"It must have been a love match," I said, for I had heard about it from Nanny Grange, whose aunt had been Cousin Agatha's nanny and was therefore quite knowledgeable about past family affairs.
"Pray," went on Cousin Agatha, "do not interrupt. This is a very serious matter. Your mother, against her family's wishes, went off and married this man from some outlandish place of which we had never heard." She looked at me very severely. "In something less than a year you were born. Soon after, your mother left her new home irresponsibly and came back to her family, bringing you." "I was three years old," I said, quoting Nanny Grange.
She raised her eyebrows. "I did beg you not to interrupt. She had nothing... simply nothing. You and she became a burden to your grandmother. Your mother died two years later."
I had been five years old at the time. I remembered her vaguely: the suffocating embraces which I loved and the feeling of security which I did not recognize until she was gone. There was a hazy picture in my mind of sitting on cool grass, with her beside me, a sketchbook in her hand. She had always been sketching, and she used to hide the book from my grandmother. I sensed, of course, that she was in some sort of disgrace and it used to make me happy to think of myself as a kind of protector. "You love me, don't you, Ellen?" she would say. "No matter what I've done." Those words rang in my ears when I thought of her and I was always so impatient with myself for my five-year-old incompetence in not understanding what was going on.
"Your grandmother was scarcely of an age to bring up a child," went on Cousin Agatha.
No, I thought grimly. She had seemed incredibly old to me with her tight lips, her cold eyes and the little white cap without which I never saw her—a formidable old lady who struck terror into me when I realized that I was now alone and had lost that loving conspirator and companion and that in future I must extricate myself from the continual trouble which seemed to dog me. Fortunately I was naturally resilient and managed to cultivate a stoical indifference to reproaches and appeals to God as to what would become of me. I could not feel grief when my grandmother died and I made no attempt to pretend I did.
"When your grandmother died," added Cousin Agatha, "she asked me to care for you and so I gave her my solemn promise on her deathbed. I am determined to carry it out. You must realize that it is only because I have taken you into my house that you are not in an orphanage, training to give service in some household as a maid or, perhaps if you showed an aptitude for learning, a governess. However, I have brought you here and you share Esmeralda's lessons; you live as a member of my family. Pray remember it. I do not ask for gratitude but I expect it. Do not think that you will have advantages like those of my own daughter. That would not be good for your character. When you are of age it may well be that you will have to earn a living. I therefore advise you to take advantage now of the immense blessings which have come your way. You will have a governess to teach you so that by the time you reach your eighteenth birthday you will be an educated young woman. You will also learn the manners and customs of well-bred households. It is for you, Ellen, to profit from this. Learn all you can and always remember that it is due to my bounty that you are able to take advantage of these opportunities. That is all."
I was meant to go away and brood on these things, to marvel at my good fortune and to cultivate humility, that most desirable virtue of all for those in my position, and in which alas I seemed sadly lacking. I had at one time even thought briefly that Cousin Agatha regarded me with affection, for she would glow with satisfaction when her eyes rested on me, but I quickly realized that the satisfaction was in her own good deed in taking me into her household and had nothing to do with my progress. In fact she seemed to revel in the unsatisfactory defects in which I seemed to abound, and I came to understand that this was because the more of a burden I was, the greater her virtue in keeping me.
It will be seen that I had little love for Cousin Agatha. In character we were diametrically opposed, and I came to the conclusion that I was the only member of the household who ever contradicted her. When I was younger the threat of the orphanage hung over me; but I quickly learned that I should never be sent there because Cousin Agatha could never allow her friends to know that she had disposed of me in such a way. In fact my unsatisfactory character was a source of pleasure to her. I think she talked of me more often to her friends than she did of Esmeralda. Her own daughter was a nonentity. I was scarcely that. I often caught the comment after I was leaving a room: "Of course her mother ..." And "It is hard to believe that poor Frances was an Emdon." Poor Frances being my mother and Emdon the name of the noble family from which both she and Cousin Agatha had sprung.
Of course I grew shrewd, "artful as a wagonload of monkeys" as Nanny Grange put it. "If there's mischief about, Miss Ellen will be in it. As for Miss Esme, she's led there by her naughty cousin, that's what." I suppose in my way I was as much a force in that household as Cousin Agatha.
In the winter we lived in a tall house opposite Hyde Park. I loved the trees which would be growing bronzed and golden when we returned from summer in the country. Esme and I used to sit at one of the topmost windows and point out the famous buildings to each other. From the north we looked right across the Park, but from the east we could pick out the Houses of Parliament, Big Ben and the Brompton Oratory. We used to listen for the muffin man's bell and watch the white-capped maids come running out with their dishes to buy his wares. Nanny Grange always sent for some and then we would sit by her fire toasting them and reveling in their soft buttery succulence. We used to watch the crossing sweepers—barefooted boys who made us unhappy because they looked so poor; and we both shed tears when we saw a man running behind a luggage-laden cab on its way to Paddington Station, where he hoped to earn a few pence by carrying the luggage. I made up a story of heartrending squalor which had Esmeralda weeping bitterly. She was very kind-hearted and so easily touched that I had to amend my story and tell it the way Cousin Agatha would have done. He had come from a good family and had' squandered his patrimony in gin and beer shops. He beat his wife, and his children went in terror of him. Poor sweet and simple Esme! She was so easily swayed.
In the afternoons after lessons we would walk in Kensington Gardens with Nanny Grange. She would sit on a seat in the flower walk while we gamboled around. "And not out of sight, Miss Ellen, or I'll have something to say to you." She rarely had to worry on that score because I liked to hang about and hear what she said to the other nannies.
"Esme's mother. My word, what a tartar. I'd not stay if it wasn't for the fact that my aunt was her nanny, and it's right and proper to keep these things in families. Sickly little thing, Miss Esme. As for that Miss Ellen, a real little madam. My patience, you'd think she was the daughter of the house instead of the poor relation. Mark my words, it will be brought home to her one day."
The other nannies would talk of their employers and their charges and I would make Esmeralda be quiet while we listened. Our companions shrieked, threw their balls to one another, spun their tops or cuddled their dolls and there would I be seated nonchalantly on the grass behind the seat on which the nannies sat, shamelessly listening.
I was obsessed with curiosity about my mother.
"My aunt says she was really pretty. Our young miss is the living image, I reckon. And we'll have trouble with her, I shouldn't wonder. But that's to come. Come home she did, said my aunt. She was in a state. Something went wrong—she never knew what, but back she came to her mother, bringing the child with her. My goodness me, it must have been jumping out of the frying pan into the fire. I heard they never let her forget what she had done. As for Miss Ellen's grandmother, she was another such as her cousin Agatha. Looking after the heathen and seeing he gets his soup and shirts and making her own daughter's life a misery... and the little 'un's too. Then Miss Frances goes and dies and leaves our Miss Ellen, who's never let forget that she's a burden. I mean to say an old lady like Mrs. Emdon and a lively young child ... it didn't work! And when she died she took her in. Couldn't do anything else really. She's not likely to let the child forget what she's doing for her either."