“Nothing nice happens nowadays,” he said. “No smuggling, no highwaymen, no pirates; nothing. People go about in top hats.”
“There are burglars still,” said Clare.
“I was much afraid of robbers when I was a child,” said Miss Ross. “When the nurses withdrew, and I was left alone to go to sleep, I became immediately so convinced of the presence of a robber close to me, that I invented a way of softening his heart. I took to saying my prayers aloud. ‘O bless my mother and father,’ I would say, ‘and teach me to live dutifully towards them in word and deed; bless my brothers and sisters, my playmates and friends;’ and then, slightly raising my voice, I would say, ‘and O, bless the thief now in the room.’ I used to think he could not possibly harm me if he heard himself prayed for, and I did not stop here. I would explain to God that I felt he only stole because he hadn’t thought much about it, and that if God blessed him and made him happy, he would give it up. And so my thoughts being distracted by inventing excuses for the robber, my fear would gradually decline, and I would fall asleep.
Raeburn
MISS ROSS
“But I have never found among grown people,” she continued, “a just appreciation of this torture children may undergo in their fear of being alone in the dark. It is better in your days, my dears, I have noticed this. You may have night lights, and your doors are left wide; but in my generation these qualms were all brushed aside.”
“Do go on telling us about when you were little,” said Clare. “There’s hardly any story I like better than when grown-up people will do that.”
“I was not an amusing child,” answered Miss Ross, “and nothing very much happened to me. But I suppose children are the same in all ages, as to what they like and what they think about, and in the manner to them in which life appears. Have you ever looked back at the house you live in from a distance, and caught yourself saying, ‘I must just run back, and find the house without me.’ The instant recognition of its being an impossibility is less real than the impulse itself.
“I used to think, too, if I only could see when my eyes were shut everything would appear different. So I would lie pretending to be asleep, and then suddenly jerk my eyes open, thinking I should catch everything strangely changed. But there invariably was the cupboard and the dressing-table, and all the familiar objects just as they had been. I endowed them with a sense of mockery at my efforts, and of being immeasurably subtler than I. So I would lie quite still, and stealthily lift a lid. But no, they were always the same. This did not convince me they did not move. On the contrary, I would say to myself with a sense of vexed despair, ‘I shall never, never know what things look like when I’m not seeing them.’”