CHAPTER VIII
THINGS happened as John and Lady Blount had planned them. Sister Theophila, having satisfied herself that Unity Blake was not a second time being thrown to the wolves—Lady Blount herself undertook the negotiations—surrendered her without many regretful pangs. Unity Blake, fatalistic child of circumstance, surrendered herself without coherent thought. World authorities, vague in their nature, but irresistibly compelling in their force, had governed her life from her earliest years. The possibility of revolt, of assertion of her own individuality, was undreamed of in her narrow philosophy. She had the outlook on life of the slave; not the slave of the mettlesome temperament depicted by the late Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe and the late Mr. Longfellow, but the unaspiring deaf-mute of a barbaric harem. It is true that Lady Blount asked her whether she would like to go away to a nice house by the seaside, and afterward live for ever and ever with the kind gentleman who gave her peppermint bull's-eyes and the kind lady who had visited her one day, bringing her a pair of woollen mittens, and that Unity, after the manner of her class, had said, “Yes, ma'am”; but the consultation of Unity's wishes had been a pure formality. She had no idea of what the seaside meant, having never seen the sea or speculated on its nature. She could form no notion of her future life with the kind lady and gentleman, save perhaps that the pokers of the establishment might have other uses than as instruments of chastisement and that, at any rate, they might be applied cold and not red-hot. If they had taken her up without a word, and put her in an open coffin, and lowered her into an open grave, and left her there, Unity would have made no complaint, having at once no standard whereby to assess the right and wrong done to her, and no tribunal to which she could appeal higher than the vague world authorities above mentioned. The instinctive animal might have clambered out of the pit and wandered about the country-side in search of food and shelter, but that would have been all. The fervent human soul would have played but a small part.
So one day the matron came and dressed her in the parody of attire which she had worn during her lamentable excursion into the world, and men carried her, a creature of no volition, down-stairs, and put her into a cab with Lady Blount, and the two journeyed in a train for an hour or so, Unity lying flat on her back along one side of the carriage, and the lady sitting opposite, reading a magazine. The jolting of the train hurt her, but that was not the lady's fault. Sometimes the lady spoke to her, and she said, “Yes, ma'am,” and, “No, ma'am,” as she had been taught to do at the orphanage; but what the lady was saying she did not very well understand. She grasped, however, the lady's kindness of intention; and now and then the lady, looking up from her magazine, smiled and nodded encouragingly, an unfathomably mysterious proceeding, but curiously comforting. On the opposite side of the compartment was the most beautiful picture she had ever seen—lovely ladies in gorgeous raiment and handsome gentlemen sitting at little lamp-lit tables, eating a meal which chiefly consisted of scarlet birds; and there were other gentlemen, not quite so handsome, hovering about with dishes and bottles of wine; and the pillars of the hall were of pure marble, and the tops of them gold, and the ceiling was golden, too. In the foreground sat a peculiarly lovely lady in a red, low-cut frock, and an entrancingly handsome gentleman, and they were bending over the table and he held a wine-glass in his hand. Below she read the legend, “Supper at the Coliseum Hotel.” She could scarcely keep her eyes off the picture. Lady Blount, noticing her rapt gaze, questioned her, and from her answers it was obvious that it was only the details that attracted her—the lovely ladies, the handsome men, the glitter and colour of the preposterously gaudy scene. The essence of it she did not grasp; her spirit was not transported into the shoddy fairy-land; her imagination was untouched by the potentialities of life which to a mind a little, a very little, more awakened it might, with all its vulgar crudity, have suggested.
After the railway journey she was lifted into another cab, and taken into a big house with wonderfully soft carpets and pictures on the walls. They carried her into a pretty room that looked like a bower of roses,—it had a rose-pattern wall-paper,—and from the window she could see trees and a great rolling expanse of country. She wondered why the place had no streets. They undressed her. A maid-servant, so trim and spruce that she addressed her as “ma'am,” pointed to the heap of poor garments and asked:
“What are we to do with these, my lady?”
“Bury them,” said Lady Blount.
“Ain't I never going out again, ma'am?” Unity inquired humbly.
“Of course, child. But we'll give you some decent clothes,” said Lady Blount.