The Retrospect. Ada Cambridge
for boys; and I can truthfully affirm that I never learned anything which would now be considered worth learning until I had done with them all and started foraging for myself. I did have a few months of boarding-school at the end – obtained by hard teasing for it – and a very good school for its day it was, but it left no lasting impression on my mind, except that of great unhappiness. The unhappiness had nothing to do with its being a boarding-school, but solely to its not being Home. Home is a place that I never do get away from without immediately wishing myself back in it.
Of the first two governesses – technically the nursery governesses – I remember little but their names and the circumstance that one of them was a nobleman's grand-daughter. Her mother had eloped with a poor tutor, and been cast out of her world in consequence – so closely does one generation resemble another in some of its practices, if not in all. The next – I think the next – was she who once turned that gable room into a torture-chamber, worthy successor of heretic-persecuting Mediæval monks, if any such preceded her. Only I was not a heretic, but an innocent, fairly well-behaved, carefully cherished child.
She came from L – , a neighbouring town of county importance, and it was darkly hinted that her father kept a boot-shop there. Anyway, she gave herself great airs. Before coming to us she had been governess at S – Hall, and her late pupil, Rosamond U – , was thrown in our faces all day long. If they were not so well known, I would like to write the omitted names in full, and express to Rosamond U – , if she be living, the sympathy I have since felt for her in that long-past experience common to us both; but at the time I loathed her beyond everybody, with the solitary exception of our joint governess. Rosamond was so beautiful, so good, such a perfect lady! – the continual foil to her successors. Miss H – sniffed behind backs at everything in our house, because it was so different from what she had been accustomed to. I slept in her room – alas! – and when she was beautifying herself for the evening and father called for her at the foot of the stairs, she used to inform me, with that ugly smile of hers, that at S – Hall Mr U – always came upstairs to her door and escorted her to the drawing-room on his arm – he was such a perfect gentleman! She must have been a liar, than which one is accustomed to believe there is nothing worse; but she was worse – a vile woman all through. I have never in my life disclosed the horrors of the nights I spent with her; her threats of revenge, if I should do so, sealed my lips at the time, and my mortal terror of her, even after she was gone, for years more; and then I was ashamed to speak. My poor parents died ignorant of what they had exposed me to in my tender childhood. I, so extravagantly beloved and cared for! Possibly Rosamond U – 's rank saved her from the like treatment. When I think of Miss H – , and I hate to think of her – even now she could taint the English landscape – when I do think of her, it is to wish I could tell all the parents in the world about her, as a warning against the promiscuous governess and against leaving any governess unwatched. Better the poorest boarding-school, where there is the safety of publicity, a thousand times. In L – I had a married cousin, whose little bridesmaid I had been, and whose baby, that I was allowed to nurse on a footstool, lured me to stay with her once or twice; but I clung to her side all the time lest perchance I should sight Miss H – half-a-mile off, after she had left our employ and lost all power over me. One day at church – great St Margaret's, so full of people – I caught a distant glimpse of the dull, sallow face, and nearly fainted as I stood.
Happily, there were other and more wholesome memories connected with that attic room. But it was still a tragedy that came first to my mind when I thought of Miss H – 's successor, Miss W – . For it was in her reign that I very nearly committed suicide.
She was not like – nobody was like – Miss H – , but she was not above using power unfairly when she was put out. I had been nasty to her in some way, and she returned the compliment by formulating a specific complaint of me to father – actually of me, his queen, to him, my devoted slave. She was a pretty young woman, and he, poor man, just as human as could be. He used to take her walks of an evening when he thought she needed exercise, and on other evenings would sit entranced for hours while she sang "Should he Upbraid" and "Good-bye, Sweetheart" and "When the Swallows homeward fly," and scores of other nice things, to him. And that accounts now, although it did not then, for the astounding circumstance that he punished me at her behest. I was not whipped, of course, but I was sent to my room in disgrace and ordered to stay there. Never shall I forget my mingled astonishment, rage and despair under the unprecedented calamity. I would not have minded, I thought, if I had really done the thing she had accused me of. But I was an innocent victim, and it was father —father– who had been set against me! Simply I could not bear it. I resolved to put an end to my wretched existence there and then. "When he comes and finds me dead upon the floor, then he will be sorry," was the reflection that was to console me in my last moments. But, although I crept into mother's room and ransacked her medicine cupboard for the fatal dose, I did not find it; I lived to make friends with father again, and to suffer many more hours of anguish over troubles that were not worth it.
Another episode of Miss W – 's reign came to my mind when I could clear it of the smoke of the darker memories. The brother and sister next below me were the victims of her wrath on this occasion. I was away from home, and my sister was promoted to the attic room and my place in the governess's bed. She noticed, as I had done, Miss W – 's habit of performing half her evening toilet by candlelight and the rest in the dark; she discovered that the unseen part of the process consisted in dabbing the skin with Rowland's Kalydor for the improvement of a much-valued complexion. She told the second brother – a person of humour – who promptly turned the knowledge to account. Together they unearthed the secret bottle of Kalydor, adulterated the contents with ink, re-hid it in its supposed safe place. Night came, and an evening party. Miss W – dressed herself with special care and splendour, and duly extinguished her candles before applying the finishing touch. She had fine shoulders and arms, now well displayed, and was particularly careful to anoint them thoroughly with her favourite cosmetic. Then she swept downstairs. We had dark staircases and dim halls then, and somehow she did not realise the situation until the drawing-room lights and the eyes and laughs of the assembled company revealed it to her. I am sorry I did not see the dramatic dénouement. There were violent hysterics, I was told, and a terrible hullabaloo. Father, in a towering passion, rushed upstairs and thrashed the children all round, innocent and guilty together, lest he should miss out a possible participant in the crime.
We had two more English governesses, and one French. One of the former had taught a family of cousins and was reported to be very clever; but she had a fiery, ungovernable temper, and did not stay long enough to prove her gifts. She was a tiny woman, and pretty in a bird-like, sharp-nosed, bright-eyed way, and she became engaged to one of the men who admired her; and one day he came to see her, and from the hall where he was taking off his hat and coat overheard her "giving tongue" to our stately youngest aunt, with her customary fierceness and fluency. She was unaware of his propinquity until he marched in to inform her that he had not really known her until that moment, and that, as a consequence of the revelation, his offer of marriage was revoked. It was characteristic of her that she turned on him with a furious repudiation of any desire whatever to be his wife. She died an elderly, if not old, maid some years later.
The other Englishwoman was a dear – and not much else. We loved her, but we did not learn much from her. As for our French companion – it was for French conversation that she was engaged – she was all the time learning English herself. Poor little Eugénie Léonie de B – ! She had a white face and big, lustrous black eyes, and pretty frocks, supplied by her mother, herself a governess in an English family of higher consequence than ours. The boys used to tease Eugénie about Waterloo and frogs, and she would burst into rages and tears because her limited vocabulary denied her the power of arguing for her country on equal terms. She was a dear little thing, and we were all fond of her, and she of us; she took the place of another sister while she lived with us, and there was mutual and bitter grief when she went away. But she did not teach us French to any extent. We taught her English instead.
In short, there was not one, I am convinced, amongst them all – with the possible exception of the lady with the temper – who could have passed a proper examination in the subjects she professed to teach. No one asked for a certificate of competency other than her own word and that of her friends. Miss W – certainly had the warrant of the principal