The du Mauriers

Part One

1

On a cold spring day in 1810 a little sallow-faced girl of twelve leant with her nose pressed against the windowpane of a tall house in Westbourne Place. She was in the servants' bedroom because the other rooms in the house were being stripped of their furniture, and strange men she had never seen before were strolling backwards and forwards through the two drawing-rooms pointing to the chairs and tables, feeling the legs of the little gilt boudoir couch with coarse dirty hands, running inquisitive fingers up the rich brocaded curtains. She had watched them for a time earlier in the day, and no one had noticed her; she had been free to wander through the rooms and passages and see the severe-looking gentleman in the dark coat put numbered tickets on the dining-room chairs. Then he went away, and in a few minutes came back again with two workmen who wore aprons and had their shirt sleeves rolled above their elbows, and he told the men to take the chairs away.

The room held an air of odd surprise when the chairs had gone. Then another man came and laid out all the best glass and china on a side-table, and, when he had arranged them to his satisfaction, he carried them through to the drawing-room and put the table against the wall. The chairs had been placed back to back in a long row, and the pictures had been taken down from their hanging-rails and stacked in a pile on the floor.

The callous indifference of these men towards her mother's possessions was, to the child, like a little stab of pain. She had known for some time that Westbourne Place was to be sold, and she and her mother would move to another home, but she had not understood that the chairs and the tables, the glass and china, the very plate off which they ate, would be theirs no longer. One by one the familiar things were touched and tested by unfamiliar hands, and a dreary procession formed itself like a line of mourners at a funeral, bearing from the house a succession of little corpses that could not say farewell. When the gold timepiece was lifted from his place above the stairs the child could stand no more, and she turned away with tears in her eyes and crept upstairs to the servants' bedroom at the top of the house.

That clock had been a friend to her in the many lonely hours. He had a singing chime every quarter that she would listen for when she lay awake in bed, and that note of reassurance had never failed her yet. Now she would never hear him again. And he would go perhaps to people who would care nothing for him, who would forget to dust his smiling face, and let his chime rust and ring false. As she knelt with her nose and chin smudged against the window, she felt for the first time a little sting of bitterness against her mother, who permitted these things to happen.

Ever since last year her world had been changed and insecure, and that daily life that every child imagines will continue into eternity had suddenly ceased to be. No longer did she ride in the phaeton every morning, with her mother at her side, up and down Hyde Park in a procession of carriages, or sometimes out to Richmond to drink porter with Lord Folkestone, who used to measure her with his riding-crop to see if she had grown. And, while her mother laughed and chatted, teasing Lord Folkestone in her own inimitable way, whispering oddities to him behind her hand that made him shout with laughter, the child Ellen sat silent, like a little sallow mouse, watching the play between them with a strange inborn sense of disapproval. If this was how grown-up people spent their time, she had little use for them; for herself she preferred books and music, having a thirst for knowledge of all kinds that her mother declared to be positively wearisome in a child not yet thirteen.

'You see,' she would say to her friends, with a tiny shrug of her shoulders and a shadow of mock despair in her eyes, 'my children have outgrown me already. It is monstrous. I am too young for them; they consider me irresponsible and giddy. Master George must lecture me from school like an old professor, and Ellen here, clasping solemn hands, asks "May I learn Italian, m'am, as well as French?" ' At this there would be much laughter at Ellen's expense, and the child would flush uncomfortably until they had forgotten her again.

Yet driving in the Park or at Richmond was a pleasure, for there were so many things to see, and so many people to watch, and even at ten or twelve Ellen must consider herself a student of human nature.

She was old beyond her years because she had never had the companionship of other children. George, her only brother, and an idol, had been sent early to school, and was now so much taken up by his new companions, the horses he had learnt to ride, and the talk of his future military career, that the conversation of a small sister was something to be heard with impatience.

Ellen had to depend upon herself. Books became her friends then, and music, when her mother had money enough for a master; but she must understand, her mother would say, that living as they did amongst such elegance, keeping the table they did, and with the carriage and horses, there was little over for such fads as music-lessons and an Italian master. 'I will see if it can be arranged,' she would say vaguely, waving her hand in the air; and, smiling that brilliant smile that meant she was thinking of something else, would pull the bell for the servant to discuss the dinner-party for the evening.

There was such profusion of good things, such abundance of fruit and cake and wine, such glitter of glass upon the table, such smooth white napery, that it seemed hard the pound or two necessary for the music-master had to be given over to that extra bunch of grapes. A child's nature is such that she accepted it as inevitable, and later in the day would hear from the privacy of her own room the clatter of the party below—that peculiar parrot sound, strained and shrill, that distorts the human voice when men and women come together.

Such was her home, and she was contented with it, having known nothing else but this funny superficial brilliance as far back as she could remember. A season or two at Weymouth and Brighton, and then London—Park Lane, Gloucester Place, Bedford Place, Westbourne Place, a succession of town houses following one upon the other; and all was froth, and entertainment, and show; her mother coming in with a new ring on her second finger as pleased as a kitten with a ball of string, laughing over her shoulder to the puppy-faced officer in his scarlet tunic who followed at her heels, his slow mind stumbling awkwardly in pursuit of her swift brain.

'This is my babe, Captain Venning, my little Ellen, so shy and solemn, so unlike her silly mother.' And with a trill of laughter she had passed into the drawing-room, having first signalled with her eyes to her daughter that she might run away to her own room. And Ellen, climbing the stairs sedately with her mouth pursed, caught sight of herself in the tall mirror and hovered an instant, staring at her own reflection, struck by her mother's words.

