CHAPTER VIII.—UNCLE LUKE IS BROKEN-HEARTED.

It appeared on explanation that the notice on the outside door of the ‘studio’ was a common ruse of Mr. Marmaduke White whenever he desired perfect solitude, and when the visits of even friends and acquaintances, not to speak of ambassadors from certain adamantine creditors, would be considered irksome.

Although White dwelt in a studio, he was not an artist—not, that is to say, an artist by profession, though he could paint a little, and had a very pretty feeling for colour. By profession he was a man of letters; by special taste and habit, a writer for the theatre. Some of his less ambitious plays had been acted with no little éclat, and everybody had thriven through them except the author. Others had failed, and these failures constituted his glory. They were really productions of considerable literary merit. In literary circles White was spoken of as a man of genius whose mission it was to revive ‘the poetical drama,’ but who had fallen on dark days, when the Muses, having discarded classic drapery altogether, had taken to fleshings and the can-can.

He was a gentle creature, with as soft a heart as ever throbbed in human bosom, and as little power of managing his worldly affairs as of creating a profitable taste for dramas in ‘five acts and in blank verse.’ He lived in a studio, with one artist or another for a companion, not because the place was necessary for his vocation, but because he was naturally a Bohemian, and a studio was a thoroughly Bohemian sort of abode. He was forty years of age, unmarried, and unlikely to marry. The number of his follies could only have been measured by the number of his good deeds, and those were legion. To see him was to like him; to know him was to love him well.

For years past he had paid a small stipend—not much, but a sharp pinch sometimes to him—for the maintenance of Madeline. The way in which he had contracted this responsibility was characteristic, and may at once be explained. A friend of his who was a ‘genius’—that is to say, an individual who promised prodigies, and on the strength of his promises, which were never fulfilled, discarded all conventional morality and lived the life of a shabby Don Juan—had become entangled with a country girl. Dying penitent, as well as penniless, he confided to White, who watched by his sick bed like a woman, that he had betrayed the girl, and that she had given birth to a child, then about one year old. White promised that he would seek both mother and child, and help them if possible. So after putting his poor friend into the ground, and moving heaven and earth to get a few tender things about him inserted in the newspapers, White betook himself to the lonely seaside village where the widow dwelt. He found a comely but ignorant girl in a state of comparative destitution, and, to make matters worse, in the last stage of consumption, brought on by exposure and neglect, In the course of the interviews which ensued, he learned such things of his dead friend’s treacherous and selfish conduct as would have shaken his faith in genius altogether had he been less simple-hearted. A little later the girl died in his arms, giving him her last blessing and consigning her little daughter to his care.

After considerable reflection, he decided that the best course he could adopt with the little one was to find some good motherly soul, in the mother’s sphere of life, who would rear her kindly. During an artistic excursion to Grayfleet he discovered Mrs. Peartree, and, after certain pecuniary preliminaries were arranged, committed the child to her care. What had been originally only a temporary arrangement presently became fixed and habitual. Years passed away. Madeline remained with the Peartrees, who were childless. White, in a very irregular manner, sent them small sums from time to time; but it had never occurred to him to take any more serious responsibility in the matter. He meant the girl to grow up happy in the sphere to which her mother belonged. Though he had beheld her once or twice in infancy, he had for years afterwards seen nothing of her, only hearing of her existence through correspondence from time to time.

When, therefore, Uncle Luke turned up in St. John’s Wood, with Madeline under his charge, and explained that sad events had broken up the little home and left Madeline helpless on their hands, White was staggered. It was clear that the Peartrees thought him her natural guardian, and could not comprehend that he stood in no closer relationship to her than they did themselves.

He looked at Madeline, and was astonished to see her so fair and elf-like, with a touch in her eyes of his poor dead friend, the literary Bohemian. Somehow or other he had always pictured her as a fat little country cherub, with very hard cheeks, a pug nose, and ugly feet. As she gazed at him with her great blue eyes, he felt troubled more and more.

‘You don’t remember poor Fred Hazelmere?’ he said to Cheveley. ‘No, he was gone before your time. But you’ve read his “Ballads of Bohemia”—by Jove, sir, some of them are worthy of the “Buch der Lieder.”’ And he added in a whisper, ‘That’s his child.’

He had led Cheveley aside, and was conversing with him apart, while Madeline and Uncle Luke sat waiting in the centre of the studio. ‘Look at her face,’ he proceeded. ‘Never saw such a likeness in my life—it quite turns me over. She looks a wild little thing, don’t she? The man with her is a sort of natural. It was absurd to think of sending her to me, for what on earth can I do with her? I’m not her father, after all. Upon my soul, I’m in a dilemma. I must persuade him to take her back.’

