by Hugh Walpole
The only other person with whom Janet had been brought into contact, her father, was far more perplexing.
She had accepted him in her early years as somebody about whom there was no question. When he was amusing and played with her there was no one in the world so completely delightful. He had carried her sometimes into the woods and they had spent the whole day there. She remembered when he had whistled and sung and the animals had come creeping from all over the wood. The birds had climbed on to his shoulders and hands, rabbits and hares had let him take them in his hands and had shown no fear at all. She remembered once that a snake had crawled about his arm. He had played with her as though he had been a child like herself, and she had done what she pleased with him and he had told her wonderful stories. And then suddenly, for no reason that she could understand, that mood had left him and he had been suddenly angry, terribly, furiously angry. She had seen him once take a kitten that they had had in his hands and, whilst it purred in his face, he had twisted its neck and killed it. That had happened when she was very small, but she would never forget it. Then she had grown gradually accustomed to this rage and had fled away and hidden. But on two occasions he had beaten her, and then, afterwards, in a moment it had passed, and he had cried and kissed her and given her presents.
She had known no other man, and so she could not tell that they were not all like that. But, as the years had passed, she had begun to wonder. She had asked Miss Minns whether everybody could make animals come when they whistled, and Miss Minns had admitted that the gift was unusual, that, in fact, she didn’t know anyone else who could do it. But Janet was growing old enough now to realise that Miss Minns’ experience was limited and that she did not know everything. She herself had tried to attract the birds, but they had never come to her.
Her father’s fury had seemed to her like the wind or rain; something that came to him suddenly, blowing from no certain place, and something, too, for which he was not responsible. She learnt to know that they only lasted a short time, and she used to hide herself until they were over.
With all this she did not love him. He gave her very little opportunity of doing so. His affection was as strangely fierce as his temper and frightened her almost as badly. She felt that that too was outside himself, that he had no love for her personally, but felt as he did about the animals, about anything young and wild. It was this last characteristic that was strangest of all to her. It was very difficult to put it into words, but she had seen that nothing made him so furious as the conventional people of the town. She was too young to recognise what it was about them that made him so angry, but she had seen him grow pale with rage at some insignificant thing that some one had said or done. On the other hand, he liked the wildest people of the place, the fishermen and tramps that haunted the lower quarters of the town. All this she grasped very vaguely, because she had no standard of comparison; she knew no one else. But fear had made love impossible; she was frightened when he was fond of her, she was frightened when he was angry with her. Miss Minns, too, was a difficult person to bestow love upon. She did not want it, and indeed resolutely flung it back with the remark that emotion was bad for growing girls and interfered with their education. When she lived at all she lived in the past, and Janet was only a very dim shadowy reflexion of the Misses Crate, Devonshire, and Simpson, who had glorified her earlier years.
Janet, therefore, had spent a very lonely and isolated childhood, and, as she had grown, the affection that was in her had grown too, and she had had no one to whom she might give it. At first it had been dolls, and ugly and misshapen though they were they had satisfied her. But the time came when their silence and immobility maddened her, she wanted something that would reply to her caresses and would share with her all her thoughts and ideas. Then Miss Minns came, and Janet devoted herself to her with an ardour that was quite new to the good lady; but Miss Minns distrusted enthusiasm and had learnt, whilst educating Miss Simpson, to repress all emotion, so she gave it all back to Janet again, carefully wrapped up in tissue paper. When Janet found that Miss Minns didn’t want her, and that she was only using her as a means of livelihood, she devoted herself to animals, and in a puppy, a canary and a black kitten she found what she wanted. But then came the terrible day when her father killed the kitten, and she determined never to have another pet of any kind.
By this time she was about fifteen and she had read scarcely anything. Her father never talked to her about books, and Miss Minns considered most novels improper and confined herself to Mrs. Hemans and the “Fairchild Family.” Janet’s ideas of the world were, at this time, peculiar. Her father had talked to her sometimes strangely about places that he had seen, but they had never attracted her: mountain heights, vast unending seas, tangled forests, sun-scorched deserts; always things without people, silent, cold, relentless. She had asked him about cities and he had spoken sometimes about London, and this had thrilled her through and through. What she longed for was people; people all round her, friends who would love her, people whom she herself could help. And then suddenly, on an old bookshelf that had remained untouched for many years past, she had found “Kenilworth.” There was a picture that attracted her and she had begun to read, and then a new world opened before her. There were several on the shelf: Lytton’s “Rienzi” and “The Last of the Barons,” George Eliot’s “Middlemarch,” Trollope’s “Barchester Towers,” and Miss Braddon’s “Lady Audley’s Secret.” There were some other things; somebody’s “History of England,” a Geography of Europe, a torn volume of Shakespeare, and the “Pickwick Papers.” Living, hitherto a drab and unsatisfactory affair, became a romantic thrilling business in which anything might happen, a tremendous bran pie into which one was continually plunging for plums. She had no doubt at all that there would be adventures for her in the future. Everyone, even the people in “Middlemarch,” had adventures, and it was absurd to suppose that she wouldn’t have them as well. She noticed, too, that all the adventures that these people had rose from the same source, namely love. She did not realise very thoroughly what this love was, except that it meant finding somebody for whom you cared more than anyone else in the world and staying with them for the rest of your life, and perhaps after. She did not admire all the people of whom the heroines were enamoured, but she realised that everyone thought differently about such things, and that there was apt to be trouble when two ladies cared for the same gentleman or vice versa.
