Birds of Prey

by M. E. Braddon

The experiences of Diana Paget are not the experiences which make a pure or perfect woman. There are trials which chasten the heart and elevate the mind; but it is doubtful whether it can be for the welfare of any helpless, childish creature to be familiar with falsehood and chicanery, with debt and dishonour, from the earliest awakening of the intellect; to feel, from the age of six or seven, all the shame of a creature who is always eating food that will not be paid for, and lying on a bed out of which she may be turned at any moment with shrill reproaches and upbraidings; to hear her father abused and vilified by vulgar gossips over a tea-table, and to be reminded every day and every hour that she is an unprofitable encumbrance, a consumer of the bread of other people's children, an intruder in the household of poverty, a child whose heritage is shame and dishonour. These things had hardened the heart of Captain Paget's daughter. There had been no counteracting influence—no fond, foolish loving creature near at hand to save the girl from that perdition into which the child or woman who has never known what it is to be loved is apt to fall. For thirteen years of Diana's life all love and tenderness, endearing words, caressing touches, fond admiring looks, had been utterly unknown to her. To sit in a room with a father who was busy writing letters, and who was wont to knit his brows peevishly if she stirred, or to mutter an oath if she spoke; to be sent to a pawnbroker's in the gloaming with her father's watch, and to be scolded and sworn at on her return if the money-lender had advanced a less sum than was expected on that security—do not compose the most delightful or improving experiences of a home life. But Diana could remember little of a more pleasant character respecting her existence during those brief periods when she was flung back upon her father's hands, and while that gentleman was casting about for some new victim on whom to plant her.

At Hyde Lodge, for the first time, the girl knew what it was to be loved. Bright, impulsive Charlotte Halliday took a fancy to her, as the schoolgirl phrase goes, and clung to her with a fond confiding affection. It may be that the softening influence came too late, or that there was some touch of natural hardness and bitterness in Diana's mind; for it is certain that Charlotte's affection did not soften the girl's heart or lessen her bitter consciousness of the wide difference between her own fortunes and those of the happier daughters whose fathers paid their debts. The very contrast between Charlotte's position and her own may have counteracted the good influence. It was very easy for Charlotte to be generous and amiable. She had never been hounded from pillar to post by shrewish matrons who had no words too bitter for their unprofitable charge. She had never known what it was to rise up in the morning uncertain where she should lie down at night, or whether there would be any shelter at all for her hapless head; for who could tell that her father would be found at the lodging where he had last been heard of, and how should she obtain even workhouse hospitality, whose original parish was unknown to herself or her protector? To Charlotte these shameful experiences would have been as incomprehensible as the most abstruse theories of a metaphysician. Was it any wonder, then, if Charlotte was bright and womanly, and fond and tender—Charlotte, who had never been humiliated by the shabbiness of her clothes, and to whom the daily promenade had never been a shame and a degradation by reason of obvious decay in the heels of her boots?

"If your father would dress you decently, and supply you with proper boots, I could almost bring myself to keep you for nothing," Priscilla had said to her reprobate kinsman's daughter; "but the more one does for that man the less he will do himself; so the long and the short of it is, that you will have to go back to him, for I cannot consent to have such an expensive establishment as mine degraded by the shabbiness of a relation."

Diana had been obliged to listen to such speeches as this very often during her first residence at Hyde Lodge, and then, perhaps, within a few minutes after Priscilla's lecture was concluded, Charlotte Halliday would bound into the room, looking as fresh and bright as the morning, and dressed in silk that rustled with newness and richness. Keenly as Diana felt the difference between her friend's fortune and her own, she did nevertheless in some manner return Charlotte's affection. Her character was not to be altered all at once by this new atmosphere of love and tenderness; but she loved her generous friend and companion after her own fitful fashion, and defended her with passionate indignation if any other girl dared to hint the faintest disparagement of her graces or her virtues. She envied and loved her at the same time. She would accept Charlotte's affection one day with unconcealed pleasure, and revolt against it on the next day as a species of patronage which stung her proud heart to the quick.

"Keep your pity for people who ask you for it," she had exclaimed once to poor bewildered Charlotte; "I am tired of being consoled and petted. Go and talk to your prosperous friends, Miss Halliday; I am sick to death of hearing about your new frocks, and your holidays, and the presents your mamma is always bringing you."

And then when Charlotte looked at her friend with a sad perplexed face, Diana relented, and declared that she was a wicked discontented creature, unworthy of either pity or affection.

"I have had so much misery in my life, that I am very often inclined to quarrel with happy people without rhyme or reason, or only because they are happy," she said in explanation of her impatient temper.

"But who knows what happiness may be waiting for you in the future, Di?" exclaimed Miss Halliday. "You will marry some rich man by-and-by, and forget that you ever knew what poverty was."

"I wonder where the rich man is to come from who will marry Captain Paget's daughter?" Diana asked contemptuously. "Never mind where he comes from; he will come, depend upon it. The handsome young prince with the palace by the Lake of Como will come to fall in love with my beautiful Diana, and then she will go and live at Como; and desert her faithful Charlotte, and live happy ever afterwards."

"Don't talk nonsense, Lotta," cried Miss Paget. "You know what kind of fate lies before me as well as I do. I looked at myself this morning, as I was plaiting my hair before the glass—you know how seldom one gets a turn at the glass in the blue room—and I saw a dark, ugly, evil-minded-looking creature, whose face frightened me. I have been getting wicked and ugly ever since I was a child. An aquiline nose and black eyes will not make a woman a beauty; she wants happiness, and hope, and love, and all manner of things that I have never known, before she can be pretty."