She remembered him in the clothes of his office, shabby and ill-cut, going doggedly about the duties which in later years she knew had been uncongenial.
Half reluctantly Anne took up the book again.
“I said that nothing ever happened to me. But one lovely thing happened last year. I went to stay at Dymfield, with Mr. and Mrs. Burbage. Mr. Burbage was some relation to my mother—a cousin, I think. Anyhow they wrote to father, and asked him to let me come. Their house is called Fairholme Court, and it is a lovely house, only the furniture is ugly (except upstairs in some of the bedrooms, where Mrs. Burbage can’t see it). Mrs. Burbage is very funny. She was kind to me, and I liked her rather, but not nearly so much as Mr. Burbage. I liked him better than any one I ever saw, though he doesn’t talk much, but reads all day long. Perhaps that’s what makes his eyes look so tired and sad. He has a lovely study full of books, and he let me read anything I liked. It was there that I read about Charlotte and Emily and Anne Brontë. They are very interesting, but I wish Emily had been called Anne, like me, instead of the youngest one. I like Emily best. And I read Hans Andersen too, and when I came away Mr. Burbage gave it to me. It is the loveliest book in the world. My favourite story is ‘The Little Sea Maid.’ Some day when I am grown up, I will go to places where there are orange trees, and marble palaces, and the sea is quite blue.
“My bedroom was so pretty. It was like a room in a fairy-tale. There was furniture with spindly legs in it; the kind of furniture Mrs. Burbage said was ugly and old-fashioned. But I thought it was very pretty. There were white curtains to the bed, and the wall-paper had pink rosebuds on it, and the window was like a little door with lots of tiny panes, and it pushed outwards. There was clematis all round the window, and white roses which tried to grow into the room. In the morning I used to hear the birds chirping in their nests, and then I used to jump out of bed, and see the sun rising over the fields. And the garden was all shining with dew, and everything look enchanted.
“I was there a month, while Miss Atkins was away for her holiday, and I was too happy. But now I shall never go there again, because father has had a quarrel with Mr. Burbage. It was something about me, I think.”
Her eyes still fixed on the round handwriting, Anne’s memory was working.
Years later she knew that her old friend had once loved her mother, his cousin and playfellow. At her father’s death she had found, on going through his papers, the letter in which he had offered to provide for the child of the woman who would not be his wife. It was a letter full of tact and delicate feeling, but it indicated how much of the little girl’s loneliness he knew and understood.
He pointed out that companions of her own age were necessary for the happy development of her temperament. He wanted to educate her with some neighbour’s children, so that she might live at Fairholme Court, in the country which she loved. She was not strong, he declared, and London air obviously did not suit her. There would of course be no attempt to separate her from her father. She could return to him during the holidays, whenever he wished to see her.
It was a letter written from full knowledge of the circumstances.
He knew the atmosphere of struggling poverty in which Anne, as the daughter of a curate with an income of little more than a hundred a year, passed her existence. He knew also that the man had little tenderness for his daughter, and he hoped that his suggestion might come as a relief.