The Young Clementina

by D. E. Stevenson

  “I like Tatticoram best,” she said.

  “But, Clementina, she was so ungrateful.”

  “She couldn’t help it, Aunt Charlotte,” Clementina said eagerly. “They wanted things from her. They wanted her to be grateful. You can’t be grateful to people who are always expecting you to be grateful. They were always pawing her.” She shivered. “I hate being pawed.”

  “Dickens didn’t mean us to like her.”

  “He didn’t understand her,” said the astonishing child.

  “But, Clementina, he must have understood her to write about her.”

  She was silent for a few moments and then she said: “I know it seems funny, but I’m sure he didn’t really understand her any more than the Meagles did. He had never been a little girl so he couldn’t know just how little girls feel about things.”

  After this conversation I began to feel that I understood Clementina better. She allowed me to understand her, and you helped me, Clare. I felt all the time you were helping me to understand the child. Perhaps you have girls of your own. I did not try to force the pace with Clementina. I just went my own way. When she wanted to talk to me I was ready to talk, and when she shut herself away from me I turned to other things.

  Mr. Howard continued to be friendly with us even after he had heard about the misfortunes of Clementina’s parents. In fact, he was even more friendly with us than before. We met him constantly in the hunting field and he often rode over to the Manor for lunch or tea. He was always friendly and cheerful, and I liked him more and more.

  One day he rode over from Fairways to have tea with us; Clementina had gone down to the stables, so I was alone in the library when he arrived.

  “I’m glad you’re alone,” he said. “I wanted to talk to you.”

  “What do you want to talk to me about?” I asked, smiling.

  “About that wretched divorce; it makes me mad the way people go on. It’s extraordinary to come back from the wilds and find people behaving like this.”

  “Behaving like what?” I inquired.

  “Refusing to have anything to do with Clementina,” he replied. “It’s not Clementina’s fault if her parents made a mess of things. I thought the world had progressed a bit, but it’s just as narrow as ever.”

  “It’s only a little bit of the world,” I told him, “and you need not waste your pity on us. Clementina and I are quite happy in our own society—and yours.”

  “Yes, it’s their loss of course. That’s what I said to—I mean—er—it makes me feel pretty sick all the same.”

  I smiled at his slip; he had evidently been crossing swords with somebody over Clementina and me. It was nice to feel we had a champion, and such a vigorous one.

  “Are they still talking about it?” I asked him.

  “Well—er—a certain amount,” he replied, looking rather embarrassed at the question. “It’s not so much the actual divorce that they’re mad about—lots of people get divorced nowadays. But the Wisdons resented any interference—they kept it all dark. Mrs. Wisdon was stuck up—so they say—and Wisdon snubbed one or two people who tried to poke their noses into his affairs. He was quite right, of course, but it alienated people. The Wisdons didn’t want sympathy, they wouldn’t tolerate busybodies—that, apparently, is their chief crime.”

  I was interested. “What are people saying—exactly?” I inquired.

  “Oh, there are lots of tales,” he said. “I don’t believe the half of them—about what went on at Hinkleton Manor. They have to make up tales because they don’t really know anything—that’s what annoys them.”

  “What kind of tales?”

  “I’m not going to tell you. I couldn’t, Miss Dean. Besides, they are all lies. You know the wild way people talk nowadays. They talk without thinking. I heard somebody say the other day that Wisdon should have let his wife divorce him, and quite a lot of people agreed.”

  “You don’t think so?”

  “How could I? How could anyone who gave the subject a moment’s thought? He would have had to surrender his daughter to a woman who was not fit to look after a child—I’m sorry, Miss Dean, I forgot for a moment she is your sister.”

  “I asked for it,” I told him, “and you haven’t said anything as bad about her as I have thought.”

  “And a trumped up divorce is a hateful thing to my mind,” he continued. “Dishonest and degrading. Far worse than a straightforward, above-board case like the Wisdons’. But—would you believe it—they all agreed that Wisdon should have trumped up some evidence so that she could have divorced him—they would have forgiven him then—I think they’re all mad. Don’t let’s talk about it anymore, Miss Dean.”

