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The Beth Book

by Sarah Grand · English · Gutenberg #28088 · 1,380,419 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The Beth Book

Author: Sarah Grand


        
Release date: February 15, 2009 [eBook #28088]

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/28088

Credits: E-text prepared by Jen Haines, Suzanne Shell, and the Project Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE BETH BOOK ***


E-text prepared by Jen Haines, Suzanne Shell, and the Project Gutenberg
Online Distributed Proofreading Team (http://www.pgdp.net)



THE BETH BOOK

Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure
A Woman of Genius

by

SARAH GRAND







IAGO.     Come, hold your peace.

EMILIA.  'Twill out, 'twill out:--I hold my peace, Sir? no;
   I'll be in speaking, liberal as the air:
   Let heaven, and men, and devils, let them all
   All, all, cry shame against me, yet I'll speak.
                               SHAKESPEARE


New York:
D. Appleton
1897.


     "_I cannot gather the sunbeams out of the east, or I
     would make them tell you what I have seen; but read this
     and interpret this, and let us remember together. I
     cannot gather the gloom out of the night sky, or I would
     make that tell you what I have seen; but read this and
     interpret this, and let us feel together. And if you have
     not that within you which I can summon to my aid, if you
     have not the sun in your spirit and the passion in your
     heart which my words may awaken, though they be
     indistinct and swift, leave me, for I will give you no
     patient mockery, no labouring insults of that glorious
     Nature whose I am and whom I serve._"--RUSKIN.


     "_The men who come on the stage at one period are all
     found to be related to one another. Certain ideas are in
     the air. We are all impressionable, for we are made of
     them; all impressionable, but some more than others, and
     these first express them. This explains the curious
     temporaneousness of inventions and discoveries. The truth
     is in the air, and the most impressionable brain will
     announce it first, but all will announce it a few minutes
     later. So women, as most susceptible, are the best index
     of the coming hour._"--EMERSON.




CHAPTER I


The day preceding Beth's birth was a grey day, a serene grey day, awesome
with a certain solemnity, and singularly significant to those who seek a
sign. There is a quiet mood, an inner calm, to which a grey day adds
peculiar solace. It is like the relief which follows after tears, when
hope begins to revive, and the warm blood throbs rebelliously to be free
of the shackles of grief; a certain heaviness still lingers, but only as
a luxurious languor which is a pleasure in itself. In other moods,
however, in pain, in doubt, in suspense, the grey day deepens the
depression of the spirits, and also adds to the sense of physical
discomfort. Mrs. Caldwell, looking up at noon from the stocking she was
mending, and seeing only a slender strip of level gloom above the houses
opposite, suddenly experienced a mingled feeling of chilliness and
dread, and longed for a fire, although the month was June. She could not
afford fires at that time of year, yet she thought how nice it would be
to have one, and the more she thought of it the more chilly she felt. A
little comfort of the kind would have meant so much to her that morning.
She would like to have felt it right to put away the mending, sit by a
good blaze with a book, and absorb herself in somebody else's thoughts,
for her own were far from cheerful. She was weak and ill and anxious,
the mother of six children already, and about to produce a seventh on an
income that would have been insufficient for four. It was a reckless
thing for a delicate woman to do, but she never thought of that. She
lived in the days when no one thought of the waste of women in this
respect, and they had not begun to think for themselves. What she
suffered she accepted as her "lot," or "The Will of God"--the expression
varied with the nature of the trouble; extreme pain was "The Will of
God," but minor discomforts and worries were her "lot." That much of the
misery was perfectly preventable never occurred to her, and if any one
had suggested such a thing she would have been shocked. The parson in
the pulpit preached endurance; and she understood that anything in the
nature of resistance, any discussion even of social problems, would not
only have been a flying in the face of Providence, but a most indecent
proceeding. She knew that there was crime and disease in the world, but
there were judges and juries to pursue criminals, doctors to deal with
diseases, and the clergy to speak a word in season to all, from the
murderer on the scaffold to the maid who had misconducted herself. There
was nothing eccentric about Mrs. Caldwell; she accepted the world just
as she found it, and was satisfied to know that effects were being dealt
with. Causes she never considered, because she knew nothing about them.

But she was ill at ease that morning, and did think it rather hard
that she should not have had time to recover from her last illness.
She acknowledged to herself that she was very weak, that it was hard
to drag the darning-needle through that worn stocking, and, oh dear!
the holes were so many and so big that week, and there were such
quantities of other things to be done, clothes mended and made for the
children, besides household matters to be seen to generally; why
wasn't she strong? That was the only thing she repined about, poor
woman, her want of physical strength. She would work until she
dropped, however, and mortal man could expect no more of her, she
assured herself with a sigh of satisfaction, in anticipation of the
inevitable event which would lay her by, and so release her from all
immediate responsibility. Worn and weary working mothers, often
uncomplaining victims of the cruelest exactions, toilers whose day's
work is never done, no wonder they welcome even the illness which
enforces rest in bed, the one holiday that is ever allowed them. Mrs.
Caldwell thought again of the fire and the book. She had read a good
deal at one time, and had even been able to play, and sing, and draw,
and paint with a dainty touch; but since her marriage, the many
children, the small means, and the failing strength had made all such
pursuits an impossible luxury. The fire and the book--who knows what
they might not have meant, what a benign difference the small
relaxation allowed to the mother at this critical time might not have
made in the temperament of the child? Perhaps, if we could read the
events even of that one day aright, we should find in them the clue to
all that was inexplicable in its subsequent career.

In deciding that she could not afford a fire for herself, Mrs.
Caldwell had glanced round the room, and noticed that the whisky
bottle on the sideboard was all but empty. She got up hastily, and
went into the kitchen.

"I had quite forgotten the whisky," she said to the maid-of-all-work,
who was scraping potatoes at the sink. "Your master will be so put
out if there isn't enough. You must go at once and get some--six
bottles. Bring one with you, and let them send the rest."

The girl turned upon her with a scowl. "And who's to do my dinner?"
she demanded.

"I'll do what I can," Mrs. Caldwell answered. The servant threw the
knife down on the potatoes, and turned from the sink sullenly, wiping
her hands on her apron as she went.

Mrs. Caldwell rolled up her sleeves, and set to work, but awkwardly.
Household work comes naturally to many educated women; they like it,
and they do it well; but Mrs. Caldwell was not one of this kind. She
was not made for labour, but for luxury; her hands and arms, both
delicately beautiful in form and colour, alone showed that. Her whole
air betokened gentle birth and breeding. She looked out of place in
the kitchen, and it was evident that she could only acquit herself
well among the refinements of life. She set to work with a will,
however, for she had the pluck and patience of ten men. She peeled
vegetables, chopped meat, fetched water, carried coals to mend the
fire, did all that had to be done to the best of her ability, although
she had to cling many times to table, or chair, or dresser, to recover
from the exertion, and brace herself for a fresh attempt. When she had
done in the kitchen she went to the dining-room and laid the cloth.
The sulky servant did not hurry back. She had a trick of lingering
long on errands, and when at last she did appear she brought no
whisky.

"They're going to send it," she explained. "They promised to send it
at once."

"But I told you to bring a bottle!" Mrs. Caldwell exclaimed, stamping
her foot imperiously.

The girl walked off to the kitchen, and slammed the door.

Mrs. Caldwell's forehead was puckered with a frown, but she got out
the mending again, and sat down to it in the dining-room with dogged
determination.

Presently there was a step outside. She looked up and listened. The
front door opened. Her worn face brightened; backache and weariness
were forgotten; her husband had come home; and it was as if the clouds
had parted and the sun shone forth.

She looked up brightly to greet him. "You've got your work over early
to-day," she said.

"I have," he answered drily, without looking at her.

The smile froze on her lips. He had come back in an irritable mood. He
went to the sideboard when he had spoken, and poured himself out a
stiff glass of whisky-and-water, which he carried to the window, where
he stood with his back to his wife, looking out. He was a short man,
who made an instant impression of light eyes in a dark face. You would
have looked at him a second time in the street, and thought of him
after he had passed, so striking was the peculiar contrast. His
features were European, but his complexion, and his soft glossy black
hair, curling close and crisp to the head, betrayed a dark drop in
him, probably African. In the West Indies he would certainly have been
set down as a quadroon. There was no record of negro blood in the
family, however, no trace of any ancestor who had lived abroad; and
the three moors' heads with ivory rings through their noses which
appeared in one quarter of the scutcheon were always understood by
later generations to have been a distinction conferred for some
special butchery-business among the Saracens.

Mrs. Caldwell glanced at her husband, as he stood with his back to her
in the window, and then went on with the mending, patiently waiting
till the mood should have passed off, or she should have thought of
something with which to beguile him.

When he had finished the whisky-and-water, he turned and looked at her
with critical disapprobation.

"I wonder why it is when a woman marries she takes no more pains with
herself," he ejaculated. "When I married you, you were one of the
smartest girls I ever saw."

"It would be difficult to be smart just now," she answered.

He made a gesture of impatience. "But why should a woman give up
everything when she marries? You had more accomplishments than most of
them, and now all you do, it seems to me, is the mending."

"The mending must be done," she answered deprecatingly, "and I'm not
very strong. I'm not able to do everything. I would if I could."

There was a wild stampede at this moment. The four elder children had
returned from school, and the two younger ones from a walk with their
nurse, and now burst into the room, in wild spirits, demanding dinner.
It was the first bright moment of the morning for their mother, but
her husband promptly spoilt her pleasure.

"Sit down at table," he roared, "and don't let me hear another word
from any of you. A man comes home to be quiet, and this is the kind of
thing that awaits him!"

The children shrank to their places abashed, while their mother
escaped to the kitchen to hurry the dinner. The form--or farce--of
grace was gone through before the meal commenced. The children ate
greedily, but were obediently silent. All the little confidences and
remarks which it would have been so healthy for them to make, and so
good for their mother to hear, had to be suppressed, and the silence
and constraint made everyone dyspeptic. The dinner consisted of only
one dish, a hash, which Mrs. Caldwell had made because her husband had
liked it so much the last time they had had it. He turned it over on
his plate now, however, ominously, blaming the food for his own want
of appetite. Mrs. Caldwell knew the symptoms, and sighed.

"I can't eat this stuff," he said at last, pushing his plate away from
him.

"There's a pudding coming," his wife replied.

"Oh, a pudding!" he exclaimed. "I know what our puddings are. Why
aren't women taught something sensible? What's the use of all your
accomplishments if you can't cook the simplest dish? What a difference
it would have made to my life if you had been able to make pastry
even."

Mrs. Caldwell thought of the time she had spent on her feet in the
kitchen that morning doing her best, and she also thought how easy it
would have been for him to marry a woman who could cook, if that were
all he wanted; but she had no faint glimmering conception that it was
unreasonable to expect a woman of her class to cook her dinner as well
as eat it. One servant is not expected to do another's work in any
establishment; but a mother on a small income, the most cruelly tried
of women, is too often required to be equal to anything. Mrs. Caldwell
said nothing, however. She belonged to the days when a wife's meek
submission to anything a man chose to say made nagging a pleasant
relaxation for the man, and encouraged him to persevere until he
acquired a peculiar ease in the art, and spoilt the tempers of
everybody about him.

The arrival of the family doctor put an end to the scene. Mrs.
Caldwell told the children to run away, and her husband's countenance
cleared.

"Glad to see you, Gottley," he said. "What will you have?"

"Oh, nothing, thank you. I can't stay a moment. I just looked in to
see how Mrs. Caldwell was getting on."

"Oh, she's all right," her husband answered for her cheerfully. "How
are you all, especially Miss Bessie?"

"Ha! ha!" said the old gentleman, sitting down by the table. "That
reminds me I'm not on good terms with Bessie this morning. I'm generally
careful, you know, but it seems I said something disrespectful about a
Christian brother--a _Christian_ brother, mind you--and I've been had up
before the family tribunal for blasphemy, and condemned to everlasting
punishment. Lord!--But, mark my words," he exclaimed emphatically, "a
time will come when every school-girl will see, what my life is made a
burden to me for seeing now, the absurdity of the whole religious
superstition."

"O doctor!" Mrs. Caldwell cried, "surely you believe in God?"

"God has not revealed Himself to me, madam; I know nothing about Him,"
the old gentleman answered gently.

"Ah, there you know you are wrong, Gottley," Mr. Caldwell chimed in,
and then he proceeded to argue the question. The old doctor, being in
a hurry, said little in reply, and when he had gone Mrs. Caldwell
exclaimed, with wifely tact--

"Well, I think you had the best of that!"

"Well, I think I had, poor old buffer!" her husband answered
complacently, his temper restored. "By the way, I've brought in the
last number of Dickens. Shall I read it to you?"

Her face brightened. "Yes, do," she rejoined. "One moment, till Jane
has done clearing the table. Here's your chair," and she placed the
only easy one in the room for him, in the best light.

These readings were one of the joys of her life. He read to her often,
and read exceedingly well. Books were the bond of union between them,
the prop and stay of their married life. Poor as they were, they
always managed to find money for new ones, which they enjoyed together
in this way. Intellectuality balanced the morbid irritability of the
husband's temperament, and literature made life tolerable to them both
as nothing else could have done. As he read now, his countenance
cleared, and his imaginary cares fell from him; while his wife's very
real ones were forgotten as she listened, and there was a blessed
truce to trouble for a time. Unfortunately, however, as the reading
proceeded, he came to a rasping bit of the story, which began to grate
upon his nerves. The first part had been pleasurably exciting, but
when he found the sensation slipping from him, he thought to stay it
with a stimulant, and went to the sideboard for the purpose. Mrs.
Caldwell's heart sank; the whisky bottle was all but empty.

"Oh, damn it!" he exclaimed, banging it down on the sideboard. "And I
suppose there is none in the house. There never is any in the house.
No one looks after anything. My comfort is never considered. It is
always those damned children."

"Henry!" his wife protested; but she was too ill to defend herself
further.

"What a life for a man," he proceeded; "stuck down in this cursed
hole, without a congenial soul to speak to, in or out of the house."

"That is a cruel thing to say, Henry," she remonstrated with dignity.

"Well, I apologise," he rejoined ungraciously. "But you must confess
that I have some cause to complain."

He was standing behind her as he spoke, and she felt that he eyed her
the while with disapproval of her appearance, and anger at her
condition. She knew the look only too well, poor soul, and her
attitude was deprecating as she sat there gazing up pitifully at the
strip of level greyness above the houses opposite. She said nothing,
however, only rocked herself on her chair, and looked forlornly
miserable; seeing which brought his irritation to a climax. He flung
the book across the room; but even in the act, his countenance
cleared. He was standing in the window, and caught a glimpse of Bessie
Gottley, who was passing at the moment on the opposite side of the
road, and looked across at him, smiling and nodding invitingly. Mrs.
Caldwell saw the pantomime, and her heart contracted with a pang when
she saw how readily her husband responded. It was hard that the evil
moods should not be conquered for her as well as for Bessie Gottley.

Bridget came in just then, bringing the belated whisky.

"Oh, you did order it," he graciously acknowledged. "Why didn't you
say so?" He opened the bottle, and poured some out for himself.
"Here's to the moon-faced Bessie!" he said jocularly.

Mrs. Caldwell went on with the mending. Her husband began to walk up
and down the room, in a good humour again. He walked peculiarly, more
on his toes than his heels, with an odd little spring in each step, as
if it were the first step of a dance. This springiness gave to his
gait a sort of buoyancy which might have seemed natural to him, if
exaggerated, in his youth, but had the air of an affectation in middle
life, as if it were part of an assumption of juvenility.

"Won't you go on with the reading?" his wife said at last. His
restlessness worried her.

"No," he answered; "I shall go out. I want exercise."

"When will you be back?" she asked wistfully.

"Oh, hang it all! don't nag me. I shall come back when I like."

He left the room as he spoke, slamming the door behind him. Mrs.
Caldwell did not alter her attitude, but the tears welled up in her
eyes, and ran down her haggard cheeks unheeded. The children came in,
and finding her so, quietly left the room, all but the eldest girl,
who went and leant against her, slipping her little hand through her
mother's arm. The poor woman kissed the child passionately; then, with
a great effort, recovered her self-control, put her work away, gave
the children their tea, read to them for an hour, and saw them to bed.
The front door was open when she came downstairs, and she went to shut
it. A lady, who knew her, happened to be passing, and stopped to shake
hands. "I saw your husband just now sitting on the beach with Bessie
Gottley," she informed Mrs. Caldwell pleasantly. "They were both
laughing immoderately."

"Very likely," Mrs. Caldwell responded with a smile. "She amuses my
husband immensely. But won't you come in?"

"No, thank you. Not to-night. I am hurrying home. Glad to see you
looking so well;" with which she nodded, and went her way; and Mrs.
Caldwell returned to the little dining-room, holding her head high
till she had shut the door, when she burst into a tempest of tears.
She was a lymphatic woman ordinarily, but subject to sudden squalls of
passion, when she lost all self-control.

She would have sobbed aloud now, when the fit was on her, in the face
of the whole community, although the constant effort of her life was
to keep up appearances. She had recovered herself, however, before the
servant came in with the candles, and was sitting in the window
looking out anxiously. The greyness of the long June day was darkening
down to night now, but there was no change in the sultry stillness of
the air. Summer lightning played about in the strip of sky above the
houses opposite. One of the houses was a butcher's shop, and while
Mrs. Caldwell sat there, the butcher brought out a lamb and killed it.
Mrs. Caldwell watched the operation with interest. They did strange
things in those days in that little Irish seaport, and, being an
Englishwoman, she looked on like a civilised traveller intelligently
studying the customs of a savage people.

But as the darkness gathered, the trouble of her mind increased. Her
husband did not return, and a sickening sensation of dread took
possession of her. Where had he gone? What was he doing? Doubtless
enjoying himself--what bitterness there was in the thought! She did
not grudge him any pleasure, but it was hard that he should find so
little in her company. Why was there no distraction for her? The
torment of her mind was awful; should she try his remedy? She went to
the sideboard and poured herself out some whisky, but even as she
raised it to her lips she felt it unworthy to have recourse to it, and
put the glass down untouched.

After that she went and leant against the window-frame. It was about
midnight, and very few people passed. Whenever a man appeared in the
distance, she had a moment of hope, but only to be followed by the
sickening sensation of another disappointment. The mental anguish was so
great that for some time she paid no attention to physical symptoms
which had now begun. By degrees, however, these became importunate, and
oh the relief of it! The trouble of her mind ceased when the physical
pain became acute, and therefore she welcomed it as a pleasant
distraction. She was obliged to think and be practical too; there was no
one in the house to help her. The sleeping children were of course out
of the question, and the two young servants, maid-of-all-work and
nurse, nearly as much so. Besides, there was the difficulty of calling
them. She felt she must not disturb Jane who was in the nursery, for
fear of rousing the children; but should she ever get to Bridget's room,
which was further off? Step by step she climbed the stairs, clinging to
the banister with one hand, holding the candle in the other. Several
times she sank down and waited silently, but with contracted face, till
a paroxysm had passed. At last she reached the door. Bridget was awake
and had heard her coming. "Holy Mother!" she exclaimed, startled out of
her habitual sullenness by her mistress's agonised face. "Yer ill,
ma'am! Let me help you to your bed!"

"Fetch the doctor and the nurse, Bridget," Mrs. Caldwell was just able
to gasp.

In the urgency and excitement of the moment, there was a truce to
hostilities. Bridget jumped up, in night-dress and bare feet, and
supported her mistress to her room. There she was obliged to leave her
alone; and so it happened that, just as the grey dawn trembled with
the first flush of a new and brighter day, the child arrived
unassisted and without welcome, and sent up a wail of protest. When
the doctor came at last, and had time to attend to her, he pronounced
her to be a fine child, and declared that she had made a good
beginning, and would do well for herself, which words the nurse
declared to be of happy omen. Her father was not fit to appear until
late in the day. He came in humbly, filled with remorse for that
mis-spent night, and was received with the feeble flicker of a smile,
which so touched and softened him that he made more of the new child,
and took a greater interest in her than he had done in any of the
others at the time of their birth. There was some difficulty about a
name for her. Her father proposed to call her Elizabeth--after his
sister, he said--but Mrs. Caldwell objected. Elizabeth was Miss
Gottley's name also, a fact which she recollected, but did not
mention. That she did not like the name seemed reason enough for not
choosing it; but her husband persisted, and then there was a hot
dispute on the subject above the baby's cradle. The dispute ended in a
compromise, the mother agreeing to have the child christened Elizabeth
if she were not called so; and she would not have her called Eliza,
Elsie, Elspeth, Bessie, Betsy, or Bess either. This left nothing for
it but to call her Beth, and upon consideration both parents liked the
diminutive, her father because it was unaccustomed, and her mother
because it had no association of any kind attached to it.

For the first three months of her life Beth cried incessantly, as if
bewailing her advent. Then, one day, she opened her eyes wide, and
looked out into the world with interest.