Only you must, so to speak, have your chance, and that she seemed to be missing. It was all very well to watch romance from your high window and speculate on its possibilities as it passed down the street, but you ought to be down in the midst of it if you were going to do anything. It all seemed ridiculously simple and easy, and she waited for her knight to come with a quiet and assured certainty.
At first she had attacked Miss Minns on the question, but had got little response. Miss Minns was of the opinion that knights were absurd, and that it did not do to expect anything in this world, and that in any case young girls oughtn’t to think about such things, and that it came of reading romances and stuff, with a final concession that it was “Love that made the world go round,” and that “It was better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.”
All this was to little purpose, but it was of trivial importance, because Janet was quite settled in her mind about the whole affair. She had no ideal knight; he was quite vague, hidden in a cloud of glory, and she did not want to see his face; but that he would come she was sure.
But, afterwards, she gave her knight kingdoms and palaces and a beautiful life in which she had some vague share, as of a worshipper before a misty shrine. And he, indeed, was long in coming. She met no one from one year’s end to another, and wistful gazing from her window was of no use at all. She wished that she had other girls for company. She saw them pass, sometimes, through the town, arm in arm; fisher-girls, perhaps, or even ladies from the hotel, and she longed, with an aching longing, to join them and tell the
m all that she was thinking.
Her father never seemed to consider that she might be lonely. He never thought very much about her at all, and he was not on sufficiently good terms with the people of the place to ask them to his home; he would not have known what to do with them if he had had them there, and would have probably played practical jokes, to their extreme discomfiture.
And then Tony came. She did not see him with any surprise. She had known that it was only a matter of waiting, and she had no doubt at all that he was the knight in question. Her ignorance of the world prevented her from realising that there were a great many other young men dressed in the same way and with the same charming manners. From the first moment that she saw him she took it for granted that they would marry and would go away to some beautiful country, where they would live in the sunshine for ever. And with it all she was, in a way, practical. She knew that it would have to be a secret, that Miss Minns and her father must know nothing about it, and that there would have to be plots and, perhaps, an escape. That was all part of the game, and if there were no difficulties there would be no fun. She had no scruples about the morality of escaping from Miss Minns and her father. They neither of them loved her, or if they did, they had not succeeded in making her love them, and she did not think they would miss her very much.
She was also very thankful to Providence for having sent her so charming a knight. She loved every bit of him, from the crown of his head to the sole of his foot, his curly hair, his eyes, his smile, his mouth, his hands. Oh! he would fit into her background very handsomely. And charming though he was, it never entered her head for a moment that he was not in love with her. Of course he was! She had seen it in his eyes from the very first minute.
And so all the scruples, the maidenly modesty and the bashful surprise that surround the love affairs of most of her sex were entirely absent. It seemed to her like the singing of a lark in the sky or the murmur of waves across the sand; something inevitable and perfectly, easily natural. There might be difficulties and troubles, because there were people like Miss Minns in the world, but they would pass away in time, and it would be as though they had never existed.
The only thing that puzzled her a little was Maradick. She did not understand what he was doing there. Was he always coming whenever Tony came? He was old like her father, but she thought he looked pleasant. Certainly not a person to be afraid of, and perhaps even some one to whom one could tell things. She liked his size and his smile and his quiet way of talking. But still it was a nuisance his being there at all. There were quite enough complications already with Miss Minns and father without another elderly person. And why was Tony with him at all? He was an old man, one of those dull, elderly people who might be nice and kind but couldn’t possibly be any use as a friend. She tried to get Miss Minns to solve the problem, but that lady murmured something about “Birds of a feather,” and that it was always proper to pay calls in twos, which was no use at all.
So Janet gave up Maradick for the present with a sigh and a shake of the head. But she was most blissfully happy. That country that had remained so long without an inhabiter was solitary no longer, her dreams and pictures moved before her now with life and splendour. She went about her day with a light in her eyes, humming a little song, tender and sympathetic with Miss Minns because she, poor thing, could not know how glorious a thing it was, this love!
I do not know whether Miss Minns had her suspicions. She must have noticed Janet’s pleasant temper and gaiety, but she said nothing. As to Morelli, there was no telling what he noticed.
