uncovered it, screamed because she thought she had seen that grotesque old face which servant girl Minnie had longed to kiss fifty years back, recovered herself, and looked. "He said I should be perfect if I had a name," she muttered. She was getting a fierce little tiger-cat, and beginning to show her pretty teeth. "Why am I not a humpback, or diseased in some way, or hideous, if I am an illegitimate child? I am as good as any girl. People in Tavistock turn to look at me, and I know they say: 'What a pretty girl!' Am I to say to every one: 'I am an illegitimate child, and therefore I am as black as the devil himself?' Why is a girl as black as the devil just because no clergyman has jabbered some rubbish at her parents? Oh, Boodles, you pretty love-child, don't stand it," she cried.
She flung the towel over the glass, turned to the window, and cast it open to receive the wind. "I am not frightened now. I am wild. Let us have the coronation march, and let me go by while they shout at me, 'bastard.' What have I done? I know that the sins of the parents are visited upon the children, but why should the children stand it? Must they, poor little fools? They must endure disease, but not dishonour. I am not going to stand it. I would go into God's presence, and clench my fists, and say I will not stand it. He allowed me to be born. If matrimony is what people say it is, a sort of sacrament, how is it that children can be born without it?"
The wind rushed into the room so violently that she had to shut the window. The lamp-flames were leaping up the glasses. A different tune began and made the tortured little girl less fierce.