CHAPTER II


It was the sunshine really that first called her into conscious
existence, the blessed heat and light; up to the moment that she
recognised these with a certain acknowledgment of them, and consequently
of things in general outside herself, she had been as unconscious as a
white grub without legs. But that moment roused her, calling forth from
her senses their first response in the thrill of warmth and well-being
to which she awoke, and quickening her intellect at the same time with
the stimulating effort to discover from whence her comfort came. She
could remember no circumstance in connection with this earliest
awakening. All she knew of it was the feeling of warmth and brightness,
which she said recurred to her at odd times ever afterwards, and could
be recalled at will.

Some may see in this first awakening a foreshadowing of the fact that
she was born to be a child of light, and to live in it; and certainly
it was always light for which she craved, the actual light of day,
however; but nothing she yearned for ever came to her in the form she
thought of, and thus, when she asked for sunshine it was grudgingly
given, fate often forcing her into dark dwellings; but all the time
that light which illumines the spirit was being bestowed upon her in
limitless measure.

The next step in her awakening was to a kind of self-consciousness.
She was lying on her nurse's lap out of doors, looking up at the sky,
and some one was saying, "Oh, you pretty thing!" But it was long years
before she connected the phrase with herself, although she smiled in
response to the voice that uttered it. Then she found herself on her
feet in a garden, moving very carefully for fear of falling; and
everything about her was gigantic, from Jane Nettles, the nurse, at
whose skirt she tugged when she wanted to attract attention, to the
brown wallflower and the purple larkspur which she could not reach to
pull. There was a thin hedge at the end of the garden, through which
she looked out on a path across a field, and a thick hedge on her
left, in which a thrush had built a nest at an immense height above
her head. Jane lifted her up to look into the nest, and there was
nothing in it; then Jane lifted her up again, and, oh! there was a
blue egg there; and Jane lifted her up a third time, and the egg had
brown spots on it. The mystery of the egg awed her. She did not ask
herself how it came to be there, but she felt a solemn wonder in the
fact, and the colour caused a sensation of pleasure, a positive
thrill, to run through her. This was her first recognition of beauty,
and it was to the beauty of colour, not of form, that her senses
awoke! Through life she had a keen joy and nice discrimination in
colours, and seemed to herself to have always known their names.

But those spots on the egg. She was positive that they had come
between her first and second peep, which shows how defective her
faculty of observation, which became so exact under cultivation, was
to begin with. Beth also betrayed other traits with regard to the
spots, which she carried through life--the trick of being most
positive when she was quite in the wrong, for one; and want of faith
in other people, for another.

Jane said: "Did you see the spots that time, dearie?"

"Spots just comed," Beth declared.

"No, dearie, spots always there," Jane answered.

"Spots _comed_," Beth maintained.

"No, dearie. Spots always there, only you didn't see them."

"Spots comed _now_!" Beth stamped, and then, because Jane shook her
head, she sat down suddenly on the gravel, and sent up a howl which
brought her father out. He chucked Jane under the chin. Jane giggled,
then made a sign; and there was Mrs. Caldwell looking from one to the
other.

To Beth's recollection it seemed as if she had rapidly acquired the
experiences of this first period. Each incident that she remembered is
apparently trifling in itself, but who can say of what significance as
an indication? In those first few years, had there been any there with
intelligence to interpret, they probably would have found foreshadowings
of all she might be, and do, and suffer; and that would have been the
time to teach her. To me, therefore, these earliest impressions are more
interesting than much that occurred to her in after life, and I have
carefully collected them in the hope of finding some clue in them to
what followed. In several instances it seems to me that the impression
left by some chance observation or incident on her baby mind, made it
possible for her to do many things in after life which she certainly
never would have done but for those early influences. It would be
affectation, therefore, to apologise for such detail. Nothing can be
trivial or insignificant that tends to throw light on the mysterious
growth of our moral and intellectual being. Many a cramped soul that
struggles on in after years, vainly endeavouring to rise on a broken
wing, might, had the importance of such seeming trifles in its
development been recognised, have won its way upward from the first,
untrammelled and uninjured. It was a Jesuit, was it not, who said: "Give
me the child until it is six years old; after that you can do as you
like with it." That is the time to make an indelible impression of
principles upon the mind. In the first period of life, character is a
blossom that should be carefully touched; in the second the petals
fall, and the fruit sets; it is hard and acrid then until the third
period, when, if things go well, it will ripen on the bough, and be
sweet and wholesome--if ill, it will drop off immediately, and rot upon
the ground.

Beth was a combative child, always at war with Jane. There was a great
battle fought about a big black velvet bonnet that Beth wanted to wear
one day. Beth screamed and kicked and scratched and bit, and finally
went out in the bonnet triumphantly, and found herself standing alone
on the edge of a great green world dotted with yellow gorse. A hot,
wide dusty road stretched miles away in front of her; and at an
infinite distance overhead was the blue sky flecked with clouds so
white and dazzling that her eyes ached when she looked at them. She
had stopped a moment to cry, "Wait for me!" Jane walked on, however,
taking no notice, and Beth struggled after her, whimpering, out of
breath, choked with dust, scorched with heat, parched with thirst,
tired to death--how she suffered! A heartless lark sang overhead,
regardless of her misery: and she never afterwards heard a lark
without recalling the long white road, the heat, and dust, and
fatigue. She tore off the velvet bonnet, and threw it away, then began
another despairing "Wait for me!" But in the midst of the cry she saw
some little yellow flowers growing in the grass at the roadside, and
plumped down then and there inconsequently to gather them. By that
time Jane was out of sight; and at the moment Beth became aware of the
fact, she also perceived an appalling expanse of bright blue sky above
her, and sat, gazing upwards, paralysed with terror. This was her
first experience of loneliness, her first terrified sensation of
immensity.

Then the snowdrops and crocuses were out, and the sky grew black, and
she sat on the nursery floor and looked up at it in solemn wonder.
Flakes of snow began to fall, a few at first, then thicker and
thicker, till the air was full of them, and Jane said, "The Scotch are
picking their geese," and immediately Beth saw the Scotch sitting in
some vague scene, picking geese in frenzied haste, and throwing great
handfuls of feathers up in the air; which was probably the first
independent flight of her imagination.

It is astonishing how little consciousness of time there is in these
reminiscences. The seasons are all confounded, and it is as if things
had happened not in succession but abreast. There was snow on the
ground when her brother Jim was with her in the wash-house, making
horse-hair snares to catch birds. They made running loops of the
horse-hair, and tied them on to sticks, then went out and stuck them
in the ground in the garden outside the wash-house window, sprinkled
crumbs of bread, and crept carefully back to watch. First came a
robin with noiseless flight, and lit on the ground with its head on
one side; but the children were too eager, and in their excitement
they made a noise, and the robin flew away. Next came a sparrow, saw
the children, saw the crumbs, and, with the habitual self-possession
of his race, stretched in his head between the sticks, picked out the
largest piece of bread, and carried it off in triumph. Immediately
afterwards a blackbird flew down, and hopped in among the snares
unconsciously. In a moment he was caught, and, with a wild shout of
joy, the children rushed out to secure their prize; but when they
reached the spot the blackbird had burst his bonds and escaped. Then
Beth threw a chunk of wood at her brother, and cut his head open. His
cries brought out the household, and Beth was well shaken--she was
always being shaken at this time--and marched off promptly to papa's
dressing-room, and made to sit on a little chair in the middle of the
floor, where she amused herself by singing at the top of her voice--

    "All around Sebastopol,
       All around the ocean,
     Every time a gun goes off,
       Down falls a Russian."

She wondered why her father and mother were laughing when they came to
release her. Before they appeared, however, brother Jim, her victim,
had come to the door with his head tied up, and peeped in; and she
knew that they were friends again, because he shot ripe gooseberries
at her across the floor as if they had been marbles. There is a
discrepancy here, seeing that snow and ripe gooseberries are not in
season at the same time. It is likely, however, that she broke her
brother's head more than once, and the occasions became confounded in
her recollection.

When the children went to bathe off the beach, Beth would not let Jane
dip her if kicking, scratching, and screaming could prevent it. There
used to be terrible scenes between them, until at last one day
somebody else's old Scotch nurse interfered, and persuaded Beth to go
into the water with her and consent to be dipped three times. Beth
went like a lamb--instead of having to be dragged in and pushed under,
given no time to recover her breath between each dip, half choked with
sand and salt water, and finally dragged out, exhausted by the
struggle, and certainly suffering more than she had benefited by the
immersion. The cold water came up about her and took her breath away
as the old Scotch nurse led her in, and Beth clung to her hand and
panted "Wait!" as she nerved herself for the dip. Nurse had promised
to wait until Beth was ready, and it was Beth's faith in her promise
that gave her courage to go bravely through the ordeal. The old Scotch
nurse never deceived her as Jane had done, and so Beth learnt that
there are people in the world you can depend on.

There was one painful circumstance in connection with those battles on
the beach. Beth was such a tiny girl, they did not think it necessary
to give her a bathing dress, and consequently she was marched into the
water with nothing on; and the agony of shame she suffered is
indescribable. But the worst of it was, the shame wore off. Jim teased
her about it and called her "a little girl," a dreadful term of
reproach in those days, when the boys were taught to consider
themselves superior beings. Beth flew at him, and fought him for it,
but was beaten; and then she took off her things in the nursery, and
scampered up and down before them all, with nothing on, just to show
how little she cared.

It is astonishing how small a part Beth's family play in these
childish recollections. Her father took very little notice of the
children. He was out of health and irritable, and only tried to save
himself annoyance; not to disturb him was the object of everybody's
life. Probably he only appeared on the scene when Beth was naughty,
and the recollection, being painful, was quickly banished. She
remembered him coming downstairs when she was standing in the hall one
day, when her mother was away from home. He had a letter in his hand,
and asked her if she would send her love to mamma. Her heart bounded;
it seemed to her such a tremendous thing to be asked; and she was
dying to send her love; but such an agony of shyness came upon her,
she could not utter a word. She had a little hymn-book in her hand,
however, which she held out to her father. No, that would not do. He
could not send the book, only her love. Didn't she love mamma? Didn't
she! But not a word would come.

All through life she was afflicted with that inability to speak at
critical times. Dumb always was she apt to be when her affections were
concerned, except occasionally, in moments of strong excitement; and
in anger, when she was driven to bay. The intensity of her feelings
would probably have made her dumb in any case in moments of emotion;
but doubtless the hardness of those about her at this impressionable
period strengthened the defect. It is impossible to escape from the
hampering influences of our infancy. Among Beth's many recollections
of these days, there was not one of a caress given or received, or of
any expression of tenderness; and so she never became familiar with
the exquisite language of love, and was long in learning that it is
not a thing to be ashamed of and concealed.

Later that day, with a mighty effort, she summoned up courage enough
to go down to her father. She was determined to send the message to
mamma; but when it came to the point, she was again unable to utter a
word on the subject. Her mother had gone to stay with her relations in
England. Beth found her father in the dining-room, and several other
people were present. He was standing by the sideboard, mixing
whisky-and-water, so, instead of sending her love to mamma, Beth
exclaimed, confidently and pleasantly, "If you drink whisky, you'll be
drunk again."

A smart slap rewarded this sally. Beth turned pale and recoiled. It
was her first taste of human injustice. To drink and to be drunk was
to her merely the natural sequence of cause and effect, and she could
not conceive why she should be slapped and turned out of the room so
promptly for uttering such a simple truth.

Beth was present at many discussions between her father and mother,
and took much interest in them, all the more perhaps, because most of
what was said was a mystery to her. She wondered why any mention of
the "moon-faced Bessie" disturbed her mother's countenance. Jane
Nettles, too--when her mother was out, her father used to come and
talk to Jane, and they laughed a good deal. He admired Jane's white
teeth, and the children used to make Jane show them her teeth after
that.

"Papa says Jane's got nice white teeth," Beth said to her mother one
day, and she never forgot the glance which Mrs. Caldwell threw at her
husband. His eyes fell before it.

"What! even the servants, Henry!" Mrs. Caldwell exclaimed, and then
she left the room. Beth learned what it all meant in after years, the
career of one of her brothers furnishing the clue. Like father, like
son.

It was after this that Mrs. Caldwell went to visit her relations in
England, accompanied by two of the children. It was in the summer, and
Jane took Beth to the Castle Hill that morning to see the steamer,
with her mother on board, go by. The sea was iridescent, like molten
silver, the sky was high and cloudless, and where sea and sky met and
mingled on the horizon it was impossible to determine. Numbers of
steamers passed far out. They looked quite small, and Beth did not
think there was room in any of them for her mother and brother and
sister. They did not, therefore, interest her much, nor did the
policeman who came and talked to Jane. But the Castle Hill, and the
little winding path up which she had come, the green of the grass, the
brambles, the ferns, the ruined masonry against which she leant, the
union of sea and sky and shore, the light, the colour, absorbed her,
and drew her out of herself. Her soul expanded, it spread its wings,
it stretched out spiritual arms to meet and clasp the beloved nature
of which it felt itself to be a part. It was her earliest recognition
of their kinship, a glimpse of greatness, a moment of ecstasy never to
be forgotten, the first stirring in herself of the creative faculty,
for in her joy she burst out into a little song--

    "Far on the borders of the Arcane."

It was as if the pleasure played upon her, using her as a passive
instrument by which it attained to audible expression. For how should
a child know a word like Arcane? It came to her as things do which we
have known and forgotten--the whole song did in fact; but she held it
as a possession sacred to herself, and never recorded it, or told more
than that one line, although it stayed with her, lingered on her lips,
and in her heart, for the rest of her life. It was a great moment for
Beth, the moment when her further faculty first awoke. On looking back
to it in after years, she fancied she found in it confirmation of an
opinion which she afterwards formed. Genius to her was yet only
another word for soul. She could not believe that we all have souls,
or that they are at all equally developed even in those who have
obtained them. She was a child under six at this time, Jane Nettles
was a woman between twenty and thirty, and the policeman--she could
not say what age he was; but she was the only one of the three that
throbbed responsive to the beauty of the wonderful scene before them,
or felt her being flooded with the glory of the hour.

Meanwhile, what her parents would have called her education had begun.
She went with Mildred, her elder sister, to a day school. They used to
run down the street together without a nurse, and the sense of freedom
was delicious to Beth. They had to pass the market where the great
mealy specimen potatoes were displayed, and Mary Lynch's shop--she was
the vegetable woman, who used to talk to Mrs. Caldwell about the
children when they went there, and one or the other always called them
"poor little bodies," upon which they commented afterwards among
themselves. Mary Lynch was a large red-faced woman, and when the
children wanted to describe a stout person they always said, "As fat
as Mary Lynch." One house which Beth had to pass on her way to school
made a strong impression on her imagination. It was a gloomy abode
with a broad doorstep and deep portico, broken windows, and a
mud-splashed door, from beneath which she always expected to see a
slender stream of blood slowly trickling. For a man called Macgregor
had murdered his wife there--beaten her brains out with a poker. Beth
never heard the name Macgregor in after life without a shiver of
dislike. Much of her time at school was spent in solitary confinement
for breaches of the peace. With a face as impassive as a monkey's she
would do the most mischievous things, and was always experimenting in
naughty tricks, as on one occasion when Miss Deeble left the
schoolroom for a minute, but had to come hurrying back, recalled by
wild shrieks; and found that Beth had managed in that minute to tip up
a form with four children on it, throw their books out of the window,
and sprinkle ink all over the floor. Miss Deeble marched her
downstairs to an empty kitchen, and left her sitting on a stool in the
middle of it with an A B C in her hand. But Beth took no interest in
the alphabet in those days, and hunted black-beetles with the bellows
instead of learning it. The hearthstone was the place of execution.
When she found a beetle, she would blow him along to it with the
bellows, and there despatch him. She had no horror of any creature in
her childhood, but as she matured, her whole temperament changed in
this respect, and when she met a beetle on the stairs she would turn
and fly rather than pass it, and she would feel nauseated, and shiver
with disgust for hours after if she thought of it. She knew the exact
moment that this horror came upon her; it happened when she was ten
years old. She found a beetle one day lying on its back, and thinking
it was dead, she took it up, and was swinging it by its antennae when
the creature suddenly wriggled itself round, and twined its prickly
legs about her finger, giving her a start from which she never
recovered.

Beth probably got as far as A B ab, while she was at Miss Deeble's;
but if she were backward with her book, her other faculties began to
be acute. It was down in that empty kitchen that she first felt the
enchantment of music. Some one suddenly played the piano overhead and
Beth listened spell-bound. Again and again the player played, and
always the same thing, practising it. Beth knew every note. Long
afterwards she was trying some waltzes of Chopin's, and came upon one
with which she was quite familiar. She knew that she had heard it all,
over and over again, but could not think when or where. Presently,
however, as she played it, she perceived a smell of black-beetles, and
instantly she was back in that disused kitchen of Miss Deeble's,
listening to the practising overhead.

All Beth's senses were acute, and from the first her memory helped
itself by the involuntary association of incongruous ideas. Many
people's recollections are stimulated by the sense of smell, but it is
a rarer thing for the sense of taste to be associated with the past in
the same way, as it was in Beth's case. There were many circumstances
which were recalled by the taste of the food she had been eating at
the time they occurred. The children often dined in the garden in
those early days, and once a piece of apple-dumpling Beth was eating
slid off her plate on to the gravelled walk. Some one picked it up,
and put it on her plate again, all covered with stones and grit, and
the sight of hot apple-dumpling made her think of gravel ever
afterwards, and filled her with disgust; so that she could not eat it.
She had a great aversion to bread and butter too for a long time, but
that she got over. It would have been too great an inconvenience to
have a child dislike its staple food, and in all probability she was
forced to conquer her aversion, and afterwards she grew to like bread
and butter; but still, if by any chance the circumstances which caused
her dislike to it recurred to her when she was eating a piece, she was
obliged to stop. The incident which set up the association happened
one evening when her father and mother were out. Beth was alone in the
dining-room eating bread and butter, and Towie, the cat, came into the
room with a mouse in her mouth. The mouse was alive, and Towie let it
run a little way, and then pounced down upon it, then gave it a pat to
make it run again. Beth, lying on her stomach on the floor, watching
these proceedings, naturally also became a cat with a mouse. At last
Towie began to eat her mouse, beginning with its head, which it
crushed. Beth, eating her bread and butter in imitation, saw the white
brains, but felt no disgust at the moment. The next time she had bread
and butter, however, she thought of the mouse's brains and felt sick;
and always afterwards the same association of ideas was liable to
recur to her with the same result.

But even the description of anything horrifying affected her in this
way. One day when she was growing up her mother told her at dinner
that she had been on the pier that morning and had seen the body of a
man, all discoloured and swollen from being in the water a long time,
towed into the harbour by a fishing boat. Beth listened and asked
questions, as she always did on these occasions, with the deepest
interest. She was taking soup strongly flavoured with catsup at the
moment, and the story in no way interfered with her appetite; but the
next time she tried catsup, and ever afterwards, she perceived that
swollen, discoloured corpse, and immediately felt nauseated. It is
curious that all these associations of ideas are disagreeable. She had
not a single pleasant one in connection with food.




CHAPTER III


All of Beth that was not eyes at this time was ears, and her brain was
as busy as a squirrel in the autumn, storing observations and
registering impressions. It does not do to trust to a child's not
understanding. It may not understand at the moment, but it will
remember all the same--all the more, perhaps, because it does not
understand; and its curiosity will help it to solve the problem. Beth
did humorous things at this time, but she had no sense of humour; she
was merely experimenting. Her big eyes looked out of an impassive face
solemnly; no one suspected the phenomenal receptivity which that
stolid mask concealed, and, because the alphabet did not interest her,
they formed a poor opinion of her intellect. The truth was that she
had no use for letters or figures. The books of nature and of life
were spread out before her, and she was conning their contents to more
purpose than any one else could have interpreted them to her in those
days. And as to arithmetic, as soon as her father began to allow her a
penny a week for pocket-money, she discovered that there were two
half-pennies in it, which was all she required to know. She also
mastered the system of debit and credit, for, when she found herself
in receipt of a regular income, and had conquered the first awe of
entering a shop and asking for things, she ran into debt. She received
the penny on Saturday, and promptly spent it in sweets, but by Monday
she wanted more, and the craving was so imperative, that when Miss
Deeble sent her down to the empty kitchen in the afternoon, she could
not blow black-beetles with any enthusiasm, and began to look about
for something else to interest her. It being summer, the window was
open, but it was rather out of her reach. She managed, however, with
the help of her stool, to climb on to the sill, and there, in front of
her, was the sea, and down below was the street--a goodish drop below
if she had stopped to think of it; but Beth dropped first and thought
afterwards, only realising the height when she had come down plump,
and looked up again to see what had happened to her, surprised at the
thud which had jarred her stomach and made her feet sting. She picked
herself up at once, however, and limped away, not heeding the hurt
much, so delightful was it to be out alone without her hat. By the
time she got to Mary Lynch's she was Jane Nettles going on an errand,
an assumption which enabled her to enter the shop at her ease.

