The door of the bright, pretty bedchamber closed upon Mildred, and Fay went back to the schoolroom heavy of heart, to enjoy the privilege of sitting up by herself till half-past nine, a privilege conceded to superior years. In that dismal hour and a half the girl had leisure to contemplate the solitude of her friendless life. Take Mildred from her, and she had no one—nothing. Mr. Fausset had meant to be kind to her, perhaps. He had talked very kindly to her in the long drive from Streatham. He had promised her a home and the love of kindred; but evil influences had come in his way, and he had given her—Bell. Perhaps she was of a jealous, exacting disposition; for, fondly as she loved Mildred, she could not help comparing Mildred’s lot with her own: Mildred’s bright, airy room and flower-decked windows, looking over the tree-tops in the Park, with her dingy cell opening upon a forest of chimneys, and tainted with odours of stables and kitchen; Mildred’s butterfly frocks of lace and muslin, with the substantial ugliness of her own attire; Mildred’s manifold possessions—trinkets, toys, books, games, pictures, and flowers—with her empty dressing-table and unadorned walls.
“At your age white frocks would be ridiculous,” said Bell; yet Fay saw other girls of her age flaunting in white muslin all that summer through.
Sometimes the footman forgot to bring her lamp, and she would sit in the schoolroom window, looking down into the street, and watching the carriages roll by in endless procession, with their lamps flaming in the pale gray night, carrying their freight to balls and parties, hurrying from pleasure to pleasure on swift-revolving wheels. A melancholy hour this for the longing heart of youth, even when the schoolgirl’s future participation in all these pleasures is a certainty, or contingent only upon life; but what was it for this girl, who had all girlhood’s yearnings for pleasure and excitement, and who knew not if that sparkling draught would ever touch her lips, who felt herself an alien in this fine house, a stranger at this fashionable end of the town? It was no new thing for her to sit alone in the twilight, a prey to melancholy thoughts. Ever since she could remember, her life had been solitary and loveless. The home ties and tender associations which sweeten other lives were unknown to her. She had never known what love meant till she felt Mildred’s warm arms clinging round her neck, and Mildred’s soft cheek pressed against hers. Her life had been a shifting scene peopled with strangers. Dim and misty memories of childhood’s earliest dawn conjured up a cottage-garden on a windy hill; the sea stretching far away in the distance, bright and blue, but unattainable; a patch of grass on one side, a patch of potatoes on the other; a bed of wallflowers and stocks and yellow marigolds in front of the parlour window; a family of hens and an arrogant cock strutting in the foreground; and, standing out sharply against the sky and the sea, a tall column surmounted by a statue.
How she had longed to get nearer that vast expanse of water, to find out what the sea was like! From some points in the view it seemed so near, almost as if she could touch it with her outstretched hands; from other points it looked so far away. She used to stand on a bank behind the cottage and watch the white-sailed boats going out to sea, and the steamers with their trailing smoke melting and vanishing on the horizon.
“Where do they go?” she asked in her baby French. “Where do they go?”
Those were the first words she remembered speaking, and nobody seemed ever to have answered that eager question.
No one had cared for her in those days. She was very sure of that, looking back upon that monotonous childhood: a long series of empty hours in a cottage garden, and with no companions except the fowls, and no voice except that of the cow in the meadow hard by: a cow which sent forth meaningless bellows occasionally, and which she feared as if it had been a lion.
There was a woman in a white cap whom she called Nounou, and who seemed too busy to care about anybody; a woman who did all the housework, and dug the potato-garden, and looked after the fowls, and milked the cow and made butter, and rode to market on a donkey once or twice a week: a woman who was always in a hurry. There was a man who came home from work at sundown, and there were two boys in blouses and sabots, the youngest of whom was too old to play with the nurse-child. Long summer days in the chalky garden, long hours of listless monotony in front of the wide bright sea, had left a sense of oppression upon Fay’s mind. She did not know even the name of the town she had seen far below the long ridge of chalky hill—a town of tall white houses and domes and spires, which had seemed a vast metropolis to the eyes of infancy. She had but to shut her eyes in her evening solitude, and she could conjure up the picture of roofs and spires, and hill and sea, and the tall column in its railed enclosure; yet she knew no more of town or hill than that they were on the other side of the Channel.
She remembered lying in a narrow little bed, that rocked desperately on a windy day, and looking out at the white sea-foam dashing against a curious oval window, like a giant’s eye; and then she remembered her first wondering experience of railway travelling; a train flashing past green fields and hop-gardens and houses; and then darkness and the jolting of a cab; and after that being carried half-asleep into a strange house, and waking to find herself in a strange room, all very clean and neat, with a white-curtained bed and white muslin window-curtains, and on looking out of the window, behold, there was a patch of common all abloom with yellow gorse.
She remembered dimly that she had travelled in the charge of a little gray-haired man, who disappeared after the journey. She found herself now in the care of an elderly lady, very prim and strict, but not absolutely unkind; who wore a silk gown, and a gold watch at her waistband, and who talked in an unknown tongue. Everything here was prettier than in Nounou’s house, and there was a better garden, a garden where there were more flowers and no potatoes and there was the common in the front of the garden, all hillocks and hollows, where she was allowed to amuse herself in charge of a ruddy-faced girl in a lavender cotton frock.