The Golden Scarecrow Part 18

When her mother, in a temper, struck her, she would push her hair back from her face with a sharp movement of her hand and then would watch broodingly and cynically for the next move. "You hit me again," she seemed to say, "and you _will_ make a fool of yourself."

She was aware, of course, of a thousand influences in the house of which her mother and Hortense had never the slightest conception. From the cosy security of her cradle she had watched the friendly spirit who had accompanied (with hostile irritation) her entrance into this world.

His shadow had, for a long period, darkened her nursery, but she repelled, with absolute a.s.surance, His kindly advances.

"I'm not frightened. I don't, in the least, want things made comfortable for me. I can get along very nicely, indeed, without you. You're full of sentiment and gush--things that I detest--and it won't be the least use in the world for you to ask me to be good, and tender, and all the rest of it. I'm not like your other babies."

He must have known, of course, that she was not, but, nevertheless, He stayed. "I understand perfectly," He a.s.sured her. "But, nevertheless, I don't give you up. You may be, for all you know, more interesting to me than all the others put together. And remember this--every time you do anything at all kind or thoughtful, every time you think of any one or care for them, every time you use your influence for good in any way, my power over you is a little stronger, I shall be a little closer to you, your escape will be a little harder."

"Oh, you needn't flatter yourself," she answered Him. "There's precious little danger of _my_ self-sacrifice or love for others. That's not going to be my att.i.tude to life at all. You'd better not waste your time over me."

She had not, she might triumphantly reflect, during these eight years, given Him many chances, and yet He was still there. She hated the thought of His patience, and somewhere deep within herself she dreaded the faint, dim beat of some response that, like a warning bell across a misty sea, cautioned her. "You may think you're safe from Him, but He'll catch you yet."

"He shan't," she replied. "I'm stronger than He is."

II

This must sound, in so prosaic a summary of it, fantastic, but nothing could be said to be fantastic about Sarah. She was, for one thing, quite the least troublesome of children. She could be relied upon, at any time, to find amus.e.m.e.nt for herself. She was full of resources, but what these resources exactly were it would be difficult to say. She would sit for hours alone, staring in front of her. She never played with toys--she did not draw or read--but she was never dull, and always had the most perfect of appet.i.tes. She had never, from the day of her birth, known an hour's illness.

It was, however, in the company of other children that she was most characteristic. The nurses in the Square quite frankly hated her, but most of the mothers had a very real regard for Lady Charlotte's smart little lunches; moreover, it was impossible to detect Sarah's guilt in any positive fas.h.i.+on. It was not enough for the nurses to a.s.sure their mistresses that from the instant that the child entered the gardens all the other children were out of temper, rebellious, and finally unmanageable.

"Nonsense, Janet, you imagine things. She seems a very nice little girl."

"Well, ma'am, all I can say is, I won't care to be answerable for Master Ronald's behaviour when she _does_ come along, that's all. It's beyond belief the effect she 'as upon 'im."

The strangest thing of all was that Sarah herself liked the company of other children. She went every morning into the gardens (with Hortense) and watched them at their play. She would sit, with her hands folded quietly on her lap, her large black eyes watching, watching, watching.

It was odd, indeed, how, instantly, all the children in the garden were aware of her entrance. She, on her part, would appear to regard none of them, and yet would see them all. Perched on her seat she surveyed the gardens always with the same gaze of abstracted interest, watching the clear, decent paths across whose grey background at the period of this episode, the October leaves, golden, flaming, dun, gorgeous and shrivelled, fell through the still air, whirled, and with a little sigh of regret, one might fancy, sank and lay dead. The October colours, a faint haze of smoky mist, the pale blue of the distant sky, the brown moist earth, were gentle, mild, washed with the fading year's regretful tears; the cries of the children, the rhythmic splash of the fountain throbbed behind the colours like some hidden orchestra behind the curtain at the play; the statues in the garden, like fragments of the white bolster clouds that swung so lazily from tree to tree; had no meaning in that misty air beyond the background that they helped to fill. The year, thus idly, with so pleasant a melancholy, was slipping into decay.

Sarah would watch. Then, without a word, she would slip from her seat, and, walking solemnly, rather haughtily, would join some group of children. Day after day the same children came to the gardens, and they all of them knew Sarah by now. Hortense, in her turn also, sitting, stiff and superior, would watch. She would see Sarah's pleasant approach, her smile, her amiability. Very soon, however, there would be trouble--some child would cry out; there would be blows; nurses would run forward, scoldings, protests, captives led away weeping ... and then Sarah would return slowly to her seat, her gaze aloof, cynical, remote.

She would carefully explain to Hortense the reason of the uproar. She had done nothing--her conscience was clear. These silly little idiots.

She would break into French, culled elaborately from Hortense, would end disdainfully--"mais, voila,"--very old for her age.

Hortense was vicious, selfish, crude in her pursuit of pleasure, entirely unscrupulous, but, as the days pa.s.sed, she was, in spite of herself, conscious of some half-acknowledged, half-decided terror of Sarah's possibilities.

