CHAPTER IV.

MRS. KANE IN TROUBLE.

"Now, tell me all about it, for as I am going to be her mother in future I must know everything that concerns my child."

Mrs. Rushton was talking to Mrs. Kane, having come to the cottage to announce her intention of adopting Hetty. Mrs. Kane was crying bitterly.

"You'll excuse me, ma'am. I would not stand in the way of my darling's good fortune, not for ever so, I'm sure. And yet it's hard to give her up."

"I should not have thought it could make much difference to you. I believe she was generally running about the roads when not at school."

"Well, you see, ma'am, that is true; but at night and in the mornings she would kneel on my lap to say her prayers, and put her little soft arms round my neck. And those are the times I'll mostly miss her."

Mrs. Rushton coughed slightly. She herself liked the sight of Hetty's pretty face, and was amused by her prattle; but she was not a woman to think much about the feel of a child's arms around her neck. Mrs. Kane, perceiving that she was not understood, sprang up from her seat and went to fetch a parcel from an inner room.

"This is the little shift she wore when I first set eyes on her. It is the only rag she brought with her; though not much of a rag, I'm bound to say; for so pretty an article of the kind I never saw," said the good woman, spreading out on the table an infant's garment of the finest cambric embroidered delicately round the neck and sleeves.

In the corner was a richly wrought monogram of the initials H.G.

"And that's why we called her Hetty Gray," said Mrs. Kane. "John and I made up the name to suit the letters. If ever her friends turn up they'll know the difference, but in the meantime we had to have something to call her by."

"Why, this is most interesting!" said Mrs. Rushton, examining the monogram; "she probably belonged to people of position. It is quite satisfactory that she should prove to be a gentlewoman by birth."

"And that is why I feel bound to give her up, ma'am," said Mrs. Kane, wiping her overflowing eyes. "I've always put it before me that some day or other her folks would come wanting her, and I've said to myself that it would be terrible if she had grown up in the meantime with no better education than if she was born a village la.s.s. And yet what better could I have done for her than I could have done for a daughter of my own if I had had one?"

"Just so," said Mrs. Rushton; "and now you may be sure that she will be educated, trained, dressed, and everything else, just as if she had been in her mother's house. As for her own people coming for her, I am not sure that I shall give her up if they do. Not unless I have grown tired of her in the meantime."

"Tired of her!" echoed Mrs. Kane, looking at her visitor in great surprise; "surely, madam, you do not think you will get tired of our little Hetty!"

"I hope not, my good woman; but even if I do you cannot complain, as in that case I shall give her back to you; that is, if it happens before her friends come to fetch her. Unless you are pretending to grieve now, you cannot be sorry at the prospect of having her again."

"That's true," said the poor woman in a puzzled tone, and she still looked wistfully at the handsome visitor sitting before her. She did not know how to express herself, and she was afraid of offending the lady who was going to be Hetty's mother; yet she felt eager to make some remonstrance against the injustice of the proceeding which Mrs. Rushton spoke of as within the bounds of possibility. She believed in her heart that a great wrong would be done if the child, having been educated and accustomed to luxury for years, were to be carelessly thrown back into a life of lowly poverty. However, the trouble that was in her heart could not find its way through her lips, and she tried to think that Mrs.

Rushton spoke only in jest.

"It is altogether like a romance," that lady was saying as she folded up the baby garment and put it away in a pretty scented satchel which she wore at her side. "I have not met with anything so interesting for years, and I promise myself a great deal of pleasure in the matter."

"May Hetty come to see me sometimes?" asked Mrs. Kane, humbly curtseying her good-bye, when her visitor was seated in her pony phaeton and gathering up the reins for flight.

"Oh, certainly, as often as you please," answered Mrs. Rushton gaily, and touching the ponies with her whip she was soon out of sight; while poor Mrs. Kane retreated into her cottage to have a good motherly cry over the tiny broken shoes and the little washed-out faded frocks which were now all that remained to her of her foster-daughter.

CHAPTER V.

A LONELY CHILD.

Mrs. Rushton having adopted Hetty, set about extracting the utmost amount of amus.e.m.e.nt possible from the presence of the child in her home.

She soon grew anxious to get away from her brother's "unpleasantly sensible remarks," and Isabel's gentle excuses for her conduct, which annoyed her even more, as they always suggested motives for her actions which were far beyond her ken, and seemed far-fetched, over-strained, and absurd. So she took the child to London, where she introduced her to her friends as her latest plaything.

Hetty had frocks of all the colours of the rainbow, and learned to make saucy speeches which entertained Mrs. Rushton's visitors.

She sat beside her new mamma as she drove in her victoria in the park; and on Mrs. Rushton's "at home" days was noticed and petted by fashionable ladies and gentlemen, her beauty praised openly to her face, her pretty clothes remarked upon, and her childish prattle laughed at and applauded as the wittiest talk in the world.

Certainly there were many days when Hetty's presence was wearisome and intolerable to her benefactress, and then she was banished to a large gloomy room at the top of the London house, and left to the tender mercies of a maid, who did not at all forget that she was only Mrs.

Kane's little girl from the village of Wavertree, and treated her accordingly. She was often left alone for hours, amusing herself as best she could, crying when she felt very lonely, or leaning far out of the window to feel nearer to the people in the street. The consequence of all this was to spoil the child's naturally sweet temper, to teach her to crave for excitement, and to suffer keenly, when, after a full feast of pleasure, she was suddenly snubbed, scolded, deserted, and forgotten.

