in adeline's idiosyncrasy there was a subtle, elusive suggestion of singularity, of unexpectedness, which richard in spite of himself found very alluring, and he correctly attributed it, in some degree, to the peculiar circumstances of her early life, an account of which, with characteristic quaintness, she had given him at their second meeting.
the posthumous child of richard aked's brother, adeline, who had no recollection of her mother, lived at first with her maternal grandparents and two uncles. she slept alone at the top of the house, and when she arose in the morning from the big bed with its red curtains and yellow tassels, she always ran to the window. immediately below here were the leads which roofed the great projecting windows of the shop. it was her practice at night to scatter crumbs on the leads, and sometimes she would be early enough to watch the sparrows pecking them; more often all the crumbs had vanished while she was yet asleep. the square never failed to interest her in the morning. in the afternoon it seemed torpid and morose; but before dinner, more especially on saturdays and mondays, it was gaily alert—full of canvas-covered stalls, and horses and carts, and heaped piles of vegetables, and pigs grunting amidst straw, and rough rosy-faced men, their trousers tied at the knees with string, who walked about heavily, cracking whips. these things arrived mysteriously, before the sun, and in the afternoon they dwindled imperceptibly away; the stalls were unthatched, the carts jolted off one by one, and the pigs departed squeaking, until at five o'clock the littered square was left deserted and forlorn. now and again a new stall, unfolding vivid white canvas, stood out brightly amid its soiled companions; then adeline would run downstairs to her favourite uncle, who had breakfast at 7.30 so that he might be in charge of the shop while the rest were at table: "uncle mark, uncle mark, there is a new stall up at the top of the square, near the new inn!" "perhaps it is only an old one with its face washed," uncle mark would say; and adeline, raising her right shoulder, would put her head on it and laugh, screwing up her eyes.
in those days she was like a little puritan girl, with her plain frocks and prim gait. her black hair, confined by a semicircular comb which stretched from ear to ear over the top of her head, was brushed straight away from her forehead, and fell across the entire width of her shoulders in glossy, wavy lines. her grey eyes were rather large, except when she laughed, and they surveyed people with a frank, inquiring look which frightened some of the commercial travellers who came into the shop and gave her threepenny bits; it seemed as if all one's secret shames stood revealed to that artless gaze. her nose was short and flattened, but her mouth happened to be perfect, of exactly the classic form and size, with delectable lips half hiding the small white teeth.
to her the house appeared to be of immense proportions; she had been told that once, before she was born, it was three houses. certainly it possessed more than the usual number of staircases, and one of these, with the single room to which it gave access, was always closed. from the square, the window of the disused chamber, obscured and bare, contrasted strangely with the clear panes, white blinds, and red pads of the others. this room was next to her own, the two staircases running parallel; and the thought of its dread emptiness awed her at nights. one saturday night in bed she discovered that grandma, who had been plaiting her hair for sunday, had left a comb sticking in it. she called aloud to grandma, to uncle mark, to uncle luke, in vain. none of them came to her; but she distinctly heard an answering cry from the shut room. she ceased to call, and lay fearfully quiet for a while; then it was morning, and the comb had slipped out of her hair and down into the bed.
beneath the house were many cellars. one served for kitchen, and adeline had a swing there, hung from a beam; two others were larders; a fourth held coal, and in a fifth ashes were thrown. there were yet two more under the shop, to be reached by a separate flight of stone steps. uncle mark went down those steps every afternoon to turn on the gas, but he would never allow adeline to go with him. grandma, indeed, was very cross if, when the door leading to the steps happened to be open, adeline approached within a yard of it. often, chattering to the shop-girls, who at quiet times of the day clustered round the stove with their sewing, she would suddenly think of the cellars below, and her heart would seem to stop.
if the shutters were up, the shop was even more terribly mysterious than either the cellars or the disused room. on sunday afternoons, when grandpa snored behind a red and yellow handkerchief in the breakfast-room, it was necessary for adeline to go through the shop and up the show-room staircase, in order to reach the drawing-room, because to get to the house staircase would involve disturbing the sleeper. how strange the shop looked as she hurried timorously across! a dim twilight, worse than total darkness, filtered through the cracks of the shutters, showing faintly the sallow dust-sheets which covered the merinos and the chairs on the counters, and she always reached the show-room, which had two large, unobstructed windows, with a sob of relief. very few customers were asked into the show-room; adeline employed it on weekdays as a nursery; here she nursed her dolls, flew kites, and read "little wideawake," a book given to her by a commercial traveller; there was a cheval glass near the front window in which she contemplated herself long and seriously.