She wondered whether it mattered very much to be born without beauty. The contour of her face was lean and angular, in contrast to her mother's rounded cheeks and dimpled chin. Her chin was sharp and the prominent nose curved to her narrow mouth, adding severity to the solemnity that was already there—for all the world, the child told herself, like a pair of German nut-crackers; and she stroked the high bridge of her nose with her fingers, thinking of the tip-tilted, provocative feature that was perhaps one of her mother's greatest charms. Their eyes and their hair were alike in colour—a soft warm brown—but there all resemblance ended; for the child's eyes were deep set, lacking lustre, and the crimped hair had difficulty in curling.

Her mother's eyes would change with every mood. One moment they would sparkle with gaiety, bright and clear like cut amber turned to the light, and the next moment they would be swimmy, clouded, more alluring even than before, full of that lovely blindness peculiar only to near-sighted persons.

Her hair, too, curled softly round her forehead, dressed as it was in the new style with her ears showing, drawn away from the white column of her neck, leaving this white and free and sloping without shadow to the superb shoulders. Ellen's hand wandered slowly from her nose to her pale sallow cheeks, and thence to her own small rounded shoulders—so rounded, in fact, that a servant once, in an ill-tempered mood, had called her 'Hunch-back'. The child had never forgotten this, and she flushed now at the memory. Then, with a shrug of these same despised shoulders, she turned from the mirror towards her room, the sound of her mother's voice, quick and eager, coming up to her from the drawing-rooms below.

Well, those days were over now. There had been no parties for more than a year. The officers in their bright tunics came no more; even Lord Folkestone had gone abroad, and of course His Royal Highness, who used to visit them so often when they had lived in Park Lane, had not been near them now for four years. Ellen had almost forgotten him. Other people began coming to the house—tradespeople; she recognised them, dressed as for Sunday in their dark clothes, and, when her mother refused to see them, they would shout rudely at the servant, as though it was his fault.

One day there had been quite a crowd of them at the front door, and they had pushed their way in and forced themselves into her mother's presence. They had not remained for long. Her mother had listened to their complaints, shaking her head gently at them, letting them exhaust themselves with talk, and then, when the ringleader, an upholsterer from Lamb Street, near by, drew breath, expecting her to eat out of his hand, she left fly at him with a string of gutter-words, well chosen, that struck him and his companions in such confusion that they were left without weapons of retaliation.

They had stared at her, open-mouthed, and she had swept them from the room before they could recover, and she was left then, her cheeks scarlet and her eyes flashing, mistress of the field.

That day was followed by days and weeks of insecurity, when her mother was never at home, or when she was she would have no time for Ellen but an impatient hug, and 'Run away to the servants, child; I have not a moment,' closeting herself at once with a strange visitor; and the two would talk away in the boudoir for hours, the low murmur of their voices going on and on. There was a tense atmosphere about the house, sinister and disturbing to a child who was used to the normal continuity of things, and she longed for an explanation that was never given. If she found her way to the kitchen, the servants stopped talking when she approached, and the silly footman giggled behind his hand, thrusting a pamphlet into his breeches pocket. George remained at school for Easter and did not come home. When Ellen wrote to him, he did not reply. The child was tortured by the fear he might be ill, or that this was to be a permanent separation. Her mother gave her half-answers to her repeated questions. One morning, before she left the house she found Ellen hovering behind her like a shadow. 'Be finished, child,' she said impatiently, 'plaguing me as you do. I have told you a hundred times your brother is well.'

'Then why does he not return home?' said Ellen, setting her narrow mouth.

'Because it is better for him to stay there for the moment,' came the reply.

'What is the reason, then, for all these changes? Surely I am old enough to know? I am not a baby, to be pacified with fairy tales. The servants gossip in corners. People come to the street and stare up at the house. Yesterday some boys threw a stone at me when I looked from the window. You can see where the stone has shattered the pane. Why was I followed when I took my walk in the Square, and pointed at, like a monkey in a cage, and why did a strange gentleman, winking to his friend, stop me on the step and say, "And who was your father, little maid, the duke or the dustman?" '

She spoke with passion, her eyes blazing, her small face white and tense.

The mother looked at her uncertainly, her hand fidgeting with her kid glove, her poise shaken momentarily by these questions flung at her by a little girl of twelve.

'Listen, Ellen,' she said swiftly. 'Your mamma has enemies—never mind why. People who would see us all flung penniless on the streets like dogs. They would like to have me crawl to them for bread, beg for it in the gutter. They were pleased enough to dine at my table once, but that's over now. I've got to fight 'em for our future, yours and mine and George's. I've no money and no friends. Only my wits. They have served me before and they will serve me now. Whatever happens, and however much dirt they fling at me, remember one thing—that I am doing it for your sake, for you and for George, and so to hell with 'em.' She waited a moment, as though she would say more; and then, thinking better of it, she laid one finger on the child's cheek, smiling an instant, and was gone, leaving behind her the little trail of perfume that was part of her. On the parquet was a piece of paper, torn in two. It must have fallen from her hand unwittingly. Ellen stooped to pick it up that she might put it with the waste letters. She saw that it was a lampoon, vulgar and splodged, sold by some hawker in the street. Her mother had torn it right across, but Ellen could see the four last lines smirking up at her like a leer.

The child threw the paper away so that she could see no more, and went quickly to the door; but, seeing the footman there with his foolish, vacant face, she went back again, and kneeling beside the paper-basket, she took from it the discarded paper, and tore it piece by piece until it was in shreds.