Cousin Cinderella Read online

  Toronto Reprint Library of Canadian Prose and Poetry

  Douglas Lochhead, General Editor

  This series is intended to provide for libraries a varied selection of titles of Canadian prose and poetry which have been long out-of-print. Each work is a reprint of a reliable edition, is in a contemporary library binding, and is appropriate for public circulation. The Toronto Reprint Library makes available lesser known works of popular writers and, in some cases, the only works of little known poets and prose writers. All form part of Canada’s literary history; all help to provide a better knowledge of our cultural and social past.

  The Toronto Reprint Library is produced in short-run editions made possible by special techniques, some of which have been developed for the series by the University of Toronto Press.

  This series should not be confused with Literature of Canada: Poetry and Prose in Reprint, also under the general editorship of Douglas Lochhead.

  Toronto Reprint Library of Canadian Prose and Poetry

  © University of Toronto Press 1973

  Toronto and Buffalo

  ISBN 0-8020-7518-5

  American editions:

  A Canadian Girl in London.

  By Mrs Everard Cotes. (Sara Jeannette Duncan).

  New York, Macmillan, 1908. 365 p.;

  Cousin Cinderella. By Mrs Everard Cotes.

  (Sara Jeannette Duncan).

  New York, Macmillan. 1908. 365 p.;

  Cousin Cinderella. By Mrs Everard Cotes.

  (Sara Jeannette Duncan).

  London, Methuen, 1908. 316 p.

  COUSIN CINDERELLA

  THE MACMILLAN COMPANY

  NEW YORK • BOSTON • CHICAGO

  ATLANTA • SAN FRANCISCO

  MACMILLAN & CO., LIMITED

  LONDON • BOMBAY • CALCUTTA

  MELBOURNE

  THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, LTD.

  TORONTO

  COUSIN CINDERELLA

  BY

  MRS. EVERARD COTES

  (SABA JEANNETTE DUNCAN)

  COPYRIGHT, 1908,

  BY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.

  Set up and electrotyped. Published September, 1908.

  J. S. Cushing Co.—Berwick & Smith Co.

  Norwood, Mass., U.S.A.

  A CANADIAN GIRL IN LONDON

  CHAPTER I

  I WILL first introduce our father, as seems suitable. He is Mr. John Trent of the Minnebiac Planing Mills. I could say “the Hon. Mr. John Trent” if I liked, but father does not care about its being dragged in everywhere. Minnebiac is a place in Eastern Ontario with the accent on the “bi.” It is not the only seat of father’s interests, but it was the original one, and we have always lived there, so it counts for most with us. Father never had a great deal to do with politics; but he made lumber pay from the very beginning, and he simply created Minnebiac, and there were other reasons, so about ten years ago they made him a Senator, so that, of course, we can claim to know Ottawa. Our mother must have been the loveliest thing when father married her; but now she isn’t strong, and none of us would think of asking her to undertake anything more than just to keep as well as she can. We ourselves are Graham and Mary Trent,—mother was a Miss Graham,—and there never were any others, so they were able to bring us up very much as they liked; and I do not see how it could have been better done. We had the best influences, and even in Minnebiac were never allowed to play with interesting children or in the street, though how we longed to on big, light, empty spring evenings after tea, words can never tell. At that age we went to a private school where there was a backboard for punishment that had come out from England, and I think the teacher, too; but she is lost in the funny cloud that hangs like the drop-scene of life just in front of the time when you couldn’t read. As I remember, however, even her misty outline suggests something remote and superior, anyhow, old and different; a brown front emerges, and a high forehead. I think she came from England, but I am certain about the backboard. After that Graham went to Upper Canada College and to the Military Academy at Kingston, and I to Miss Vincent’s in Toronto, where one was taught æsthetics as a regular course, and thoroughly prepared for life. I mean such things as Domestic Science were obligatory; and girls simply cried to be allowed to take Beautiful Thoughts, though, of course, practically everything was extra. Father never seemed to mind the expense, and I must say I was very happy at Miss Vincent’s. There was a time when I wanted enormously to be finished at New York, but father said no, I wasn’t an American—and now I am just as glad. It is simpler to be a natural product and to finish where you begin, I think.

  The South African War had a great effect on father, who came originally from Yorkshire, especially after Graham was sent home wounded. It was odd, too, because all the time Graham was at Kingston, hoping hard to get a commission from there in the English Army, father more or less discouraged it. He would have it he wanted Graham in the business. But the moment the war broke out he began to worry about the waste it was, all that drill and riding Graham had had at Kingston, if nothing was to come of it; and he was perfectly delighted when Graham made up his mind to go out with the first contingent of Canadian Volunteers. Mother and I were not delighted, though we pretended to be. Mother’s grandfather was a United Empire Loyalist, so she had to make more of a pretence than I, who am further removed from George the Fourth. However, he went; and in six months they offered him a commission, and shortly afterwards a D.S.O., and he took them both, also typhoid fever, and finally a piece of shell in his leg which is still there. We got him back then. In the meantime father’s partner had suddenly died—it was the longest funeral ever known in Minnebiac—and it was simply impossible to do without Graham in the business. So he resigned his commission. We thought father would have difficulty in getting him to do it; but, to our surprise, there was no trouble. He said very little one way or the other about his experience as an officer, though he told us a great deal about what he saw and did as a private soldier. The only thing I remember his saying definitely about the officer part was that he wouldn’t resign what it had taught him for something. It was in Minnebiac, the day he wrote to the War Office in London, and we were walking back from the Post Office together. I was still at Miss Vincent’s then, but home for the holidays.

