My Little Sister.

by Elizabeth Robins.

CHAPTER I

FIRST IMPRESSIONS

She is very fair, my little sister.

I mean, not only she is good to look upon. I mean that she is white and golden, and always seemed to bring a shining where she went.

I have not been able, I see, to set down these few sentences without touching the quick.

I have used the present and then fallen to the past. I say "is" and then, she "seemed." And I do not know whether I should have written "was" or "seems."

And that, in sum, is my story.

We were both so young when we went to Duncombe that even I cannot clearly remember what life was like before.

Whether there was really some image left upon my mind of India, or my father in a c.o.c.ked hat, looking very grand on a horse, or whether these were a child's idea of what a cavalry officer's daughter must have seen, I cannot tell. I do not think I imagined the confused picture of dark faces and a ship.

My first clear impression of the world is the same as Bettina's. A house, which we did not yet know as small, set in a place which still is wide and green.

As far back as we remember it at all, we remember roaming this expanse; always, in the beginning, with our mother. A region where we played with the infinite possibilities of existence--from the discovery of a wheat-ear's hidden nest, to the apparition of a pack of hounds on the horizon, followed by men in red coats and ladies in sober habit, on horses that came galloping out of the vague, up over the green rim of the world, jumping the five-barred gate into Little Klaus's meadow, and vanishing in a pleasant fanfare of horn, of baying and hallooing, leaving us standing there in a stirred and wonderful stillness.

We seldom met anyone afoot in those days except, now and then, the cottager who lived in a thatched hut down in one of the mult.i.tude of hollows. We called him "Kleiner Klaus," because he had one horse of his own, and because sometimes in the paddock four others grazed and kicked their heels. And he was little and shrewd-looking, and used to smile at Bettina.

To be sure, everyone smiled at Bettina.

And Bettina would show her dimple, and nod her shining curls, and pa.s.s by like a small Princess, scattering gold of gladness and goodwill.

Though we children looked on Kleiner Klaus as a friend, years went by before we dared so much as say good-morning to him. Anyone else found at large in our green dominions was an enemy.

So much we learned before we learned to speak our mother tongue, and all in that first lesson, so far as I was concerned. A lesson typified in the figure hurrying to the rescue down the flagged path toward the gate.

My mother!... who had moved through all our days with changeless calm.

And now she was running so fast that her thick hair was loosened. A lock blew across her face.

Melanie, our nurse, stood inside the gate with Bettina in her arms. A lady leaned over, asking the way to the Dew Pond. Melanie could not even understand the question. But I knew all about the Dew Pond. I had been there with my mother to look for caddis flies. So I pointed to the knoll against the sky, and stammered a direction. Bettina was of no use to anyone looking for the Dew Pond. But she quickly took her place as the centre of interest. All that she did to make good her Divine Right was to show her dimple, and point a meaning finger at the jewelled watch pinned to the stranger's gown. The lady held out her hands to our baby.

Bettina consented to be taken nearer to the sparkling toy.

Then our mother, as I say, hurrying out of the house as though it were on fire, taking the baby and the nurse and me away in such haste, I had no time to finish telling the lady how to find the Dew Pond.

I heard my mother, who was commonly so gentle, telling the nurse in stern staccato French if ever it happened again she would be sent away.

Never, never was she to allow anyone to touch our baby. Had the strange woman kissed Bettina?

The new nurse lied.

And I said no word.

But the impression was stamped deep. No one outside the family at Duncombe was ever to kiss Bettina. Or even to kiss me--which I remember thinking a pity.

Moreover, I perceived that if, through the ignorance or the wickedness of stranger-folk, this thing were to happen again, one would never dare confess it.

For such a catastrophe the far-sighted Bon Dieu had provided the refuge of the lie.

CHAPTER II

LESSONS

There was one lasting cloud upon a childhood spent as close to our mother as fledglings in a nest.

Our mother was the most beautiful person we had ever seen. Even as quite young children we were dimly conscious of the touch of pathos in the beauty that is frail, as though we guessed it was never to grow old. But this was not the cloud. For the presentiment was too undefined, it came in a guise too gentle to give us present uneasiness.

In the unquestioning way of children, we accepted the fact that one's mother should be too easily tried to join in active games. But she taught us how to play. She was as much a factor in our recreation as in our lessons--so much so that we were a long time in finding out the dividing line between work and play. I think that must have been because our mother had a genius for teaching. The hard things she made stimulating, and the easy things she made delight.

No; there was an exception to this.

Not even my mother could make me good at music. She was infinitely patient. She made allowances for me that she never made for my sister.

Once, when I was dreadfully discouraged, I was allowed to leave my "etude" and learn something that might be supposed to catch my fancy--a gay and foolish little waltz-tune called "The Emerald Isle."

"Oh, but quicker, child!" I hear her now. "It is not a dirge."

I began again--_allegro_, as I thought.

But "Faster, faster!" my mother kept saying, till I dropped my hands.

"How _can_ I? You expect me to be as quick as G.o.d!"

I think this must have been after that act of His which gave us a sense of surpa.s.sing swiftness. For long I blamed my lack of skill upon my fingers; they were as stiff as Bettina's were elastic. She kept always the hand of a very young child--so soft and pliant that you wondered if there were any bones in it at all until you heard the firm tone in her playing, and saw the way in which, when she was stirred, she brought down the flying hands on some rich, resolving chord.

Years after I was still able only to practise, Bettina "played." And better even than her playing was Bettina's singing. That began when she was quite a baby. I see her now, a small figure, all white except her green shoes and her hair of sunset gold, singing; singing a nursery rhyme to an ancient tune my mother had found in one of her collections of old English song:

"_Where are you going to, my pretty maid?_"

We thought this specially accomplished of Bettina, because it was the first thing she sang in English.

I do not remember how we learned French. It must have been the first language that we spoke. Our mother, without apparent intention, kept us to the habit of talking French when we did the pleasantest things. All the phrases and verbal framework of our games were French; all the mythology stories were in French.