  We didn’t speak of it again; there was nothing to be gained by speaking of it. Clementina appeared from the stables and we had tea.

  Mr. Howard was our only friend at this time. I heard no more of the Felsteads and concluded that Mrs. Felstead had decided not to allow her child to resume her friendship with Clementina. It was a pity, because I thought it would be good for Clementina to have a friend of her own age, but it could not be helped.

  The winter passed, and with it hunting. Spring came to Hinkleton. I had not seen spring come to the country for thirteen years—spring in London is a sad travesty of the real thing. It came very suddenly that year. We had had weeks of cold wind, and then the rain came, and the sun, and a faint haze of green appeared on the face of the earth. It was so beautiful that I could hardly bear it. The small fat buds on the trees and hedges burst asunder, and the tiny leaves appeared and spread their frail green fingers to the sun. In the woods, patches of tender green shone like flames among the darkness of the conifers. The sun poured down, dappling the ground with tiny patches of light and shade. Primroses came, hiding in sheltered nooks, and the sweet woodland violets, and after these came bluebells like a carpet of sea-blue velvet beneath the trees. In the garden were lilacs with their sweet heavy scent, and laburnums, laden with golden rain. Azaleas bloomed in the borders like bushes of fire. The beauty of the spring filled me with happiness—I was glad now that I had chosen to leave my cell. Life in the city was not really life, it was only existence. I made up my mind that I would never go back to Wentworth’s. I would rather take a job as a farm hand and spend my days in manual work, laboring in the fields, or tending the cows. It might be possible to get something of the sort, I thought. Perhaps when Garth came back he could find me a country job—I did not care what it was, so long as I could be out in the fields and watch the passing of the seasons and the coming of the flowers.

  I walked in the woods finding treasures at every step, the sunlight, the leafy shadows, the flowers—I can’t find words to tell you what they meant to me, Clare. I lay on the springy turf with the scent of the pines warm and sweet in my nostrils. I felt the soft moss under my cheek. I think I went mad, that spring, mad with the beauty of the woods.

  Chapter Nine

  “She Was Beautiful”

  One day in June, when I had been at Hinkleton Manor for about eight months I received a telegram from George Hamilton asking me to come at once to an address in Brighton: Kitty was ill and wanted to see me. The telegram had been forwarded from Wentworth’s, and I realized that Kitty did not know that I had taken up my abode at the Manor. It seemed strange that Kitty should want me, but I could not refuse to go to her when she was ill. I showed the telegram to Nanny and told her I must catch the ten o’clock train.

  “I suppose you must go, Miss Char,” she said. “But come back as soon as you can. We won’t tell Clemmie about it. It would only upset her.”

  I had no time to arrange anything; I threw a few clothes into a suitcase and set off. All the way down to Brighton I thought of Kitty and wondered about her—how ill was she? Why did she want to see me, me of all people?

  Kitty had dropped out of my mind so completely in the last few months that I had scarcely t
hought of her at all except in a vague way as the mother of Clementina. And now she had come back into my life like a thunderbolt out of a blue sky. She had a habit of doing that, I mused. She had a habit of disappearing out of my life for months—or even years—and returning suddenly and unexpectedly with peremptory demands upon my time. What kind of Kitty should I find when I reached Brighton? Would she be the old carefree Kitty of her little girlhood, or the Kitty who had come to me in trouble and made me the receptacle of her moods, or would she be the hard woman with the hatred in her eyes who had looked at me across the crowded courtroom and frightened me so?

  I was still frightened when I remembered that look of scorn and hatred; it came back to me very vividly, and a cold shiver ran up my spine. That look was the last I had had from Kitty; I had not seen her since.