"Good-day," she began. "Give me a ha'porth of pear-drops, and a
ha'porth of raspberry-drops, Mary Lynch, please. I'll pay you on
Saturday."

"What are you doing out alone without your hat?" Mary Lynch rejoined,
beaming upon her. "I'm afraid you're a naughty little body."

"No, I'm not," Beth answered. "It's my own money." Mary Lynch laughed,
and helped her liberally, adding some cherries to the sweets; and, to
Beth's credit be it stated, the money was duly paid, and without
regret, she being her mother at the moment, looking much relieved to
be able to settle the debt, which shows that, even by this time, Beth
had somehow become aware of money-troubles, and also that she learned
to read a countenance long before she learned to read a book.

She straggled home with the sweets in her hand, but did not eat them,
for now she was a lady going to give a party, and must await the
arrival of her guests. She did not go in by the front door for obvious
reasons, but up the entry down which the open wooden gutter-spout ran,
at a convenient height, from the house into the street. The wash-house
was covered with delicious white roses, which scented the summer
afternoon. Beth concealed her sweets in the rose-tree, and then leant
against the wall and buried her nose in one of the flowers, loving it.
The maids were in the wash-house; she heard them talking; it was all
about what he said and she said. Presently a torrent of dirty water
came pouring down the spout, mingling its disagreeable soapy smell
with that of the flowers. Beth plucked some petals from the rose she
was smelling, set them on the soapy water, and ran down the passage
beside them, until they disappeared in the drain in the street. This
delight over, she wandered into the garden. She was always on
excellent terms with all animals, and was treated by them with
singular confidence. Towie, the cat, had been missing for some time,
but now, to Beth's great joy, she suddenly appeared from Beth could
not tell where, purring loudly, and rubbing herself against Beth's
bare legs. The sun poured down upon them, and the sensation of the
cat's warm fur above her socks was delicious. Beth tried to lift her
up in her arms, but she wriggled herself out of them, and began to run
backwards and forwards between her and a gap in the hedge, until Beth
understood that she wished her to follow her through it into the next
garden. Beth did so, and the cat led her to a little warm nest where,
to Beth's wild delight, she showed her a tiny black kitten. Beth
picked it up, and carried it, followed by the cat, into the house in a
state of breathless excitement, shrieking out the news as she ran.
Beth was immediately seized upon. What was she doing at home when she
ought to have been at school? and without her hat, too! Beth had no
explanation to offer, and was hustled off to the nursery, and there
shut up for the rest of the day. She stood in the window most of the
time, a captive princess in the witch's palace, waiting for the
fairy-prince to release her, and catching flies.

The sky became overcast, and a big gun was fired. Beth's father had
something to do with the firing of big guns, and she connected this
with the gathering gloom, stories of God striking wicked people down
with thunder and lightning for their sins, and her own naughtiness,
and felt considerably awed. Presently a little boy was carried down
the street on a bed. His face looked yellow against the sheets. He
was lying flat on his back, and had a little black cap on, which was
right out of doors, but wrong in bed. He smiled up at Beth as they
carried him under the window, and she stretched out her arms to him
with infinite pity. She knew he was going to die. They all died, that
family, or had something dreadful happen to them. Jane Nettles said
there was a curse upon them, and Beth never thought of them without a
shudder. That boy's sisters both died, and one had something dreadful
happen to her, for they dug her up again, and when they opened the
coffin the corpse was all in a jelly, and every colour of the rainbow,
according to Jane Nettles. Beth believed she had been present upon the
occasion, in a grass-grown graveyard, by the wall of an old church,
beneath which steps led down into a vault. The stones of the steps
were mossy, and the sun was shining. There was a little group of
people standing round, with pale, set, solemn faces, and presently
something was brought up, and they all pressed forward to look at it.
Beth could not see what it was for the grown-up people, and never knew
whether or not the whole picture had been conjured up by her
imagination; but as there was always a foundation of fact in the
impressions of this period of her life, it is not improbable that she
really was present at the exhumation, with the curious and
indefatigable Jane Nettles.

Opposite the nursery window, on the other side of the road, was the
butcher's shop, in front of which the butcher made his shambles. Late
in the evening he brought out a board and set it on trestles, then he
brought a sheep, lifted it up by its legs and put it on its back on
the board, tied its feet, and cut its throat. Beth watched the
operation with grave interest, but no other feeling. She had been
accustomed to see it all her life.

Presently Beth's father and mother went out together, and then Beth
stole downstairs, and out to the wash-house to find the sweets in the
white rose-tree. Mildred and Jim were doing their lessons in the
dining-room, and she burst in upon them with the sweets; but Mildred
was cross, and said:

"Don't make such a noise, Beth, my head aches."

The next day was Sunday. Beth knew it by the big black bonnet which
played such a large part in her childish recollections. She had a kind
of sensation of having seen herself in it, bobbing along to church, a
sort of Kate Greenaway child, with a head out of all proportion to the
rest of her body, and feeling singularly satisfied--a feeling,
however, which was less a recollection than an experience continually
renewed, for a nice gown or bonnet was always a pleasure to her.

In church she sat in a big square pew on one side of the aisle, and on
the other side was another pew exactly like it, in which sat a young
lady whom Beth believed to be Miss Augusta Noble in the _Fairchild
Family_. Augusta Noble was very vain, and got burnt to death for
standing on tiptoe before the fire to look at herself in a new frock
in the mirror on the mantelpiece. Beth thought it a suitable end for
her, and did not pity her at all--perhaps because she went on coming
to church regularly all the same.

After the service they climbed the Castle Hill; and there was the grey
of stonework against a bright blue sky, and green of grass and trees
against the grey, and mountainous clouds of dazzling white hung over a
molten sea; and because of the beauty of it all, Beth burst into a
passion of tears.

"What is the matter with that child?" her father exclaimed
impatiently. "It's very odd other people can bring up their children
properly, Caroline, but you never seem to be able to manage yours."

"What's the matter with you, you tiresome child?" Mrs. Caldwell
exclaimed, shaking Beth by the arm. Beth only sobbed the more. "Look,"
said her mother, pointing to a small lake left by the sea on the shore
when the tide went out, where the children used to wade knee-deep, or
bathe when it was too rough for them to go into the sea; "look,
there's the pond, that bright round thing over there. And look below,
near the Castle--that great green mound is the giant's grave. When the
giant died they buried him there, and he was so big, he reached all
that length when they laid him in the ground."

"And when he stood up where did he reach to?" said Beth, interested in
a moment.

"Oh, when he sat here, I should think he could make a footstool of his
own grave, and when he stood up he could look over the Castle."

Beth, with big dilated eyes and wet cheeks, saw him do both, and was
oppressed to tears no more that day by delight and wonder of the
beautiful; but she was always liable to these paroxysms, the outcome
of an intensity of pleasure which was positive pain. So, from the
first, she was keenly susceptible to outdoor influences, and it was
now that her memory was stored with impressions which were afterwards
of inestimable value to her, for she never lived amongst the same kind
of scenery again.

The children had the run of some gentleman's grounds, which they
called The Walks. There were banks of flowers, and sidewalks where the
London pride grew, and water, and great trees with hollows in them
where the water lodged. Beth called these fairy wells, and put her
fingers in to see how deep they were, and there were dead leaves in
them; and there, on a memorable occasion, she found her first
skeleton leaf, and told Jane Nettles she really didn't know before
that there were such things. Once there was a wasp's nest hanging from
a branch, and they met a young man coming away from it, holding a
handkerchief to his face. He stopped to tell Jane Nettles how he had
been stung, and the children wandered off unheeded to look at the
nest. It was all grey and gossamer, like cobwebs laid in layers. Beth
was an Indian scout inspecting it from behind a neighbouring tree; and
then she shelled it with sticks, but did not wait to see it surrender.

They picked up horse-chestnuts from under the trees, in the season,
and hammered the green rind off with stones for the joy of seeing the
beautiful shining, slippery, dark brown, or piebald, polished fruit
within; and also, when there were wet leaves on the ground, they
gathered walnuts from out of the long tangled grass, and stained their
fingers picking off the covering, which was mealy-green when it burst,
and smelt nice; but the nut itself, when they came to it, was always
surprisingly small. There were horrid mahogany-coloured pieces of
liver put about the walks on sticks sometimes. Jane Nettles said they
were to poison the dogs because they came in and destroyed the
flowers. Beth wondered how it was people could eat liver if it
poisoned dogs, and was careful afterwards not to touch it herself.
Most children would have worried the reason out of their nurse, but
Jane Nettles was not amiable, and Beth could never bring herself to
ask a question of any one who was likely either to snub her for
asking, or to jeer at her for not knowing. There are unsympathetic
people who have a way of making children feel ashamed of their
ignorance, and rather than be laughed at, a sensitive child will
pretend to know. Beth was extraordinarily sensitive in this respect,
and so it happened that, in later life, she sometimes found herself in
ignorance of things which less remarkable people had learnt in their
infancy for the asking.

These were certainly days of delight to Beth, but the charm of them was
due less to people than to things--to some sight or scent of nature, the
smell of new-mown hay from a waggon they had stood aside to let pass in
a narrow lane, a glimpse of a high bank on the other side of the road--a
high grassy bank, covered and crowned with trees, chiefly chestnuts, on
which the sun shone; hawthorn hedgerows from which they used to pick the
green buds children call bread-and-butter, and eat them; and one
privet-hedge in their own garden, an impenetrable hedge, on the other
side of which, as Beth imagined, all kinds of wonderful things took
place. The flowers of those early days were crocuses, snowdrops, white
roses, a little yellow flower they called ladies' fingers, sea-pinks,
and London pride--particularly London pride. In the walks Jane Nettles
used to teach her the wonderful rhyme of--

    "London Bridge is broken down,
     Grand, said the little Dee,
     London Bridge is broken down,
       Fair-Lade-ee."

And so the rhyme, London pride amongst the rock-work, the ornamental
water, a rustic bridge, shining laurel leaves, mahogany-coloured
liver, warmth, light, and sweet airs all became mingled in one
gracious memory.

People, however, as has been already shown, also came into her
consciousness, but with less certainty of pleasing, wherefore she
remembered them less, for it was always her habit to banish a
disagreeable thought if she could. One day she went into the garden
with her spade and an old tin biscuit-box. She put the box on the
ground beside her, with the lid off, and began to dig. By-and-by the
kitten came crooning and sidling up to her, and hopped into the box.
Beth instantly put on the lid, and the kitten was a corpse which must
be buried. She hurriedly dug its grave, put in the box, and covered it
up with earth. Just as she had finished, a gruff voice exclaimed:
"What are ye doing there, ye little divil?" and there was old Krangle
the gardener, looking at her over the hedge. "Dig it up again
directly," he said, and Beth, much startled, dug it up quicker than
she had buried it. The kitten had been but loosely covered, and was
not much the worse, but had got some earth in its eye, which was very
sore afterwards. People wondered what had hurt it, and Beth looked
from one to the other and listened with grave attention to their
various suppositions on the subject. She said nothing, however, and
Krangle also held his peace, which led to a very good understanding
between them. Krangle had a cancer on his lip, and Beth was forbidden
to kiss him for fear of catching it. He had a garden of his own too,
and a pig, and little boiled potatoes in his cottage. The doctor's
brother died of cancer, and Beth supposed he had been naughty and
kissed old Krangle, though she wondered he cared to, as Krangle had a
very prickly chin. The doctor often came to see papa. He used to talk
about the Bible, and then the children were sent out of the room. Once
Beth hid under the table to hear what he said. It was all about God,
whom it appeared that he did not like. He had a knob at the end of his
nose, and Beth laughed at it, in punishment of which, as she used to
believe, her own nose developed a little knob at the end. Her mind was
very much exercised about the doctor and his household. He and his
brother and sister used to live together, but now he lived alone, and
on a bed in one of the rooms, according to Jane Nettles, there were
furs, and lovely silks, satins, and laces, all being eaten by moths
and destroyed because there was no one to look after them. It seemed
such a pity, but whose were they? Where was the lady?

Bridget used to come up to the nursery when the children were in bed,
to talk to Jane Nettles, and look out of the window. Those gossips in
the nursery were a great source of disturbance to Beth when she ought
to have been composing herself to sleep. She recollected nothing of
the conversations more corrupting than that ghastly account of how the
girl was exhumed, so it is likely that the servants exercised some
discretion when they dropped their voices to a whisper, as they often
did; but these whispered colloquies made her restless and cross, and
brought down upon her a smart order to go to sleep, to which she used
to answer defiantly, "I will if you'll ask me a riddle." One of the
riddles was: "Between two sticks, between two stones, between two old
men's shin-bones. What's that?" The answer had something to do with a
graveyard, but Beth could not remember what.

She used to suffer a small martyrdom in her little crib on those
evenings from what she called "snuff up her nose," a hot, dry, burning
sensation which must have been caused by a stuffy room, and the
feverish state she tossed herself into when she was kept awake after
her regular hour for sleep. Sometimes she sat up in bed suddenly, and
cried aloud. Then Jane Nettles would push her down again on her pillow
roughly, and threaten to call mamma if she wasn't good directly.
Occasionally mamma heard her, and came up of her own accord, and shook
her by the shoulder, and scolded her. Then Beth would lie still
sobbing silently, and wretched as only a lonely, uncomprehended, and
uncomplaining child can be. No one had the faintest conception of what
she suffered. Her naughtinesses were remembered against her, but her
latent tenderness was never suspected. Once the old Doctor said:
"That's a peculiarly sensitive, high-strung, nervous child; you must
be gentle with her," and both parents had stared at him. They were
matter-of-fact creatures themselves, comparatively speaking, with a
notion that such nonsense as nervousness should be shaken out of a
child.

At dinner, one day, Beth saw little creatures crawling in a piece of
cheese she had on her plate, and uttered an exclamation of disgust.

"Those are only mites, you silly child," her father said, and then to
her horror, he took up the piece, and ate it. "Do look at that child,
Caroline!" he exclaimed, "she's turned quite pale."

Beth puzzled her head for long afterwards to know what it meant to
turn pale.

Little seeds of superstition were sown in her mind at this time, and
afterwards flourished. She found a wedding-ring in her first piece of
Christmas cake, and was told she would be the first of the party to
marry, which made her feel very important.

Being so sensitive herself, she was morbidly careful of the feelings
of others, and committed sins of insincerity without compunction in
her efforts to spare them. She and Mildred were waiting ready dressed
one day to go and pay a call with mamma. Beth had her big bonnet on,
and was happy; and Mildred also was in a high state of delight. She
said Beth's breath smelt of strawberries, and wanted to know what her
own smelt of.

"Raspberries," Beth answered instantly. It was not true, but Beth felt
that something of the kind was expected of her, and so responded
sympathetically. When they got to the house, they were shown into an
immense room, and wandered about it. Beth upset some cushions, and had
awful qualms, expecting every moment to be pounced upon, and shaken;
but she forgot her fright on approaching her hostess, and discovering
to her great surprise that she was busy doing black monkeys on a grey
ground in woolwork. She was astonished to find that it was possible to
do such wonderful work, and she wanted to be taught immediately; but
her mother made her ashamed of herself for supposing that _she_ could
do it, silly little body. They stayed dinner, and Beth cried with rage
because the servant poured white sauce over her fish, and without
asking her too. The fish was an island, and Beth was the hungry sea,
devouring it bit by bit. Of course if you put white sauce over it, you
converted it into a table with a white cloth on, or something of that
kind, which you could not eat, so the fish was spoilt. She got into a
difficulty, too, about Miss Deeble's drawing-room, which was upstairs,
overlooking the bay, and you could only see the water from the window,
so there were water-colours on the wall. Her mother smilingly tried to
explain, but Beth stamped, and stuck to her point; the water accounted
for the water-colours.

On the way home, Beth found a new interest in life. The mill had been
burnt down, and they went to see the smouldering embers, and Beth
smelt fire for the first time. The miller's family had been burnt out,
and were sheltering in a shed. One little boy had his fingers all
crumpled up from the fire. Beth's benevolence awoke. She was all
sympathetic excitement, and wanted to do something for somebody. The
miller's wife was lying on a mattress on the floor. She had a little
baby, a new one, a pudgy red-looking thing. Mrs. Caldwell fed the
other children with bread-and-milk, and Beth offered to teach them
their letters.

Mrs. Caldwell laughed at her: "_You_ teach them their letters!" she
exclaimed. "You had better learn your own properly." And Mildred also
jeered. Beth subsided, crimson with shame at being thus lowered in
everybody's estimation. She was deficient in self-esteem, and required
to be encouraged. Praise merely gave her confidence; but her mother
never would praise her. She brought all her children up on the same
plan, regardless of their different dispositions. It made Mildred vain
to praise her, and therefore Beth must not be praised; and so her
mother checked her mental growth again and again instead of helping
her to develop it. "It's no use your trying to do that, Beth, you
can't," she would say, when Beth would have done it easily, if only
she had been assured that she could.

Beth had a strange dream that night after the fire, which made a
lasting impression upon her. Dorman's Isle was a green expanse, flat
as a table, and covered with the short grass that grows by the sea. At
high tide it was surrounded by water, but when the tide was low, it
rested on great grey, rugged rocks, as the lid of a box rests upon its
sides. Between the grey of the rocks and the green of the grass there
was a fringe of sea-pinks. That night she dreamt that she was under
Dorman's Isle, and it was a great bare cave, not very high, and
lighted by torches which people held in their hands. There were a
number of people, and they were all members of her own family,
ancestors in the dresses of their day, distant relations--numbers of
strange people whom she had never heard of; as well as her own father
and mother, brothers and sisters. She knew she was under Dorman's
Isle, but she knew also that it was the dark space beneath the stage
of a theatre. When she entered, the rest of the family were already
assembled; but they none of them spoke to each other, and the doors
kept opening and shutting, and the people seemed to melt away, until
at last only three or four remained, and they were just going. She saw
the shine on the paint of the door-posts, and the smoke of the
torches, as they let themselves out. Then they had all gone, and left
her alone in a cave full of smoke. Vainly she struggled to follow
them, the doors were fast, the smoke was smothering her, and in the
agony of a last effort to escape she awoke.

In after days, when Beth began to think, she used to wonder how it was
she knew those people were her ancestors, and that the place was like
any part of a theatre. She had never heard either of ancestors or
theatres at that time. Was it recollection? Or is there some more
perfect power to know than the intellect--a power lying latent in the
whole race, which will eventually come into possession of it; but with
which, at present, only some few rare beings are perfectly endowed.
Beth had the sensation of having been nearer to something in her
infancy than she ever was again--nearer to knowing what it is the
trees whisper--what the murmur means, the all-pervading murmur which
sounds incessantly when everything is hushed, as at night; nearer to
the "arcane" of that evening on the Castle Hill when she first felt
her kinship with nature, and burst into song. It may have been
hereditary memory, a knowledge of things transmitted to her by her
ancestors along with their features, virtues, and vices; but, at any
rate, she herself was sure that she possessed a power of some kind in
her infancy which gradually lapsed as her intellectual faculties
developed. She was conscious that the senses had come between her and
some mysterious joy which was not of the senses, but of the spirit.
There lingered what seemed to be the recollection of a condition
anterior to this, a condition of which no tongue can tell, which is
not to be put into words, or made evident to those who have no
recollection; but which some will comprehend by the mere allusion to
it. All her life long Beth preserved a half consciousness of this
something--something which eluded her--something from which she
gradually drifted further away as she grew older--some sort of vision
which opened up fresh tracts to her; but whether of country, or
whether of thought, she could not say. Only, when it came to her, all
was immeasurable about her; and she was above--above in a great calm
through which she moved without any sort of effort that is known to
us; she just thought it, and was there; while humanity dwindled away
into insignificance below.

One other strange vision she had which she never forgot. With her
intellect, she believed it to have been a dream, but her further
faculty always insisted that it was a recollection. She was with a
large company in an indescribable, hollow space, bare of all
furnishments because none were required; and into this space there
came a great commotion, bright light and smoke, without heat or sense
of suffocation. Then she was alone, making for an aperture; struggling
and striving with pain of spirit to gain it; and when she had found
it, she shot through, and awoke in the world. She awoke with a
terrible sense of desolation upon her, and with the consciousness of
having traversed infinite space at infinite speed in an interval of
time which her mortal mind could not measure.

All through life, when she was in possession of her further faculty,
and perceived by that means--which was only at fitful intervals,
doubtless because of unfavourable circumstances and surroundings--she
was calm, strong, and confident. She looked upon life as from a
height, viewing it both in detail and as a whole. But when she had
only her intellect to rely upon, all was uncertain, and she became
weak, vacillating, and dependent. So that she appeared to be a
singular mixture of weakness and strength, courage and cowardice,
faith and distrust; and just what she would do depended very much on
what was expected of her, or what influence she was under, and also on
some sudden impulse which no one, herself included, could have
anticipated.




