A Little Princess, Frances Hodgson Burnett [ebook reader macos txt] 📗

“Yes,” Mr. Carmichael said, “it seems more than probable.”

The Indian gentleman leaned forward and struck the table with a long, wasted hand.

“Carmichael,” he said, “I MUST find her. If she is alive, she is somewhere. If she is friendless and penniless, it is through my fault. How is a man to get back his nerve with a thing like that on his mind? This sudden change of luck at the mines has made realities of all our most fantastic dreams, and poor Crewe’s child may be begging in the street!”

“No, no,” said Carmichael. “Try to be calm. Console yourself with the fact that when she is found you have a fortune to hand over to her.”

“Why was I not man enough to stand my ground when things looked black?” Carrisford groaned in petulant misery. “I believe I should have stood my ground if I had not been responsible for other people’s money as well as my own. Poor Crewe had put into the scheme every penny that he owned. He trusted me—he LOVED me. And he died thinking I had ruined him—I—Tom Carrisford, who played cricket at Eton with him. What a villain he must have thought me!”

“Don’t reproach yourself so bitterly.”

“I don’t reproach myself because the speculation threatened to fail—I reproach myself for losing my courage. I ran away like a swindler and a thief, because I could not face my best friend and tell him I had ruined him and his child.”

The good-hearted father of the Large Family put his hand on his shoulder comfortingly.

“You ran away because your brain had given way under the strain of mental torture,” he said. “You were half delirious already. If you had not been you would have stayed and fought it out. You were in a hospital, strapped down in bed, raving with brain fever, two days after you left the place. Remember that.”

Carrisford dropped his forehead in his hands.

“Good God! Yes,” he said. “I was driven mad with dread and horror. I had not slept for weeks. The night I staggered out of my house all the air seemed full of hideous things mocking and mouthing at me.”

“That is explanation enough in itself,” said Mr. Carmichael. “How could a man on the verge of brain fever judge sanely!”

Carrisford shook his drooping head.

“And when I returned to consciousness poor Crewe was dead—and buried. And I seemed to remember nothing. I did not remember the child for months and months. Even when I began to recall her existence everything seemed in a sort of haze.”

He stopped a moment and rubbed his forehead. “It sometimes seems so now when I try to remember. Surely I must sometime have heard Crewe speak of the school she was sent to. Don’t you think so?”

“He might not have spoken of it definitely. You never seem even to have heard her real name.”

“He used to call her by an odd pet name he had invented. He called her his `Little Missus.’ But the wretched mines drove everything else out of our heads. We talked of nothing else. If he spoke of the school, I forgot—I forgot. And now I shall never remember.”

“Come, come,” said Carmichael. “We shall find her yet. We will continue to search for Madame Pascal’s good-natured Russians. She seemed to have a vague idea that they lived in Moscow. We will take that as a clue. I will go to Moscow.”

“If I were able to travel, I would go with you,” said Carrisford; “but I can only sit here wrapped in furs and stare at the fire. And when I look into it I seem to see Crewe’s gay young face gazing back at me. He looks as if he were asking me a question. Sometimes I dream of him at night, and he always stands before me and asks the same question in words. Can you guess what he says, Carmichael?”

Mr. Carmichael answered him in a rather low voice.

“Not exactly,” he said.

“He always says, `Tom, old man—Tom—where is the Little Missus?’” He caught at Carmichael’s hand and clung to it. “I must be able to answer him—I must!” he said. “Help me to find her. Help me.”

On the other side of the wall Sara was sitting in her garret talking to Melchisedec, who had come out for his evening meal.

“It has been hard to be a princess today, Melchisedec,” she said. “It has been harder than usual. It gets harder as the weather grows colder and the streets get more sloppy. When Lavinia laughed at my muddy skirt as I passed her in the hall, I thought of something to say all in a flash—and I only just stopped myself in time. You can’t sneer back at people like that- -if you are a princess. But you have to bite your tongue to hold yourself in. I bit mine. It was a cold afternoon, Melchisedec. And it’s a cold night.”

Quite suddenly she put her black head down in her arms, as she often did when she was alone.

“Oh, papa,” she whispered, “what a long time it seems since I was your `Little Missus’!”

This was what happened that day on both sides of the wall.