she never had the companionship of other children, nor did she desire it. other children, she understood, were rude and dirty; although uncle mark and uncle luke taught in the sunday-school, and grandpa had once actually been superintendent, she was not allowed to go there, simply because the children were rude and dirty. but she went to morning chapel, sitting alone with grandpa on the red cushions of the broad pew, that creaked every time she moved; uncle mark and uncle luke sat away up in the gallery with the rude and dirty sunday-school children; grandma seldom went to chapel; the ministers called to see her instead. once to her amazement uncle luke had ascended the pulpit stairs, looking just as if he was walking in his sleep, and preached. it seemed so strange, and afterwards the religious truths which she had been taught somehow lost their awfulness and some of their reality. on sunday evenings she celebrated her own private service, in which she was preacher, choir, organist, and congregation. her extempore prayers were the secret admiration of grandma, who alone heard them. adeline stayed up for supper on sundays. when the meal was over, grandpa opened the big bible, and in his rich, heavy voice read that shem begat arphaxad and arphaxad begat salah and salah begat eber and eber begat pelag, and about the ammonites and the jebusites and the canaanites and the moabites; and then they knelt, and he prayed for them that rule over us, and widows and orphans; and at the word "orphans," grandma, who didn't kneel like the others but sat upright in her rocking-chair with one hand over her eyes, would say "amen, amen," under her breath. and after it was all over adeline would choose whether uncle mark or uncle luke should carry her to bed.
grandpa died, and then grandma, and aunt grace (who was not an aunt at all, but a cousin) came to stay with adeline and her uncles, and one day the shutters of the shop were put up and not taken down again. adeline learnt that uncle mark and uncle luke were going a long way off, to america, and that she was to live in future with aunt grace in a large and splendid house full of coloured pictures and statues and books. it seemed odd that aunt grace, whose dresses were rather shabby, should have a finer house than grandpa's, until uncle mark explained that the house did not really belong to aunt grace; aunt grace merely kept it in order for a rich young gentleman who had fifteen servants.
when she had recovered from the parting with her uncles, adeline accepted the change with docility. long inured as she was to spiritual solitude (for the closest friendship that can exist between a child and an adult comprises little more than an affectionate tolerance on either side, and certainly knows nothing of those intimate psychic affinities which attract child to child or man to man), she could not, indeed, have easily found much hardship in the conditions of her new life. one matter troubled her at first, namely, that aunt grace never prayed or read the bible or went to chapel; nor, so far as adeline knew, did anyone else at the abbey. but she soon became reconciled to this state of things. for a time she continued to repeat her prayers; then the habit ceased.
the picture-gallery, of which she had heard a great deal, fascinated her at once. it was a long but not very lofty apartment, receiving daylight from a hidden source, hung with the finest examples of the four great italian schools which flourished during the first half of the sixteenth century: the venetian, a revel of colour; the roman, dignified and even sedate; the florentine, nobly grandiose; and the school of parma, mysteriously delicate. opportunity serving, she spent much of her time here, talking busily to the madonnas, the christs, the martyred saints, the monarchs, the knights, the lovely ladies, and all the naïve mediæval crowd, giving each of them a part in her own infantile romances. when she grew older, she copied—who shall say whether consciously or unconsciously?—the attitudes and gestures of the women; and perhaps in time there passed into adeline, by some ineffable channel, at least a portion of their demure grace and contented quietude. there were pictures also in the square library, examples of quite modern english and french work, sagaciously chosen by one whose critical faculty had descended to him through four generations of collectors; but adeline had no eyes for these. the books, however, gorgeous prisoners in glass, were her good friends, though she might never touch them, and though the narrow, conventional girl's education assiduously bestowed upon her by her aunt in person, stifled rather than fostered curiosity with regard to their contents.
when adeline was about nineteen, her guardian became engaged to be married to a middle-aged farmer, a tenant of the abbey, who made it clear that in espousing aunt grace he was not eager to espouse aunt grace's protégée also. a serious question arose as to her future. she had only one other relative in england, mr. aked, and she passively accepted his timely suggestion that she should go to london and keep house for him.
