Winefred: A Story of the Chalk Cliffs

by S. Baring-Gould

If Winefred could have said—I am a poor girl, I went about on the seashore collecting pebbles and grinding them, and glad to get a shilling for a good specimen, and my mother peddled tapes and buttons, I have had no more education than could be acquired in a Dame's school—then she would have experienced a sense of relief.

But this she could not do. Her father was a gentleman. She was being polished at his desire, and in fulfilment of her mother's ardent wishes. She was no longer poor, but her mother must ever remain illiterate and excluded from the class into which she, Winefred, was to be introduced. Nor was this all that troubled her. She was in uncertainty as to the actual position of that mother whom she idolised; consequently she was in doubt as to her own.

If her mother had been really married, then Winefred had a perfect right to the name she bore, but it was a mistake for her mother not to carry the same. But if the marriage had been invalid, then she herself was guilty of imposition in assuming a name to which she had no title. In many ways she was sailing under false pretences. Her situation was full of difficulties and productive of embarrassment. To shield her mother, she could not speak of her as her mother; she was constrained to accept the fable that she was her nurse. She was impelled into a course of equivocation and half-truths against which her conscience rebelled.

Were it to leak out that Mrs. Marley actually was her mother, what looks would be exchanged, and how precipitate would be her expulsion from the house! For herself she would not care. But she was aware that her mother's ambition was to see her a lady, and this was a necessary step towards that goal. Were she by her conduct or admissions to forfeit her place there, it would make her mother's heart bitter with disappointment. Moreover, she had been led to believe that she was put with Mrs. Tomkin-Jones at her father's desire, and deep in her heart lay the longing desire that she might be the means at some future time of bringing him and her mother together once more. If that consummation were to be obtained, it could only be through fidelity in carrying out their common desire.

She had tact, and yet was in fear of betraying her ignorance, transferred suddenly as she was from one social element into another. When she did make a blunder it involved an elaborate apology and explanation on the part of Mrs. Tomkin-Jones to such as had witnessed the error, and this wounded her to the quick.

Had she been a cowardly girl she would have written to her mother to say that her position was unendurable and that she must return to her. But she was brave and strong. She knew her mother's heart, and to satisfy the ambition of that heart she was content to remain and suffer.

But it must be added that, although she was subjected to humiliations and to discomforts, there were compensations. She was quick-witted and perceptive enough to see that an opportunity was given her of making her future. Nor was she so unfeminine as not to feel relish in being measured, fitted, and brought up to the fashionable pitch. Nor again so inhuman as not to derive pleasure from being complimented by Mr. Wardroper, the value of whose flatteries she was too inexperienced to estimate. As Winefred sat thus, her mind a prey to many thoughts and her heart to conflicting emotions, she noticed a man sauntering along the side of the square, by the rail, which he tapped with his umbrella handle and rattled as he came along.

Something in his manner attracted her attention, and diverted it from her own affairs. Owing to the intervention of the rails she could not see his face distinctly till he came near, and then only when having inadvertently missed striking one bar, he stepped back to tap it.

At once she leaped to her feet—she had recognised her father—and she ran to the gate, opened it, and awaited him. Mrs. Tomkin-Jones had studied the Bath Gazette, but had not found in it among the fashionable arrivals that of the Governor of Tierra del Fuego, and she had thought that Winefred must have been mistaken when she caught a passing glimpse of a gentleman and took him to be her father.

Now there could be no doubt as to the identity.