CHAPTER IV


Up to this time, Beth's reminiscences jerk along from incident to
incident, but now there come the order and sequence of an eventful
period, perfectly recollected. The date is fixed by a change of
residence. Her father, who was a commander in the coastguard, was
transferred on promotion from the north of Ireland to another
appointment in the wild west, and Beth was just entering upon her
seventh year when they moved. Captain Caldwell went on in advance to
take up his appointment, and Jim accompanied him; Mildred, Beth, and
Bernadine, the youngest, who had arrived two years after Beth, being
left to follow with their mother. The elder children had been sent to
England to be educated. In their father's absence Mildred and
Bernadine were transferred to their mother's room, Jane Nettles and
Bridget, the sulky, had disappeared, and Kitty slept in the nursery
with Beth. Beth had grown too long for her crib, but still had to
sleep in it, and her legs were cramped at night and often ached
because she could not stretch them out, and the pain kept her awake.

"Mamma, my legs do ache in bed," she said one day.

"Beth, you really _are_ a whiny child, you always have a grievance,"
her mother complained.

"But, mamma, they _do_ ache."

"Well, it's only growing pains," Mrs. Caldwell replied with a satisfied
air, as if to name the trouble were to ease it. And so Beth's legs ached
on unrelieved, and, when they kept her awake, Kitty became the object of
her contemplation. The sides of the crib were like the seat of a
cane-bottomed chair, and Beth had enlarged one of the holes by fidgeting
at it with her fingers. This was her look-out station. A night-light had
been conceded to her nervousness at the instance of Dr. Gottley, when it
became a regular thing for her to wake in the dark out of one of her
vivid dreams, and shriek because she could not see where she was. The
usual beating and shaking had been tried to cure her of her nonsense,
but this sensible treatment only seemed to make her worse, she was such
a tiresome child, till at last, when Dr. Gottley threatened serious
consequences, the light was allowed, a dim little float that burned on
an inch of oil in a glass of water, and made Kitty look so funny when
she came up to bed. Kitty began to undress, and at the same time to
mutter her prayers, as soon as she got into the room; and sometimes she
would go down on her knees and beat her breast, and sigh and groan to
the Blessed Virgin, beseeching her to help her. Beth thought at first
she was in great distress, and pitied her, but after a time she believed
that Kitty was enjoying herself, perhaps because she also had begun to
enjoy these exercises. Beth had been taught to say her Protestant
prayers, but not made to feel that she was addressing them to any
particular personality that appealed to her imagination, as Kitty's
Blessed Lady did.

"Kitty, Kitty," she cried one night, sitting up in her crib, with a
great dry sob. "Tell _me_ how to do it. I want to speak to her too."

Kitty, who was on her knees on the floor, with her rosary clasped in
her hands, her arms and shoulders bare, and her dark hair hanging down
her back, looked up, considerably startled: "Holy Mother! how you
frightened me!" she exclaimed. "Go to sleep."

"But I _want_ to speak to her," Beth persisted.

"Arrah, be good now, Miss Beth," Kitty coaxed, still on her knees.

"I'll be good if you'll tell me what to say," Beth bargained.

Kitty rose from her knees, went to the side of the crib, and looked
down at the child.

"What do ye want to say to her at all?" she asked.

"I don't know," Beth answered. "I just want to speak to her. I just
want to say, 'Holy Mother, come close, I love you. Stay by me all
night long, and when the daylight comes don't forget me.' How would
you say that, Kitty?"

"Bless your purty eyes, darlint!" said Kitty, "just say it that way
every time. It couldn't be better said, not by the praste himself. An'
if the Blessed Mother ever hears anything from this world," she added
in an undertone, "she'll hear that. But turn over now, an' go to
sleep, honey. See! I'll stand here till ye do, and sing to you!"

Beth turned over on her left side with her face to the wall, and
settled herself to sleep contentedly, while Kitty stood beside her,
patting her shoulder gently, and crooning in a low sweet voice--

    "Look down, O Mother Mary,
       From thy bright throne above;
     Send down upon thy children
       One holy glance of love!
     And if a heart so tender
       With pity flows not o'er,
     Then turn, O Mother Mary,
       And smile on me no more."

As Beth listened her little heart expanded, and presently the Blessed
Virgin stood beside her bed, a heavenly vision, like Kitty, with dark
hair growing low on her forehead and hanging down her back, blue eyes,
and an earnest, guileless face. Beth's little mouth, drooping with
dissatisfaction ordinarily, curled up at the corners, and so,
thoroughly tranquillised, she fell happily asleep, with a smile on her
lips.

Kitty bent low to look at her, and shook her head several times.
"Coaxin's better nor bating you, anyway," she muttered. "But what are
they going to do wid ye at all?" She stood up, and raised her clasped
hands. "Holy Mother, it 'ud be well maybe if ye'd take her to
yourself--just now--God forgive me for saying it."

Next morning Mrs. Caldwell was sitting at breakfast with Beth and
Mildred. Every moment she glanced at the window, and at last the
postman passed. She listened, but there was no knock, and her heart
sank.

"Beth, will you stop drumming with your spoon?" she exclaimed
irritably. As she spoke, however, Kitty came in with the expected
letter in her hand, and Mrs. Caldwell's countenance cleared: "I
thought the postman had passed," she exclaimed.

"No, m'em," Kitty rejoined. "I was standin' at the door, an' he gave
me the letter."

Mrs. Caldwell had opened it by this time, but it was very short. "How
often am I to tell you not to stand at the door, letting in the cold
air, Kitty?" she snapped.

"And how'd I sweep the steps, m'em, if you plase, when I'm not to
stand at the door?"

But Mrs. Caldwell was reading the letter, and again her countenance
cleared. "Papa wants us to go to him as soon as ever we can get
ready!" was her joyful exclamation. "And, oh, they've had such snow!
See, Mildred, here's a sketch of the chapel nearly buried."

"Oh, let me see, too," Beth cried, running round the table to look
over Mildred's shoulder.

"Did papa draw that? How _wonderful_!"

"Beth, don't lean on me so," Mildred said crossly, shaking her off.

The sketch, which was done in ink on half a sheet of paper, showed a
little chapel with great billows of snow rolling along the sides and
up to the roof. After breakfast, Mildred sat down and began to copy it
in pencil, to Beth's intense surprise. The possibility of copying it
herself would never have occurred to her, but when she saw Mildred
doing it of course she must try too. She could make nothing of it,
however, till Mildred showed her how to place each stroke, and then
she was very soon weary of the effort, and gave it up, yawning.
Drawing was not to be one of her accomplishments.

Kitty was to accompany them to the west.

When the day of departure arrived, a great coach and pair came to the
door, and the luggage was piled up on it. Beth, with her mouth set, and
her eyes twice their normal size from excitement, was everywhere,
watching everybody, afraid to miss anything that happened. Her mother's
movements were a source of special interest to her. At the last moment
Mrs. Caldwell slipped away alone to take leave of the place which had
been the first home of her married life. She was a young girl when she
came to it, the daughter of a country gentleman, accustomed to luxury,
but right ready to enjoy poverty with the man of her heart; and poverty
enough she had had to endure, and sickness and sorrow too--troubles
inevitable--besides some of those other troubles, which are the harder
to bear because they are not inevitable. But still, she had had her
compensations, and it was of these she thought as she took her last
leave of the little place. She went to the end of the garden first,
closely followed by Beth, and looked through the thin hedge out across
the field. She seemed to be seeing things which were farther away than
Beth's eyes could reach. Then she went to an old garden seat, touched it
tenderly, and stood looking down at it for some seconds. Many a summer
evening she had sat there at work while her husband read to her. It was
early spring, and the snowdrops and crocuses were out. She gathered a
little bunch of them. When she had made the tour of the garden, she
returned to the house, and went into every room, Beth following her
faithfully, at a safe distance. In the nursery she stood some little
time looking round at the bare walls, and seeming to listen expectantly.
No doubt she heard ghostly echoes of the patter of children's feet, the
ring of children's voices. As she turned to go she pressed her
handkerchief to her eyes. In her own room she lingered still longer,
going from one piece of furniture to another, and laying her hand on
each. It was handsome furniture, such as a lady should have about her,
and every piece represented a longer or shorter period of self-denial,
both on her own part and on her husband's, and a proportionately keen
joy in the acquisition of it. She remembered so well when the wardrobe
came home, and the dressing-table too, and the mahogany drawers. The
furniture was to follow to the new home, and each piece would still have
its own history, but, once it was moved from its accustomed place, new
associations would have to be formed, and that was what she dreaded. She
could picture the old home deserted, and herself yearning for it, and
for the old days; but she could not imagine a new home or a new chapter
of life with any great interest or pleasure in it, anything, in fact,
but anxiety.

When at last she left the house, she was quite overcome to find that a
little crowd of friends of every degree had collected to wish her good
speed. She went from one to the other, shaking hands, and answering
their words in kindly wise. Mary Lynch gave Beth a currant-cake, and
lifted her into the coach, though she could quite well have got in by
herself. Then they were off, and Mrs. Caldwell stood at the door,
wiping her eyes, and gazing at the little house till they turned the
corner of the street, and lost sight of it for ever.

The tide was out, Dorman's green Isle rested on its grey rocks, the
pond shone like a mirror on the shore, and the young grass was
springing on the giant's grave; but the branches were still bare and
brown on the Castle Hill, and the old grey castle stood out whitened
by contrast with a background of dark and lowering sky. Beth's
highly-strung nerves, already overstrained by excitement, broke down
completely under the oppression of those heavy clouds, and she became
convulsed with sobs. Kitty took her on her knee, but tried in vain to
soothe her before the currant-cake and the motion of the coach had
made her deadly sick, after which she dozed off from sheer exhaustion.

The rest of the journey was a nightmare of nausea to her. She was
constantly being lifted out of the carriage, and made to lie on a sofa
somewhere while the horses were being changed, or put to bed for the
night, and dragged up again unrefreshed in the early morning, and
consigned once more to misery. Sometimes great dark mountains towered
above her, filling her with dread; and sometimes a long lonely level
of bare brown bogs was all about her, overwhelming her little soul
with such a terrible sense of desolation that she cowered down beside
Kitty, and clung to her shivering.

Once her mother shook her for something, and Beth turned faint.

"What's the matter with her, Kitty?" Mrs. Caldwell exclaimed, alarmed
by her white face.

"You've jest shook the life out of her, m'em, I think," Kitty answered
her tranquilly: "An' ye'll not rare her that way, I'm thinking."

Mrs. Caldwell began to dislike Kitty.

On the third day they drove down a delightful road, with hedges on
either hand, footpaths, and trees, among which big country-houses
nestled. The mountains were still in the neighbourhood, but not near
enough to be awesome. On one side of the road was a broad shallow
stream, so clear you could see the brown stones at the bottom, a
salmon-stream with weirs and waterfalls.

They were nearing a town, and Kitty began to put the things together.
Beth became interested. Mamma looked out of the window every instant,
and at last she exclaimed in a tone of relief, which somehow belied
the words: "Here's papa! I _knew_ he would come!" And there was a
horse at the window, and papa was on the horse, looking in at them.
Mamma's face became quite rosy, and she laughed a good deal and showed
her teeth. Beth had not noticed them before.

"What are you staring at, Beth?" Mildred whispered.

"Mamma's all pink," Beth said.

"That's blushing," said Mildred.

"What's blushing?" said Beth.

"Getting pink."

"What does she do it for?"

"She can't help it."

Beth continued to stare, and at last Mrs. Caldwell noticed it, and
asked her what she was looking at.

"You've got nice white teeth," said Beth. Mrs. Caldwell smiled.

"Have you only just discovered that?" papa asked through the window.

"You never told me," Beth protested, thinking herself reproached. "You
said Jane Nettles had."

The smile froze on mamma's lips, and papa's horse became unmanageable.
Beth saw there was something wrong, and stopped, looking from one to
the other intently.

Mrs. Caldwell recovered herself. "What a stolid face she has!" she
remarked presently by way of breaking an awkward pause.

Beth wondered what "stolid" meant, and who "she" was.

"She doesn't look well," papa observed.

"She's jest had the life shook out of her, sir," Kitty put in.

"Kitty, how dare you?" Mrs. Caldwell began.

"It's to the journey I'm alludin' now, m'em," Kitty explained with
dignity. "The child can't bear the travellin'."

"Well, it won't last much longer now," said papa, and then made some
remark to mamma in Italian, which brought back her good-humour. They
always spoke Italian to each other, because papa did not know French
so well as mamma did. Beth supposed at that time that all grown-up
people spoke French or Italian to each other, and she used to wonder
which she would speak when she was grown up.

They stopped at an inn for an hour or two, for there was still another
stage of this interminable journey. Mildred had a bag with a big doll
in it, and some almond-sweets. She left it on a window-seat when they
went to have something to eat, and when she thought of it again it was
nowhere to be found.

"They would steal the teeth out of your head in this God-forsaken
country," Captain Caldwell exclaimed, in a tone of exasperation.

An awful vision of igneous rocks, with mis-shapen creatures prowling
about amongst them, instantly appeared to Beth in illustration of a
God-forsaken country, but she tried vainly to imagine how stealing
teeth out of your head was to be managed.

When they set off again, and had left the grey town with its green
trees and clear rivulet behind, the road lay through a wild and
desolate region. Great dark mountains rolled away in every direction,
and were piled up above the travellers to the very sky. The scene was
most melancholy in its grandeur, and Beth, gazing at it fascinated,
with big eyes dilated to their full extent, became exceedingly
depressed. At one turn of the way, in a field below, they saw a
gentleman carrying a gun, and attended by a party of armed policemen.

"That's Mr. Burke going over his property," Captain Caldwell observed
to his wife. "He's unpopular just now, and daren't move without an
escort. His life's not worth a moment's purchase a hundred yards from
his own gate, and I expect he'll be shot like a dog some day, with all
his precautions."

"Oh, why does he stay?" Mrs. Caldwell exclaimed.

"Just pluck," her husband answered; "and he likes it. It certainly
does add to the interest of life."

"O Henry! don't speak like that," Mrs. Caldwell remonstrated. "They
can't owe you any grudge."

Captain Caldwell flipped a fly from his horse's ear.

Beth gazed down at the doomed gentleman, and fairly quailed for him.
She half expected to see the policemen turn on him and shoot him
before her eyes, and a strange excitement gradually grew upon her. She
seemed to be seeing and hearing and feeling without eyes, or ears, or
a body.

The carriage rocked like a ship at sea, and once or twice it seemed to
be going right over.

"What a dreadfully bad road!" Mrs. Caldwell exclaimed.

"Yes," her husband rejoined, "the roads about here are the very devil.
This is one of the best. Do you see that one over there?" pointing
with his whip to a white line that zigzagged across a neighbouring
mountain. "It's disused now. That's Gallows Hill, where a man was
hanged."

Beth gazed at the spot with horror. "I see him!" she cried.

"See whom?" said her mother.

"I see the man hanging."

"Oh, nonsense!" Mrs. Caldwell exclaimed. "Why, the man was hanged ages
ago. He isn't there now."

"You must speak the truth, young lady," papa said severely.

Beth, put to shame by the reproof, shrank into herself. She was keenly
sensitive to blame. But all the same her great grey eyes were riveted
on the top of the hill, for there, against the sky, she did distinctly
see the man dangling from the gibbet.

"Kitty," she whispered, "don't you see him?"

"Whisht, darlint," Kitty said, covering Beth's eyes with her hand. "I
don't see him. But I'll not be after calling ye a liar because ye do,
for I guess ye see more nor most, Holy Mother purtect us! But whisht
now, you mustn't look at him any more."

The carriage came to the brow of the mountain, and down below was
their destination, Castletownrock, a mere village, consisting
principally of one long, steep street. Some distance below the village
again, the great green waves of a tempestuous sea broke on a dangerous
coast.

"The two races don't fuse," papa was saying to mamma, "in this part of
the country, at all events. There's an Irish and an English side to
the street. The English side has a flagged footpath, and the houses
are neat and clean, and well-to-do; on the Irish side all is poverty
and dirt and confusion."

Just outside the village, a little group of people waited to welcome
them--Mr. Macbean the rector, Captain Keene, the three Misses Keene,
and Jim.

The carriage was stopped, and they all got out and walked the rest of
the distance to the inn, where they were to stay till the furniture
arrived. On the way down the street they saw their new home. It made
no impression on Beth. But she recognised the Roman Catholic Chapel on
the other side of the road from papa's drawing, only it looked
different because there was no snow.

The "gentleman and lady" who kept the inn, Mr. and Mrs. Mayne, with
their two daughters, met them at the door, and shook hands with mamma,
and kissed the children.

Then they went into the inn parlour, and there was wine and plum-cake,
and Dr. and Mrs. Macdougall came with their little girl Lucy, who was
eleven years old, Mildred's age.

Mr. Macbean, the rector, who was tall and thin, and had a brown beard
that waggled when he talked, drew Beth to his side, and began to ask
her questions, just when she wanted so much to hear what everybody
else was saying, too.

"Well, and what have you been taught?" he began.

Beth gazed at him blankly.

"Do you love God?" he proceeded, putting his hand on her head.

Beth looked round the room, perplexed, then fixed her eyes on his
beard, and watched it waggle with interest.

"Ask her if she knows anything about the other gentleman," Captain
Keene put in jocosely--"here's to his health!" and he emptied his
glass.

Beth's great eyes settled upon him with sudden fixity.

"I suppose you never heard of the devil?" he proceeded.

"Oh yes, I have," was Beth's instant and unexpected rejoinder. "The
devil is a bad road."

There was an explosion of laughter at this.

"But you said so, papa," Beth remonstrated indignantly.

"My dear child, I said just the reverse."

"What's the reverse?" said Beth, picturing another personality.

"There now, that will do," Mrs. Caldwell interposed. "Little bodies
must be seen and not heard."

Mr. Macbean stroked Beth's head--"There is something in here, I
expect," he observed.

"Not much, I'm afraid," Mrs. Caldwell answered. "We've hardly been
able to teach her anything."

"Ah!" Mr. Macbean ejaculated, reflecting on the specimen he had heard
of the method pursued. "You must let me see what _I_ can do."




CHAPTER V


In a few days all the bustle of getting into the new house began. The
furniture arrived in irregular batches. Some of it came and some of it
did not come. When a box was opened there was nothing that was wanted
in it, only things that did not go together, and mamma was worried,
and papa was cross.

The workpeople were wild and ignorant, and only trustworthy as long as
they were watched. They were unaccustomed to the most ordinary comforts
of civilised life, particularly in the way of furniture. When the family
arrived at the house one morning, they found Mrs. Caldwell's wardrobe,
mahogany drawers, and other articles of bedroom furniture, set up in
conspicuous positions in the sitting-room, and the carpenter was much
ruffled when he was ordered to take them upstairs.

"Shure it's mad they are," he remonstrated to one of the servants, "to
have sich foine things put in a bedroom where nobody'll see thim."

The men came up from the coastguard station to scrape the walls, and
Ellis, the petty officer, used the bread-knife, and broke it, and papa
bawled at him. Beth was sorry for Ellis.

The house was built of stone, and very damp. There was a great deal of
space in it, but little accommodation. On the ground-floor were a huge
hall, kitchen, pantry and sitting-room, all flagged. The sitting-room
was the only one in the house, and had to be used as dining-room and
drawing-room, but it was large enough for that and to spare. There was
a big yard and a big garden too, and Riley was in the stable, and
Biddy and Anne in the kitchen, and Kitty in the nursery. This increase
of establishment, which meant so much to the parents, was accepted as
a matter of course by the children.

Kitty told Riley and Biddy and Anne about what Beth had seen on
Gallows Hill, and they often asked Beth what she saw when she used to
sit looking at nothing. Then Beth would think things, and describe
them, because it seemed to please the servants. They used to be very
serious, and shake their heads and cross themselves, with muttered
ejaculations, but all the time they liked it. This encouraged Beth,
and she used to think and think of things to tell them.

Beth was exceedingly busy in her own way at this time. Her mind was
being rapidly stored with impressions, and nothing escaped her.

The four children and Kitty were put all together in one great
nursery, an arrangement of which Kitty, with the fastidious delicacy
of a strict Catholic, did not at all approve.

"Indeed, m'em," she said, "I'm thinkin' Master Jim's too sharp to be
in the nursery wid his sisters now."

"Nonsense, Kitty," Mrs. Caldwell exclaimed. "How can you be so
evil-minded? Master Jim's only a child--a baby of ten!"

"Och, thin, me'm, it's an ould-fashioned baby he is," said Kitty; "and
I'm thinkin' it's a bit of a screen or a curtain I'd like for dressin'
behind if he's to be wid us."

