The Ballad and the Source

by Rosamond Lehmann

  “That depends,” said Tilly. “Look what she went and done. Don’t tell me a mother’s feelin’s caused that bit of play-actin’. A mother—that is a mother—studies ’er dooty to ’er child, and acts accordin’ to the best of ’er abilities. No matter ’ow near she might be drove to it by excruciatin’ circumstances she’d never go and do a deed like that—roused up out of its first sleep, frightened out of its little wits. No, it was spite. And will. Fair means or foul, she’d ’ave ’er way. But she didn’t that time.”

  “What? How do you mean, Tilly? What did she do?”

  “Kidnapped it,” said Tilly. “That’s what she did.”

  “Kidnapped it!!!”

  The room looked all at once hateful. The sun coming in through the partly-lowered red blind poured out a sudden murky glare, as if a dragon’s jaws had opened. Fixed in this glare, every familiar object fastened upon me a baleful, watching face. I saw the schoolroom bookshelf, and in roaring letters a foot high one title: KIDNAPPED; and that engraved illustration, dark boat, dark water, white face of evil I never dared to look at. A hammer thumped in my ears. Through it I heard Tilly give a long low cackle of laughter.

  “I’d ’ave given somethink to been there.”

  “Mm,” I agreed feebly.

  “The coolness! … First, what does she do? She stands and waits at the corner till she sees the pram go out for its afternoon walk; then along she comes, up the steps, a ring at the front door bell, cool as you please. ‘Oh, Madame!!!’ ‘Bonjoo, Maree. I’ve come to fetch my petty fee. Take ’er to the sunny south for the winter.’ ‘Oh Madame, this is a surprise! Would Moossew be expectin’ you?’ ‘No, ’e wouldn’t. I’ll just step inside for a bit. ’Ow’s your dear old parents and your brother n the Army? I’ve brought you a little present, Maree. I know you’d like to do somethink to oblige me.’ ‘Certindly, Madame’—the double-faced thing. Not that you can blame ’er reelly. She was between the devil and the deep sea, like—and them French girls is flighty.”

  As this dialogue developed, I felt my sanity returning. When Tilly paused, musing, I was able to prompt her to continue.

  “Well, she got round the girl to ’ide ’er till the evenin’. Yes—up in ’er own boodwar, where nobody never set foot no more, except to air it and dust and shut up—the key turned on ’er for safety, like a thief in ’er own ’usband’s ’ouse—which she was—where all society ’ad flocked once to fawn at ’er feet. Bidin’ ’er time. … I wonder what ’er thoughts was, alone there.”

  I saw a figure, alone, stretched on a couch. I knew how it looked in solitude, the stone thoughts moulding its face. Shivers pricked me, and I said quickly:

  “What was she biding her time for?”

  Now, I thought, now it’s coming. I was braced to bear it all.

  “For when the child would be tucked up in its cot in the night nursery. That was ’er only chance of gettin’ at it unbeknown to the nurse. Between seven and eight, when she was nicely off, the nurse would pop down for a bit of supper—not long—three-quarters of an hour, say. Well, round about then, this girl Maree—she was on the watch— come and unlocked the door. ‘See voo play, Madame, now’s your chance. ’Urry. She’s just gone down.’ ‘Good. And Moossew, Maree? Nowhere about?’ ‘’E come in and changed and gone out to dine, Madame. I ’ad it from the valet.’ ‘Thank you, Maree. You may go now. ’Ere’s your little present. Buy somethink to remember me. But mind—you ain’t seen so much as the whisk of my skirts—see? Keep your mouth shut and you won’t get into trouble. You’ve done nothink wrong. You’ve only ’elped me to what’s my own. I’m takin’ ’er far away now, where nobody won’t never find us. Good-bye and thankin’ you. I’ll never forget you.’ ‘Nor me you, Madame. Le Bong Dew bless and keep you.’ So she gives the girl a kiss and sends ’er off. Then up she creeps to the night nursery, takes that mite out of its cot, wraps it up in a blanket—and sets off down with it.”

  “Did she wake up? Did she know her mother had come for her?”

  “Whether she woke up or not, she never cried out. The woman said she couldn’t ’ave. She said it was like as if she always left one of ’er ears up in the nursery, and would ’ave ’eard ’er. Down the stairs she goes, quiet as a mouse, with it in ’er arms. Reaches the bottom stair. All quiet. Starts across the marble ’all. When all of a sudden comes a step outside on the pavement, a man’s step. It stops. Next moment comes the scritch of a key in the lock. The front door opens. And there ’e stands—face to face, on the doorstep.”

  I heard myself give a groan.

  “Mr. Charles?”

