The Beth Book
people who have no comfort or wholesome interest in life fall a prey,
immorality is inevitable. It was the boast of the place that there
were no illegitimate children; it would have been a better sign if
there had been.
Mrs. Caldwell, true to her training, lived opposite to all this vice
and squalor, serenely indifferent to it. Anne, therefore, who knew
nothing about the management of children, and was not in any respect a
proper person to have the charge of them, had it all her own way in
the nursery: and her way was to do nothing that she could help. She
used to call the children in the morning, and then leave them to their
own devices. The moment they were awake, which was pretty soon, for
they were full of life, they began to batter each other with pillows,
dance about the room in their night-dresses, pitch tents with the
bed-clothes on the floor, and make noise enough to bring their mother
down upon them. Then Anne would be summoned and come hurrying up, and
help them to huddle on their clothes somehow. She never washed them,
but encouraged them to perform their own ablutions, which they did
with the end of a towel dipped in a jug. The consequence was they were
generally in a very dirty state. They took their meals with their
parents, and papa would notice the dirt eventually, and storm at mamma
in Italian, when words would ensue in a tone which made the children
quake. Then mamma would storm at Anne, for whom the children felt
sorry, and the result would be a bath, which they bore with fortitude,
for fear of getting Anne into further trouble. They even made good
resolutions about washing themselves, which they kept for a few days;
then, however, they began to shirk again, and had again to be
scrubbed. The resolutions of a child must be shored up by kindly
supervision, otherwise it is hardly likely that they will cement into
good habits.
Beth suffered from a continual sense of discomfort in those days for
want of proper attention. All her clothing fitted badly, and were
fastened on with anything that came to hand in the way of tape and
buttons; her hair was ill brushed, and she was so continually found
fault with that her sense of self-respect was checked in its
development, and she lost all faith in her own power to do anything
right or well. The consequence was the most profound disheartenment,
endured in silence, with the exquisite uncomplaining fortitude of a
little child. It made its mark on her countenance, however, in a
settled expression of discontent, which, being mistaken for a bad
disposition, repelled people, and made her many enemies. People
generally said that Mildred was a dear, but Beth did not look
pleasant; and for many a long day to come, very few troubled
themselves to try and make her look so.
It cannot be said that Beth's parents neglected their children. On the
contrary, her father thought much of their education, and of their
future; it was the all-importance of the present that did not strike
him, and so with her mother. Neither parent was careless, but their
care stopped short too soon; and it is astonishing the amount of
liberty the children had. They were sent out of doors as soon as they
were dressed in the morning, because sunshine and air are so essential
to children. If they went for a walk, Anne accompanied them; but very
often Anne was wanted, and then the children were left to loiter about
the garden or stable-yard, where, doubtless with the help of reasoning
powers much in advance of her age, Beth had soon heard and seen enough
to make her feel a certain contempt for her father's veracity when he
told her that she had originally been brought to the house in the
doctor's black bag.
After Kitty's departure Beth had many a lonely hour, and the time hung
heavy on her hands. Mildred, her senior by four years, was of a
simpler disposition, and always able to amuse herself, playing with
the Baby Bernadine, or with toys which were no distraction to Beth.
Mildred, besides, was fond of reading; but books to be deciphered
remained a wonder and a mystery to Beth.
Jim went to the national school, the only one in the place, with all
the other little boys. The master was a young curate who gave Mildred
and Beth their lessons also, when school-hours were over. Beth used to
yearn for lesson-time, just for the sake of being obliged to do
something; but lessons were disappointing, for the curate devoted
himself to Mildred, who was docile and studious, and took no special
pains to interest Beth, and consequently she soon wearied of the dull
restraint, and became troublesome. Sometimes she was boisterous, and
then the tutor had to spend half his time in chasing her to rescue his
hat, a book, an ink-bottle, or some other article which she threatened
to destroy; and, sometimes she was so depressed that he had to give up
trying to teach her, and just do his best to distract her. In her
eighth year she was able to follow the church-service in the
prayer-book, and make out the hymns, but that was all.
Sunday-school was held in the church, and was attended by all the
unmarried parishioners. Mildred taught some of the tiny mites, and
Beth was put into her class at first; but Beth had no respect for
Mildred, and had consequently to be removed. She was expected to
learn the collect for the day and the verse of a hymn every Sunday,
but never by any chance knew either. No one ever thought of reading
the thing over to her, and fixing her attention on it by some little
explanation; and learning by heart from a book did not come naturally
to her. She learned by ear easily enough, but not by sight. The hymns
and prayers which Kitty had repeated to her, she very soon picked up;
but Kitty had true sympathetic insight to inform her of what the child
required, and all her little lessons were proper to some occasion, and
had comfort in them. What Beth learned now, on the contrary, often
filled her with gloom. Some of the hymns, such as,
"When gathering clouds around I view,
And days are dark, and friends are few,"
made her especially miserable. It was always a dark day to her when
she repeated it, with heavy clouds collecting overhead, and herself, a
solitary little speck on the mountain side wandering alone.