  I gazed out of the window at the flying fields and tried to calm myself and to reason with the strange fear which had seized upon me—was I afraid of Kitty? I thought about it for a little and decided that it was not Kitty of whom I was afraid; it was the hatred which had terrified me. And surely the hatred must have gone now or she would not have sent for me to come to her when she was ill. It was a comforting thought, and I held on to it and elaborated it. If Kitty had married Mr. Hamilton and was happy with him—as Garth had seemed to expect—she would bear me no grudge for the part I had played in the divorce. Happy people do not cherish grievances. It is only when people are miserable, when they feel that the world has treated them badly, that hatred finds a lodging in their hearts. Soon I had convinced myself that Kitty was happy, and had sent for me to tell me so and to be friends with me. I was ready to meet her halfway, ready to wash out all the misunderstandings of the past few years.

  The journey was a troublesome one, like all cross-country journeys; it involved innumerable changes, and long waits for dawdling trains. I became more and more tired and impatient as the day wore on, and wished at least a dozen times that I had made the journey by car.

  I had wired to Mr. Hamilton to say that I would arrive at 5:10 and I more than half expected that he would be at the station to meet me. I tried to conjure up his face as I had seen it in court; a smooth round face, with a bewildered expression like that of a little boy who has been punished for something and does not understand why. (I had sympathized with the bewildered expression because I had felt bewildered too.) I had thought he looked kind and nice—not at all like a man who would steal another man’s wife. I had wondered about him a little.

  As the train drew into the station I scrutinized the faces upon the platform—the eagerly searching, anxious faces peculiar to those who have come to meet their friends and are afraid they may not recognize them before the doors are opened and the quiet platform becomes Bedlam let loose—but I could see nobody with the least resemblance to the man I remembered. I collected my suitcase and found a taxi with some difficulty. Brighton was glaring white in the afternoon sunshine; the brightness of it hurt my eyes, already tired with the long day’s traveling.

  The taxi stopped at a large square house standing well back in a formal garden. I looked up at it anxiously and saw that the blinds were drawn…

  ***

  George Hamilton met me on the doorstep; he was pale and miserable—more like a little boy than ever—his eyes were rimmed with red.

  “You’re—you’re too late,” he said thickly.

  “Too late!”

  He nodded. “She died this morning.” I stared at him aghast. I had never thought of this—not once in all my imaginings had I visualized this ending to my journey.

  “I came at once,” I stammered. “I wasn’t in London—your wire was forwarded.”

  He made a helpless gesture with his hands.

  “I can’t believe,” I said stupidly. “Kitty—she was so—so full of life.”

  “I know,” he said, looking down at his hands and speaking in that thick, husky voice which is the aftermath of weeping. “She was so full of life…it’s difficult to believe, isn’t it? You didn’t see her when she was ill…and that makes it harder to believe. I wish you had been here.”

  “I came at once,” I said again.

  “You couldn’t help it,” he replied drearily. “These things just happen…she wanted you, that’s why I wired, she wanted to tell you something.”

  “What did she want to tell me?”

  “I don’t know, she said she wanted your forgiveness.”

  “But I had forgiven her long ago.”

  “I wish we had known,” he said, still in that dreary, expressionless voice. “I wish we could have told her that you knew about it—whatever it was—and had forgiven her. She kept on saying over and over again, ‘I must see Char—I must tell her about it—tell Char to come—I must see Char.’”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “I thought once she was going to give me a message for you,” he continued. “She said, ‘Tell Char it all happened so easily. It was such a little lie at first—such a little lie—and then it grew and grew.’ And then she cried out that it had grown into a tree and we were all hanging on it, you and I and Wisdon and herself—she was delirious of course.”

  “She must have been delirious,” I said. “I had forgiven her for deceiving me over that night in the flat—I suppose it was that.”

  “Perhaps,” he said. “I don’t know. I only know she wanted to see you, she kept on saying, ‘I must see Char.’ She was afraid to die. She was—afraid. It was dreadful,” he said, twisting his hands, “dreadful, dreadful, dreadful.”