  “’Er ’usband.”

  “But how could it be? He’d gone out to dinner, you said. Why did he comes back?”

  “You can call it Providence,” said Tilly. “I don’t know what ’e come back for. I dare say ’e’d forgotten somethink—but come ’e did. Oh, the scales seemed tipped for ’er all right—right to the last momint—but she wasn’t meant to win that game. And she lost it.”

  “What did he say to her?”

  Tilly paused, seemed to wrestle with the dramatic instinct, and momentarily victorious, replied:

  “Not ’avin’ been present, I couldn’t tell you. Not: Welcome back to my ancestral ’ome—that you may be sure. You can picture it,—’im and ’er facin’ up at one another like a couple of wild beasts ready to spring—’er clutchin’ on to the child. She was caught, see?—fair and square. All I know is, the ’all bell give a ring downstairs fit to wake the dead, and the valet went to answer it. Next thing, ’e come runnin’ back like as if Old Nick was after ’im. ‘Nurse! You’re wanted at once double quick in the ’all.’ So up she tears, and ‘Oh Lor’!’ she says—you could ’ave knocked ’er down with a feather. It made ’er come over queer to see ’em. Gashly white, deadly quiet, ’e was, and ’er standin’ there by the bottom step, leanin’ up against a great statute they ’ad there—a naked great marble figure of a female, so the Nurse said, ’oldin’ up a torch, and that mite wide awake, pokin’ its ’ead up out of the blanket to stare first at one, then the other, not makin’ a sound. ‘Who let this woman in?’ ’e says, cold as a blessed iceberg. ‘Not me, sir!’ ‘Nor me, sir.’ Then she spoke up and says: ‘None of your servants is to blame, Charles. I found my own way in. You refused me my own child, so I have to come and take her.’ ‘Frances,’ ’e says, takin’ no more notice of ’er than a fly on the wall, ‘Frances’—that was ’er name, Frances Donkin—‘take Miss Ianthe at once. Take her back to the nursery.’ At that she gives a look round like a trapped thing and starts to make for the stairs. ’E gives one spring and ketches ’old of ’er by the shoulder, and that pore mite starts off a-sobbin­­­­’ and ’owlin’. ‘Take your hand away, Charles,’ she says, very dignified. ‘You are frightening I-anthe. … There, I-anthe, there, my child,’ she says. ‘Here, take her, Frances,’ and ’ands ’er over as careful and tender as if she’d just ’ad ’er down to say good-night to. ‘There, take her back quickly,’ she says. ‘Don’t cry, I-anthe. … You know,’ she says with a bit of a smile, ‘I wasn’t going to take her travelling through the night in her nightgown. I had all her clothes ready, waiting in a little trunk at the station—I made them myself.’ ’Er who’d never so much as wound a ball of baby wool since the child was born! ‘Good-night, Frances,’ she says. ‘I-anthe has grown a great deal. She looks healthy.’ So she couldn’t do no other than say: ‘Good-night, Madam,’ and off she starts upstairs with ’er legs sinkin’ under ’er like a pair of feather bolsters. But she ’ad the mite to soothe, and that got ’er on. She was fond of it in ’er own way—that I will say. When she gets to the first landin’ she stops and listens. She ’ears ’im say, deadly quiet: ‘Now leave my house.’ ‘Yes, I will go now,’ she says, as if she was tired like. ‘And if ever you attempt to set foot in it again,’ ’e says, ‘I will summon the police and have you arrested.’ ‘No need to threaten me, Charles Herbert,’ she sa
ys. ‘I’ll not give you cause to take a step so contrary to the chivalrous instincts of an English gentleman’—she meant it spiteful, see? ‘But be sure of one thing,’ she says. ‘Be it soon, be it late, I-anthe will come back to me. I will have her love. And she will HATE her father.’ And with that she sweeps out like a queen, and the front door slams be’ind ’er.”

  Now she was in the dark street alone, defeated. She was standing still, wondering where to go, what to do next. Now she was walking away with the step I knew, vanishing, swallowed up in the night beyond reach of my imagination.

  Hate, hate, HATE, went the hammer in my ears.

  She should win, and he should be cast down and hated.

  Tilly chuckled.

  “Oh, wasn’t there a kick-up in the ’ouse that night! Along a bit later, ’e sends for ’er. ‘Pack at once, Frances,’ ’e says. ‘You and Miss I-anthe will be going over to England to-morrow. I shall follow later.’ And that girl—that Maree—’ighstrikin’ all over the place, lettin’ the cat out of the bag, ’ow she done it, and she ’adn’t known what to do for the best, and she didn’t want the money, she’d do anythink for Madame, lay down ’er life, she worshipped ’er, and ’ow she’d give ’er a kiss, and I don’t know what all. She was sent packin’. But ’e give ’er ’er reference—’e was just. Bless you, Miss Sibyl could get round anybody. All but one. She never got round ’im. And the next evenin’ they turned up at number fifteen, with ten pieces of luggage not countin’ the cot and the pram.”