"I have nothing of the kind to give you," Mrs. Caldwell rejoined. And
afterwards she made merry with papa about Kitty's prudishness.

But Kitty was right as it happened. Jim had been left pretty much to
his own devices during the time he had been alone with his father at
Castletownrock. Captain Caldwell's theory was that boys would look
after themselves, "and the sooner you let 'em the sooner you'd make
men of 'em. Blood will tell, sir. Your gentleman's son is a match for
any ragamuffin"--a theory which Jim justified in many a free fight;
but, during the suspension of hostilities he hobnobbed with the
ragamuffins, who took a terrible revenge, for by the time Mrs.
Caldwell arrived Jim was thoroughly corrupted. Kitty took precautions,
however. She arranged the nursery-life so that Master Jim did not
associate with his sisters more than was absolutely necessary. She had
him up in the morning, bathed, and sent off to school before she
disturbed the little girls, and at night she never left the nursery
until he was asleep. Out of her slender purse she bought some print,
and fixed up a curtain for his sisters to dress behind, and all else
that she had to do for the children was done decently and in order.
She had almost entire charge of them, their mother being engrossed
with her husband, whose health and spirits had already begun to suffer
from overwork and exposure to the climate.

Kitty was teaching her charges dainty ways, mentally as well as
physically. When she had washed them at night, she made them purge their
little souls of all the sins of the day in prayer, and in the morning
she taught them how to fortify themselves with good resolutions. Beth
took naturally to the Catholic training, and solemnly dedicated herself
to the Blessed Virgin; Mildred conformed, but without enthusiasm; the
four-year-old baby Bernadine lisped little _Aves_; but Jim, in the words
of Captain Keene, "the old buffalo," as their father called him, sneered
at that sort of thing "as only fit for women."

"Men drink whisky," said Jim, puffing out his chest.

"True for ye," said Kitty; "but I've been told that them as drinks
whisky here goes dry in the next world."

"Well, I shall drink whisky and kiss the girls all the same," said
Jim. "And I wouldn't be a Catholic now, not to save me sowl. I owe the
Catholics a grudge. They insulted me."

"How so?" asked Kitty.

"At the midnight Mass last Christmas. Father John got up, and ordered
all heretics out of the sacred house of God, and Pat Fagan ses to me,
'Are ye a heretic?' and I ses, 'I am, Pat Fagan.' 'Thin out ye go,'
ses he, and, but for that, I'd 'a' bin a Catholic; so see what you
lose by insulting a gentleman."

"What's insulting?" Beth asked.

Jim slapped her face. "That's insulting," he explained.

Beth struck him back promptly, and a scuffle ensued.

"Oh, but it's little divils yez are, the lot of ye!" cried Kitty as
she separated them.

During fits of nervous irritability Captain Caldwell had a habit of
pacing about the house for hours at a time. One evening he happened to
be walking up and down on the landing outside the nursery door, which
was a little way open, and his attention was attracted by Beth's
voice. She was reciting a Catholic hymn softly, but with great
feeling, as if every word of it were a pleasure to her.

"What's the meaning of this?" he demanded, breaking in on her
devotions. "What papistical abominations have you been teaching the
child, Kitty?"

"Shure, sorr, it's jest a bit of a hymn," said Kitty bravely; but her
heart sank, and the colour left her lips.

Captain Caldwell was furious.

"Caroline!" he called peremptorily, going to the head of the stairs,
"Caroline, come up directly!"

Mrs. Caldwell fussed up in hot haste.

"Do you know," Captain Caldwell demanded, "that this woman is making
idolaters of your children? I heard this child just now praying to the
Virgin Mary! Do you hear?"

Mrs. Caldwell's pale face flushed with anger.

"How dare you do such a thing, you wicked woman?" she exclaimed. "I
shall not keep you another day in the house. Pack up your things at
once, and go the first thing in the morning."

"O mamma!" Beth cried, "you're not going to send Kitty away? Kitty,
Kitty, you won't go and leave me?"

"There, you see!" Captain Caldwell exclaimed. "You see the influence
she's got over the child already! That's the Jesuit all over!"

"An ignorant woman like you, who can hardly read and write, setting up
to teach _my_ children, indeed--how dare you?" Mrs. Caldwell stormed.

"Well, m'em, I _am_ an ignorant woman that can hardly read and write,"
Kitty answered with dignity; "but I could tell you some things ye'll
not find out in all yer books, and may be they'd surprise ye."

"Kitty, ye'll not go and leave me," Beth repeated passionately.

"Troth, an' I'd stay for your sake if I could," said Kitty, "fur it's
a bad time I'm afraid ye'll be havin' once I'm gone."

"Do you hear that?" Captain Caldwell exclaimed. "Now you see what
comes of getting people of this kind into the house. She's going to
make out that the child is ill-treated."

"One of _my_ children ill-treated!" Mrs. Caldwell cried scornfully.
"Who would believe her?" Then turning to Beth: "If I ever hear you
repeat a word that wicked woman has taught you, I'll beat you as long
as I can stand over you."

Kitty looked straight into Mrs. Caldwell's face, and smiled
sarcastically, but uttered not a word.

"How dare you stand there, grinning at me in that impertinent way, you
low woman?" Mrs. Caldwell exclaimed with great exasperation. "I
believe you _are_ a Jesuit, sent here to corrupt my children. But go
you shall to-morrow morning."

"Oh, I'll go, m'em," Kitty answered quietly. She knew the case was
hopeless.

"There, now," said Mrs. Caldwell, turning to her husband. "Do you see?
That shows you! She doesn't care a bit."

Beth was clinging to Kitty, but her mother seized her by the arm, and
flung her half across the room, and was about to follow her, but
Captain Caldwell interfered. "That will do," he said significantly.
"It's no use venting your rage on the child. In future choose your
nurses better."

"Then, in future, give me better advice when I consult you about
them," Mrs. Caldwell retorted, following him out of the room.

Beth clung to Kitty the whole night long, and had to be torn from her
in the morning, screaming and kicking. She stood in front of her
mother, her eyes and cheeks ablaze:--

"I shall pray to the Blessed Virgin--I shall pray to the Blessed
Virgin--every _hour_ of my life," she gasped, "and you can't prevent
me. Beat me as long as you can stand over me if you like, but I'll
only pray the harder."

"For God's sake, m'em," Kitty cried, clasping her hands, "let that child
alone. Shure she's a sweet lamb if you'd give her a chance. But ye put
the divil into her wid yer shakin' an' yer batin', and mischief'll come
of it sooner or later, mark my words."

When Kitty had gone, Mrs. Caldwell shut Beth up in the nursery with
Baby Bernadine. Beth threw herself on the floor, and sobbed until she
had exhausted her tears; then she gathered herself together, and sat
on the floor with her hands clasped round her legs, her chin on her
knees, looking up dreamily at the sky, through the nursery window. Her
pathetic little face was all drawn and haggard and hopeless. But
presently she began to sing--

        "Ave Maria!
    Mother of the desolate!
    Guide of the unfortunate!
        Hear from thy starry home our prayer:
    If sorrow will await us,
    Tyrants vex and hate us,
        Teach us thine own most patient part to bear!
            Sancta Maria!
    When we are sighing,
    When we are dying,
       Give to us thine aid of prayer!"

As she sang, comfort came to her, and the little voice swelled in
volume.

Baby Bernadine also sat on the floor, opposite to Beth, and gazed at
her, much impressed. When she had finished singing, Beth became aware
of her sister's reverent attention, and put out her tongue at her.
Bernadine laughed. Then Beth crisped up her hands till they looked like
claws, and began to make a variety of hideous faces. Bernadine thought
it was a game and smiled at first, but finally she ceased to recognise
her sister and shrieked aloud in terror. Beth heard her mother hurrying
up, and got behind the door so that her mother could not see her as she
opened it. Mrs. Caldwell hurried up to the baby--"The darling, then,
what have they been doing to you?"--and Beth made her escape. As she
crossed the hall, some one knocked at the front door. Beth opened it a
crack. Captain Keene was outside. When she saw him, she recollected
something she had heard about his religious opinions, and began to
question him eagerly. His answers were apparently exciting, for
presently she flung the door wide open to let him in, then ran to the
foot of the stairs, and shouted at the top of her voice--

"Papa, papa, come down! come directly! Here's old Keene, the old
Buffalo, and he says there is no God!"

Captain Caldwell descended the stairs hurriedly, but, on catching a
glimpse of his countenance, Beth did not wait to receive him.

She had to pass through the kitchen to get into the yard. It was the
busy time of the day, and Biddy and Anne and Riley, all without shoes
or stockings, were playing football with a bladder.

Biddy tried to detain Beth.

"Arrah, bad luck to ye, Biddy," Beth cried, imitating the brogue. "Let
me go, d'ye hear?"

"Holy Mother, preserve us!" Biddy exclaimed, crossing herself. "Don't
ye ever be afther wishin' anybody bad luck, Miss Beth; shure ye'll
bring it if ye do."

"Thin don't ye ever be afther stoppin' me when I want to be going,
Biddy," Beth rejoined, stamping her foot, "or I'll _blast_ ye," she
added as she passed out into the sunlight.

Fowls and ducks and Jim's pet pigeons were the only creatures moving in
the yard. Beth stood among them, watching them for a little, then went
to the cornbin in the stable, and got some oats. There was a shallow tub
of water for the birds to drink; Beth hunkered down beside it, and held
out her hand, full of corn. The pigeons were very tame, and presently a
beautiful blue-rock came up confidently, and began to eat. His eyes were
a deep rich orange colour. Beth caught him, and stroked his glossy
plumage, delighting in the exquisite metallic sheen on his neck and
breast. The colour gave her an almost painful sensation of pleasure,
which changed on a sudden into a fit of blind exasperation. Her grief
for the loss of Kitty had gripped her again with a horrid twinge. She
clenched her teeth in her pain, her fingers closed convulsively round
the pigeon's throat, and she held him out at arm's length, and shook him
viciously till the nictitating membrane dropped over his eyes, his head
sank back, his bill opened, and he hung from her hand, an inert heap of
ruffled feathers. Then the tension of her nerves relaxed; it was a
relief to have crushed the life out of something. She let the bird drop,
and stood looking at him, as an animal might have looked, with an
impassive face which betrays no shade of emotion. As she did so,
however, the bird showed signs of life; and, suddenly, quickening into
interest, she stooped down, turned him over, and examined him; then
sprinkled him with water, and made him drink. He rapidly revived, and
when he was able to stand, she let him go; and he was soon feeding among
his companions as if nothing had happened.

Beth watched them for a little with the same animal-like
expressionless gravity of countenance, then moved off unconcernedly.

She never mentioned the incident to any one, and never forgot it; but
her only feeling about it was that the pigeon had had a narrow escape.




CHAPTER VI


Beth was a fine instrument, sensitive to a touch, and, considering the
way she was handled, it would have been a wonder if discordant effects
had not been constantly produced upon her. Hers was a nature with a
wide range. It is probable that every conceivable impulse was latent
in her, every possibility of good or evil. Exactly which would
predominate depended upon the influences of these early years; and
almost all the influences she came under were haphazard. There was no
intelligent direction of her thoughts, no systematic training to form
good habits. Her brothers were sent to school as soon as they were old
enough, and so had the advantage of regular routine and strict
discipline from the first; but a couple of hours a day for lessons was
considered enough for the little girls; and, for the rest of the time,
so long as they were on the premises and not naughty, that is to say,
gave no trouble, it was taken for granted that they were safe, morally
and physically. Neither of their parents seem to have suspected their
extreme precocity; and there is no doubt that Beth suffered seriously
in after life from the mistakes of those in authority over her at this
period. People admired her bright eyes without realising that she
could see with them, and not only that she could see, but that she
could not help seeing. But even if they had realised it, they would
merely have scolded her for learning anything in that way which they
preferred that she should not know. They were not sufficiently
intelligent themselves to perceive that it is not what we know of
things, but what we think of them, which makes for good or evil. Beth
was accordingly allowed to run wild, and expected to see nothing; but
all the time her mind was being involuntarily stored with observations
from which, in time to come, for want of instruction, she would be
forced to draw her own--often erroneous--conclusions.

Kitty's departure was Beth's first great grief, and she suffered
terribly. The prop and stay of her little life had gone, the comfort
and kindness, the order and discipline, which were essential to her
nature. Mrs. Caldwell was a good woman, who would certainly do what
she thought best for her children; but she was exhausted by the
unconscionable production of a too numerous family, a family which she
had neither the means nor the strength to bring up properly. Her
husband's health, too, grew ever more precarious, and she found
herself obliged to do all in her power to help him with his duties,
which were arduous. There was a good deal that she could do in the way
of writing official letters and managing money-matters, tasks for
which she was much better fitted than for the management of children;
but the children, meanwhile, had to be left to the care of others--not
that that would have been a bad thing for them had their mother had
sufficient discrimination to enable her to choose the proper kind of
people to be with them. Unfortunately for everybody, however, Mrs.
Caldwell had been brought up on the old-fashioned principle that
absolute ignorance of human nature is the best qualification for a
wife and mother, and she was consequently quite unprepared for any
possibility which had not formed part of her own simple and limited
personal experience. She never suspected, for one thing, that a
servant's conversation could be undesirable if her appearance and her
character from her last mistress were satisfactory; and, therefore,
when Kitty had gone, she put Anne in her place without misgiving,
Anne's principal recommendation being that she was a nice-looking
girl, and had pretty deferential manners.

Anne came from one of the cabins on the Irish side of the road, where
people, pigs, poultry, with an occasional cow, goat, or donkey herded
together indiscriminately. The windows were about a foot square, and
were not made to open. Sometimes they had glass in them, but were
oftener stopped up with rags. Before the doors were heaps of manure
and pools of stagnant water. There was no regular footway, but a mere
beaten track in front of the cabins, and this, on wet days, was
ankle-deep in mud. The women hung about the doors all day long,
knitting the men's blue stockings, and did little else apparently.
Both men and women were usually in a torpid state, the result,
doubtless, of breathing a poisoned atmosphere, and of insufficient
food. It took strong stimulants to rouse them: love, hate, jealousy,
whisky, battle, murder, and sudden death. Their conversation was
gross, and they were very immoral; but it is hardly necessary to say
so, for with men, women, children, and animals all crowded together in
such surroundings, and the morbid craving for excitement to which
people who have no comfort or wholesome interest in life fall a prey,
immorality is inevitable. It was the boast of the place that there
were no illegitimate children; it would have been a better sign if
there had been.

Mrs. Caldwell, true to her training, lived opposite to all this vice
and squalor, serenely indifferent to it. Anne, therefore, who knew
nothing about the management of children, and was not in any respect a
proper person to have the charge of them, had it all her own way in
the nursery: and her way was to do nothing that she could help. She
used to call the children in the morning, and then leave them to their
own devices. The moment they were awake, which was pretty soon, for
they were full of life, they began to batter each other with pillows,
dance about the room in their night-dresses, pitch tents with the
bed-clothes on the floor, and make noise enough to bring their mother
down upon them. Then Anne would be summoned and come hurrying up, and
help them to huddle on their clothes somehow. She never washed them,
but encouraged them to perform their own ablutions, which they did
with the end of a towel dipped in a jug. The consequence was they were
generally in a very dirty state. They took their meals with their
parents, and papa would notice the dirt eventually, and storm at mamma
in Italian, when words would ensue in a tone which made the children
quake. Then mamma would storm at Anne, for whom the children felt
sorry, and the result would be a bath, which they bore with fortitude,
for fear of getting Anne into further trouble. They even made good
resolutions about washing themselves, which they kept for a few days;
then, however, they began to shirk again, and had again to be
scrubbed. The resolutions of a child must be shored up by kindly
supervision, otherwise it is hardly likely that they will cement into
good habits.

Beth suffered from a continual sense of discomfort in those days for
want of proper attention. All her clothing fitted badly, and were
fastened on with anything that came to hand in the way of tape and
buttons; her hair was ill brushed, and she was so continually found
fault with that her sense of self-respect was checked in its
development, and she lost all faith in her own power to do anything
right or well. The consequence was the most profound disheartenment,
endured in silence, with the exquisite uncomplaining fortitude of a
little child. It made its mark on her countenance, however, in a
settled expression of discontent, which, being mistaken for a bad
disposition, repelled people, and made her many enemies. People
generally said that Mildred was a dear, but Beth did not look
pleasant; and for many a long day to come, very few troubled
themselves to try and make her look so.

It cannot be said that Beth's parents neglected their children. On the
contrary, her father thought much of their education, and of their
future; it was the all-importance of the present that did not strike
him, and so with her mother. Neither parent was careless, but their
care stopped short too soon; and it is astonishing the amount of
liberty the children had. They were sent out of doors as soon as they
were dressed in the morning, because sunshine and air are so essential
to children. If they went for a walk, Anne accompanied them; but very
often Anne was wanted, and then the children were left to loiter about
the garden or stable-yard, where, doubtless with the help of reasoning
powers much in advance of her age, Beth had soon heard and seen enough
to make her feel a certain contempt for her father's veracity when he
told her that she had originally been brought to the house in the
doctor's black bag.

After Kitty's departure Beth had many a lonely hour, and the time hung
heavy on her hands. Mildred, her senior by four years, was of a
simpler disposition, and always able to amuse herself, playing with
the Baby Bernadine, or with toys which were no distraction to Beth.
Mildred, besides, was fond of reading; but books to be deciphered
remained a wonder and a mystery to Beth.

Jim went to the national school, the only one in the place, with all
the other little boys. The master was a young curate who gave Mildred
and Beth their lessons also, when school-hours were over. Beth used to
yearn for lesson-time, just for the sake of being obliged to do
something; but lessons were disappointing, for the curate devoted
himself to Mildred, who was docile and studious, and took no special
pains to interest Beth, and consequently she soon wearied of the dull
restraint, and became troublesome. Sometimes she was boisterous, and
then the tutor had to spend half his time in chasing her to rescue his
hat, a book, an ink-bottle, or some other article which she threatened
to destroy; and, sometimes she was so depressed that he had to give up
trying to teach her, and just do his best to distract her. In her
eighth year she was able to follow the church-service in the
prayer-book, and make out the hymns, but that was all.

Sunday-school was held in the church, and was attended by all the
unmarried parishioners. Mildred taught some of the tiny mites, and
Beth was put into her class at first; but Beth had no respect for
Mildred, and had consequently to be removed. She was expected to
learn the collect for the day and the verse of a hymn every Sunday,
but never by any chance knew either. No one ever thought of reading
the thing over to her, and fixing her attention on it by some little
explanation; and learning by heart from a book did not come naturally
to her. She learned by ear easily enough, but not by sight. The hymns
and prayers which Kitty had repeated to her, she very soon picked up;
but Kitty had true sympathetic insight to inform her of what the child
required, and all her little lessons were proper to some occasion, and
had comfort in them. What Beth learned now, on the contrary, often
filled her with gloom. Some of the hymns, such as,

    "When gathering clouds around I view,
     And days are dark, and friends are few,"

made her especially miserable. It was always a dark day to her when
she repeated it, with heavy clouds collecting overhead, and herself, a
solitary little speck on the mountain side wandering alone.




CHAPTER VII


It is significant to note that church figures largely in Beth's
recollection of this time, but religion not at all. There was, in
fact, no connection between the two in her mind.

Both Captain and Mrs. Caldwell protested strongly against what they
called cant; and they seemed to have called everything cant except an
occasional cold reading aloud of the Bible on Sundays, and the bald
observance of the church service. The Bible they read aloud to the
children without expounding it, and the services they attended without
comment. Displays of religious emotion in everyday life they regarded
as symptoms of insanity; and if they heard people discuss religion
with enthusiasm, and profess to love the Lord, they were genuinely
shocked. All that kind of thing they thought "such cant," "and so like
those horrid dissenters;" which made them extra careful that the
children should hear nothing of the sort. This, from their point of
view, was right and wise; in Beth's case especially; for her
unsatisfied soul was of the quality which soon yearns for the fine
fulness of faith; her little heart would have filled to bursting with
her first glad conception of the love divine, and her whole being
would have stirred to speak her emotion, even though speech meant
martyrdom. Thanks to the precautions of her parents, however, she
heard nothing to stimulate her natural tendency to religious fervour
after Kitty's departure; and gradually the image of our Blessed Lady
faded from her mind, and was succeeded by that of the God of her
parents, a death-dealing deity, delighting in blood, whom she was
warned to fear, and from whom she did accordingly shrink with such
holy horror that, when she went to church, she tried to think of
anything but Him. This was how it happened that church, instead of
being the threshold of the next world to her mind, became the centre
of this, where she made many interesting observations of men and
manners; for in spite of her backwardness in the schoolroom, Beth's
intellect advanced with a bound at this period. She had left her
native place an infant, on whose mind some chance impressions had been
made and lingered; she arrived at Castletownrock with the power to
observe for herself, and even to reflect upon what she saw--of course
to a certain extent only; but still the power had come, and was far in
advance of her years. So far, it was circumstances that had impressed
her; she knew one person from another, but that was all. Now, however,
she began to be interested in people for themselves, apart from any
incident in which they figured; and most of her time was spent in a
curiously close, but quite involuntary study of those about her, and
of their relations to each other.

