Wednesday's Child

Front matter

LONDON : PRINTED BY GILBERT AND RIVINGTON, LD,f ST. JOHN'S HOUSE, CLERKENW'ELL ROAD, 'e.C. BY MIRIAM ALAN ' Life is a leaf of paper white, Whereon each one of us may write His word or two, and then comes night. " Greatly begin ! Though thou have time But for a line, be that sublime Not failure, but low aim, is crime." James Russell Lowell. LONDON LOW, MARSTON & COMPANY SAMPSON Limited gt. jhmstan'g Sense Fetter Lane, Fleet Street, E.C. 1891 [All rights reserved] Œo sIDarton. CONTENTS. PAGE Preface ix BOOK FIRST

Chapter I

The Light goes out in Hetty's Home . . i II. Life in the Cloister 10 III. The First Lesson 19 IV. Jessie's Fate 24 V. A Night with a Maniac 35 VI. Arthur's Letter and what came of it . 43 VII. "Wednesday's Child is full of Woe!" . 54 VIII. The Company of Saints 68 IX. The Last of Dragon Hall . . . -73 BOOK SECOND. X. Hetty is received at Sunnylea . . .80 XI. " You will surely be an old Maid, Het ! " . 99 XII. Making Friends .....'.. 105 BOOK THIRD. XIII. Geoffrey Haig 116 XIV. Hetty pays Forfeit 123 XV. Love's Delight 127 XVI. Valerie resolves on Conquest . . .135 XVII. Hetty is driven out of her Fools' Paradise . 141 XVIII. Obbie says Grace 152 XIX. Mrs. Yonge alarms her Guests . . . 15S XX. The Rivals 166 XXI. " Christ keep us all from a Sudden and Unprovided Death ! " 175 XXII. All Hallow Eve 182 XXIII.

"What would You have Me say?" . . 193 XXIV. An Unexpected Guest CONTENTS. VIII CHAPTER PAGE XXV. Wedding Bells 204 XXVI. "Never, Fred!" 209 XXVII. An Interview with Mrs. Vernon . . 212 XXVIII. Mr. Massy at Home 220 XXIX. Arthur bids Good-bye to England . . 228 XXX. " I NEVER WANTED TO QUARREL : IT WAS YOU THREW DOWN THE GAUNTLET ! " . . 232 BOOK FOURTH XXXI. Brook Street, Grosvenor Square . . 239 XXXII. Husband and Wife 252 XXXIII. Doctor Wortley's Verdict .... 261 XXXIV. "Why did You Knock at the Door, Effie?" 269 XXXV. " No Trouble at all : it's all in the Day's Work!" 284 XXXVI. Hawthorn Lodge is to Let .... 293 XXXVII. Hawthorn Lodge is Taken .... 297 XXXVIII. "The Monkey goes with the Parrots !" 306 XXXIX. Nina wears Orange Blossoms . . .316 XL. "Who is Dead?" 319 XLI. "Wait a Bit," said Obbie, "and I'll Marry You!" 321 BOOK FIFTH XL1I. A Telegram from Mrs. Benson . . . 327 XLIII.

"Dieu ne l'a pas Permis" . . . .337 XLIV. Thy Will be Done 345 XLV. On Westminster Bridge 350 XLVI. Hetty makes Her Choice .... 359 BOOK SIXTH. XLVI I. The dearest Husband that ever was . 26* I'nnir nTn -itr— ,..~ .. _.~ ... J.*i XLVI 1 1. "If We had only parted kindly!'' . . 166 -V.-T TV Tl~~~ /~~ „ — 1 J . XLIX. Poor Clement ! 376 L. A loyal Lover 086 LL "Therl's Luck in Odd Numbers" . 392 LI I. Summer is Nigh

Preface

TO WEDNESDAY'S CHILD. " Every day throughout this wealthy country there are men and women busy marring the little images of God that are by and by to be part of its public — shadowing their spirits, repressing their energy, sapping their vigour or failing to make it up, corrupting their nature by foul associations moral and physical. Some are doing it by special licence of the devil, others by Act of Parliament, others by negligence or niggardliness. Could you teach or force these people — many unconsciously engaged in the vile work — to run together as men alarmed by sudden danger, and throw around a helpless generation influences and a care more akin to your own home ideal, would you not transfigure the next epoch — would not your labour and sacrifice be a GOD-WORK reaching out weighty fruit-laden branches far into the grateful future ?