  “Oh!” I cried in delight. “They came to Grandma!” For now, surely, Grandma would send for Miss Sibyl, and re-unite her to her little girl.

  “Yes. We got a telegram—could they stay till ’e’d made ’is arrangements. You see, there wasn’t no relations to speak of on ’is side neither, and she’d been a good friend to ’im too before the marriage. They stayed a month. She was a funny little soul—very takin’.”

  Tilly fell silent, looking tender and amused, as she always did when she spoke of children.

  “Where did they go after the month?”

  “Oh, ’e bought a place in Kent, and they went there to live. ’E give it all up—’is Dippermatic, I mean—and the divorce went through, and ’e got it fixed legal the mother would be forbid all access to the child till she was turned eighteen years; and ’e shut ’isself up and grew as stiff and awkward as an old ’orned crab in a shell. It was a shame. ’E was a feller with plenty of brains—and in ’is prime—not much over forty. She broke ’im all right. It was ’is pride. And then ’e’d been a bachelor too long before she got ’im. ’E opened up too late. It was like a weak stomach ’avin’ a fancy sudden to come off a diet of milk and soda and take a feed of ’ot lobster. One good go and ’e was finished. It seems as if that night give ’im a sort of a brain storm—and ’e never shook it off. ’E got it stuck in is ’ead she’d come for that child and get it by ’ook or by crook. That child was watched day and night. Never let run free to play by ’erself in the garden. Bars on all the windows. Oh, ’e was ’ipped! It wasn’t no life for a child. No wonder she went the way she did.”

  I said quickly:

  “How did she go?”

  “Wild,” said Tilly. Again she looked wandering and astray. “I don’t know. It was ’earsay. I lost sight of ’er later.”

  “Did you go on seeing her then—when she was little?”

  “Bless you, yes. I see ’er reg’lar. ’E trusted me—and that was a funny thing, too, why ’e did, I never fathomed it. For ’e got so ’ipped ’e wouldn’t trust no one after a bit. That Frances, she stayed some years, then ’e got suspicious she was correspondin’ with the mother on the sly—and she ’ad to go. It was over some little frock or somethink that come from America—addressed to the child—no name or message inside: ’e guessed ’oo it was from and ’eld ’er responsible. Then it was one governess, then another. If ’e didn’t give ’em the sack, they sacked theirselves; they couldn’t stand it—the watchin’ and the worritin’—it got their nerves all of a jangle. But if ever ’e was stuck between one goin’ and another comin’, ’e’d bring ’er up and leave ’er in our charge. And many’s the nice bit of ’oliday she ’ad that way.”

  “Did you look after her? Bath her and all that?”

  “Yes. I’d bath ’er and keep ’er clothes nice. Many’s the little frock I made ’er. It was a understood thing your Grandma should see to that. Madrona she called ’er, like the other. Oh, the things she’d say! She did talk strange sometimes. ‘You know, Tilly,’ she says once, ‘everybody has a mother. I’ve got one. She’s not dead. But she told so many lies my father had to send her away, or she might have taught me to tell lies too. But the queer thing is,’ she says, ‘I do tell lies sometimes, I don’t seem able to help it. So I think she must be watching me somehow, and putting them in my head.’ Fancy that from a child! It sounded shockin’. ‘My father says,’ she says, ‘if he found me out in a lie it would break his heart. He doesn’t mind me being stupid or rude or disobedient or anything else,’ she says, ‘only that.’”

  A terrible echo stirred. This same paternal threat, expressed in even direr terms—I had heard it only a short while ago from the lips of another child. It seemed that this thing went on and on, like a curse. Liar begot liar; and all their road, forward and back, far back, was cratered with disastrous pits of guilt, haunted by ruinous voices crying vengeance. Lying was not like anything else.

  But now, I felt, and trembled to feel, now at last I was getting back to the beginning. The moment was approaching when I should light on the link I sought, and, with one click, hold the whole circle in my hand.

  Instinct led me to say:

  “Did you take her out in the Park?”

  “Many and many a time. Through ’Yde Park into Kensington Gardens. With a bag of crusts to feed the gulls—she’d never go without that. Nasty scrawkin’ ravengeous things—I ’ated the sight of ’em. They’d come all round ’er —and the sparrers too. It was there,” said Tilly casually, meditatively, “I first sor ’er. One bright windy autumn day.”