Church was often a sore penance to the children, it was so long, and
cold, and dull; but they set off on Sunday happy in the consciousness
of their best hats and jackets, nevertheless; and the first part of
the time was not so bad, for then they had Sunday-school, and the
three Misses Keene--Mary, Sophia, and Lenore--and the two Misses
Mayne, Honor and Kathleen, and Mr. and Mrs. Small, the Vicar and his
wife, and the curate, were all there talking and teaching. Beth
remembered nothing about the teaching except that, on one occasion,
Mr. Macbean, the rector, tried to explain the meaning of the trefoil
on the ends of the pews to Mildred and herself; but she could think of
nothing but the way his beard wagged as he spoke, and was disconcerted
when he questioned her. He had promised to be a friend to Beth; but he
was a delicate man, and not able to live much at Castletownrock, where
the climate was rigorous; so that she seldom saw him.

When Sunday-school was over, the children went up to the gallery;
their pew and the Keenes', roomy boxes, took up the whole front of it.
Mrs. Caldwell always sat up in the gallery with the children, but
Captain Caldwell often sat downstairs in the rectory-pew to be near
the fire; when he sat in the gallery he wore a little black cap to
keep off the draught. He and Mr. O'Halloran the Squire, and Captain
Keene, stood and talked in the aisle sometimes before the service
commenced. One Sunday they kept looking up at the children in the
gallery.

"I'll bet Mildred will be the handsomest woman," Mr. O'Halloran was
saying.

"I'll back Beth," Captain Keene observed. "If all the men in the place
are not after her soon, I'm no judge of her sex, eh?"

"Oh, don't look at me!" said Captain Caldwell complacently. "I can't
pretend to say. But let's hope that they'll go off well, at all
events. They'll have every chance I can give them of making good
matches."

Beth heard her father repeat this conversation to her mother
afterwards, but was too busy wondering what a handsome woman was to
understand that it was her own charms which had been appraised; but
Mildred understood, and was elated.

Mr. O'Halloran, the squire, had a red beard, which was an offence to
Beth. His wife wore bonnets about which everybody used to make remarks
to Mrs. Caldwell. Beth understood that Mrs. O'Halloran was young and
pretty, and had three charming children, but was not happy because of
Sophia Keene.

"Just fancy," she heard Mrs. Small, the Vicar's wife, say to her
mother once. "Just fancy, he was in a carriage with them at the races,
and stayed with Sophia the whole time; and poor Mrs. O'Halloran left
at home alone. I call it scandalous. But you know what Sophia is!"
Mrs. Small concluded significantly.

Mrs. Caldwell drew herself up, and looked at Mrs. Small, but said
nothing; yet somehow Beth knew that she too was unhappy because of
Sophia Keene. Beth was not on familiar terms with her mother, and
would not have dared to embrace her spontaneously, or make any other
demonstration of affection; but she was loyally devoted to her all the
same, and would gladly have stabbed Sophia Keene, and have done battle
with the whole of the rest of the family on her mother's behalf had
occasion offered.

She was curled up among the fuchsias on the window-seat of the
sitting-room one day, unobserved by her parents, who entered the room
together after she had settled herself there, and began to discuss the
Keenes.

"You did not tell me, Henry, you spent all your time with them before
we came," Mrs. Caldwell said reproachfully.

"Why should I?" he answered, with a jaunty affectation of ease.

"It is not why you should," his wife said with studied gentleness,
"but why you should not. It seems so strange, making a mystery of it."

"I described old Keene to you--the old buffalo!" he replied; "and I'll
describe the girls now if you like. Mary is a gawk, Sophia is as
yellow as a duck's foot, and Lenore is half-witted."

The Keenes were ignorant, idle, good-tempered young women, and kind to
the children, whom they often took to bathe with them. They were
seldom able to go into the sea itself, for it was a wild, tempestuous
coast; but there were lovely clear pools on the rocky shore, natural
stone baths left full of water when the tide went out, sheltered from
the wind by tall, dark, precipitous cliffs, and warmed by the sun; and
there they used to dabble by the hour together. Anne went with them,
and it was a pretty sight, the four young women in white chemises that
clung to them when wet, and the three lovely children--little white
nudities with bright brown hair--scampering over the rocks, splashing
each other in the pools, or lying about on warm sunny slabs, resting
and chattering. One day Beth found some queer things in a pool, and
Sophia told her they were barnacles.

"They stick to the bottom of a ship," she said, "and grow heavier and
heavier till at last the ship can make no more way, and comes to a
standstill in a shining sea, where the water is as smooth as a mirror;
you would think it was a mirror, in fact, if it did not heave gently
up and down like your breast when you breathe; and every time it
heaves it flushes some colour, blue, or green, or pink, or purple. And
the barnacles swell and swell at the bottom of the ship, till at last
they burst in two with a loud report; and then the sailors rush to the
side of the ship and look over, and there they see a flock of
beautiful big white geese coming up out of the water; and sometimes
they shoot the geese, but if they do a great storm comes on and
engulfs the ship, and they are all drowned; but sometimes they stand
stockstill, amazed, and then the birds rise up out of the air on their
great white wings, up, up, drifting along, together, till they look
like the clouds over there. Then a gentle breeze springs up, and the
ship sails away safely into port."

"And where do the geese go?" Beth demanded, with breathless interest.

"They make for the shore too, and in the dead of winter, on stormy
nights, they fly over the land, uttering strange cries, and if you
wake and hear them, it means somebody is going to die."

Beth's eyes were staring far out beyond the great green Atlantic rollers
that came bursting in round the sheltering headland, white-crested with
foam, flying up the beach with a crash, and scattering showers of
spray that sparkled in the sunshine. She could see the ships and the
barnacles, and the silent sea, heaving great sighs and flushing with
fine colour in the act; and the geese, and the sailors peering over the
side and shooting at them and sinking immediately in a storm, but also
sailing into a safe haven triumphantly, where the sun shone on white
houses, although, at the same time, it was dark night, and overhead
there were strange cries that made her cower--"Beth!" cried Sophia,
"what's the matter with you, child?"

Beth returned with a start, and stared at her--"I know who it will
be," she said.

"Who what'll be, Miss Beth?" Anne asked in awe.

"Who'll die," said Beth.

"You mustn't say, Beth; you'll bring bad luck if you do," Miss Keene
interposed hastily.

"I'm not going to say," Beth answered dreamily; "but I know."

"You shouldn't have told the child that story, miss," Anne said.
"Shure, ye know what she is--she sees." Anne nodded her head several
times significantly.

"I forgot," said Sophia.

"She'll forget too," said Mary philosophically. "I say, Beth," she
went on, raising herself on her elbow--she was lying prone on a slab
of rock in the sun--"what does your mother think of us?"

Beth roused herself. "I don't know," she answered earnestly; "she
never says. But I know what papa thinks of you. He says Mary's a gawk,
Sophia is as yellow as a duck's foot, and Lenore is only half-witted."

The effect of this announcement astonished Beth. The Misses Keene,
instead of being interested, all looked at her as if they did not like
her, and Anne burst out laughing. When they got in, Anne told Mrs.
Caldwell, who flushed suddenly, and covered her mouth with her
handkerchief.

"Yes, mamma," Mildred exclaimed with importance, "Beth did say so. And
Mary tossed her head, and Sophia sneered."

"What is sneered?" Beth demanded importunately. "What is sneered?"

"O Beth! don't bother so," Mildred exclaimed irritably. "It's when you
curl up your lip."

"Beth, how could you be so naughty?" Mrs. Caldwell said at last from
behind her handkerchief. "Don't you know you should never repeat
things you hear said? A lady never repeats a private conversation."

"What's a private conversation?" said Beth.

Mrs. Caldwell gave her a broad definition, during which she lowered
her handkerchief, and Beth discovered that she was trying not to
smile.

This was Beth's first lesson in honour, which was her mother's god,
and she felt the influence of it all her life.

Later in the day, Beth was curled up on the window-seat among the
fuchsias, looking out. Behind the thatched cabins opposite, the sombre
mountains rolled up, dark and distinct, to the sky; but Beth would not
look at them if she could help it, they oppressed her. It was a close
afternoon, and the window was wide open. A bare-legged woman, in a
short petticoat, stood in an indolent attitude leaning against a
door-post opposite; a young man in low shoes, light blue stockings,
buff knee-breeches, a blue-tailed coat with brass buttons, and a soft
high-crowned felt hat, came strolling up the street with his hands in
his pockets.

"Hallo, Biddy," he remarked, as he passed the woman, "you're all
swelled."

"Yes," she answered tranquilly, "I've been drinking buttermilk."

"Well, let's hope it'll be a boy," he rejoined.

The woman looked up and down the street complacently.

Presently Beth saw Honor and Kathleen Mayne come out of the inn. The
Maynes used to pet the children and play the piano to them when they
were at the inn, and had been very good to Jim also when he was there
alone with his father before the family arrived. Their manners were
gentle and caressing, and they did their best to win their way into Mrs.
Caldwell's good graces, but at first she coldly repulsed them, which
hurt Beth very much. The Maynes, however, did not at all understand that
they were being repulsed. A kindly feeling existed among all classes in
those remote Irish villages. The squire's family, the doctor's,
clergyman's, draper's, and innkeeper's visited each other, and shook
hands when they met. There was no feeling of condescension on the one
hand, or of pretension on the other; but Mrs. Caldwell had the strong
class prejudice which makes such stupid snobs of the English. It was not
_what_ people were, but _who_ they were, that was all important to her;
and she would have bowed down cheerfully, as whole neighbourhoods do,
and felt exhilarated by the notice of some stupid county magnate, who
had not heart enough to be loved, head enough to distinguish himself, or
soul enough to get him into heaven. She was a lady, and Mayne was an
innkeeper. His daughters might amuse the children, but as to associating
with Mrs. Caldwell, that was absurd!

The girls were not to be rebuffed, however. They persevered in their
kindly attentions, making excuses to each other for Mrs. Caldwell's
manner; explaining her coldness by the fact that she was English, and
flattering her, until finally they won their way into her good graces,
and so effectually too, that when they brought a young magpie in a
basket for Beth one day, her mother graciously allowed her to accept
it.

Beth liked the Maynes, but now as they came up the road she slid from
the window-seat. She knew they would stop and talk if she waited, and
she did not want to talk. She was thinking about something, and it
irritated her to be interrupted. So she tore across the hall and
through the kitchen out into the yard, impelled by an imperative
desire to be alone.

The magpie was the first pet of her own she had ever had, and she
loved it. At night it was chained to a perch stuck in the wall of the
stable-yard. On the other side of that wall was the yard of Murphy the
farrier. The magpie soon became tame enough to be let loose by day,
and Beth always went to release it the first thing in the morning and
give it its breakfast. It came hopping to meet her now, and followed
her into the garden. The garden was entered by an archway under the
outbuildings, which divided it from the stable-yard. It was very long,
but narrow for its length. On the right was a high wall, but on the
left was a low one--at least one half of it was low--and Beth could
look over it into the farrier's garden next door. The other half had
been raised by Captain Caldwell on the understanding that if he raised
one half the farrier would raise the other, but the farrier had proved
perfidious. The wall was built without mortar, of rough, uncut stones.
Captain Caldwell had his half neatly finished off at the top with
sods, but Murphy's piece was still all broken down. The children used
to climb up by it on to the raised half, and dance there at the risk
of life and limb, and jeer at Murphy as he dug his potatoes, calling
his attention to the difference between the Irish and English half of
the wall, till he lost his temper and pelted them. This was the signal
for a battle. The children returned his potatoes with stones by way of
interest, and hit him as often as he hit them. (Needless to say, their
parents were not in the garden at the time.) They had a great contempt
for the farrier because he fought them, and he used to go about the
village complaining of them and their "tratement" of him, "the little
divils, spoilin' the pace of the whole neighbourhood."

There was a high wall at the end of the garden, and Beth liked to sit on
the top of it. She went there now, picked up her magpie, and climbed up
with difficulty by way of Pat Murphy's broken bit. Immediately below her
was a muddy lane, beyond which the land sloped down to the sea, and as
she sat there, the sound of the waves, that dreamy, soft murmur for
which we have no word, filled the interstices of her consciousness with
something that satisfied.

She was not left long in peace to enjoy it that afternoon, however,
for the farrier was at work in his garden below, and presently he
looked up and saw the magpie.

"There ye are agin, Miss Beth, wi' yer baste of a burrd; bad luck to
it!" he exclaimed, crossing himself. "Shure, don't I tell ye ivery day
uf your life it's wan fur sorrow."

"Bad luck to yerself, Pat Murphy," Beth rejoined promptly. "It's a
foine cheek ye have to be spakin' to a gentleman's daughter, an' you
not a man uv yer wurrd."

"Not a man o' me wurrd! what d'ye mane?" said Murphy, firing.

"Look at that wall," Beth answered; "didn't ye promise ye'd build it?"

"An' so I will when yer father gives me the stones he promised me,"
Murphy replied. "It's a moighty foine mon uv his wurrd he is."

"Is it my father yer maning, Pat Murphy?" Beth asked.

"It is," he said, sticking his spade in the ground emphatically.

"Ye know yer lying," said Beth. "My father promised you no stones.
He's not a fool."

"I niver met a knave that was," Pat observed, turning over a huge
spadeful of earth, and then straightening himself to look up at her.

Beth's instinct was always to fight when she was in a rage; words
break no bones, and she preferred to break bones at such times. It was
some seconds before she saw the full force of Pat's taunt, but the
moment she did, she seized the largest loose stone within reach on the
top of the wall, and shied it at him. It struck him full in the face,
and cut his cheek open.

"That'll teach ye," said Beth, blazing.

The man turned on her with a very ugly look.

"Put yer spade down," she said. "I'm not afraid of you."

"Miss Beth! Miss Beth!" some one called from the end of the garden.

Murphy stuck his spade in the ground, and wiped his jaw. "Ye'll pay
for this, ye divil's limb," he muttered, "yew an' yours."

"Miss Beth! Miss Beth!"

"I'm coming!" Beth rejoined irritably, and slid from the wall to the
ground regardless of the rough loose stones she scattered in her
descent. "Ye'll foind me ready to pay when ye send in yer bill, Pat,"
she called out as she ran down the garden.

The children were to have tea at the vicarage that day, and Anne had
been sent to fetch her.

In the drawing-room at the vicarage there was a big bay-window which
looked out across a desolate stretch of bog to a wild headland,
against which the waves beat tempestuously in almost all weathers. The
headland itself was high, but the giant breakers often dashed up far
above it, and fell in showers of spray on the grass at the top. There
was a telescope in the window at the vicarage, and people used to come
to see the sight, and went into raptures over it. Beth, standing out
of the way, unnoticed, would gaze too, fascinated; but it was the
attraction of repulsion. The cruel force of the great waves agitated
her, and at the same time made her unutterably sad. Her heart beat
painfully when she watched them, her breath became laboured, and it
was only with an effort that she could keep back her sobs. It was not
fear that oppressed her, but a horrible sort of excitement, which so
gained upon her on that afternoon in particular that she felt she must
shriek aloud, or make her escape. If she showed any emotion she would
be laughed at, if she made her escape she would probably be whipped;
she preferred to be whipped; so, watching her opportunity, she quietly
slipped away.

At home the window of the sitting-room was still wide open, and as she
ran down the street she noticed some country people peeping in
curiously, and apparently astonished by the luxury they beheld. Beth,
who was picking up Irish rapidly, understood some exclamations she
overheard as she approached, and felt flattered for the furniture.

She ran up the steps and opened the front door: "Good day to ye all,"
she said sociably; "will ye not come in and have a look round? now
do!"

She led the way as she spoke, and the country people followed her, all
agape. In the hall they paused to wonder at the cocoanut matting; but
when they stood on the soft pile carpet, so grateful to their bare
feet, in the sitting-room, and looked round, they lowered their voices
respectfully, and this gave Beth a sudden sensation of superiority.
She began to show them the things: the pictures on the walls, the
subjects of which she explained to them; the egg-shell china, which
she held up to the light that they might see how thin it was; and some
Eastern and Western curios her father had brought home from various
voyages. She told them of tropical heat and Canadian cold, and began
to be elated herself when she found all that she had ever heard on the
subject flowing fluently from her lips.

The front door had been left open, and the passers-by looked in to see
what was going on, and then entered uninvited. Neighbours, too, came
over from the Irish side of the road, so that the room gradually
filled, and as her audience increased, Beth grew excited and talked
away eloquently.

"Lord," one man exclaimed with a sigh, on looking round the room, "it's
aisy to see why the likes of these looks down on the likes of us."

"Eh, dear, yes!" a woman with a petticoat over her head solemnly
responded.

"The durrty heretics," a slouching fellow, with a flat white face,
muttered under his breath. "But if they benefit here, they'll burn
hereafter, holy Jasus be praised."

"Will they?" said Beth, turning on him. "Will they burrn hereafter,
Bap-faced Flanagan? No, they won't! They'll hunt ye out of heaven as
they hunted ye out o' Maclone.

    "Oh, the Orange militia walked into Maclone,
     And hunted the Catholics out of the town.
     Ri' turen nuren nuren naddio,
     Right tur nuren nee."

She sang it out at the top of her shrill little voice, executing a
war-dance of defiance to the tune, and concluding with an elaborate
curtsey.

As she recovered herself, she became aware of her father standing in the
doorway. His lips were white, and there was a queer look in his face.

"Oh! So this is _your_ party, is it, Miss Beth?" he said. "You ask
your friends in, and then you insult them, I see."

Beth was still effervescing. She put her hands behind her back and
answered boldly--

"'Deed, thin, he insulted me, papa. It was Bap-faced Flanagan. He
said we were durrty heretics, and--and--I'll not stand that! It's
a free country!"

Captain Caldwell looked round, and the people melted from the room
under his eye. Then Anne appeared from somewhere.

"Anne, do you teach the children party-songs?" he demanded.

"Shure, they don't need taching, yer honour," said Anne, disconcerted.
"Miss Beth knows 'em all, and she shouts 'em at the top of her voice
down the street till the men shake their fists at her."

"Why do you do that, Beth?" her father demanded.

"I like to feel," Beth began, gasping out each word with a mighty
effort to express herself--"I like to feel--that I can _make_ them
shake their fists."

Her father looked at her again very queerly.

"Will I take her to the nursery, sir?" Anne asked.

Beth turned on her impatiently, and said something in Irish which made
Anne grin. Beth did not understand her father in this mood, and she
wanted to see more of him.

"What's that she's saying to you, Anne?" he asked.

"Oh--sure, she's just blessin' me, yer honour," Anne answered
unabashed.

"I believe you!" Captain Caldwell said dryly, as he stretched himself
on the sofa. "Go and fetch a hair-brush."

While Anne was out of the room he turned to Beth. "I'll give you a
penny," he said, "if you'll tell me what you said to Anne."

"I'll tell you for nothing," Beth answered. "I said, 'Yer soul to the
devil for an interfering hussy.'"

Captain Caldwell burst out laughing, and laughed till Anne returned
with the brush. "Now, brush my hair," he said to Beth; and Beth went
and stood beside the sofa, and brushed, and brushed, now with one
hand, and now with the other, till she ached all over with the effort.
Her father suffered from atrocious headaches, and this was the one
thing that relieved him.

"There, that's punishment enough for to-day," he said at last.

Beth retired to the foot of the couch, and leant there, looking at him
solemnly, with the hair-brush still in her hand. "That's no
punishment," she observed.

"What do you mean?" he asked.

"I mean I like it," she said. "I'd brush till I dropped if it did you
any good."

Captain Caldwell looked up at her, and it was as if he had seen the
child for the first time.

"Beth," he said, after a while, "would you like to come out with me on
the car to-morrow?"

"'Deed, then, I would, papa," Beth answered eagerly.

Then there was a pause, during which Beth rubbed her back against the
end of the couch thoughtfully, and looked at the wall opposite as if
she could see through it. Her father watched her for a little time
with a frown upon his forehead from the pain in his head.

"What are you thinking of, Beth?" he said at last.

"I've got to be whipped to-night," she answered drearily; "and I wish
I hadn't. I do get so tired of being whipped and shaken."

Her little face looked pinched and pathetic as she spoke, and for the
first time her father had a suspicion of what punishment was to this
child--a thing as inevitable as disease, a continually recurring
torture, but quite without effect upon her conduct--and his heart
contracted with a qualm of pity.

"What are you going to be whipped for now?" he asked.

"We went to tea at the vicarage, and I ran away home."

"Why?"

