From Clement Hazeldine to Hermia Rivers.
"In the course of our many talks together, you have more than once confided to me certain details of your earliest impressions and recollections. What I now want you to do is, to shut your eyes and go back in memory to those early days, and then to write down in detail, and with careful minuteness, everything you can call to mind about your childhood previously to your adoption by Uncle John and Aunt Charlotte. I am afraid that all you can tell me will amount to very little, but I want the information in question for a certain purpose, about which I may have more to tell you by-and-bye. Meanwhile, I shall await your reply with as much patience--or as little--as Providence has seen fit to endow me with."
From Hermia Rivers to Clement Hazeldine.
"You are quite right in your assumption that anything I may be able to tell you of my earliest recollections will amount to very little. Until I heard from Uncle John the story of his adoption of me, I had no absolute knowledge of any existence apart from, or prior to, my life with him and Aunt Charlotte. It is true that I seemed to remember certain people and certain incidents with whom or which uncle and aunt seemed to be in no way mixed up, although there was nothing to prove to me that I was not living under uncle's roof at the time to which they referred. Indeed, so shadowy were they that at times there came over me a doubt as to whether they had any basis of fact whatever; and in any case they lived in my recollections as so many faded pictures, which each year that passed tended to render dimmer and more indistinct; and there is little question that had it not been for what Uncle John told me they would by-and-bye have vanished utterly from my memory.
"Uncle John, as you are aware, had no information to give me beyond the fact that, after he had arranged to adopt me, I was taken to his house one evening after dark by a respectable-looking, middle-aged woman, who, judging from her appearance, might be the wife of a well-to-do mechanic. Uncle asked no questions and the woman proffered no statement. She was not more than five minutes in the house, and he never saw her again.
"Well, Uncle John's statement threw me back upon myself, so to speak. Again and again I went over my confused and half-forgotten recollections, striving to piece them together, and bring them into clearer relief, but to very little purpose, I'm afraid. However, I will now proceed to sketch for you in outline the three incidents, if I may term them such, which stand out most definitely in my memory as evidently pertaining to a time which I now know must have been anterior to that of my adoption.
"Incident the first. I see myself, as a very little girl, seated in a shut-up carriage in company with a man and a woman, neither of whose faces I can bring to mind. I am hugging to my breast a gaily-dressed doll as my dearest earthly treasure. It is a gloomy evening, and the rain is falling fast. I seem to have been in the carriage a long time, jolting over the dreary country roads, but as to where I came from and how I happened to be there at all, I can remember nothing whatever. Then I seem to wake up from sleep, roused by the sudden stoppage of the carriage, and, looking out, I see someone open two large iron gates, which swing slowly back on their hinges. But what takes my childish attention more than anything else is the fact that on the top of one of the supporting pillars--I can only see one from where I sit--there is fixed a strange-looking animal carved in stone, as it might be a griffin, or a dragon, holding a shield between its paws. But one half of the shield and one of the creature's paws are broken away and missing, and I remember thinking how strangely forlorn it looked in its maimed condition, and how the rain-drops, trickling from the end of its nose, seemed like tears, so that I felt quite to pity the poor thing.
"After that comes a blank.
"In the next scene of which I retain anything like a clear recollection--although how long a time elapsed between it and the preceding one I am unable to say--I am in a gloomy panelled room, the two high, narrow windows of which look out upon a small, semi-circular lawn shut in by a tall hedge. A case-clock in one corner ticks slowly and solemnly. Against the wall on one side of the room stands a tall bureau of black oak carved with fruit and quaint figures. There is a large open fireplace, in which a few embers glow faintly red. On two high, straight-backed chairs sit two angular, straight-backed ladies; both elderly, both with long, thin faces, both having the same cold, unsympathetic eyes and the same frozen expression, and so much alike generally, that I can only now conclude they must have been sisters. As I stand before them in my white frock and bronze shoes, with my hands behind my back, I glance timidly from one to the other. They are talking about me in a language I don't understand; but all the same, I am quite aware that I am the subject of their conversation. It is growing dusk, and presently a man--the same, I fancy, that was with me in the carriage--brings in two lighted candles in silver candlesticks on a silver tray, and sets them down on the table between the two ladies. Then one of the ladies takes up the snuffers--also of silver--and solemnly extinguishes one of the candles. Somehow, I have an impression, how or whence derived I am quite at a loss to know, that it is a nightly custom for the manservant to bring in two lighted candles, and for one of them to be at once put out.
"The manservant, having raked together the dying embers in the grate, is on the point of leaving the room, when the same lady who had put out the candle holds up her hand, covered with a black lace mitten, to arrest him. 'You may take her away,' she says, evidently alluding to me. 'I have no wish ever to see her again.' With that, the man leads me by the hand from the room, and with the shutting of the door everything becomes a blank again.
"Next I am in bed, where I am awakened by a kiss on my forehead. I open two sleepy eyes, to see for a moment a tall figure............