Kindness Transforms a Lonely Childhood

Acting upon the suggestion his invaluable clerk had thrown out, Mr. Merapie inquired of Mina whether she would let Miss Caldera teach her at home, and receiving, after some hesitation, a conditional answer in the affirmative, he proceeded to that lady and demanded if she would be willing to instruct his niece.

Poor Miss Caldera would have jumped at the proposition of taming even a cannibal, had a few pounds been promised as the result of her efforts; for she was poor—poorer even than the church mouse alluded to in the old saw, inasmuch as that little animal enjoys comparative freedom, a thing the governess had never known for years, excepting perhaps occasionally in dreams.

She was the daughter of a country clergyman; had been brought up in a pretty village rectory; 142had been educated solidly, but not inducted into the mysteries of any of those lighter accomplishments generally deemed so essential to young ladies. She was learned in Latin, had dabbled in Greek, knew a little of German, and was mistress of French and Italian; had studied mathematics till somehow she grew herself like a problem in Euclid, full of harsh unbending lines and angles; algebra, to her, presented no more difficulties than the rule-of-three; and as for the derivation of words, only let any person ask the meaning of one, and she poured down upon the devoted head of the questioner hosts of Latin and Greek direct ancestors, with collateral Gallic and old Saxon relatives, thick as dust from the backs of antique black letter volumes which almost suffocated him. And whilst her father thus crammed her with useless learning, her mother instructed her in some more needful and feminine arts—to wit, the making of pies, and concocting of puddings, and stitching of shirts, and mending of stockings. And, if nature had not bestowed upon her a kind heart, a placid temper, and a love of the beautiful so intense as to be almost painful, she would have been in reality as in appearance, as crisp, and short, and good, as one of her own pie crusts, which had been perhaps a little overdone in the ovening; but she was possessed 143of, and retained, in spite of circumstances, a fondness for flowers, and poetry, and quiet scenery, which added still a bitter drop unto a cup which time and change and death and misfortune soon made bitter enough.

Parents died, money was lost, friends grew cold, relatives careless, all save one—the strong minded schoolmistress previously referred to, who, hearing that her cousin, the rector’s daughter, was in absolute want and could not get a situation, wrote to ask her up to town, to the end that she might assist in her matter of fact seminary and receive no remuneration.

She supported her; and Miss Caldera, after school hours, occasionally obtaining a French or Italian tuition, contrived by dint of economy and patching, to clothe herself, and sometimes, purchase a new book and a bunch of flowers: the two latter were all her luxuries. Toiling, pinching, saving, she could make no more than kept her from the parish, and enabled her to buy, at rare intervals, a volume of poetry and a few half-faded lilies. And this was she who once had affectionate parents, pleasant acquaintances, a cheerful home; whose birth had been welcomed with smiles, whose mother had thanked God because a daughter was given unto her, who once 144had been admired,—loved perhaps: this was she. Wonderful are the ways of this world, and of the people in it; but most wonderful of all things unto me seems the mode in which assistance and pity, and sympathy and affection, are accorded,—frequently gratuitously and unnecessarily to the young and to the pretty, the almost happy and the wealthy; whilst those, on whose faces care has set its unmistakeable mark,—whose feet are weary with the toilsome journey of years, who require a double portion of kindness, friendship, and happiness, to console them for the misery of the past,—are permitted to pass solitary on their way, unquestioned, unheeded, unloved.

Miss Caldera’s cousin—a bustling, determined, energetic woman—declared she was a good enough creature, but a great oddity; and the governess who, though she would have liked her own way as well as any body living, never got it, subsided in the course of years, into a silent, reserved, angular old maid, who never opened her heart unto mortal, and never spoke energetically on any subject unless she were exhorting a child to be good, or a girl to marry; and who was thought to be just fit for her position.

And oh! how she detested that position, how uselessly she had striven to master fate a little, and 145better her condition, she knew; and how, at night, when she laid down to rest, sick and dispirited, the tears trickled down her cheeks as she thought of her old home, and her dead parents; her past, and her present,—the cold moonbeams that fell upon her face alone took cognizance.

Had any one told any of her London acquaintances, that Mary Caldera wept in secret, because, at thirty-two, she was an orphan and a dependant, the thing would have been first discredited, and then laughed at; but people will not even smile at my recording the fact here, as it is the custom to extend compassion to individuals where it can do them no good, viz., in books; and to withhold the same where it might prove beneficial, to wit, in actual life.

And though Miss Caldera had a kind true heart, and was, moreover, only two and thirty, her pupils, even those who liked her best, persisted in calling her a plain, strange old maid; and she cared very little for anybody on earth, and nobody in the world really cared one straw for her.