CHAPTER VII
It is significant to note that church figures largely in Beth's
recollection of this time, but religion not at all. There was, in
fact, no connection between the two in her mind.
Both Captain and Mrs. Caldwell protested strongly against what they
called cant; and they seemed to have called everything cant except an
occasional cold reading aloud of the Bible on Sundays, and the bald
observance of the church service. The Bible they read aloud to the
children without expounding it, and the services they attended without
comment. Displays of religious emotion in everyday life they regarded
as symptoms of insanity; and if they heard people discuss religion
with enthusiasm, and profess to love the Lord, they were genuinely
shocked. All that kind of thing they thought "such cant," "and so like
those horrid dissenters;" which made them extra careful that the
children should hear nothing of the sort. This, from their point of
view, was right and wise; in Beth's case especially; for her
unsatisfied soul was of the quality which soon yearns for the fine
fulness of faith; her little heart would have filled to bursting with
her first glad conception of the love divine, and her whole being
would have stirred to speak her emotion, even though speech meant
martyrdom. Thanks to the precautions of her parents, however, she
heard nothing to stimulate her natural tendency to religious fervour
after Kitty's departure; and gradually the image of our Blessed Lady
faded from her mind, and was succeeded by that of the God of her
parents, a death-dealing deity, delighting in blood, whom she was
warned to fear, and from whom she did accordingly shrink with such
holy horror that, when she went to church, she tried to think of
anything but Him. This was how it happened that church, instead of
being the threshold of the next world to her mind, became the centre
of this, where she made many interesting observations of men and
manners; for in spite of her backwardness in the schoolroom, Beth's
intellect advanced with a bound at this period. She had left her
native place an infant, on whose mind some chance impressions had been
made and lingered; she arrived at Castletownrock with the power to
observe for herself, and even to reflect upon what she saw--of course
to a certain extent only; but still the power had come, and was far in
advance of her years. So far, it was circumstances that had impressed
her; she knew one person from another, but that was all. Now, however,
she began to be interested in people for themselves, apart from any
incident in which they figured; and most of her time was spent in a
curiously close, but quite involuntary study of those about her, and
of their relations to each other.
Church was often a sore penance to the children, it was so long, and
cold, and dull; but they set off on Sunday happy in the consciousness
of their best hats and jackets, nevertheless; and the first part of
the time was not so bad, for then they had Sunday-school, and the
three Misses Keene--Mary, Sophia, and Lenore--and the two Misses
Mayne, Honor and Kathleen, and Mr. and Mrs. Small, the Vicar and his
wife, and the curate, were all there talking and teaching. Beth
remembered nothing about the teaching except that, on one occasion,
Mr. Macbean, the rector, tried to explain the meaning of the trefoil
on the ends of the pews to Mildred and herself; but she could think of
nothing but the way his beard wagged as he spoke, and was disconcerted
when he questioned her. He had promised to be a friend to Beth; but he
was a delicate man, and not able to live much at Castletownrock, where
the climate was rigorous; so that she seldom saw him.
When Sunday-school was over, the children went up to the gallery;
their pew and the Keenes', roomy boxes, took up the whole front of it.
Mrs. Caldwell always sat up in the gallery with the children, but
Captain Caldwell often sat downstairs in the rectory-pew to be near
the fire; when he sat in the gallery he wore a little black cap to
keep off the draught. He and Mr. O'Halloran the Squire, and Captain
Keene, stood and talked in the aisle sometimes before the service
commenced. One Sunday they kept looking up at the children in the
gallery.
"I'll bet Mildred will be the handsomest woman," Mr. O'Halloran was
saying.
"I'll back Beth," Captain Keene observed. "If all the men in the place
are not after her soon, I'm no judge of her sex, eh?"
"Oh, don't look at me!" said Captain Caldwell complacently. "I can't
pretend to say. But let's hope that they'll go off well, at all
events. They'll have every chance I can give them of making good
matches."
Beth heard her father repeat this conversation to her mother
afterwards, but was too busy wondering what a handsome woman was to
understand that it was her own charms which had been appraised; but
Mildred understood, and was elated.
Mr. O'Halloran, the squire, had a red beard, which was an offence to
Beth. His wife wore bonnets about which everybody used to make remarks
to Mrs. Caldwell. Beth understood that Mrs. O'Halloran was young and
pretty, and had three charming children, but was not happy because of
Sophia Keene.
"Just fancy," she heard Mrs. Small, the Vicar's wife, say to her
mother once. "Just fancy, he was in a carriage with them at the races,
and stayed with Sophia the whole time; and poor Mrs. O'Halloran left
at home alone. I call it scandalous. But you know what Sophia is!"
Mrs. Small concluded significantly.