One of the Populace

The winter was a wretched one. There were days on which Sara tramped through snow when she went on her errands; there were worse days when the snow melted and combined itself with mud to form slush; there were others when the fog was so thick that the lamps in the street were lighted all day and London looked as it had looked the afternoon, several years ago, when the cab had driven through the thoroughfares with Sara tucked up on its seat, leaning against her father’s shoulder. On such days the windows of the house of the Large Family always looked delightfully cozy and alluring, and the study in which the Indian gentleman sat glowed with warmth and rich color. But the attic was dismal beyond words. There were no longer sunsets or sunrises to look at, and scarcely ever any stars, it seemed to Sara. The clouds hung low over the skylight and were either gray or mud-color, or dropping heavy rain. At four o’clock in the afternoon, even when there was no special fog, the daylight was at an end. If it was necessary to go to her attic for anything, Sara was obliged to light a candle. The women in the kitchen were depressed, and that made them more ill-tempered than ever. Becky was driven like a little slave.

“‘Twarn’t for you, miss,” she said hoarsely to Sara one night when she had crept into the attic—“‘twarn’t for you, an’ the Bastille, an’ bein’ the prisoner in the next cell, I should die. That there does seem real now, doesn’t it? The missus is more like the head jailer every day she lives. I can jest see them big keys you say she carries. The cook she’s like one of the under-jailers. Tell me some more, please, miss—tell me about the subt’ranean passage we’ve dug under the walls.”

“I’ll tell you something warmer,” shivered Sara. “Get your coverlet and wrap it round you, and I’ll get mine, and we will huddle close together on the bed, and I’ll tell you about the tropical forest where the Indian gentleman’s monkey used to live. When I see him sitting on the table near the window and looking out into the street with that mournful expression, I always feel sure he is thinking about the tropical forest where he used to swing by his tail from coconut trees. I wonder who caught him, and if he left a family behind who had depended on him for coconuts.”

“That is warmer, miss,” said Becky, gratefully; “but, someways, even the Bastille is sort of heatin’ when you gets to tellin’ about it.”

“That is because it makes you think of something else,” said Sara, wrapping the coverlet round her until only her small dark face was to be seen looking out of it. “I’ve noticed this. What you have to do with your mind, when your body is miserable, is to make it think of something else.”

“Can you do it, miss?” faltered Becky, regarding her with admiring eyes.

Sara knitted her brows a moment.

“Sometimes I can and sometimes I can’t,” she said stoutly. “But when I CAN I’m all right. And what I believe is that we always could—if we practiced enough. I’ve been practicing a good deal lately, and it’s beginning to be easier than it used to be. When things are horrible—just horrible—I think as hard as ever I can of being a princess. I say to myself, `I am a princess, and I am a fairy one, and because I am a fairy nothing can hurt me or make me uncomfortable.’ You don’t know how it makes you forget”— with a laugh.

She had many opportunities of making her mind think of something else, and many opportunities of proving to herself whether or not she was a princess. But one of the strongest tests she was ever put to came on a certain dreadful day which, she often thought afterward, would never quite fade out of her memory even in the years to come.

For several days it had rained continuously; the streets were chilly and sloppy and full of dreary, cold mist; there was mud everywhere—sticky London mud—and over everything the pall of drizzle and fog. Of course there were several long and tiresome errands to be done—there always were on days like this—and Sara was sent out again and again, until her shabby clothes were damp through. The absurd old feathers on her forlorn hat were more draggled and absurd than ever, and her downtrodden shoes were so wet that they could not hold any more water. Added to this, she had been deprived of her dinner, because Miss Minchin had chosen to punish her. She was so cold and hungry and tired that her face began to have a pinched look, and now and then some kind-hearted person passing her in the street glanced at her with sudden sympathy. But she did not know that. She hurried on, trying to make her mind think of something else. It was really very necessary. Her way of doing it was to “pretend” and “suppose” with all the strength that was left in her. But really this time it was harder than she had ever found it, and once or twice she thought it almost made her more cold and hungry instead of less so. But she persevered obstinately, and as the muddy water squelched through her broken shoes and the wind seemed trying to drag her thin jacket from her, she talked to herself as she walked, though she did not speak aloud or even move her lips.

“Suppose I had dry clothes on,” she thought. “Suppose I had good shoes and a long, thick coat and merino stockings and a whole umbrella. And suppose—suppose—just when I was near a baker’s where they sold hot buns, I should find sixpence—which belonged to nobody. SUPPOSE if I did, I should go into the shop and buy six of the hottest buns and eat them all without stopping.”

Some very odd things happen in this world sometimes.

It certainly was an odd thing that happened to Sara. She had to cross the street just when she was saying this to herself. The mud was dreadful—she almost had to wade. She picked her way as carefully as she could, but she could not save herself much; only, in picking her way, she had to look down at her feet and the mud, and in looking down—just as she reached the pavement— she saw something shining in the gutter. It was actually