Such, then, was the individual who was selected to instruct Mina Frazer for two hours per diem, and to bring the rebellious Scotch child up “in the way she should go.” Her cousin, indeed, to whom, of course, no profit was to accrue from the arrangement, 146and who entertained a sort of horror of the “first pupil who had ever mastered her,” and whom in consequence she had summarily dismissed home, “hoping that the ruling powers there would send her back penitent and acquiescent;” seriously advised Miss Caldera to have nothing to do with the obstinate, over-indulged, deceitful looking little creature, who had promised to be so easily managed, and who turned out such a miniature virago. “But the governess had a vague faith in Mina, and moreover wanted the money; for both of which reasons she undertook the task of teaching the child, so far as in her lay, the lore of books, the love of man, and the fear of God.”

What other persons disliked in Mina, viz., her perpetual allusions to her father, and her ceaseless regret for her native land and the friends who dwelt there, proved a sort of link of communication betwixt the girl and the woman; between her whose future was yet unrevealed to mortal ken, and her whose lot was, to all human appearance, cast, and settled for ever; between the child of the Scotch officer and the daughter of the village rector. For years, it is true, they never exactly understood each other; for the dry formal manner acquired during a kind of eternity of tuition, cannot be cast aside at 147once; and Mina never could comprehend any one being very fond of her who did not say so; but still, after a time, they got on remarkably well together; and so did the little girl with her lessons.

At the first she rebelled considerably, having a dim idea that Miss Caldera had been in some way accessary to the insults and injuries heaped upon her Highland head upon the occasion of her first and only visit to Mrs. Meredith’s establishment for young ladies; but Miss Caldera, having an intuitive feeling that her charge might be subdued by kindness, said so calmly, “You would not wish to make me unhappy I know;” that Mina, quite astonished at this view of the question, answered, “She would not;” and, therefore, did what she was told, as quietly as if she had been brought up under the iron rule of “discipline.”

Still there was always, even in her best moments, something so unsettled, dissatisfied, and melancholy about the pupil, that the soul of the governess was frequently disturbed about her. “I do not quite understand her,” she generally thought: “I wonder if her father, who was so fond of her, did; and dear me! how fond I am growing of the child too.”

But whether loved in England or not; whether 148new friends liked or disliked, praised or blamed, it seemed much the same to Mina: her heart like that of Campbell was in the Highlands; it stuck there tenaciously, let her body be where it might. She had been transplanted somewhat rudely to English ground, and though she lived there, she never for years and years took root in, or looked kindly on, the soil.

The country of old—the looks of old—the friends of old, were to the young child what they frequently do not prove even to much older people—things to be remembered and grieved over, not for a day, but for years: never to be forgotten till Mina Frazer should have forgotten her own identity too, and passed from the sight of heather and roses for ever.

Colin Saunders had done her merely justice when he affirmed so vehemently, on the morning of her departure, that “she would not forget even a daisy on the moors;” and when Allan, the old laird’s grandson, who delighted in tormenting the gardener, remarked, as he frequently did:

“I told you, Colin, she would not remember us for more than a few days; we have not had a letter for an immense time, and your ‘mull’ seems to me like what Prince Charlie was, ‘long o’ comin’,—’”

Saunders, looking up into heaven as if to implore 149it to corroborate the truth of his assertion, would respond—

“If I never heard tell of her; if I never saw her; if there never was word from her again; I would know her heart was wi’ us a’—the places and the people she cared so much for: the child of my dear old master never could but care for the land he ‘lo’ed sae weel.’”

“But my cousin, Malcolm, is the son of Captain Frazer, too; and—”

“Ay! but Miss Mina strained after her father’s side of the house; and he, got from his mother the English nature that cares not so much for country or clan, as for gold, and ease, and comfort, and the things o’ this wicked world.”

“I am sure our neighbours would be flattered by your opinion of them, Colin.”

“Flattered or no’, it’s nae concern o’ mine,” retorted the man warmly; “I’d say it to their king if he were standing where you are now,—that no people in the world cares so much for home when they’re in it, or pines as much for it when absent, as the true old Highlanders that fought so nobly for their own prince,—fought, and fell, and died for him: ay! and would do it again, if need were.”

“Hush! hush!” cried Allen, laughing, “or 150although the Jacobite days are over, I shall have to report you to our friend the sheriff.”

“I said, Master Allan, I would speak it to the king, and I don’t mind telling it to the sheriff; it’s not treason but truth; the minister says it is so; and if he says it——”

“I may swear it,” supplied the laird’s grandson; “and does he assert also that Mina will not forget us?”

“I never heard him speak of her, in regard of that,” responded the gardener; “but I assert it Master Allan, and if she does not send the ‘mull’ to me, I know she wants to send it, which is just the same.”

Colin was quite correct, as the subsequent advent of his snuff box proved, the sole cause of the delay having arisen from the fact that even in London things cannot be purchased without money, of which valuable commodity, when Mina made her generous proposal, she was lamentably in want. But a present from her uncle, who discovered in course of time, perhaps through the medium of Mr. Westwood, the desire of his niece’s heart, at length enabling her to fulfil her promise, she dispatched to Craigmaver the very ugliest snuff box eye of mortal ever lighted on. She thought it beautiful, however, and so did 151Colin Saunders, who regularly carried it to “Kirk” with him, though he would have died rather than have taken a pinch out of it in the sacred edifice; and when the old man, long long afterwards, closed his eyes on earth’s pleasures and sorrows for ever, that snuff box was found, preserved as a precious relic, beside the two other treasures of his life—his mother’s Bible and his father’s spectacles.

