Her power was horrible; she could do it in a momentary look, in a single word; it seemed to be her mission in life, whenever he whitewashed the window of his soul for better privacy, to scratch a hole and look through.
When, for instance, he first experimented in kissing outside the routine of family life, Davidina seemed by instinct to know of it. Secretively, in the presence of their elders, she held him with her eye, pursed her lips, and made the kissing sound; then, before he could compose a countenance suitable to meet the charge, her glance shot off and left him. For Davidina was a sleek adept in giving that flick of the eye which does not wait for the repartee; though on other occasions, when her eye definitely challenged him, there was no bearing it down; it stabbed, it stuck, it went in, and came at his back.
It was in these wordless encounters that she beat him worst; till Mr. Trimblerigg, conscious of his inferiority, went and practised at the glass a gesture which he hoped thereby to make more effective—a lifting of the nose, a slight closing of the eyelids, a polished putting-off of the hands, deprecatory but bland; and a smile to show that he was not hurt. But the first time he used it upon her was also the last.
‘Did you practise that in the glass?’ said Davidina; and the gesture died the death.
Truly at that time of her life he wanted her to die, and slightly damped her shoes on the inside after they had been cleaned, that they might help her to do so. But it was no good; without saying anything, she damped his also, rather more emphatically, so that there could be no mistake; whereas his damping was so delicately done that she ought not to have found it out.
The most afflictive thing about these encounters was his constant failure to score a victory; only once, in the affair of the pocket-money already narrated, had he succeeded in holding his own. Perhaps it was all for the good of his soul; for in matters of finance his sense of probity remained in after years somewhat defective; victory over Davidina in that respect had apparently done him no good. But in other directions she continued to do her best to save his soul; and though he was now committed to the ministry, and was himself to become a soul-saving apparatus, he did not like her way of doing it; temperamentally (and was there ever a character more largely composed of temperament?) he would much rather have gone his own way and been damned, than saved by Davidina on the lines she chose. She stung him like a gad-fly in his weakest spots, till the unerring accuracy of her aim filled him with a superstitious dread; and though never once uttered in words, ‘Thou, Davidina, seest me,’ was the motive force which thus early drove him so deeply and deviously into subterfuge that it became an infection of his blood. And though against her it availed little, in other directions, pricked to it by her incessant skill, he had a quite phenomenal success, and was—up to a point—the nimblest being that ever skipped from cover to open and from open to cover, till, in the development of speed, he ceased to distinguish which was which; and what he told would tell with the most complete conviction that, if it told to his advantage, it must be truth; and then, on occasion, would avail himself of the truth to such dazzling effect that, lost in the blaze of his rectitude, he forgot those other occasions when he had been truer to himself.
Of Davidina’s inspired pin-pricks here is an example, notable for the early date of its delivery, when they were at the respective ages of twelve and eleven. Brother and sister had fallen out in guessing at an event as to which with probability all the other way, Davidina proved to be right. Not believing this to be a guess, ‘You knew!’ he cried indignantly.
‘I didn’t,’ she replied smoothly, ‘I only knew better.’
This was superfluous: it enabled Mr. Trimblerigg to get in with a retort. ‘Even very conceited people,’ he said, ‘do sometimes manage to guess right.’
Davidina recovered her ground. ‘I’m not as conceited as you,’ she replied, ‘I never think myself good.’ It was the sticking-out of her tongue, and adding ‘so there’! which gave the barb to those words.