  “Saw who?”

  “It was by the Round Pond—I’d seen a woman, lady, that is to say, standin’ a little way off under a tree, as it might be watchin’ us. But I didn’t take ’er in much, except to remark she ’ad on a funny sort of a blue cloak wrapped round ’er. But when it was time to go ’ome we passed ’er quite close. … And then I thought to myself: Now where in the world … and then what with ’er chatter I put it out of my mind. Next day, bless me if she wasn’t there again, standin’ still and just watchin’. I thought: Well, that’s funny, you do take an interest, I wonder why. I didn’t quite like it. There’s plenty of people watches the pretty fashionable-dressed children in the Park, and this one was worth a look too, she ’ad a cherry corded velvet coat and bonnet that year—but this seemed a sort of special watchin’. She ’ad a bit of a cold for a day or two after that and we didn’t go out. But the next time—there she was again! And the child says to me: ‘Oh, look, Tilly,’ she says, ‘there’s the lady in the blue cloak again.’ She ’adn’t let on before she’d even noticed ’er. And oh Lor’! it all come over me then. I felt myself go like a bath of cold water runnin’ down the plug ’ole. I thought: Whatever shall I do if she makes to come and speak? But she didn’t. I made some excuse it was later than I thought for, and ketches ’old of ’er ’and and starts to scurry off ’ome; and she just stood there a little way off, like a statute, not budgin’ a inch to foller us. My ’eart was bouncin’ in and out of my throat like a rubber ball, and I says to myself: ‘You daft idiot you! Where’s your brains and where’s your eyesight?’ But I was always a bit short-sighted. And it was close on nine years since I last see ’er. And oh, she ’ad changed! Thin!—she was a skelinton. And ’er ’air done different— that changes a woman. So when I got back I goes straight to your grandmother. She listens and she thinks; then she says: ‘You have acted qu
ite rightly, Tilly, in mentioning it, but I think you must be mistaken. When I heard of her last she was far away the other side of the world. You look quite upset,’ she says. ‘Go and get yourself a nice hot cup of tea in the kitchen at once. If you’re nervous,’ she says, ‘I’ll take her out myself for a few days and see what I make of this blue-cloak lady. Anyway,’ she says, ‘she’s to go to tea to-morrow with Mrs. Venables’ children. They’re calling for her in the carriage, so she’ll be quite safe,’ she says, smilin’. So that night I felt a bit easier in my mind.”

  “And were you mistaken?” I said in agitation.

  “Ah!” said Tilly slowly, drawing out the suspense. “Was I or wasn’t I? Next afternoon the carriage come about three as arranged, and off she went, ever so worked up. Whenever it came to a little treat or a party she’d light up and go off like a packet of squibs. She’d be like a little mad thing. It was the dull screwed-down life she led—and she was volatile by nature. I thought: ‘Well, I’ve got the afternoon free—I’ll pop down to the kitching and do my ironin’.’ Round about four comes a ring at the front door bell. As Fate would ’ave it, Stevens was out for ’is afternoon. ‘There!’ I says. ‘That’ll be from the dressmaker. It was promised for four. I’ll run up and take it in.’ So up I run—I was very light and quick on my feet in them days—opens the door—and there she stands! In that blue cloak. Pale. Oh, I nearly fell down in a swoond on the mat. I ’ung on to the door-’andle, and: ‘Oh! Miss Sibyl,’ I gasps out, ‘whatever ’ave you come after?’ I forgot myself, see? She gives me a smile—she did ’ave a lovely smile, it was enough to melt a stone. ‘Tilly, Tilly,’ she says, ‘don’t look so scared. I’m not a ghost—or a tiger escaped from its cage. I’m the same Sibyl you used to know. How wonderful,’ she says, ‘that you should open the door to me. It’s like coming home again. You haven’t changed a little bit.’ ‘Oh, Miss Sibyl,’ I says, ‘you ’ave.’ She ’ad ’old of my ’and. Mind, she was a beauty still—but she wasn’t a girl no longer. She ’ad a look on ’er … as if she’d seen a lot and learnt a lot—not all pleasant neither. You couldn’t call it exactly ’ard—more stern. Slow to brighten up. ‘So it was you in the Park,’ I says. ‘Yes,’ she says. ‘Forgive me if I frightened you. You see, I felt I must watch Ianthe first from a little way off—before I came close to her. So that I’d take in all the outlines of her nature—feel what she was like. So that when I touched her she wouldn’t feel strange at all to me; and that would help her, on her side, to know me quickly—remember me quickly, I should say.’ I’ve never forgot those words she spoke.”