The Story of Louie - Oliver Onions

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to be rid of her, to Mallard Bois, Lord Moone's seat, there to romp with her cousin, Eric Scarisbrick, already preparing for Eton, and such small fry as climbed trees and cheeked the gardeners with him. Here she revelled in the liberty that was denied her at home; and perhaps she already realised instinctively that her mother's relief at having her out of the way was tempered only by the invalid's resentment that the child could be happy out of her own not very cheerful company. Be that as it may, the girl was told, at twelve years of age, that she was getting too big to kick these limbs her stepfather so admired about among growing boys. She was given half-long skirts and French and English governesses: the French one, though she did not yet know it, as a preparation for sending her to a Paris convent.

      At fourteen years of age she had not heard of the man whose grey eyes and perfect shapeliness of body she inherited. The Scarisbricks, be sure, had allowed that episode to be hushed up. But the day was bound to come when she should hear of the Honourable Mrs. Causton and identify that lady with her mother. The day did come, no matter how; and, inwardly trembling but outwardly resolved, she sought her mother. Mrs. Chaffinger had just come with a cry out of a doze. Her daughter demanded to be told who the Honourable Mrs. Causton was. She was told that there was no such person.

      "Then who was she?" the girl demanded. There were few of her questions to her mother that were not demands.

      "Who's been telling you about her?"

      That did not seem to Louie to matter. She repeated the question.

      "She was a very great fool," Mrs. Chaffinger snapped. "Why aren't you with Mademoiselle?"

      "Who was she besides being a very great fool?" the child persisted.

      It had to come out.

      "Then papa isn't my father?" Louie said, pale. All through her life she was pale in her moments of stress.

      "I'm your mother, and I tell you to go to your French lesson at once."

      But Louie did not move.

      "Then who was my father?" she asked.

      "Who do you suppose he is, when I was Mrs. Causton?"

      "Is? … Then he isn't dead?"

      Mrs. Chaffinger compressed her lips.

      "I was going to tell you all about Mr. Causton all in good time" (her daughter looked coldly unbelieving), "but since you are here I'll tell you now. Sit down on that chair and stop fidgeting——"

      And she told the girl the facts, not to be denied, of the divorcing of Buck.

      The end of the matter was that Louie now hated, not only her mother, but her father also.

      Her stepfather she thenceforward addressed as "Chaff." He liked it.

      Three months later she was sent to Paris.

      Eight months later still she turned up again, not at Trant, but at the Captain's club in London. She announced that she had run away from the convent and did not intend to return to it. Her arrival, though not unwelcome, was inopportune, for the Captain had a little party that evening and seemed disconcerted. The toyshops, he reflected, were closed, and then he looked at his stepdaughter again. … It could not, after all, have been one of the more characteristic of the Captain's parties, for he took Louie to it, pigtail and all, and for a whole evening pinched nobody. Then he took her to his chambers, winked at his man in token of something extraordinary, hesitated, and then, with an "Oh, be hanged to it!" expression, gave Louie the key of his own sleeping apartment. Louie examined his prints a little wonderingly, but approved of his ribboned haircurlers and large frilled pincushion, and then went to sleep. The next day the Captain took her down to Trant and left her there.

      The next few years were a constant succession of wrangles with her mother. She had flatly refused to return to the convent, and if the Honourable Emily was petulant, her daughter was merciless. She had been put off with the drawing-master version of her mother's marriage, but that was enough; she held it over her mother's head, and Buck, if he had desired revenge, had it. She knew herself to be hybrid, and treated the Scarisbricks and their drawing-masters with equal scorn. Worse, she treated them equally with a contemptuous tolerance. She harped with pride on the baser strain. In a word, there was no doing anything with her.

      She reached the age of twenty-one.

      At twenty-two she expressed a wish to go on the stage. The Captain, who was genuinely fond of her, stopped that. At twenty-three she declared plainly that "a girl in her position" ought to have a means of earning her own living—not necessarily drawing. The Captain being averse from this also, she took the matter into her own hands by writing to the secretary of a Horticultural College in Somersetshire, paying her fees, and enrolling herself as a student without saying a word to anybody. She packed her boxes, and in the second week of January 1894 presented herself before her mother, dressed for travelling, and announced that she had very little time in which to catch her train.

      "Oh, by the way," she said, turning at the door, "if you write, you might address letters to me in my own name—Causton."

      Then she left.

      "Was die Mutter träumt, das vollbringt die Tochter." Here, with its repetitions of and its departures from that of the Honourable Emily, follows her story.

       RAINHAM PARVA

       Table of Contents

      I

      The Horticultural College at Rainham Parva, now defunct, was hardly a college in the modern sense at all. Its technical books were antiquated; it had only one or two old microscopes; and it totally lacked the newer trimmings of specialisation. Its founder, a Bristol seedsman called Chesson, had bought the place cheaply, house and all, a dozen years before, and having five hardy daughters eating their heads off at home, had, as the saying is, economically emancipated them. That meant then (whatever it may mean now) that, realising that the wages of two men and a boy might be saved, he had had them down to Rainham Parva and had set them to work.

      The second Miss Chesson, Miss Harriet, had shown a real aptitude for the work. She had won, after three years, a Diploma, and this Diploma, together with the presence in the house as paying boarder of a niece of Chesson's, had put an idea into the seedsman's head—the premium idea. With the Diploma properly advertised, its grantee made Principal, a premium or so forgone (called a Scholarship) and the proper person installed over all as Lady-in-Charge, Chesson had foreseen a good deal of his work being done by young women who would pay for the privilege of being allowed to do it. There is no need to describe the development of the idea. The enterprise had prospered, and when Louie Causton had put her name down on the books and paid her fees the complement of thirty girls was full.

      She did not, after all, travel down alone. Her stepfather, hinting that it was not necessary to say anything about this to her mother, made the journey with her. The pair of them shortened the hours by guessing which of the young women in the same train were to be Louie's fellow-students; and when they alighted at Rainham Magna station the Captain put Louie and her traps into one of the nondescript vehicles that only saw the light when the Rainham girls arrived or departed, and drove off with her to the college. There he shook hands with the Lady-in-Charge, Mrs. Lovenant-Smith, and asked her whether she was related to Lovenant-Smith of the 24th. Mrs. Lovenant-Smith's reply did not actually affirm her regret that she was so related, but the Captain's affability dried up suddenly. He was returning to town by the four-o'clock train; before doing so he took a turn round the place with Louie.

      "Well," he said, as Louie took her leave of him at the gates, "it's a good growing country, I should say; rum idea of yours though. … You've heard me speak of Lovenant-Smith, haven't you? Adjutant eight or nine years ago; not a bad chap at all, I should have said. She'll be one of the Shropshire lot, I expect. I knew he had people down there. … Well, mind you don't run away with a gardener. 'Bye, Mops——"

      And

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