" These are the thrilling words of a writer who unquestionably was actuated by the best of motives ; and to give some little help in the God-work was the primary object of the author of ' ' Wednesday's Child " : above all, the main purpose of the book was to try to stamp out the infliction of corporal punishment in girls' schools. Such a purpose might possibly be considered supererogatory in these enlightened days, when, to quote from a leader in the Daily Telegraph, " girls, both in public and private schools, have long since, and very properly, enjoyed an entire immunity from any kind of corporal punishment." This, no doubt, is the general belief; but, unfortunately, it is a mistaken one, at least as regards some Irish convent schools conducted by Roman Catholic nuns, also as regards Irish National schools, which, although under the Board of National Education, and open to Government inspection, are, in the Catholic counties, for the most part practically under the control of Roman Catholic priests. I have been positively informed that in some of these latter schools the practice of publicly and shamefully whipping girls was rampant some few a

PREFACE.

. X years ago, and may still be for aught my informant knows to the contrary. In all these National schools, with, it may be, a very few exceptions, the girl pupils are frequently slapped on the hand. This treatment contrasts unfavourably with the discipline that obtains in reformatories, which are directly under the control of the State, and in workhouses throughout England and Ireland ;* also in district schools, and all public educational institutions, throughout England, where the female pupils are exempt from corporal punishment in any shape or form. To quote again from the Daily Telegraph : — " No argument can be allowed to prevail against the distinct and unanimous verdict of the public that girls shall not, under any circumstances, be beaten. The regulations of the Local Board strictly prohibit the corporal punishment of pauper girls in workhousesf and district schools.

The rod has long since vanished from charity schools and church schools for girls, and if a Board mistress ventures now and again to visit idleness or refractoriness on the part of a girl scholar with two or three stripes of a cane on the palm of the hand, she runs the risk of being summoned in the police courts for assaulting her scholar." Now, is it not an anomaly that while the female children of the pauper and criminal population are, throughout England, pro tected, and very properly protected, from every description of physical ill-usage, girl pupils in middle class schools, religious and secular, have no effectual safeguard against " the outrage and de gradation of corporal punishment." In the case of Ireland, ex- * The paternal regulations of the Board of Supervision for Relief of the Poor in Scotland put a premium on precocious crime.

Female children in reformatories and prisons throughout the United Kingdom are exempt from every description of physical chastisement, but the Board of Super vision sanctions, nay, provides for the flogging in Scottish poorhouses of female children whose age may reasonably be supposed not to exceed fifteen years— little girls whose only crime is their poverty. Furthermore, pauper boys who may reasonably be supposed to be under fifteen years of age may be punished with corporal correction not only by the school master and the house governor but also by the schoolmistress and the matron. The regulations of this Board as regards examination of the persons of paupers, juvenile and adult, are such that it is incomprehensible to me how any body of Christian men could have formulated them, how Scottish paupers can submit to them, or how officials can be found to undertake the odious duties imposed. t This prohibition is also in force in Ireland.

By the courtesy of the Local Government Board for Ireland, I have been furnished with a copy ot the workhouse rules— drawn up in 1S49, and still in force. Rule 40 distinctly provides that no corporal punishment shall be inflicted on anv iemale child. '

PREFACE.

. XI cepting the inmates of workhouses and reformatories, the position of school-girls as regards physical chastisement is truly lamentable. Throughout the length and breadth of the land, the day scholars attending National schools, the inmates of orphanages and kin dred institutions, and the pupils in the convent schools that are scattered all over the country, are at the mercy of some who are too often prone to vent unreasonable prejudice and capricious dis like, or, it may be, the shortcomings of a parent, on the weak frames of their defenceless little charges. That such a state of things should exist is doubtless due to the fact that our legislators take it for granted that the mistresses in these schools require no coercion to make them treat their pupils with due consideration. They would never for a moment suspect that members of religious communities, above all people, could be capable of having the little girls committed to their charge brutally, and even, occasionally, shamefully maltreated ; yet that such has been the case in the not distant past is, I am sorry to say, beyond yea or nay.

