My Little Sister Part 5

With unloving eyes I watched my mother lift an ugly black spider very gently in a handkerchief, and put the creature out to safety.

But that haggard hop-picker--no, I couldn't understand it.

The hop-picker haunted me.

Then I made a compact with her. For her sake I would contrive, somehow, to give bread to any hungry man or woman who should go by. "And so," I addressed the hop-picker in my thoughts, "though you had no bread for yourself, you will be the means of giving bread to others."

The hop-picker accepted the arrangement. Peace came back.

In the vague pagan fas.h.i.+on of the young I thought, too, that by kind deeds I might pay off my mother's score. Her fears for us somehow prevented her from feeling for other people's children. Something I didn't know about had made her like that.

In my struggle to resolve the discord between a nagging conscience, and my adoration for my mother, I seemed to leave childhood behind.

Still, very dimly, if at all, could I have realised there was any connection between her continued shrinking from our fellow-creatures, and that old nameless fear we used to bar the door against. Yet in one guise or another, Fear still was at the gate. Yesterday the menace of Bettina's illness. To-day a hop-picker, bringing a whiff of the sick world's infection through our windows.

To-morrow?

CHAPTER VII

A SHOCK

When to-morrow came we knew.

We had been using up our capital.

Another year, at this rate, and it would be gone. What was to become of us?

Should we have to sell Duncombe House? I asked.

Only then we heard that Duncombe belonged to Lord Helmstone.

But the rent was low. My mother said "at the worst," we would go on living at Duncombe. Yes, even if we kept only one servant instead of three.

For we would still have the tiny pension granted an officer's widow.

And should we always have the pension?

Yes, as long as she lived.

Not "always" then.

A horrible feeling of helplessness, a sense of the bigness of the world and of our littleness, came down upon me.

We seemed to have almost no relations.

We knew our father had a step-sister, a good deal older than he. We heard that she lived in London and was childless. That was all.

My mother had been an orphan. She never seemed to want to talk about the past. When we were little we took no interest in these things. As we grew older we grew afraid of paining her with questions. In some crisis of house-cleaning a photograph came to the surface. Who was this with the hair rolled high and the pear-shaped earrings? Oh, that was Mrs.

Harborough.

"Aunt Josephine?"

"Well, your father's step-sister."

All hope of better acquaintance with her was dashed by learning that she had opposed our father's marriage, opposed it bitterly.

"She couldn't have known you," Bettina said.

"That I was not known to her was crime enough," my mother answered with unwonted bitterness.

Just as we were made to feel that questions about Aunt Josephine were troubling, I felt now that to inquire into our precise financial condition was to hara.s.s and depress my mother. The condition was bad.

Therefore it was best covered up.

"We shall manage," she said.

I was sixteen when this thunder-bolt descended, and, by that time, I knew that "to manage" was just what my mother, at all events, was quite incapable of doing. We still kept three servants and no accounts.

Lawyers' letters were put away. Out of sight, they seemed to be out of mind. Out of my mother's mind.

I thought constantly about these things.

One day, months later, I blurted out a hope that we should all die together. My mother was horrified.

"But if we don't," I said, "how are we going to live--Bettina and I, without the pension?"

"You will have husbands, I hope, to take care of you."

I went over the grounds for this "hope" with no great confidence.

My mother went alone into the garden.

She came in looking tired and white.

Compunction seized me. I persuaded her to go and lie down. I would bring up her tea-tray. I expected to have to beg and urge. But she went upstairs "quite goodly," as we used to say. She looked back and smiled.

She was still the most beautiful person we knew. But it was a very waxen beauty now. I must learn not to weary her with insoluble riddles. I went into the dining-room to make her tray ready--I liked doing it myself.

Bettina's voice came floating in. She had grown tired of playing proper music. She was singing the nursery rhyme which my mother had set to variations of the tinkling old-world tune:

"_Where are you going to, my pretty maid?_"

I thought how strange and wonderful was the simplest, most ordinary little life. There must always be that question: what is going to become of me? I had long known what was the proper thing to happen. I ought to marry Lord Helmstone's heir. And Bettina should marry a prince.

But Lord Helmstone's heir turned out to be a middle-aged cousin with a family. Lord Helmstone himself had only lately taken to coming to Forest Hall--since the laying out of the golf-course. Still less frequently came my lady. Very smart, with amazing clothes; and some married daughters with babies. There were two daughters unmarried, who seemed to be always abroad or in London. We liked Lord Helmstone; even my mother liked him. But she criticised his "noisy friends." These were the golfers who motored down from London. Broad-shouldered men, in tweeds that made them seem broader still. They would pa.s.s by our garden-wall and look at Bettina. Often when they had pa.s.sed they looked back.

Secretly, I wondered if any of them were those "husbands" who were going to take care of us. Some lodged in the village. The noisiest stayed at the Hall.