The child was eight years old. She was capable of anything; in her remote avoidance of any pa.s.sion, any regret, any antic.i.p.ated pleasure, any spontaneity, she was inhuman. Hortense thought that she detected in the chit's mother something of her own fear.

III

There used to come to the gardens a little fat red-faced girl called Mary Kitson, the child of simple and ingenuous parents (her father was a writer of stories of adventure for boys' papers); she was herself simple-minded, lethargic, unadventurous, and happily stupid. Walking one day slowly with Hortense down one of the garden paths, Sarah saw Mary Kitson engaged in talking to two dolls, seated on a bench with them, patting their clothes, very happy, her nurse busy over a novelette.

Sarah stopped.

"I'll sit here," she said, walked across to the bench and sat down. Mary looked up from her dolls, and then, nervously and self-consciously, went back to her play. Sarah stared straight before her.

Hortense amiably endeavoured to draw the nurse into conversation.

"You 'ave 'ere ze fine gardens," she said. "It calls to mind my own Paris. Ah, the gardens in Paris!"

But the nurse had been taught to distrust all foreigners, and her views of Paris were coloured by her reading. She admired Hortense's clothes, but distrusted her advances.

She buried herself even more deeply in the paper. Poor Mary Kitson, alas! found that, in some undefinable manner, the glory had departed from her dolls. Adrian and Emily were, of a sudden, gla.s.sy and lumpy abstractions of sawdust and china. Very timidly she raised her large, stupid eyes and regarded Sarah. Sarah returned the glance and smiled.

Then she came close to Mary.

"It's better under there," she said, pointing to the shade of a friendly tree.

"May I?" Mary said to her nurse with a frightened gasp.

"Well, now, don't you go far," said the nurse, with a fierce look at Hortense.

"You like where you are?" asked Hortense, smiling more than ever. "You 'ave a good place?" Slowly the nurse yielded. The novelette was laid aside.

Impossible to say what occurred under the tree. Now and again a rustle of wind would send the colours from the trees to short branches loaded with leaves of red gold, s.h.i.+vering through the air; a chequered, blazing canopy covered the ground.

Mary Kitson had, it appeared, very little to say. She sat some way from Sarah, clutching Adrian and Emily tightly to her breast, and always her large, startled eyes were on Sarah's face. She did not move to drive the leaves from her dress; her heart beat very fast, her cheeks were very red.

Sarah talked a little, but not very much. She asked questions about Mary's home and her parents, and Mary answered these interrogations in monosyllabic gasps. It appeared that Mary had a kitten, and that this kitten was a central fact of Mary's existence. The kitten was called Alice.

"Alice is a silly name for a kitten. I shouldn't call a kitten Alice,"

said Sarah, and Mary started as though in some strange, sinister fas.h.i.+on she were instantly aware that Alice's life and safety were threatened.

From that morning began a strange acquaintance that certainly could not be called a friends.h.i.+p. There could be no question at all that Mary was terrified of Sarah; there could also be no question that Mary was Sarah's obedient slave. The cynical Hortense, prepared as she was for anything strange and unexpected in Sarah's actions, was, nevertheless, puzzled now.

One afternoon, wet and dismal, the two of them sitting in a little box of a room in the little box of a house, Sarah huddled in a chair, her eyes staring in front of her, Hortense sewing, her white, bony fingers moving sharply like knives, the maid asked a question:

"What do you see--Sar-ah--in that infant?"

"What infant?" asked Sarah, without moving her eyes.

"That Mary with whom now you always are."

"We play games together," said Sarah.

"You do not. You may be playing a game--she does nothing. She is terrified--out of her life."

"She is very silly. It's funny how silly she is. I like her to be frightened."

Mary's nurse told Mary's mother that, in her opinion, Sarah was not a nice child. But Sarah had been invited to tea at the confused, simple abode of the Kitson family, and had behaved perfectly.

"I think you must be wrong, nurse," said Mrs. Kitson. "She seems a very nice little girl. Mary needs companions. It's good for her to be taken out of herself."

Had Mrs. Kitson been of a less confused mind, however, had she had more time for the proper observation of her daughter, she would have noticed her daughter's pale cheeks, her daughter's fits of crying, her daughter's silences. Even as the bird is fascinated by the snake, so was Mary Kitson fascinated by Sarah Trefusis.

"You are torturing that infant," said Hortense, and Sarah smiled.

IV

Mary was by no means the first of Sarah's victim's. There had been many others. Utterly aloof, herself, from all emotions of panic or terror, it had, from the very earliest age, interested her to see those pa.s.sions at work in others. Cruelty for cruelty's sake had no interest for her at all; to pull the wings from flies, to tie kettles to the tails of agitated puppies, to throw stones at cats, did not, in the least, amuse her. She had once put a cat in the fire, but only because she had seen it play with a terrified mouse. That had affronted her sense of justice.