"Because of the great green waves. They rush up the rocks--wish--st--st!"
(she took a step forward, and threw up her little arms in
illustration)--"then fall, and roll back, and gather, and come rushing
on again; and I feel every time--every time--that they are coming right
at me!"--she clutched her throat as if she were suffocating; "and if I
had stayed I should have shrieked, and then I should have been whipped.
So I came away."

"But you expect to be whipped for coming away?"

"Yes. But you see I don't have the waves as well. And mamma won't say
I was afraid."

"Were you afraid, Beth?" her father asked.

"No!" Beth retorted, stamping her foot indignantly. "If the waves did
come at me, I could stand it. It's the coming--coming--coming--I can't
bear. It makes me ache here." She clutched at her throat and chest
again.

Captain Caldwell closed his eyes. He felt that he was beginning to
make this child's acquaintance, and wished he had tried to cultivate
it sooner.

"You shall not be whipped to-night, Beth," he said presently, looking
at her with a kindly smile.

Instantly an answering smile gleamed on the child's face, transfiguring
her; and, by the light of it, her father realised how seldom he had seen
her smile.

Unfortunately for Beth, however, while her countenance was still
irradiated, her mother swooped down upon her. Mrs. Caldwell had come
hurrying home in a rage in search of Beth; and now, mistaking that
smile for a sign of defiance, she seized upon her, and had beaten her
severely before it was possible to interfere. Beth, dazed by this
sudden onslaught, staggered when she let her go, and stretched out her
little hands as if groping for some support.

"It wasn't your fault!--it wasn't your fault!" she gasped, her first
instinct being to exonerate her father.

Captain Caldwell had started up and caught his wife by the arm.

"That's enough," he said harshly. "You are going altogether the wrong
way to work with the child. Let this be the last time, do you
understand? Beth, go to the nursery, and ask Anne to get you some tea."
A sharp pain shot through his head. He had jumped up too quickly, and
now fell back on the sofa with a groan.

"Oh, let me brush it again," Beth cried, in an agony of sympathy.

Her father opened his haggard eyes and smiled.

"Go to the nursery, like a good child," he said, "and get some tea."

Beth went without another word. But all that evening her mind was with
her parents in the sitting-room, wondering--wondering what they were
saying to each other.




CHAPTER VIII


Next day Beth jumped out of bed early, and washed herself all over, in
an excess of grateful zeal, because she was to be taken out on the
car. As soon as she had had her breakfast, she ran into the yard to
feed her magpie. Its perch was in a comfortable corner sheltered by
the great turf-stack which had been built up against the wall that
divided the Caldwells' yard from that of Pat Murphy, the farrier.
Beth, in wild spirits, ran round the stack, calling "Mag, Mag!" as she
went. But Mag, alas! was never more to respond to her call. He was
hanging by the leg from his perch, head downward, wings outstretched,
and glossy feathers ruffled; and below him, on the ground, some stones
were scattered which told the tale of cruelty and petty spite.

Beth stood for a moment transfixed; but in that moment the whole thing
became clear to her--the way in which the deed was done, the man that
did it, and his motive. She glanced up to the top of the high wall,
and then, breathing thick through her clenched teeth, in her rage she
climbed up the turf-stack with the agility of a cat, and looked over
into the farrier's yard.

"Come out of that, Pat Murphy, ye black-hearted, murthering villain,"
she shrieked. "I see ye skulking there behind the stable-door. Come
out, I tell ye, and bad luck to you for killing my bird."

"Is it me, miss?" Pat Murphy exclaimed, appearing with an injured and
innocent look on his face. "Me kill yer burrd! Shure, thin, ye never
thought such a thing uv me!"

"Didn't I, thin! and I think it still," Beth cried. "Say, 'May I never
see heaven if I kilt it'--or I'll curse ye."

"Ah, thin, it isn't such bad language ye'd hev me be using, and you a
young lady, Miss Beth," said Pat in a wheedling tone.

"'Deed, thin, it is, Pat Murphy; but I know ye daresn't say it," said
Beth. "Oh, bad luck to ye! bad luck to ye every day ye see a wooden
milestone, and twice every day ye don't. And if ye killed my bird, may
the devil attend ye, to rob ye of what ye like best wherever ye are."

She slid down the stack when she had spoken, and found her father
standing at the bottom, looking at the dead bird with a heavy frown on
his dark face. He must have heard Beth's altercation with Murphy, but
he made no remark until Mrs. Caldwell came out, when he said something
in Italian, to which she responded, "The cowardly brute!"

Beth took her bird, and buried it deep in her little garden, by which
time the car was ready. She had not shed a tear, nor did she ever
mention the incident afterwards; which was characteristic, for she was
always shy of showing any feeling but anger.

Captain Caldwell had a wild horse called Artless, which few men would
have cared to ride, and fewer still have driven. People wondered that
he took his children out on the car behind such an animal, and perhaps
he would not have done so if he had had his own way, but Mrs. Caldwell
insisted on it.

"They've no base blood in them," she said; "and I'll not have them
allowed to acquire any affectation of timidity."

Artless was particularly fresh that morning. He was a red chestnut,
with a white star on his forehead, and one white stocking.

When Beth returned to the stable-yard she found him fidgeting between
the shafts, with his ears laid back, and the whites of his wicked eyes
showing, and Riley struggling with his head in a hard endeavour to
keep him quiet enough for the family to mount the car. Captain and
Mrs. Caldwell and Mildred were already in their seats, and Beth
scrambled up to hers unconcernedly, although Artless was springing
about in a lively manner at the moment. Beth sat next her father, who
drove from the side of the car, and then they were ready to be off as
soon as Artless would go; but Artless objected to leave the yard, and
Riley had to lead him round and round, running at his head, and
coaxing him, while Captain Caldwell gathered up the reins and held the
whip in suspense, watching his opportunity each time they passed the
gate to give Artless a start that would make him bound through it.
Round and round they went, however, several times, with Artless
rearing, backing, and plunging; but at last the whip came down at the
right moment, just the slightest flick, Riley let go his head, and out
he dashed in his indignation, the battle ending in a wild gallop up
the street, with the car swinging behind him, and the whole of the
Irish side of the road out cheering and encouraging, to the children's
great delight. But their ebullition of glee was a little too much for
their father's nerves.

"These children of yours are perfect little devils, Caroline!" he
exclaimed irritably. Mrs. Caldwell smiled as at a compliment. She had
been brought up on horseback herself, and insisted on teaching the
children to regard danger as a diversion--not that that was difficult,
for they were naturally daring. She would have punished them promptly
on the slightest suspicion of timidity. "Only base-born people were
cowardly," she scornfully maintained. "No lady ever shows a sign of
fear."

Once, when they were crossing Achen sands, a wide waste, innocent of
any obstacle, Artless came down without warning, and Mildred uttered
an exclamation.

"Who was it made that ridiculous noise?" Mrs. Caldwell asked, looking
hard at Beth.

Beth could not clear herself without accusing her sister, so she said
nothing, but sat, consumed with fiery indignation; and for long
afterwards she would wake up at night, and clench her little fists,
and burn again, remembering how her mother had supposed she was
afraid.

Artless went at breakneck speed that day, shied at the most unexpected
moments, bolted right round, and stopped short occasionally; but Beth
sat tight mechanically, following her own fancies. Captain Caldwell was
going to inspect one of the outlying coastguard stations; and they went
by the glen road, memorable to Beth because it was there she first felt
the charm of running water, and found her first wild violets and tuft of
primroses. The pale purple of the violets and the scent of primroses,
warm with the sun, were among the happy associations of that time. But
her delight was in the mountain-streams, with their mimic waterfalls and
fairy wells. She loved to loiter by them, to watch them bubbling and
sparkling over the rocks, to dabble her hands and feet in them, or to
lie her length upon the turf beside them, in keen consciousness of the
incessant, delicate, delicious murmur of the water, a sound which
conveyed to her much more than can be expressed in articulate speech. At
times too, when she was tired of loitering, she would look up and see
the mountain-top just above her, and begin to climb; but always when she
came to the spot, there was the mountain-top just as far above her as
before; so she used to think that the mountain really reached the sky.

When they returned, late that afternoon, Riley met them with a very
serious face, and told Captain Caldwell mysteriously that Pat Murphy's
horse was ill.

"What a d----d unfortunate coincidence," Captain Caldwell muttered to
his wife; and Beth noticed that her mother's face, which had looked
fresh and bright from the drive, settled suddenly into its habitual
anxious, careworn expression.

Beth loitered about the yard till her parents had gone in; then she
climbed the turf-stack, and looked over. The sick horse was tied to
the stable-door, and stood, hanging his head with a very woebegone
expression, and groaning monotonously. Murphy was trying to persuade
him to take something hot out of a bucket, while Bap-faced Flanagan
and another man, known as Tony-kill-the-cow, looked on and gave good
advice.

Beth's fury revived when she saw Murphy, and she laughed aloud
derisively. All three men started and looked up, then crossed
themselves.

"Didn't I tell ye, Pat!" Beth exclaimed. "Ye may save yourself the
trouble of doctoring him. He's as dead as my magpie."

Murphy looked much depressed. "Shure, Miss Beth, the poor baste done
ye no harm," he pleaded.

"No," said Beth, "nor my bird hadn't done you any harm, nor the cow
Tony cut the tail off hadn't done him any harm."

"I didn't kill yer burrd," Murphy asserted doggedly.

"We'll see," said Beth. "When the horse dies we'll know who killed the
bird. Then one of you skunks can try and kill me. But I'd advise you
to use a silver bullet; and if you miss, you'll be damned.--Blast ye,
Riley, will ye let me alone!"

Riley, hearing what was going on, and having called to her vainly to
hold her tongue, had climbed the stack himself, and now laid hold of
her. Beth struck him in the face promptly, whereupon he shook her, and
loosening her hold of the wall, began to carry her down--a perilous
proceeding, for the stack was steep, and Beth, enraged at the
indignity, doubled herself up and scratched and bit and kicked the
whole way to the ground.

"Ye little divil," said Riley, setting her on her feet, "ye'll get us
all into trouble wid that blasted tongue o' yours."

"Who's afraid?" said Beth, shaking her tousled head, and standing up
to Riley with her little fists clenched.

"If the divil didn't put ye out when he gave up housekeeping, I dunno
where you come from," Riley muttered as he turned away and stumped off
stolidly.

During the night the horse died, and Beth found when she went out next
day that the carcass had been dragged down Murphy's garden and put in
the lane outside. She climbed the wall, and discovered the farrier
skinning the horse, and was much disgusted to see him using his hands
without gloves on in such an operation. Her anger of the day before
was all over now, and she was ready to be on the usual terms of
scornful intimacy with Murphy.

"Ye'll never be able to touch anything to eat again with those hands,"
she said.

"Won't I, thin!" he answered sulkily, and without looking up. He was
as inconsequent as a child that resents an injury, but can be diverted
from the recollection of it by anything interesting, only to return to
its grievance, however, the moment the interest fails. "Won't I, thin!
Just you try me wid a bit o' bread-an'-butter this instant, an' see
what I'll do wid it."

Beth, always anxious to experiment, tore indoors to get some
bread-and-butter, and never did she forget the horror with which she
watched the dirty man eat it, with unwashed hands, sitting on the
horse's carcass.

That carcass was a source of interest to her for many a long day to
come. She used to climb on the wall to see how it was getting on, till
the crows had picked the bones clean, and the weather had bleached
them white; and she would wonder how a creature once so full of life
could become a silent, senseless thing, not feeling, not caring, not
knowing, no more to itself than a stone--strange mystery; and some day
_she_ would be like that, just white bones. She held her breath and
suspended all sensation and thought, time after time, to see what it
felt like; but always immediately there began a great rushing sound in
her ears as of a terrific storm, and that, she concluded, was death
coming. When he arrived then all would be blotted out.

       *       *       *       *       *

The country was in a very disturbed state, and it was impossible to
keep all hints of danger from the children's sharp ears. Beth knew a
great deal of what was going on and what might be expected, but then a
few chance phrases were already enough for her to construct a whole
story upon, and with wonderful accuracy generally. Her fine faculty of
observation developed apace at this time, and nothing she noticed now
was ever forgotten. She would curl up in the window-seat among the
fuchsias, and watch the people in the street by the hour together,
especially on Sundays and market-days, when a great many came in from
the mountains, women in close white caps with goffered frills, short
petticoats, and long blue cloaks; and men in tail-coats and
knee-breeches, with shillalahs under their arms, which they used very
dexterously. They talked Irish at the top of their voices, and
gesticulated a great deal, and were childishly quarrelsome. One
market-day, when Beth was looking out of the sitting-room window, her
mother came and looked out too, and they saw half-a-dozen countrymen
set upon a young Castletownrock man. In a moment their shillalahs were
whirling about his head, and he was driven round the corner of the
house. Presently he came staggering back across the road, blubbering
like a child, with his head broken, and the blood streaming down over
his face, which was white and distorted with pain. They had knocked
him down, and kicked him when he was on the ground.

"Oh! the cowards! the cowards!" Mrs. Caldwell exclaimed. Beth felt
sick, but it was not so much what she saw as what she heard that
affected her--the man's crying, and the graphic description of the
nature and depth of the wound which another man, who had been present
while the doctor dressed it, stopping at the window, kindly insisted
on giving them, Mrs. Caldwell being obliged to listen courteously for
fear of making herself unpopular. The man's manner impressed
Beth--there was such a solemn joy in it, as of one who had just
witnessed something refreshing.

There were two priests in the place, Father Madden and Father John.
Captain Caldwell said Father Madden was a gentleman. He shook hands
with everybody, even with the curate and Mr. Macbean; but Father John
would not speak to a protestant, and used to scowl at the children
when he met them, and then Mildred would seize Bernadine's hand and
drag her past him quickly, because she hated to be scowled at; but
Beth always stopped and made a face at him. He used to carry a long
whip, and crack it at the people, and on Sunday mornings, if they did
not go to mass, he would patrol the streets in a fury, rating the
idlers at the top of his voice, and driving them on before him. Beth
used to glance stealthily at the chapel as she went to church; it had
the attraction of forbidden fruit for her, and of Father John's
exciting antics--nothing ever happened in church. Chapel she
associated with the papists, and not at all with Kitty, whose tender
teaching occupied a separate compartment of her consciousness
altogether. There she kept the "Blessed Mother" and the "Dear Lord"
for her comfort, although she seldom visited them now. Terms of
endearment meant a great deal to Beth, because no one used them
habitually in her family; in fact, she could not remember ever being
called dear in her life by either father or mother.

Since the day when she had run away from the great green waves,
however, her father had taken an interest in her. He often asked her
to brush his hair, and laughed very much sometimes at things she said.
He used to lie on the couch reading to himself while she brushed.

"Read some to me, papa," she said one day. He smiled and read a
little, not in the least expecting her to understand it, but she soon
showed him that she did, and entreated him to go on; so he gradually
fell into the habit of reading aloud to her, particularly the
"Ingoldsby Legends." She liked to hear them again and again, and would
clamour for her favourites. On one occasion when he had stopped, and
she had been sitting some time at the foot of the couch, with the
brush in her hand, she suddenly burst out with a long passage from
"The Execution"--the passage that begins:--

    "God! 'tis a fearsome thing to see
     That pale wan man's mute agony."

Captain Caldwell raised his eyebrows as she proceeded, and looked at
his wife.

"I thought a friend of ours was considered stupid," he said.

"People can do very well when they like," Mrs. Caldwell answered
tartly; "but they're too lazy to try. When did you learn that, Beth?"

"I didn't learn it," Beth answered.

"Then how do you know it?"

"It just came to me," Beth said.

"Then I wish your lessons would _just come_ to you."

"I wish they would," said Beth sincerely.

Mrs. Caldwell snapped out something about idleness and obstinacy, and
left the room. The day was darkening down, and presently Captain
Caldwell got up, lit a lamp at the sideboard, and set it on the
dining-table. When he had done so, he took Beth, and set her on the
table too. Beth stood up on it, laughing, and put her arm round his
neck.

"Look at us, papa!" she exclaimed, pointing at the window opposite.
The blinds were up, and it was dark enough outside for them to see
themselves reflected in the glass.

"I think we make a pretty picture, Beth," her father said, putting his
arm round her.

He had scarcely spoken, when there came a terrific report and a crash;
something whizzed close to Beth's head; and a shower of glass fell on
the floor. In a moment Beth had wriggled out of her father's arm, slid
from the table, and scrambled up on to the window-seat, scattering the
flower-pots, and slapping at her father's hand in her excitement, when
he tried to stop her.

"It's Bap-faced Flanagan--or Tony-kill-the-cow," she cried. "I can
see--O papa! why did you pull me back? Now I shall never know!"

The servants had rushed in from the kitchen, and Mrs. Caldwell came
flying downstairs.

"What is it, Henry?" she cried.

"The d----d scoundrels shot at me with the child in my arms," he
answered, looking in his indignation singularly like Beth herself in a
stormy mood. As he spoke he turned to the hall door, and walked out
into the street bareheaded.

"For the love of the Lord, sir," Riley remonstrated, keeping well out
of the way himself.

But Captain Caldwell walked off down the middle of the road alone
deliberately to the police station, his wife standing meanwhile on the
doorstep, with the light behind her, coolly awaiting his return.

"Pull down the blind in the sitting-room, Riley, and keep Miss Beth
there," was all she said.

Presently Captain Caldwell returned with a police-officer and two men.
They immediately began to search the room. The glass of a picture had
been shattered at the far end. Riley pulled the picture to one side,
and discovered something imbedded in the wall behind, which he picked
out with his pocket-knife and brought to the light. It looked like a
disc all bent out of shape. He turned it every way, examining it, then
tried it with his teeth.

"I thought so," he said significantly. "It wouldn't be yer honour
they'd be afther wid a silver bullet. I heard her tell 'em herself to
try one."

"And I said if they missed they'd be damned," Beth exclaimed
triumphantly.

"Beth!" cried her mother, seizing her by the arm to shake her, "how
dare you use such a word?"

"I heard it in church," said Beth, in an injured tone.

"Look here, Beth," said her father, rescuing her from her mother's
clutches, and setting her on the table--he had been talking aside with
the police officer--"I want you to promise something on your word of
honour as a lady, just to please me."

Beth's countenance dropped: "O papa!" she exclaimed, "it's something I
don't want to promise."

"Well, never mind that, Beth," he answered. "Just promise this one
thing to please me. If you don't, the people will try and kill you."

"I don't mind that," said Beth.

"But I do--and your mother does."

Beth gave her mother a look of such utter astonishment, that the poor
lady turned crimson.

"And perhaps they'll kill me too," Captain Caldwell resumed. "You see
they nearly did to-night."

This was a veritable inspiration. Beth turned pale, and gasped: "I
promise!"

"Not so fast," her father said. "Never promise anything till you hear
what it is. But now, promise you won't say bad luck to any of the
people again."

"I promise," Beth repeated; "but"--she slid from the table, and nodded
emphatically--"but when I shake my fist and stamp my foot at them
it'll mean the same thing."

It was found next morning that Bap-faced Flanagan and Tony-kill-the-cow
had disappeared from the township; but Murphy remained; and Beth was not
allowed to go out alone again for a long time, not even into the garden.
All she knew about it herself, however, was, that she had always either
a policeman or a coastguardsman to talk to, which added very much to her
pleasure in life, and also to Anne's.




CHAPTER IX


One of the interests of Captain Caldwell's life was his garden. He
spent long hours in cultivating it, and that summer his vegetables,
fruits, and flowers had been the wonder of the neighbourhood. But now
autumn had come, vegetables were dug, fruits gathered, flowers
bedraggled; and there was little to be done but clear the beds, plant
them with bulbs, and prepare them for the spring.

Now that Captain Caldwell had made Beth's acquaintance, he liked to
have her with him to help him when he was at work in the garden, and
there was nothing that she loved so much.

One day they were at work together on a large flower-bed. Her father
was trimming some rose-bushes, and she was kneeling beside him on a
little mat, weeding.

"I'm glad I'm not a flower," she suddenly exclaimed, after a long
silence.

"Why, Beth, flowers are very beautiful."

"Yes, but they last so short a time. I'd rather be less beautiful, and
live longer. What's your favourite flower, papa?"

She had stopped weeding for the moment, but still sat on the mat,
looking up at him. Captain Caldwell clipped a little more, then
stopped too, and looked down at her.

"I don't get a separate pleasure from any particular flower, Beth;
they all delight me," he answered.

Beth pondered upon this for a little, then she asked, "Do you know
which I like best? Hot primroses." Captain Caldwell raised his
eyebrows interrogatively. "When you pick them in the sun, and put them
against your cheek, they're all warm, you know," Beth explained; "and
then they _are_ good! And fuchsias are good too, but it isn't the same
good. You know that one in the sitting-room window, white outside and
salmon-coloured inside, and such a nice shape--the flowers--and the
way they hang down; you have to lift them to look into them. When I
look at them long, they make me feel--oh--feel, you know--feel that I
could take the whole plant in my arms and hug it. But fuchsias don't
scent sweet like hot primroses."