  “I wish—I wish I could have been here sooner,” I said again. It seemed to me that I had said the same thing a dozen times; I could find nothing else to say to him, no comfort of any kind to give him.

  “It was pneumonia,” he continued. “First ’flu, you know, and then pneumonia. She wasn’t so very ill at first, and then—two days ago—she suddenly got worse. I could see it in the doctor’s face. I had specialists…they said they were afraid…they thought her heart…I did all I could, everything they suggested…”

  “I’m sure you did,” I told him, as comfortingly as I could. “Perhaps her heart wasn’t very strong—our mother died very suddenly of heart trouble.”

  He nodded miserably. “It was when she—when she knew that she wasn’t going to get better that she began to ask for you. She said over and over again, ‘I can’t die till I’ve seen Char.’ She clung to my hand and said I wasn’t to let her die—she was so afraid—so afraid.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “She’s happy now, isn’t she?” he asked, looking at me with his pathetic brown eyes. “She knows now that you’ve forgiven her and that everything’s all right—you believe that, don’t you, Miss Dean?”

  I said I believed it.

  We were still standing in the hall; he was too stricken to think of asking me to sit down. I leaned against the carved oak table, for my knees were knocking together and I felt that all the strength had flowed out of my body.

  “I suppose—you’d like to—to see her,” he said at last.

  He took me upstairs to see Kitty. It was a beautiful room, big and airy; Kitty was lying very peacefully in the bed. The room was full of flowers—great masses of roses and lilac—there were pink roses in the hands that were crossed so peacefully upon her breast.

  “Isn’t she beautiful?” he said softly.

  She was beautiful. She looked very pure and holy, very young. Her face wore an expression of sweet austerity. It was very calm, very peaceful. I saw that the old Kitty had come back—the Kitty that I had known and loved long ago. And yet it was not quite the old Kitty, for this was a woman, not a girl, a woman who had sampled life, who had been tossed by its storms and had come at last into a haven of rest.

  Memories of the past crowded into my mind—memories of the past—discarded fragments of days long fled. I was overwhelmed with grief—not so much for Kitty�
�s broken life as for the mystery of Life itself. Kitty’s life was but half run—a mere twisted fragment—how could I think that it was complete? Where could I find the purpose, the meaning of it all?

  There had been none of this bewilderment in my mind when I had stood and looked down upon the still forms of my mother and my father—they had had their lives. Death is natural when it comes to the old, natural and even kindly. But this was different, this was a ruthless thing.

  I realized that Mr. Hamilton was speaking. “We had only been married for a few months,” he was saying. “Just a few months, that’s all, and I loved her more than ever. But I’m glad we were married because, you see, she belongs to me now. She doesn’t belong to anybody else. She’s my very own.”

  He leaned over her and touched her hand possessively, protectingly. It was almost as if he were afraid that I would claim her—God knows I had no thought of such a thing. His love for Kitty had given him the right to call her his.

  “She was good,” he continued huskily. “She really was good, Miss Dean. There was no badness in her. She just liked fun and amusement—she was so gay and pretty you see—and she needed love. We were very happy together. We suited each other. All I wanted was to see her happy, and when she was happy it made me happy too. She wasn’t happy with—with Wisdon.” He raised his eyes and looked at me, almost sternly. “He wasn’t kind to her, Miss Dean, and she needed kindness so much.”

  I nodded—I couldn’t speak—it was true. Garth had not been kind to Kitty.

  I stayed to dinner at Garton Lodge and went to a hotel for the night. Mr. Hamilton talked about Kitty all the time—I like to think that he found some relief in talking to me about her; he needed all the comfort he could get. He talked about her unselfishness, her goodness, her sunny nature, and the courage with which she had faced her ruined life. I listened to it all and I had to believe what he was saying—he believed it so implicitly himself—and yet, all the time at the back of my mind, I knew that Kitty had not been quite like that. I had seen another side of her, a side that George Hamilton had never seen. Perhaps the truth lay between our two visions—Kitty was neither all black nor all white but a mixture of the two, like the rest of humanity.