  “They were decent enough chaps at bottom,” he added; “and there was one thing they could do rather well.”

  “What was that?” I asked.

  “Drop down dead,” said Graham; and I would have given anything to know who he was thinking of, though after all—if he was dead ——

  “You’ve got to learn their ways,” he went on. “They’ve got a lot of little ways, and it’s a pity not to know them, for they don’t seem to make any sort of allowance. But when it came to fighting, it was always all right.”

  It is a shady road along the river between the town and our place; and the afternoon woods were full of the sound of the saws devouring the timber. It is a delicious sound; they sing their way through it with a kind of mounting cry, that wanes and waxes and wanes again with a perpetual call and a perpetual lullaby; I like it better than any other note that you hear out-of-doors. It is always there, of course; but sometimes you listen to it. Graham listened for a minute then.

  “There’s a lot of Canada in that,” he said, “and Canada, Sis, is a pretty good alternative.”

  We continued our way home; and next day Graham went into the business.

  So that Graham, of course, has not seen quite so much of life in Ottawa as the rest of us. He has been there off and on; but he never seemed greatly taken with it or excited with it, though they were always very nice to him at Rideau Hall on account of his Distinguished Service Order. I like to write it out in full like that, because it
isn’t an ordinary thing for one’s brother to have, in my country. Graham stuck to soldiering as far as the Militia was concerned, and is a Captain in the Minnebiac Rifles, so he has to wear it when he dines in uniform with the Governor-General; and it always pleases me to notice the effect upon the A.D.C.’s.

  “What’s that your brother is wearing?” one of them has asked me before now, as if it were something out of a cracker.

  “The D.S.O.,” I would reply. “Don’t you know it?”

  This was very nice for father and mother and me, and I didn’t care how often it happened; but anyone could see that Graham took no great satisfaction out of it. What he loved was Minnebiac, where he built himself a kind of workshop for composing and carving things out of wood. A mantelpiece he made, with a design of fir-trees, comes back to me like a line of poetry, or a bar of music. He gave it to one of the foremen, who thought a great deal of it. Graham was a kind of missionary in Minnebiac, of simple purposes and fine ideas in wood, the people there, though so near to nature’s heart, being dreadfully fond of gilt and plush. He would have done well as an ébéniste of the First Empire; he had the conscience and enthusiasm. Or as a Japanese cabinet-maker with his life before him, and no accounts to keep. As a little boy he made clothespins, and signed every one of them. He loved the touch and the feeling and the idea of wood. Instead, however, he was the Son of John Trent and Son; and with the business extending the way it has done and seems bound to do, he has been obliged to reserve the poetry of it for his spare time; which perhaps is as it ought to be.

  For a time all went well; and few men, I must say, had less to complain of in life than Senator Trent. His health, as long as he didn’t touch certain starchy things, was excellent, and mother’s never bad enough to be more than a subject for kind enquiry. He had a finger in every sort of national pie. There was nothing he couldn’t help to endow if he wanted to, from a Home for Dyspeptics in the grape country, to an independent newspaper in Toronto. He had become so rich that none of us liked, except quite privately, to mention money. He was one of the legislators of a country he couldn’t say enough in praise of. But a year or two ago the old microbe started working in father again. They began to talk about Canadians in England as if they were very fond of us indeed, and were longing for an opportunity of showing it; and the Toronto papers were full of their wonderful opinion of us, cabled across for practically the first time. Most people thought it was probably true, though nothing to get excited about; but father didn’t seem able to take it that way; he would get worked up. He made his secretary cut out all the speeches delivered in England about that time on the subject of our future greatness, and paste them in a book, which he intends some day to publish at his own expense; so that whatever happens, they will be obliged to recognise over there that they did see it and say it once. It was as if he wanted to triumph over them in their very words; and he wouldn’t give them credit for half-realising what they were proclaiming.

  “Yes,” he seemed to say to the people of Great Britain; “you’re talking as if you had found out the truth at last, but the day after to-morrow you’ll think it was a fairy tale, and be sold again.”

  Father has very little patience with his own countrymen—in one way, that is. In another way he thinks more of them than you would imagine.

  It might be expected that feelings like these would induce him to go over there often and explain things, and show what he himself had arrived at by believing in the fairy tale; but, no, father is curious in some ways, and back across the Atlantic nothing will induce him to go. He adopted Canada forty years ago in the most specific kind of way; and I believe he feels that to go back again even for a visit would be to admit that for him the bargain wasn’t perfectly ideal. As a matter of fact, it has been ideal. He has been as contented in Minnebiac as if he were king of it. There may be things to see, and know, and enjoy beyond Minnebiac; but he doesn’t seem to hunger after them. He likes to run across to the States now and then, for the sake of criticising their political arrangements, and coming back, as he always makes a point of doing, about three days before he need; this seems to give him more satisfaction than going. But he never goes to England. People do seem to escape like that from the British Isles; I’ve noticed other cases. With quite a pleasant sentiment about their early cells, and great affection for the warder, they simply don’t want to set foot there again.