"And therefore they are not so good?" her father suggested, greatly
interested in the child's attempt to express herself. "They say that
the scent is the soul of the flower."

"The scent is the soul of the flower," Beth repeated several times;
then heaved a deep sigh of satisfaction. "I want to sing it," she
said. "I always want to sing things like that."

"What other 'things like that' do you know, Beth?"

    "The song of the sea in the shell,
       The swish of the grass in the breeze,
     The sound of a far-away bell,
       The whispering leaves on the trees,"

Beth burst out instantly.

"Who taught you that, Beth?" her father asked.

"Oh, no one taught me, papa," she answered. "It just came to me--like
this, you know. I used to listen to the sea in that shell in the
sitting-room, and I tried and tried to find a name for the sound, and
all at once _song_ came into my head--_The song of the sea in the
shell_. Then I was lying out here on the grass when it was long,
before you cut it to make hay, and you came out and said, 'There's a
stiff breeze blowing.' And it blew hard and then stopped, and then it
came again; and every time it came the grass went--swish-h-h! _The
swish of the grass in the breeze._ Then you know that bell that rings
a long way off, you can only just hear it out here--_The sound of a
far-away bell_. Then the leaves--it _was_ a long time before anything
came that I could sing about them. I used to try and think it, but you
can't sing a thing you think. It's when a thing comes, you can sing
it. I was always listening to the leaves, and I always felt they were
doing something; then all at once it came one day. Of course they were
whispering--_The whispering leaves on the trees_. That was how they
came, papa. At first I used to sing them by themselves; but now I sing
them all together. You can sing them three different ways--the way I
did first, you know, then you can put _breeze_ first--

    The swish of the grass in the breeze,
    The whispering leaves on the trees,
    The song of the sea in the shell,
    The sound of a far-away bell.

Or you can sing--

    The sound of a far-away bell,
      The whispering leaves on the trees,
      The swish of the grass in the breeze,
    The song of the sea in the shell.

Which way do you think the nicest?" She had rattled all this off as
fast as she could speak, looking and pointing towards the various
things she mentioned as she proceeded, the sea, the grass, the trees,
the distance; now she looked up to her father for an answer. He was
looking at her so queerly, she was filled with alarm. "Am I naughty,
papa?" she exclaimed.

"Oh no," he said, with a smile that reassured her. "I was just
thinking. I like to hear how 'things come' to you. You must always
tell me--when new things come. By the way, who told you that fuchsia
was salmon-coloured?"

"I _saw_ it was," she said, surprised that he needed to ask such a
question. "I saw it one day when we had boiled salmon for dinner.
Isn't it nice when you see that one thing's like another? I have a
pebble, and it's just the shape of a pear--now you know what shape it
is, don't you?" He nodded. "But if I said it's thick at one end and
thin at another, you wouldn't know what shape it is a bit, would you?"

"No, I should not," he answered, beginning to prune again,
thoughtfully. "Beth," he said presently, "I should like to see you
grow up."

"Shan't I grow up?" said Beth in dismay.

"Oh yes--at least I should hope so. But--it's not likely that _I_
shall be--looking on. But, Beth, I want you to remember this. When you
grow up, I think you will want to do something that only a few other
people can do well--paint a picture, write a book, act in a theatre,
make music--it doesn't matter what; if it comes to you, if you feel
you can do it, just do it. You'll not do it well all at once; but try
and try until you _can_ do it well. And don't ask anybody if they
think you can do it; they'll be sure to say no; and then you'll be
disheartened--What's disheartened? It's the miserable feeling you
would get if I said you would never be able to learn to play the
piano. You'd try to do it all the same, perhaps, but you'd do it
doubtfully instead of with confidence."

"What's confidence?" said Beth.

"You are listening to me now with confidence. It is as if you said, I
believe you."

"But I can't say 'I believe you' to arithmetic, if I want to do it."

"No, but you can say, I believe I can do it--I believe in myself."

"Is that confidence in myself?" Beth asked, light breaking in upon
her.

"That's it. You're getting quite a vocabulary, Beth. A vocabulary is
all the words you know," he added hastily, anticipating the inevitable
question.

Beth went on with her weeding for a little.

"And there is another thing, Beth, I want to tell you," her father
recommenced. "Never do anything unless you are quite sure it is the
right thing to do. It doesn't matter how much you may want to do it,
you mustn't, if you are not quite, quite sure it is right."

"Not even if I am just half sure?"

"No, certainly not. You must be quite, quite sure."

Beth picked some more weeds, then looked up at him again: "But, papa,
I shall never want to do anything I don't think right when I'm grown
up, shall I?"

"I'm afraid you will. Everybody does."

"Did _you_ want to, papa?" Beth asked in amazement.

"Yes," he answered.

"And did you do it?"

"Yes," he repeated.

"And what happened?"

"Much misery."

"Were you miserable?"

"Yes, very. But that wasn't the worst of it."

"What was the worst of it?"

"The worst of it was that I made other people miserable."

"Ah, that's bad," said Beth, with perfect comprehension. "That makes
you feel so horrid inside yourself."

"Well, Beth, just you remember that. You can't do wrong without making
somebody else miserable. Be loyal, be loyal to yourself, loyal to the
best that is in you; that means, be as good as your friends think you,
and better if you can. Tell the truth, live openly, and stick to your
friends; that's the whole of the best code of morality in the world.
Now we must go in."

As they walked down the garden together, Beth slipped her dirty little
hand into his, and looked up at him: "Papa," she said solemnly, "when
you want to be with somebody always, more than with anybody else; and
want to look at him, and want to talk to him, and you find you can
tell him lots of things you couldn't tell anybody else if you tried,
you know; what does it mean?"

"It means you love him very much."

"Then I love you, papa, very much," she said, nestling her head
against his arm. "And it does make me feel so nice inside. But it
makes me miserable too," she added, sighing.

"How so?"

"When you have a headache, you know. I used only to be afraid you'd be
angry if I made a noise. But now I'm always thinking how much it hurts
you. I wake up often and often at night, and you are in my mind, and I
try and see you say, 'It's better,' or 'It's quite well.'"

"And what then, Beth?" her father asked, in a queer voice.

"Then I don't cry any more, you know."

She looked up at her father as she spoke, and saw that his eyes were
full of tears.




CHAPTER X


That was almost the last of those happy autumn days. Winter fell upon
the country suddenly with nipping cold. The mountains, always sombre,
lowered in great tumbled masses from under the heavy clouds that
seldom rose from their summits. Terrible gales kept the sea in
torment, and the voice of its rage and pain filled Castletownrock
without ceasing. Torrents of rain tore up the roads, and rendered them
almost impassable. There was stolid endurance and suffering written on
every face out of doors, while within the people cowered over their
peat fires, a prey to hunger, cold, and depression. Draughts made
merry through the large rooms and passages in Captain Caldwell's
house; the wind howled in the chimneys, rattled at the windows, and
whistled at the keyholes, especially at night, when Beth would hide
her head under the bed-clothes to keep out the racket, or, in another
mood, lie and listen to it, and imagine herself out in the storm, till
her nerves were strung to a state of ecstatic tension, and her mind
fairly revelled in the sense of danger. When her father was at home in
the evening, she would sit still beside the fire in the sitting-room,
listening in breathless awe, and excitement wholly pleasurable, to the
gale raging without; but if Captain Caldwell had not returned, as
frequently happened now that the days were short, and the roads so
bad, well knowing the risks he ran, she would see the car upset a
hundred times, and hear the rattle of musketry in every blast that
shook the house, and so share silently, but to the full, the terrible
anxiety which kept her mother pacing up and down, up and down, unable
to settle to anything until he entered and sank into a seat, often so
exhausted that it was hard to rouse him to change his dripping
clothes. His duties, always honourably performed whatever the risk to
himself, were far too severe for him, and he was rapidly becoming a
wreck;--nervous, liverish, a martyr to headache, and a slave to
stimulants, although not a drunkard--he only took enough to whip him
up to his work. His digestion too had become seriously impaired, and
he had no natural appetite for anything. He was fond of his children,
and proud of them, but had hitherto been too irritable to contribute
anything to their happiness; on the contrary, his name was a terror to
them, and "Hush, papa has come in!" was enough at any time to damp
their wildest spirits. Now, however, he suffered more from depression
than from irritability, and would cower over the fire on stormy days
in a state of despondency which was reflected in every face, taking
no notice of any of them. The children would watch him furtively in
close silent sympathy, sitting still and whispering for fear of
disturbing him; and if perchance they saw him smile, and a look of
relief came into their mother's anxious face, their own spirits went
up on the instant. But everything was against him. The damp came up
from the flags in the sitting-room through the cocoanut matting and
the thick carpet that covered it, which it defaced in great patches.
Close to the fire the wires of the piano rusted, and had to be rubbed
and rubbed every day, or half the notes went dumb. The paper, a rare
luxury in those parts, began to drop from the walls. Great turf-fires
were constantly kept up, but the damp stole a march on them when they
smouldered in the night, and made mildew-marks upon everything.

Good food and cooking would have helped Captain Caldwell, but the food
was indifferent, and there were no cooks to be had in the country.
Biddy had never seen such a thing as a kitchen-range before she took
the situation, and when she first had to use the oven, she put the
turf on the bottom shelf in order to heat the top one. Mrs. Caldwell
made what were superhuman efforts to a woman of her training and
constitution, to keep the servants up to the mark, and grew grey in
the endeavour; but Mrs. Caldwell in the kitchen was like a racehorse
at the plough; and even if she had been a born housewife, she could
have done little with servants who would do nothing themselves except
under her eyes, and stole everything they could lay their hands on,
including the salt out of the salt-cellars between meals, if it were
not locked up.

Towards the end of January, Captain Caldwell was ill in bed; he had
wet cloths on his head, and seemed as if he could hardly speak. Beth
hung about his door all day, watching for opportunities to steal in.
Mamma always sent her away if she could, but if papa heard her, he
would whisper, "Let the child come in," and then mamma would let her
in, but would still look cross. And Beth sat at one side of the bed,
and mamma sat on the other, and no one spoke except papa sometimes;
only you could seldom understand what he said. And mamma cried, but
Beth did not. She ached too much inside for that. You can't cry when
you ache so much.

Beth day after day sat with her hands folded on her lap, and her feet
dangling from a chair that was much too high for her, watching her
father with an intensity of silent anxiety that was terrible to
witness in so young a child. Her mother might have beaten her to
death, but she could never have dislodged her from the room once she
had her father's leave to stay there. Mrs. Caldwell rarely beat her
now, however; she generally ignored her; so Beth came and went as she
chose. She would climb up on to the bed when there was nobody in the
room, and kiss the curls of papa's thick glossy black hair so softly
that he never knew, except once, when he caught her, and smiled. His
dark face grew grey in bed, and his blue eyes sunken and haggard; but
he battled it out that time, and slowly began to recover.

Beth was sitting in her usual place beside her father's bed one day
when the doctor came and discovered her. He was standing on the other
side of the bed, and exclaimed, "Why, it's all eyes!"

"Yes, it's a queer pixie," her father said. "But it's going to do
something some day, or _I'm_ much mistaken."

"It's going to make a nuisance of itself if you put such nonsense into
its head, or I'm much mistaken," Mrs. Caldwell observed.

"I shall _not_ make a nuisance of myself," Beth indignantly protested.

"I shall never be able to make you understand, Caroline," Captain
Caldwell exclaimed. "Little pitchers are generally bad enough, but
when there is large intelligence added to the long ears, they're the
devil."

Before the doctor left he said to Mrs. Caldwell, "We must keep our
patient amused, you know."

"O doctor!" Beth exclaimed, clasping her hands in her earnestness, "do
you think if Sophie Keene came?"

The doctor burst into a shout of laughter, in which Captain Caldwell
also joined. "Just stay here yourself, Beth," he said, when he had
recovered himself. "For amusement, neither Sophie Keene nor any one
else I ever knew could hold a candle to you."

"What's 'hold a candle to you'?" Beth instantly demanded.

And then there was more laughter, in which even Mrs. Caldwell joined;
and afterwards, when the doctor had gone, she actually patted Beth on
the back, and stroked her hair, which was the first caress Beth ever
remembered to have received from her mother.

"Now, mamma," she exclaimed, with great feeling, in the fulness of her
surprise and delight, "now I shall forget that you ever beat me."

Her mother coloured painfully.

Her father muttered something about a noble nature.

"And that was the child you never wanted at all!" slipped, with a ring
of triumph, from Mrs. Caldwell unawares--an interesting example of the
complexity of human feelings.

Captain Caldwell soon went back to his duty--all too soon for his
strength. The dreadful weather continued. Day after day he returned
soaking from some distant station to the damp and discomfort of the
house, and the ill-cooked, unappetising food, which he could hardly
swallow. And to all this was added great anxiety about the future of
his family. His boys were doing well at school by this time; but he
was not satisfied with the way in which the little girls were being
brought up. There was no order in their lives, no special time for
anything; and he knew the importance of early discipline. He tried to
discuss the subject with his wife, but she met his suggestions
irritably.

"There's time enough for that," she said. "_I_ had no regular lessons
till I was in my teens."

"But what answered with you may be disastrous to these children," he
ventured. "They are all unlike you in disposition, more especially
Beth."

"You spoil that child," Mrs. Caldwell protested. "And at any rate I
can do no more. I am run off my feet."

This was true, and Captain Caldwell let the subject drop. His patience
was exemplary in those days. He suffered severely both mentally and
physically, but never complained. The shadow was upon him, and he knew
it, but he met his fate with fortitude. Whatever his faults, they were
expiated in the estimation of all who saw him suffer now.

Mrs. Caldwell never realised how ill he was, but still she was uneasy,
and it was with intense relief that she welcomed a case of soups and
other nourishing delicacies calculated to tempt the appetite, which
arrived for him one day from one of his sisters in England.

"This is just what you want, Henry," she said, with a brighter look in
her face than he had seen there for months. "I shall soon have you
yourself again now."

Captain Caldwell's spirits also went up.

In the evening they were all together in the sitting-room. Mrs.
Caldwell was playing little songs for Mildred to sing, Baby Bernadine
was playing with her bricks upon the floor, and Beth as usual was
hanging about her father. He had shaken off his despondency, and was
quite lively for the moment, walking up and down the room, and making
merry remarks to his wife in Italian, at which she laughed a good
deal.

"Come, Beth, fetch 'Ingoldsby.' We shall just come to my favourite,
and finish the book before you go to bed," he said.

Beth brought the book, and then climbed up on his knee, and settled
there happily, with her head on his shoulder.

            "As I laye a-thynkynge, the golden sun was sinking,
             O merrie sang that Bird as it glitter'd on her breast,
                      With a thousand gorgeous dyes,
                      While soaring to the skies,
                     'Mid the stars she seem'd to rise,
                          As to her nest;

            As I laye a-thynkynge, her meaning was exprest:--
                     'Follow, follow me away,
                     It boots not to delay,'--
                     'Twas so she seemed to saye,
                        'HERE IS REST!'"

After he had read those last lines, there was a moment's silence, and
then Beth burst into a tempest of tears. "O papa--papa! No, no, no!"
she sobbed. "I couldn't bear it."

"What _is_ the matter with the child?" Mrs. Caldwell exclaimed,
starting up.

"'The vision and the faculty divine,' I think," her father answered.
"Leave her to me."

       *       *       *       *       *

Beth was awake when Anne entered the nursery next morning to call the
children.

"Get up, and be good," Anne said. "Your pa's ill."

Mrs. Caldwell came into the nursery immediately afterwards, very much
agitated. She kissed Beth, and from that moment the child was calm;
but there settled upon her pathetic little face a terrible look of age
and anxiety.

When she was dressed, she ran right into her father's room before any
one could stop her. He was moaning--"O my head, my head! O my head, my
head!" over and over again.

"You mustn't stay here, little woman--not to-day," the doctor said.
"It will make your father worse if you do."

Beth stole from the room, and returned to the nursery. There, however,
she could still hear her father moaning, and she could not bear it, so
she took her prayer-book, by way of life-saving apparatus, and went
down to the kitchen to "see" what the servants were thinking--her own
significant expression. They were all strangely subdued. "Sit down,
Miss Beth," Biddy said kindly. "Sit down in the window there wid your
book if you want company. It's a sore heart you'll be having, or I'm
much mistaken."

Beth sat in the window the whole morning, reading prayers to herself,
while she watched and waited. The doctor sent Riley down from the
sick-room several times to fetch things, and each time Beth consulted
his countenance anxiously for news, but asked no questions. Biddy
tried to persuade her to eat, but the child could not touch anything.

Late in the afternoon Riley came down in a hurry.

"Is the master better, Pat?" Biddy demanded.

"'Deed, thin, he isn't," Riley replied; "and the doctor's sending me
off on the horse as hard as I can go for Dr. Jamieson."

"Och, thin, if the doctor's sending you for Dr. Jamieson it's all up.
He's niver sent for till the last. The Lord himself won't save him
now."

Beth shuffled over the leaves of her prayer-book hurriedly. She had
been crying piteously to God in her heart for hours to save her
father, and He had not heard; now she remembered that the servants
said if you read the Lord's Prayer backwards it would raise the devil.
Beth tried; but the invocation was unavailing. Before Riley could
saddle the horse, a message was sent down to stop him; and then Anne
came for Beth, and took her up to her father's room. The dreadful
sounds had ceased at last, and there was a strange silence in the
house. Mrs. Caldwell was sitting beside her husband's bed, rocking
herself a little as if in pain, but shedding no tears. Mildred was
standing with her arm round her mother's neck crying bitterly, while
Baby Bernadine gazed at her father wonderingly.

He was lying on his side with his arms folded. His eyes were shut, and
there was a lovely look of relief upon his face.

"I sent for you children," their mother said, "to see your father just
as he died. You must never forget him."

Ellis and Rickards, two of papa's men, were in the room, and Mrs.
Ellis too, and the doctor, and Riley, and Biddy, and Anne; and there
was a foot-bath, with steaming hot water in it, on the floor; some
mustard on the table; and the fire burnt brightly. These details
impressed themselves on Beth's mind involuntarily, as indeed did
everything else connected with that time. It seemed to her afterwards
as if she had seen everything and felt nothing for the moment--nothing
but breathless excitement and interest. Her grief was entirely
suspended.

Mrs. Ellis and the doctor led mamma down to the sitting-room; they
didn't seem to think that she could walk. And then Mrs. Ellis made her
some tea, and stood there, and coaxed her to drink it, just as if
mamma had been a child. Mrs. Caldwell sat on the big couch with her
back to the window, and Mildred sat beside her, with her arm round
her, crying all the time. Bernadine cried too, but it was because she
was hungry, and no one thought of giving her anything to eat. Beth
fetched her some bread-and-butter, and then she was good. People began
to arrive--Mr. Macbean, Captain and Mrs. Keene, the Smalls, the
curate--Father Madden even. He had heard the news out in the country,
and came hurrying back to pay his respects, and offer his condolences
to Mrs. Caldwell, and see if there was anything he could do. He hoped
it was not taking a liberty to come; but indeed he came in the fulness
of his heart, and because he couldn't help it, for he had known him
well, and a better man and truer gentleman never breathed. The widow
held out her hand to the priest, and looked up at him gratefully.

Beth opened the door for Mrs. Small, who exclaimed at once: "Oh, my
dear child, how is your poor mother? Does she cry at all? I do hope
she has been crying."

"No," Beth answered, "nobody cries but Mildred."

When Mrs. Small went in, Mrs. Caldwell spoke to her quite collectedly.
"He was taken ill at eight o'clock this morning with a dreadful pain
in his head," she told her. "He had suffered fearfully from his head
of late. I sent for the doctor at once. But nothing relieved him. From
ten o'clock he got worse and worse, and at four he was gone. He always
wished to die suddenly, and be spared a lingering illness. He has been
depressed of late, but this morning, early, he woke up quite brightly;
and last night he was wonderfully better. After the children had gone
to bed, he read aloud to me as he used to do in the old days; and he
looked so much more like his old self again that I thought a happier
time was coming. And so it was. But not for me."

"Poor lady!" Mrs. Small whispered. "It has been a fearful shock."

Mrs. Caldwell showed strength of character in the midst of the
overwhelming calamity which had fallen upon her with such awful
suddenness. She had a nice sense of honour, and her love was great;
and by the help of these she was enabled to carry out every wish of
her dead husband with regard to himself. He had had a fastidious
horror of being handled after death by the kind of old women who are
accustomed to lay out bodies, and therefore Mrs. Caldwell begged Ellis
and Rickards to perform that last duty for him themselves.

When the children went to bed, she took them to kiss their father. The
stillness of the chamber struck a chill through Beth, but she thought
it beautiful. The men had draped it in white, a

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