Part 45

'I didn't mean to be naughty. I didn't, truly.'

'It's not what you mean, miss, it's what you do. I'll teach you not to mean, my lady.'

The bitter irony of the last words dried the child's tears. 'Very well, then,' she screamed, 'I won't be good; I won't try to be good. I thought you'd like your nasty old garden weeded. I only did it to please you. How was I to know it was turnips? It looked just like weeds.' Then came a pause, then another shriek. 'Oh, Auntie, don't! Oh, let me out--let me out!'

'I'll not let you out till I've broken your spirit, my girl; you may rely on that.'

The sharp voice stopped abruptly on a high note; determined feet in strong boots sounded on the stairs--fainter, fainter; a door slammed below with a dreadful definiteness, and Elsie was left alone, to wonder how soon her spirit would break--for at no less a price, it appeared, could freedom be bought.

The outlook seemed hopeless. The martyrs and heroines, with whom Elsie usually identified herself, their spirit had never been broken; not chains nor the rack nor the fiery stake itself had even weakened them. Imprisonment in an attic would to them have been luxury compared with the boiling oil and the smoking faggots and all the intimate cruelties of mysterious instruments of steel and leather, in cold dungeons, lit only by the dull flare of torches and the bright, watchful eyes of inquisitors.

A month in the house of 'Auntie' self-styled, and really only an unrelated Mrs. Staines, paid to take care of the child, had held but one interest--Foxe's Book of Martyrs. It was a horrible book--the thick oleographs, their guarding sheets of tissue paper sticking to the prints like bandages to a wound.... Elsie knew all about wounds: she had had one herself. Only a scalded hand, it is true, but a wound is a wound, all the world over. It was a book that made you afraid to go to bed; but it was a book you could not help reading. And now it seemed as though it might at last help, and not merely sicken and terrify. But the help was frail, and broke almost instantly on the thought--'They were brave because they were good: how can I be brave when there's nothing to be brave about except me not knowing the difference between turnips and weeds?'

She sank down, a huddled black bunch on the bare attic floor, and called wildly to some one who could not answer her. Her frock was black because the one who always used to answer could not answer any more. And her father was in India, where you cannot answer, or even hear, your little girl, however much she cries in England.

'I won't cry,' said Elsie, sobbing as violently as ever. 'I can be brave, even if I'm not a saint but only a turnip-mistaker. I'll be a Bastille prisoner, and tame a mouse!' She dried her eyes, though the bosom of the black frock still heaved like the sea after a storm, and looked about for a mouse to tame. One could not begin too soon. But unfortunately there seemed to be no mouse at liberty just then. There were mouse-holes right enough, all round the wainscot, and in the broad, time-worn boards of the old floor. But never a mouse.

'Mouse, mouse!' Elsie called softly. 'Mousie, mousie, come and be tamed!'

Not a mouse replied.

The attic was perfectly empty and dreadfully clean. The other attic, Elsie knew, had lots of interesting things in it--old furniture and saddles, and sacks of seed potatoes,--but in this attic nothing. Not so much as a bit of string on the floor that one could make knots in, or twist round one's finger till it made the red ridges that are so interesting to look at afterwards; not even a piece of paper in the draughty, cold fireplace that one could make paper boats of, or prick letters in with a pin or the tag of one's shoe-laces.

As she stooped to see whether under the grate some old match-box or bit of twig might have escaped the broom, she saw suddenly what she had wanted most--a mouse. It was lying on its side. She put out her hand very slowly and gently, and whispered in her softest tones, 'Wake up, Mousie, wake up, and come and be tamed.' But the mouse never moved. And when she took it in her hand it was cold.

'Oh,' she moaned, 'you're dead, and now I can never tame you'; and she sat on the cold hearth and cried again, with the dead mouse in her lap.

'Don't cry,' said somebody. 'I'll find you something to tame--if you really want it.'

Elsie started and saw the head of a black bird peering at her through the square opening that leads to the chimney. The edges of him looked ragged and rainbow-coloured, but that was because she saw him through tears. To a tearless eye he was black and very smooth and sleek.

'Oh!' she said, and nothing more.

'Quite so,' said the bird politely. 'You are surprised to hear me speak, but your surprise will be, of course, much less when I tell you that I am really a Prime Minister condemned by an Enchanter to wear the form of a crow till ... till I can get rid of it.'

'Oh!' said Elsie.

'Yes, indeed,' said the Crow, and suddenly grew smaller till he could come comfortably through the square opening. He did this, perched on the top bar, and hopped to the floor. And there he got bigger and bigger, and bigger and bigger and bigger. Elsie had scrambled to her feet, and then a black little girl of eight and of the usual size stood face to face with a crow as big as a man, and no doubt as old. She found words then.

'Oh, don't!' she cried. 'Don't get any bigger. I can't bear it.'

'I can't do it,' said the Crow kindly, 'so that's all right. I thought you'd better get used to seeing rather large crows before I take you to Crownowland. We are all life-size there.'

'But a crow's life-size isn't a man's life-size,' Elsie managed to say.

'Oh yes, it is--when it's an enchanted Crow,' the bird replied. 'That makes all the difference. Now you were saying you wanted to tame something. If you'll come with me to Crownowland I'll show you something worth taming.'

'Is Crow-what's-its-name a nice place?' Elsie asked cautiously. She was, somehow, not so very frightened now.

'Very,' said the Crow.

'Then perhaps I shall like it so much I sha'n't want to be taming things.'

'Oh yes, you will, when you know how much depends on it.'