“I don’t know anything about your not approving, and as for papa—well at least he can tell me himself what he thinks. But as for Aunt Phillis—I am sorry if I have grieved her. I would not have done so if I could have helped it, but I don’t see that I could. It isn’t my fault that she is going to marry a vulgar, purse-proud old snob, who had already begun to cast up to me, yes, actually to cast up to me, the daughter of Colonel St Quentin of Coombesthorpe, what his wife-to-be had done for me and spent on me as if I were a charity-child! And that touches on the point of the whole. I am grateful to poor auntie for all her love and care,” and here the young, excited voice quivered a little, “but I don’t see that I need to be grateful to her for what you may call substantial things—she didn’t need to give me a home, as you say, or to spend her money on me—and a good deal of what was spent was my own money, or at least papa’s, which is the same thing; she has told me so herself. I had my own home, just as you and Ermine have—I am papa’s daughter just as much as you two are, even though we hadn’t the same mother. Do you think now—in the name of common-sense—do you see that I should be grateful for being taken away from my own proper home, such a home as this—for no reason at all that I can see except that auntie herself wished it.”
Madelene’s face looked unspeakably pained.
“It was your own mother’s wish,” she said, in a low voice.
“So I have been told—but—do you think dead people’s wishes should be allowed to affect the welfare of the living to such an extent?” asked the child in her sharp downright fashion. “For I don’t. Still that’s not the point—it was done and we’ll take it for granted it was done for the best. But now it was coming to an end—old Burton wasn’t going to have any trouble about me—he’s never been asked and never will be to spend a penny upon me, except once when he paid a fly for me and quarrelled with the driver, and on my last birthday when he gave me a very shabby prayer-book—sham ivory backs, you know, the kind that splits off—and it was auntie’s own doing, so I don’t see that I could have been expected to put up with his rudeness.”
“Had you done anything to irritate him?” asked Madelene.
Ella opened her eyes in surprise.
“Oh dear, yes,” she said, “heaps of things. I don’t suppose I ever did anything but irritate him. My very existence, at least my presence, in auntie’s household irritated him. I understand it all now,” she went on, speaking more and more naturally with the interest of the subject. “Don’t you see he didn’t know anything about us when he first made auntie’s acquaintance and began to think she’d just suit him for a wife, and he thought I was a homeless orphan, a poor dependent, and that he’d have to take me too. It was rather irritating, I’ll allow,” she continued, smiling to herself a little, “for he saw we’d never get on, and if he’d only been a little nicer when he found I wasn’t in his way, after all, we might have ‘parted friendly,’ as servants say. But he was thoroughly put out by me—I couldn’t help trying to annoy him. And last night it came to a sort of crisis—he said I was impertinent and other things he had no business to say to papa’s daughter, who is no relation of his, and at last he told auntie, poor auntie, that she must choose between him and me.”
“And what did Mrs Robertson say?” asked Madelene.
“She didn’t say much. Indeed I didn’t give her any opportunity. She had a headache this morning, no wonder, and didn’t come down. So I just packed up a few things and told the servants to say I’d gone out, and I went to the railway and—came off here. Naturally I came here,” she repeated, her tone acquiring again a shade of defiance, in reality the veil of some unacknowledged misgiving.
Madelene did not at once reply. She sat there, her eyes gazing out of the window before her, in what Ella thought a very aggravating way.