Not of course into an empty room, for Miss Rawlings had many things to think about. She was by far the most important person in the Parish, and everyone—from Archdeacon Tomlington and his two curates, Mr. Moffat and Mr. Timbs, down to little old Mrs. Ort the hump-backed charwoman who lived in the top attic of a cottage down by Clopbourne—or, as they called it, Clobburne—Bridge, everyone knew how practical she was.
But once that sunny beam had begun to steal into Miss Rawlings’s mind and into her life, it had lightened up with its precious gold everything that was there. It was nevertheless a fantastic notion, simply because it could not possibly be true. How could Miss Rawlings ever have lost a little girl if there had never been any little girl to lose? Yet that exactly was Miss Rawlings’s idea. It had flitted into her imagination like a nimble, bright-feathered bird. And once it was really there, she never hesitated to talk about it; not at all.
“My little girl, you know,” she would say with a little emphatic nod and a pleasant smile on her broad face. Or rather, “My little gal”—for she always pronounced the word as if it rhymed with Sal—the short for Sarah. This, too, was an odd thing; for Miss Rawlings had been brought up by her parents with the very best education, and seldom mispronounced even such words as Chloe or Psyche or epitome or misled. And so far as I know—which is not very far—and apart from shall and pal and Hal, there is not a single word of one syllable in our enormous English language that is pronounced like Sal; for Pall Mall, of course, is pronounced Pell Mell. Still, Miss Rawlings did talk about her little girl, and she called her, her little gal.
It never occurred to anybody in the Parish—not even to Mr. Timbs—to compare the Little Gal to a gay little bird or to a beam of sunshine. Mrs. Tomlington said indeed that it was merely a bee in Miss Rawlings’s bonnet. But whether or not, partly because she delighted in bright colours, and partly because, in fashion or out, she had entirely her own taste in dress, there could not be a larger or brighter or flowerier bonnet for any bee to be in. Apart from puce silk and maroon velvet and heliotrope feathers and ribbons and pom-poms and suchlike, Miss Rawlings’s bonnets invariably consisted of handsome spreading flowers—blue-red roses, purple pansies, mauve cineraria—a complete little garden for any bee’s amusement. And this bee sang rather than buzzed in it the whole day long.
You might almost say it had made a new woman of her. Miss Rawlings had always been active and positive and good-humoured and kind. But now her spirits were so much more animated. She went bobbing and floating through the Parish like a balloon. Her interest in everything seemed to have first been multiplied by nine, and then by nine again. And eighty-one times anything is a pretty large quantity. Beggars, gipsies, hawkers, crossing-sweepers, blind men positively smacked their lips when they saw Miss Rawlings come sailing down the street. Her heart was like the Atlantic, and they like row-boats on the deep—especially the blind men. As for her donations to the Parochial Funds, they were first doubled, then trebled, then quadrupled.
There was, first, for example, the Fund for giving all the little parish girls and boys not only a bun and an orange and a tree at Christmas and a picnic with Veal and Ham Pie and Ice Pudding in June, but a Jack-in-the-Green on May-day and a huge Guy on November the 5th, with Squibs and Roman Candles and Chinese Crackers and so on. There was not only the Fund for the Delight of Infants of Every Conceivable Description; there was also the Wooden-Legged Orphans’ Fund. There was the Home for Manx and Tabby Cats; and the Garden by the River with the willows for Widowed Gentlewomen. There was the Threepenny-Bit-with-a-Hole-in-It Society; and the Organ Grinders’ Sick Monkey and Blanket Fund, and there was the oak-beamed Supper Room in “The Three Wild Geese” for the use of Ancient Mariners—haggis and toad-in-the-hole, and plum duff and jam roley-poley. And there were many others. If Miss Rawlings had been born in another parish, it would have been a sad thing indeed for the cats and widows and orphans and organ monkeys in her own.
With such a power and quantity of money, of course, writing cheques was very much like just writing in birthday-books. Still you can give too much to any Fund; though very few people make the attempt. But Miss Rawlings was a practical woman. Besides, Miss Rawlings knew perfectly well that charity must at any rate begin at home, so all this time she was keeping what the Ancient Mariners at the “Three Wild Geese” called a “weather eye” wide open for her lost Little Gal. But how, it may be asked, could she keep any kind of an eye open for a lost Little Gal, when she didn’t know what the lost Little Gal was like? And the answer to that is that Miss Rawlings knew perfectly well.
She may not have known where the absurd notion came from, or when, or why; but she knew that. She knew what the Little Gal looked like as well as a mother thrush knows what an egg looks like; or Sir Christopher Wren knew what a cathedral looks like. But as with the Thrush and Sir Christopher, a good many little things had happened to Miss Rawlings first. And this quite apart from the old wooden doll she used to lug about when she was seven, called Quatta.
One morning, for example, Miss Rawlings had been out in her carriage and was thinking of nothing in particular, just daydreaming, when not very far from the little stone bridge at Clobburne she happened to glance up at a window in the upper parts of a small old house. And at that window there seemed to show a face with dark bright eyes watching her. Just a glimpse. I say seemed, for when in the carriage Miss Rawlings rapidly twisted her head to get a better view, she discovered either that there had been nobody there at all, or that the somebody had swiftly drawn back, or that the bright dark eyes were just too close-together flaws in the diamond-shaped bits of glass. In the last case what Miss Rawlings had seen was mainly “out of her mind.” But if so, it went back again and stayed there. It was excessively odd, indeed, how clear a remembrance that glimpse left behind it.
Then again, Miss Rawlings, like her great-aunt Felicia, had always enjoyed a weakness for taking naps in the train, the flowers and plumes and bows in her bonnet nodding the while above her head. The sound of the wheels on the iron lines was like a lullaby; the fields trailing softly away beyond the window drowsed her eyes. Whether asleep or not, she would generally close her eyes and at least appear to be napping. And not once, or twice, but three separate times, owing to a screech of the whistle or a jolt of the train, she had suddenly opened them again to find herself staring out (rather like a large animal in a field) at a little girl sitting on the opposite seat, who, in turn, had already fixed her eyes on Miss Rawlings’s countenance. In every case there had been a look of intense, patient interest on the little girl’s face.