And that wonderful chariot of time, pursuing its ceaseless course just the same along the London streets as over the Scottish moors, gradually added some inches to Mina Frazer’s height; gave a different expression to her face, and by an imperceptible, inexplicable—and, if not noted day by day, almost alarming—process, transformed Mina Frazer from a child into something bordering upon, if not quite, a young lady.

But time, rarely, as we know, missing an opportunity of altering aught upon which it is possible for him to lay either a beautifying or a withering finger, had effected other changes besides that of making Mina older; he had sent Malcolm, as a midshipman, into the navy; brought a tenant to one of Mr. Merapie’s houses; and, almost immediately after Mrs. Frazer’s arrival in the mansion the merchant had chosen for his own abode, installed Miss Haswell 152as efficient housekeeper, in lieu of Mrs. Coleford, abdicated.

For these events, of course, there were a multitude of reasons; but, not to be tedious, suffice it to say that in reference to Malcolm, Mr. Merapie had wished the boy to enter his counting-house; which idea was strongly opposed by Mrs. Frazer, by her son, and finally, by Mr. Westwood, as he said, in consequence of their strong objections to the project.

“Let him take his own way for a while,” he said; “and he will then either quietly settle down to business, or else stick to the profession he has chosen for himself. If you force him now to the desk, he will never become either a clever merchant or a brave officer; give him his wish and you will speedily see whether it be not a mere boyish fancy: theoretically liking the navy is one thing, and practical knowledge of it another; let him eat of the fruit and find if it be most sweet or most bitter.” And, as usual, Mr. Merapie followed his clerk’s advice; nothing loth, if the truth must be told; for Englishmen in general, albeit ours is not a military nation, are by no means averse to talk of “my nephew, the captain,” serving his country either by land or by water: wherefore he speedily fitted Malcolm out for sea, and, as if the one step were the natural consequence 153of the other, almost immediately afterwards took, as Mrs. Frazer had often wished he would, his clever clerk Mr. Alfred Westwood, into partnership.

And, as “one event makes many,” this new business arrangement brought, in the person of that gentleman, a tenant into one of Mr. Merapie’s dreary mansions; for, with clerkship, Mr. Westwood discarded lodgings, and commenced that wretched trade called “housekeeping,” on his own account. Thus it naturally came to pass that many, or rather most of his evenings, were spent in the drawing-room of his senior partner, conversing with his sister; and, when Miss Caldera was there, insinuating himself into her good graces, and endeavouring to regain, what somehow he had lately lost, his power over Mina—whose reserve, and strangeness, and eccentricity, her mother said, increased every day; but, latterly, Mrs. Frazer, after this mournful declaration, was in the habit of adding: “And it is such a pity, for every one says she is such a clever creature;” appealing to Mr. Westwood for confirmation of this opinion,—which confirmation, he gave in a manner that made Mina feel desperately angry whenever she chanced to be in the room whilst he was delivering his complimentary impression of her.

154And Mr. Westwood had not the most remote intention of marrying Mrs. Frazer, as Mr. Merapie had once expected he would: to be sure, the advisability of such a course had once presented itself to him, and he had argued the matter in his own mind—as the newspapers say about lawyers—with considerable ability and much clearness on both sides, but he finally shook his head and said “no.”

“What would fifty pounds a year do towards maintaining her and her children, and I can get a partnership without marrying for it; and it is not by any means likely John Merapie would both give me a share of the profits and portion his sister. No, no! I won’t marry her at any rate.”

But it very soon occurred to the busy and practical imagination of Alfred Westwood, that, though John Merapie might not “give him a share of the profits and portion his sister,” yet he most probably would “give him a share of the profits and portion his niece.” And he then began to consider what an uncommonly nice little creature that niece was—quite pretty enough to fall in love with; quite clever enough, though by no means accomplished, to adorn his West End home—when he got it—and, therefore, before the partnership was even spoken of, he made up his mind that, sometime or other, he would 155marry Mina Frazer, her consent to such an arrangement being taken by the worthy clerk as quite a matter of course.

“She liked me when she was a child, and continues to do so; at least, I do not see why she should not,” he reasoned; “her uncle will give her a large fortune, and it will all suit admirably.” Acting upon which conclusion he began to make himself “particularly agreeable” to Mina, who, strange to say, seemed so wonderfully insensible to his fascinations that, finally, Mr. Westwood grew quite provoked, and resolved, as he expressed it, just “to see how matters really stood.”

And, accordingly, chancing on his way up to the drawing-room one evening to encounter her, the ci-devant clerk abruptly demanded—

“Oh! Mina, I have been intending to ask you something for a long time: should you have any objection to marry me?”

“The greatest objection possible,” she briefly returned. Whereupon he laughed as if it were a capital jest; but Mina knew it was not so on his side; and he, clearly understanding her words were spoken in solemn earnest, felt angry and irritated accordingly.