But Jane was mistaken. Such was not Mrs. Carpenter’s intention. She had come to America on receiving her sister’s telegram partly out of deference to her mother’s memory, partly to consult her lawyers, and partly for the purpose of putting Jane in a fashionable American boarding school. The sadness in Jane’s memory long connected with those days has little to do with her grandmother’s funeral, but is the lasting indelible impression of the discovery she made then, that her mother did not like her.
Mrs. Carpenter came out with her ideas for her daughter abruptly on the evening of her arrival. She had no idea that her daughter adored her. Jane’s letters beginning “My darling Mummy” and ending “Your loving daughter” had conveyed to her nothing of the writer’s emotion. No doubt they bored her, and no doubt she supposed that they bored the child who was obliged to write them. It would probably have seemed to her incredible that a little girl who scarcely ever saw her should go on wanting her for ten years from a distance of a couple of thousand miles. If she justified herself to herself at all, I suppose she made use of this argument: “Well, if I don’t care for her because she is so dreadfully her father’s daughter, then that proves that I am too different for her ever to care for me. The best thing for us both is to leave her with people who won’t let her get on their nerves as she would on mine.”
Mrs. Carpenter was not subtle, and she hated wasting time, so she opened the subject at once sitting with Patience in the back parlour, her slim silk-stockinged legs crossed easily, one smart foot dangling, her modish head tilted back above the trim cravat of black crêpe and white tulle that her French maid had fabricated for her during the crossing, and a jewelled hand playing with Jane’s long pigtail. Her sister Patience sat opposite her at her table, her head in her hands, her bony fingers poked up among her meagre locks, and Jane took in that evening with a kind of anguish of loyalty the contrast between the two women. It seemed to her somehow very pitiful that her Aunt Patty should be so ugly when her mother was so beautiful. With a childish absence of any vestige of a sense of humour, she felt at one moment ashamed for her aunt and almost angry with her mother, and then ashamed for her mother and angry with her aunt.
“I wanted to tell you, Patty, that I think it would be a good thing now for this big gawk of a girl to go to a finishing school in New York. You’ll probably be giving up this house soon, and I don’t want her with me yet awhile.”
Jane in talking to me of this moment said that she felt as if her mother’s hand that was playing affectionately with her hair an instant before had suddenly picked up a hammer and hit her on the head. For an interval everything was blurred and dark in the room, with sparks that seemed to be shooting out of her brain. It was her Aunt Patty’s face that brought her back to her senses. It was a suffering, angry face, and presently she heard Patience say—“I am not going to give up this house, but I think you ought to take Jane to live with you. She wants to go, and she’s right. You are her mother.”
But Izzy paid no attention to her older sister.
“That’s nonsense! Paris is no place for a girl of her age. What in the world should I do with her? She’d be dreadfully in the way. Besides she must learn how to walk and manage her hands before I show her to people.”
The thing was done. Jane knew. She knew that her mother did not like her and never had liked her, and she knew somehow that her mother did not like her because she was ugly and reminded her of her father Silas Carpenter. She knew too that her Aunt Patty had always known this, and that her aunt loved her as her mother never would love her, and that the mottled flush on her grim face was due in part to anger and in part to the fear of losing her. She understood that her aunt had determined to help her to attain her heart’s desire, even at the price of losing herself the one thing more precious to her than anything in the world. She dared not look at her mother and she could not speak, and still she waited though incapable now of taking in the meaning of their voices. She heard vaguely her aunt saying something about making enough money by her lectures and publications to keep the house going, but paid no attention. A question addressed directly to herself by her mother at last roused her.
“Well, Jane, what do you say? Would you rather stay here alone with your Aunt Patty than go to boarding school with a lot of jolly girls of your own age?”