You will tell me perhaps that children's impressions are not durable.
That's true enough. But here, child is only a manner of speaking. The
girl was within a few days of her sixteenth birthday; she was old enough
to be matured by the shock. The very effort she had to make in conveying
the impression to Mrs. Fyne, in remembering the details, in finding
adequate words--or any words at all--was in itself a terribly
enlightening, an ageing process. She had talked a long time,
uninterrupted by Mrs. Fyne, childlike enough in her wonder and pain,
pausing now and then to interject the pitiful query: "It was cruel of
her. Wasn't it cruel, Mrs. Fyne?"
For Charley she found excuses. He at any rate had not said anything,
while he had looked very gloomy and miserable. He couldn't have taken
part against his aunt--could he? But after all he did, when she called
upon him, take "that cruel woman away." He had dragged her out by the
arm. She had seen that plainly. She remembered it. That was it! The
woman was mad. "Oh! Mrs. Fyne, don't tell me she wasn't mad. If you
had only seen her face . . . "
But Mrs. Fyne was unflinching in her idea that as much truth as could be
told was due in the way of kindness to the girl, whose fate she feared
would be to live exposed to the hardest realities of unprivileged
existences. She explained to her that there were in the world
evil-minded, selfish people. Unscrupulous people . . . These two persons
had been after her father's money. The best thing she could do was to
forget all about them.
"After papa's money? I don't understand," poor Flora de Barral had
murmured, and lay still as if trying to think it out in the silence and
shadows of the room where only a night-light was burning. Then she had a
long shivering fit while holding tight the hand of Mrs. Fyne whose
patient immobility by the bedside of that brutally murdered childhood did
infinite honour to her humanity. That vigil must have been the more
trying because I could see very well that at no time did she think the
victim particularly charming or sympathetic. It was a manifestation of
pure compassion, of compassion in itself, so to speak, not many women
would have been capable of displaying with that unflinching steadiness.
The shivering fit over, the girl's next words in an outburst of sobs
were, "Oh! Mrs. Fyne, am I really such a horrid thing as she has made me
out to be?"