She began to hate the sight of the bare silent nursery upstairs, where there were no pretty pictures to bear her company, no pleasant little adornments, no diversions such as a mother places in the room where her darlings pa.s.s many of their baby hours. It was a motherless, blank, nursery, where the only nurse was the maid, who came and went, and looked upon Hetty as a nuisance; an extra trouble for which she had not been prepared when she engaged to live with Mrs. Rushton.

"Sit down there and behave yourself properly, if you can, till I come back," she would say, and seat Hetty roughly in a chair and go away and leave her there, shutting the door. At first Hetty used to weep dolefully, and sometimes cried herself to sleep; but after a time she became used to her lonely life, and only thought of how she could amuse herself during her imprisonment. She counted the carriages pa.s.sing the window till she was tired, and watched the little children playing in the garden of the square beyond; but at last she would get bolder, sometimes, and venture out of her nursery to take a peep at the other rooms of the house. One day she made her way down to Mrs. Rushton's bed-room; that lady had gone out and the servants were all downstairs.

Hetty contrived to pull out several drawers and played with ribbons and trinkets. At last she opened a case in which was her foster-mother's watch, and as this ticking bit of gold was like a living companion, Hetty pounced upon it at once.

She played all sorts of tricks with the watch, dressed it up in a towel and called it a baby; and making up her mind that baby wanted a bath, popped the watch into a basin of water and set about washing it thoroughly.

Just as she was working away with great energy the door opened and Mrs.

Rushton came in. Seeing what the child was doing she flew at her, s.n.a.t.c.hed the watch from her hands, and slapped her violently on the arms and neck. Hetty screamed, beat Mrs. Rushton on the face with both her little palms, and then was whirled away shrieking into the hands of the negligent maid, who shook her roughly as she carried her off to the miscalled "nursery."

The little girl, who had never been instructed or talked to sensibly by any one, was quite unconscious of the mischief she had done; and only felt that big people were hateful to-day, as she lay kicking and screaming on the floor upstairs.

The end of it all was, however, that, upon reflection, Mrs. Rushton found she did not care so much after all about the destruction of her watch, and that the whole occurrence would make a capital story to tell to her friends; and so she sent for Hetty, who was then making a dismal play for herself in the twilight with two chairs turned upside down and a pinafore hung from one to another for a curtain. The child was seized by Grant, the maid, dressed in one of her prettiest costumes, and taken down to the drawing-room to Mrs. Rushton, who had quite recovered her temper and forgotten both the beating she had given Hetty and the beating Hetty had given her. The culprit was overwhelmed with kisses, and praises of her pretty eyes; and soon found herself the centre of a brilliant little crowd who were listening with smiles to the story of Hetty's ill-treatment of the watch.

Each year Mrs. Rushton went abroad for amus.e.m.e.nt and Hetty was taken with her, and in foreign hotels was even more shown about, flattered and snubbed, petted and neglected, than she had been when at home in London.

Everything that could be done was done to make her vain, wilful, ill-tempered; and the little creature came to know that she might have anything she pleased if only she could make Mrs. Rushton laugh.

Four or five years pa.s.sed in this way, during which time Mrs. Rushton had very little intercourse with her brother's family at Wavertree. Her country house had been shut up and her time had been spent between London, Brighton, and fashionable resorts on the Continent. In the meantime the education which she had promised Mrs. Kane should be given to her nursling had not been even begun. Mrs. Rushton had had no leisure to think of it. She looked upon Hetty as still only a babe, a marmoset born to amuse her own hours of ennui. In her brother's occasional letters he sometimes devoted a line to Hetty. "I hope you are not spoiling the little girl," he would add as a postscript; or, "I hope the child is learning something besides monkey-tricks." These insinuations always annoyed Mrs. Rushton, and she never condescended to answer them.

The suggestion that she had incurred a great responsibility by adopting Hetty was highly disagreeable to her.

It is hard to say how long this state of things might have gone on had not Mrs. Rushton's health become delicate. She suddenly found herself unable to enjoy the gay life which was so much to her natural taste. The doctors recommended her a quiet sojourn in her native air, and warned her that she ought to live near friends who felt a real interest in her.

Of what these hints might mean Mrs Rushton did not choose to think, but physical weakness made her long for the rest of her own country home.

CHAPTER VI.

HETTY AND HER "COUSINS"

One cool fresh evening in October Mrs. Rushton, Hetty, Grant the maid, and an old man-servant who followed his mistress everywhere, arrived at the railway-station near Wavertree, and were driven along the old familiar country road with the soft purpled woods on one side, and the green plains and distant view of the sea on the other. They arrived at Amber Hill just as lights began to spring up in the long narrow windows of the comfortable old gray house, lights more near and bright than the stars burning dimly above the ancient cedar-trees in the avenue.

Hetty, dressed in a costly pelisse trimmed with fur, leaned forward, looking eagerly for the first glimpse of her new home. The child had now only faint recollections of Wavertree, and of her life with Mrs. Kane in the village, and except for Grant's ill-natured remarks from time to time she would have forgotten them altogether and imagined herself to be Mrs. Rushton's niece, as that lady called her when speaking of her to strangers. Hetty hated Grant, who always took a delight in lowering her pride, for by this time, it must be owned, pride had become Hetty's besetting sin.

Mrs. Rushton had perceived Grant's disposition to snub and annoy the child, and with her usual determination to uphold and justify her own conduct and disappoint those who disapproved of her views, she had put down the maid's impertinence with a high hand, and had grown more and more careful of late to protect Hetty's dignity before the servants.