But when White took Uncle Luke aside and tried to explain matters to him, the little man only began to cry. The home was broken up, he said; Aunt Jane’s only means of subsistence was to go out as a monthly nurse; and he himself was going to join a distant relation on the coast of Kent.

‘It ain’t that we want to lose her,’ he asseverated; ‘but oh, Master White, there be no home for Madlin now. Our hearts be broke, sir, to part wi’ her; but we know you’re next door to her father, and a gentleman born.

She’ll be a heap better off here than ever she was along of us.’

‘Here?’ gasped the dramatist.

‘She’s your’n, sir, more than our’n, bless her heart. We couldn’t feed her no more, let alone clothe her, now Mark’s gone to glory; but you’re a gentleman born, and can bring her up well-nigh like a lady. I brung her, Master White,’ he continued, reverting to his first fear; ‘but I dustn’t let her know I’m a-going to leave her—I dustn’t, indeed. She thinks she’s a-going back with me.’

‘But I can’t take her!’ exclaimed White. ‘This is no place for a child, and even if it were she needs a woman’s care. I really can’t think of it; the very idea’s absurd.’

Uncle Luke looked astonished. In his simple judgment, the power of a ‘gentleman born,’ like Mr. White, was unlimited, and he could not fathom the significance of his refusal.

‘She’s that good,’ he explained gently, ‘that she’d be no manner o’ trouble to any, ’cept when she’s in her tantrums, and they’re gone as soon as come. And she’s clever, Master White. I’ve heerd schoolmaster say that she can spell like a good ’un, and her writin’s as clear as print. I see her write out the Lord’s Prayer on a piece of paper, and she guv it to her Uncle Mark, and if he’d ha’ lived, he was a-going to get it framed like a pictur’ and hung up on the cabin of the barge.’

This special pleading had little or no effect on White. He was puzzling his brain what to do. Once or twice he thought of repudiating the responsibility altogether, but he was far too good-natured for that. Then he suggested that Luke should take the child back and leave him to think it over, but he soon discovered that such a delay was impracticable.

‘Mother said,’ explained Uncle Luke, firmly (his sister-in-law, it will be remembered, had always been addressed as ‘mother’ by her husband, and by all the house)—‘mother said I was to leave her along o’ you, cause you was her best friend; and mother said you’d never grudge her the wittles what she eat, for you were a gentleman born. Them were her own words. You’d never grudge her the wittles what she eat, for you was a gentleman born.’

‘How old is she?’ asked White, desperately, not that he had any special reason for asking, but because, in his perplexity, he hardly knew what to say.

Uncle Luke cocked his eye, calculating, and after due deliberation replied—

‘Mother says it be just eight year come Whit-Monday since you brung her to us. She remembers the year well, mother does, ’cause ’twas the year when her cousin Jim he was drowned off Woolwich Pier, after he had deserted and was running away for his precious life; and they held a ’quest upon him, and said he was drownded accidental, and had hisself to blame.’

‘Between eight and nine years old,’ muttered White, pursuing his own feeble reflections. ‘Is there no place where she could be put? No person who, for a small consideration, would take her in?’

Uncle Luke shook his head dolefully. He had never questioned for a moment but that White would give the child a welcome, and he was quite incapable of conceiving the manifold objections there might be to her immediate adoption.

Things were at this juncture when Madame de Bemy, who occupied the adjoining house, and from whom White rented the studio, came in smiling. She was a stout little old lady, with a very profound respect for her tenant, who had been useful to her in many ways, as indeed he was almost invariably to everybody with whom he came in close contact. To his surprise she cut the Gordian knot by offering to take care of the child on White’s behalf.

All this time Madeline had been listening with growing suspicion. At last the whole truth dawned upon her, and she burst into lamentation. Clinging to Uncle Luke, she cried that she would never leave him, and that she would return to Grayfleet in his company.

It was an exciting scene, over which we have no intention to linger.

Uncle Luke did not depart that night. They made him up a bed in the corner of the studio, where he lay awake till morning, weeping and wondering, but still firm in his desire to see Madeline made into a little lady. The child herself was taken care of by Madame de Berny. But she would not depart from the studio until Uncle Luke had avowed positively that he would be there, waiting for her, in the morning. His simple promise satisfied her, for never in all her life had she known him to break his word.