  But it was easy to see that father felt differently about Graham and me.

  “They’re nothing but a pair of colonial editions,” he would say, looking at me; and mother would reply that what greater advantages we could have had she was sure she didn’t know, and tell her boarding-school story. (It was only that when mother was at boarding-school in Montreal, as a girl, she was sent a hamper with a pot of jam in it, and the head mistress thought proper to distribute this jam among all the girls there, which she did with a spoon, making each girl open her mouth for a spoonful. Mother was shy the first time the spoon went round and refused it; and the second round finished it just before it came to her. Mother didn’t mind the injustice; but it left her with a great contempt for the educational facilities of her time, which she was fond of comparing with mine.) And she would point out how much I had been in Ottawa, helping her to entertain, and how I had accompanied her twice to New York, and once to the Coast.

  “Five days and nights in the train,” said mother, summing up the advantages of travel.

  “And Graham has had South Africa,” she would add, as much as to say, “I suppose we don’t want any more of that.” But she would always have to admit that she had not been to England herself; and father would say that that was the great drawback. Mother wasn’t equal to going too. He would have liked to send us all.

  Then suddenly one day it flashed upon me why father really wished us to go. He had a secret unacknowledged reason—he wanted to send us as samples. He would remain with proud reserve in his Minnebiac woods; but his offspring should go and show forth his country for him. I found it out by noticing how his zeal to send us fluctuated with what was said over there about Canada. When certain people expressed their disparagements and their suspicions father’s attitude would suggest that he would rather die than take a single step to change or disabuse them—let such a country stew in its own ignorance, choke over its own fatuity. But when any enthusiast made a speech he would almost insist upon packing our trunks. One day an invitation came for father, as a leading Canadian, to go over there and stump the country. I don’t think he considered it for a moment.

  “You can never tell those people anything,” he said. “The more you tell them the more they think you are up to some dodge for getting the better of them.”

  His idea being, I think, that Canada should simply roll on to greatness until she rolls into sight, without making any demand upon imagination, or any tax upon faith. But the next day it was settled that Graham and I should go. We hadn’t any mission; nobody had sent for us, yet father managed to impress upon us that we weren’t going precisely and only to have a good time, or quite in the frivolous spirit of a visit to the United States, for instance.

  “If you come across anybody who seems curious,” father said, “you can explain that this continent grows something besides Americans.”

  That was as near as he got to definite instructions, but we felt as if he had handed us a banner, and I was glad that Graham, who would have to carry it most of the time, was better qualified than I.

  CHAPTER II

  WE arrived in London with the vaguest ideas; but we decided almost at once to take a flat. We immediately felt the same feeling about London—we longed to be part of it.

  And somehow from the beginning our flat had to be in Kensington. We looked everywhere, but came back to Kensington and lingered there; we seemed to know more about it than other places, and to guess more than we knew. It seemed an old address in the heart, with finger-posts pointing to it that did not guide us to other parts; and in sentiment at least we knew our way about it.
We found it full of people with moderate incomes and kind faces, old ladies who would run and jump fearfully on an omnibus, with an elbow-lift from the conductor, rather than stop the horses, and young ladies with portfolios, who looked full of purpose. They had pleasant, interested faces, and we felt that they would be pleased to have us take a flat in their midst, if they knew we wanted one. It was the unpretentiousness of Kensington that most appealed to us, I think, after the swagger of some of the parts we had felt it our duty to penetrate. Swagger depressed us dreadfully, we were quite brow-beaten by it; and it is one of the hard things to understand about London, why such armies of people there should be occupied in enjoying it and ministering to it, and keeping it up. Perhaps if we had been accustomed to it we would have felt differently; but in our country people still have to work very hard for just a comfortable living. I am sorry to have to refer so soon again to money matters, but it is exceptional there to be as fortunate as father is; and I think most successful men with us who are vain of their accumulations would be more flattered to have them speculated about than pleased to make a display of them. There are, of course, financiers in Montreal, and even one or two in Toronto, who give eccentric dinners as they do in New York and seem to enjoy being splendidly and noisily rich; but it isn’t yet characteristic. I suppose the average wealthy person, if there are enough of them to make an average, is too new to his wealth to be happy in spending it with that kind of abandon; he has not yet learned to play about with it. He still considers his balances seriously, and perhaps makes economic adventures with them that have a political side, like father’s railway in Guatemala which was so useful to Government lately. Circumstances, of course, make some difference, and I don’t mean to say that we haven’t a carriage and coachman in Ottawa, though it comes from a livery, or that we do not live while Parliament is in Session in a suitable way; but when I speak of Canada I think of Minnebiac, where mother orders her own groceries, and father drives the team in the buggy himself. And it seemed to us that in Kensington people from Minnebiac might be almost as happy as they were at home.