He returned to the house after his conversation with Punch in no pleasant humour. Janet had been up since a very early hour; she never could sleep when the sun was bright, and she was very happy. She had a suspicion that Tony would come to-day. It was based on nothing very certain, but she had dreamt that he would; and it was the right kind of day for him to come on, when the sun was so bright and a butterfly had swept through the window like the petal of a white rose blown by the wind.
And so she met her father with a laugh when he came in and led the way gaily to breakfast. But in a moment she saw that something was wrong, and, at the thought that one of his rages was sweeping over him and that she would not be able to escape, her face grew very white and her lips began to tremble.
She knew the symptoms of it. He sat very quietly with his hands crumbling the bread at his side; he was frowning, but very slightly, and he spoke pleasantly about ordinary things. As a rule when he was like this she crept away up to her room and locked her door, but now there seemed no chance of escape.
But she talked gaily and laughed, although her heart was beating so loudly that she thought that he would hear it.
“Miss Minns and I are going to walk over to Tregotha Point this afternoon, father,” she said; “there are flowers there and we shall take books. Only I shall be back for tea, and so we shall start early.”
He said nothing, but looked at the tablecloth. She looked round the room as though for a means of escape. It was all so cheerful that it seemed to mock her, the red-tiled fireplace, the golden globe of the lamp, the shining strip of blue sky beyond the window.
“Tea, father?” The teapot trembled a little in her hand. She could not talk; when the storm was approaching some actual presence seemed to come from the clouds and place an iron grip upon her. It had been some while since the last time and she had begun to hope that it might not happen again, and now —— She was afraid to speak lest her voice should shake. The smile on her lips froze.
“Well,” he said, looking at her across the table, “talk to me.” The look that she knew so well came into his face; there was a little smile at the corners of his mouth and his eyes stared straight in front of him as though he were looking past her into infinite distances.
“Well,” he said again, “why don’t you talk?”
“I — have nothing to say,” she stammered, “we haven’t done anything.”
And then suddenly the storm broke. He gave a little scream like a wild animal, and, with one push of the hand, the table went over, crashing to the ground. The crockery lay in shattered pieces on the blue carpet. Janet crouched back against the wall, but he came slowly round the table towards her. His back was bent a little and his head stretched forward like an animal about to spring.
She was crying bitterly, with her hands pressed in front of her face.
“Please, father,” she said, “I haven’t done anything — I didn’t know — I haven’t done anything.”
She said it again and again between her tears. Morelli came over to her. “There was a man,” he said between his teeth, “a man whom I saw this morning, and he said things. Oh! if I had him here!” He laughed. “I would kill him, here, with my hands. But you see, you shall never speak to him again, you don’t go near him.” He spoke with passion.
She did not answer. He shook her shoulder. “Well, speak, can’t you?” He took her arm and twisted it, and then, apparently maddened by her immobility and her tears, he struck her with his hand across the face.
He let her sink to the floor in a heap, then for a moment he looked down on her. There was absolute silence in the room, a shaft of light fell through the window, caught a gleaming broken saucer on the floor, lighted the red tiles and sparkled against the farther wall. Janet was sobbing very quietly, crouching on the floor with her head in her hands. He looked at her for a moment and then crept silently from the room.
The stillness and peace and the twittering of a bird at the window brought her to her senses. It had happened so often before that it did not take her long to recover. She got up from her knees and wiped her eyes; she pushed back her hair and put the pins in carefully. Then she felt her cheek where he had struck her. It always happened like that, suddenly, for no reason at all. She knew that it was due to no bitter feeling against herself. Anything that came in his way at the time would suffer, as Miss Minns had learnt. Doubtless she was up in her room now with her door locked.
&
nbsp; But this occasion was different from all the others. When it had happened before, quite the worst part of it had been the loneliness. It had seemed such a terribly desolate world, and she had seen infinite, dreary years stretching before her in which she remained, defenceless and without a friend, at the mercy of his temper. But now that her knight had come she did not mind at all. It would not be long before she escaped altogether, and, in any case, he was there to be sorry for her and comfort her. She would, of course, tell him all about it, because she would tell him everything. She felt no anger against her father. He was like that; she knew what it felt like to be angry, she had screamed and stamped and bit when she was a little girl in just that kind of way. She was rather sorry for him, because she knew he was always sorry afterwards. And then it was such a relief that it was over. The worst part of it was that sickening terror at first, when she did not know what he might do.
She set up the table again, collected the pieces of crockery from the floor and carried them into the kitchen. She then wiped up the pool of tea that had dripped on to the carpet. After this she realised that she was hungry, that she had had nothing at all, and she sat down and made a picnicky meal. By the end of it she was humming to herself as though nothing had occurred.