tolled. I believe it is seven or eight o'clock.
I say, 'I should like, if you please, to be taken home now.'
Mrs Stiles laughs. 'Do you mean to that house, with those rough women? What a plaqe to call your home!'
'I should think they miss me.'
'I should say they are glad to be rid of you— the nasty, pale- faced little thing that you are. Come here. It's your bed-time.' She has pulled me from the sofa, and begins to unlace my gown. I tug away from her, and strike her. She catches my arm and gives it a twist.
I say, 'You've no right to hurt me! You're nothing to me! I want my mothers, that love me!'
'Here's your mother,' she says, plucking at the portrait at my throat. 'That's all the mother you'll have here. Be grateful you have that, to know her face by. Now, stand and be steady. You must wear this, to give you the figure of a lady.'
She has taken the stiff buff dress from me, and all the linen beneath. Now she laces me tight in a girlish corset that grips me harder than the gown. Over this she puts a nightdress. On to my hands she pulls a pair of white skin gloves, which she stitches at the wrists. Only my feet remain bare. I fall upon the sofa and kick them. She catches me up and shakes me, then holds me still.
'See here,' she says, her face crimson and white, her breath coming hard upon my cheek. 'I had a little daughter once, that died. She had a fine black head of curling hair and a temper like a lamb's. Why dark-haired, gentle-tempered children should be made to die, and peevish pale girls like you to thrive, I cannot say. Why your mother, with all her fortune, should have turned out trash and perished, while I must live to keep your fingers smooth and see you grow into a lady, is a puzzle. Weep all the artful tears you like. You shall never make my hard heart the softer.'
She catches me up and takes me to the dressing- room, makes me climb into the great, high, dusty bed, then lets down the curtains. There is a door beside the chimney-breast: she tells me it leads to another chamber, and a bad-tempered girl sleeps there. The girl will listen in the night, and if I am anything but still and good and quiet, she will hear; and her hand is very hard.
'Say your prayers,' she says, 'and ask Our Father to forgive you.'
Then she takes up the lamp and leaves, and I am plunged in an awful darkness.
I think it a terrible thing to do to a child; I think it terrible, even now. I lie, in an agony of misery and fear, straining my ears against the silence— wide awake, sick, hungry, cold, alone, in a dark so deep the shifting black of my own eye- lids seems the brighter.
My corset holds me like a fist. My knuckles, tugged into their stiff skin gloves, are starting out in bruises. Now and then the great clock shifts its gears, and chimes; and I draw what comfort I can from my idea that somewhere in the house walk lunatics, and with them watchful nurses. Then I begin to wonder over the habits of the place.
Perhaps here they give their lunatics licence to wander; perhaps a madwoman will come to my room, mistaking it for another? Perhaps the wicked-tempered girl that sleeps next door is herself demented, and will come and throttle me with her hard hand! Indeed, no sooner has this idea risen in me, than I begin to hear the smothered 120
sounds of movement, close by— unnaturally close, they seem to me to be: I imagine a thousand skulking figures with their faces at the curtain, a thousand searching hands. I begin to cry. The corset I wear makes the tears come strangely. I long to lie still, so the lurking women shall not guess that I am there; but the stiller I try to be, the more wretched I grow. Presently, a spider or a moth brushing my cheek, I imagine the throttling hand has come at last, and jerk in a convulsion and, I suppose, shriek.
There comes the sound of an opening door, a light between the
seams of the curtain. A face appears, close to my own— a kind face, not the face of a lunatic, but that of the girl who earlier brought my little tea of biscuits and sweet wine.
She is dressed in her nightgown, and her hair is let down.
'Now, then,' she says softly. Her hand is not hard. She puts it to my head and strokes my face, and I grow calmer. My tears flow naturally I say I have been afraid of lunatics, and she laughs.
'There are no lunatics here,' she says. 'You are thinking of that other place. Now, aren't you glad, to have left there?' I shake my head. She says, 'Well, it is only strange for you here. You will soon grow used to it.'
She takes up her light. I see her do it, and begin at once again to cry.— 'Why, you shall be asleep in a moment!' she says.
I say I do not like the darkness. I say I am frightened to lie alone. She hesitates, thinking perhaps of Mrs Stiles. But I dare say my bed is softer than hers; and besides, it is winter, and fearfully cold. She says at last that she will lie with me until I sleep.
She snuffs her candle, I smell the smoke upon the darkness.
She tells me her name is Barbara. She lets me rest my head against her. She says,
'Now, isn't this nice as your old home? And shan't you like it here?'
I say I think I shall like it a little, if she will lie with me every night; and at that she laughs again, then settles herself more comfortably upon the feather mattress.
She sleeps at once, and heavily, as housemaids do. She smells of a violet face-cream.
Her gown has ribbons upon it, at the breast, and I find them out with my gloved hands and hold them while I wait for sleep to come— as if I am tumbling into the perfect darkness and they are the ropes that will save me.
I am telling you this so that you might appreciate the forces that work upon me, making me what I am.
Next day, I am kept to my two bleak rooms and made to sew. I forget my terrors of the darkness of the night, then. My gloves make me clumsy, the needle pricks my fingers.
'I shan't do it!' I cry,
tearing the cloth. Then Mrs Stiles beats me. My gown and corset being so stiff, she hurts her palm in the striking of my back. I take what little consolation I might, from that.
I am beaten often, I believe, in my first days there. How could it be otherwise? I have known lively habits, the clamour of the wards, the dotings of twenty women; now the hush and regularity of my uncle's house drives me to fits and foaming tempers. I am an amiable child, I think, made wilful by restraint. I dash cups and saucers from the table to the floor. I lie and kick my legs until the boots fly from my heels. I scream until my throat bleeds. My passions are met with punishments, each fiercer than the 121
last. I am bound about the wrists and mouth. I am shut into lonely rooms, or into cupboards. One time— having overturned a candle and let the flame lap at the fringes of a chair until they smoke— I am taken by Mr Way into the park and carried, along a lonely path, to the ice- house. I don't remember, now, the chill of the place; I remember the blocks of grey ice— I should have supposed them clear, like crystal— that tick in the wintry silence, like so many clocks. They tick for three hours. When Mrs Stiles comes to release me I have made myself a kind of nest and cannot be uncurled, and am as weak as if they had drugged me.
I think that frightens her. She carries me back quietly, by the servants' stairs, and she and Barbara bathe me, then rub my arms with spirits.
'If she loses the use of her hands, my God, he'll have our characters for ever!'
It is something, to see her made afraid. I complain of pains in my fingers, and weakness, for a day or two after that, and watch her flutter; then I forget myself, and pinch her— and by that, she knows my grip is a strong one, and soon punishes me again.