That the practice of whipping girls would be even more generally followed, is evidenced by the fact that only last year a noble lord, in whose lordly breast no chivalrous instinct would seem to have place, while advocating, in the House of Peers, the introduction into the Reformatory School Bill of a clause permitting of the application of the rod to girls, produced letters in support of his peculiar views from several superintendents of industrial schools for girls, who, having been themselves thus heroically treated, did not see why they should be prevented from wreaking bodily vengeance on their wretched little pupils. Earl Brownlow, on the part of the Govern ment, promptly rejected the amendment ; nor would English public opinion have tolerated the innovation. The Daily Telegraph, in commenting upon the debate — the previous quotations are from the same article, which, I regret to say, does not reprobate the punishment as applied to boys — wrote : — " Boys are not exempt from thrashing, either at school or at home ; but girls, both in public and private schools, have long since, and very properly, enjoyed an entire immunity from any kind of corporal punishment ; while, as regards the possibility of do mestic ill-treatment, the Argus eyes of the Society for the Preven tion of Cruelty to Children* are making the infliction of cruel punishments in families every day less frequent and more certain * By the recent Act of Parliament for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, every person who ill-treats, neglects, abandons, or exposes a child, or is guilty of various other acts that, strictly speaking, do not come within the domain of active cruelty, is liable to three months' imprison ment with hard labour, and 25/. fine.

If this law had been in force, and operative in schools, some years ago, some Roman Catholic nuns I wot of would, had justice been done, have had to expiate their cruelties on the treadmill. a

PREFACE.

. XII of detection. At least there is so much chivalry in our midst as to protect female children from the lash. The school-girl, the workhouse girl, the inmate of the orphan asylum and of the cot tage home— all these are exempt from the outrage and degradation of corporal punishment. The female convict no longer dreads the lash ; the female wanton is no longer scourged ; and it would be an anomaly equally foolish and barbarous to allow the female in mates of reformatories and industrial schools to be liable to a mode of punishment which has ceased to be inflicted on any class of English females, juvenile or adult." Surely Irish and Scottish females ought not to be outside the pale ; yet it is an undeniable fact that physical chastisement has been systematically resorted to in some Irish convent schools con ducted by Roman Catholic nuns, as also in some Irish National schools which are largely under the control of Roman Catholic priests, and, in many instances, of nuns.* The female children in Scottish poorhouses are likewise liable to corporal punishment, while the fact was made public some time ago that in an industrial school for females in Glasgow, girls of fourteen and fifteen were habitually stripped and scourged with "tawse," or leathern straps ; after the castigation the bruised and broken-spirited victim was put under a shower-bath, to cool her smarting frame.

My motive in recurring to these revolting details is to arouse public feeling on the subject, so that an effectual stop may be put, at once and for all, to such sickening outrages on womanhood. Mywhole endeavour in " Wednesday's CHiLD"is to awaken public opinion, in the hope that a movement may be inaugurated for the total abolition of every description of corporal punishment in every girls' school in the three kingdoms, and that it may be decreed to be a criminal offence for any schoolmistress, religious or secular, to beat or cause a girl to be beaten, or to seek to cow a girl by the use of shameful and degrading threats. When a measure for the protection of girls of every class through out the three kingdoms becomes law — as I believe it eventually must, and the sooner the better — that it may not remain inoperative a copy of the enactment should be framed and hung up in every schoolroom, and in the dining hall of every workhouse, in England, Ireland, and Scotland, so that if a schoolmistress, religious or se cular, or a matron of a workhouse, infringe it, she will do so at her peril.

A child's person should be sacred : to seek to degrade a little child by brute force is the grossest cruelty : nor should a sensitive child be condemned to expiate some childish fault by years of * The latest return of the Board of National Education in Ireland gives the number of convent National schools as 261 (out of a total of 8267 National schools) with an average daily attendance of 26,244 pupils.

PREFACE.

. XIII mental torture. It may be urged that few children are so sensitive, and probably there is some truth in the contention ; still I do believe that the long majority of nicely-reared children in every position in life — for I hold that the daughter of a tradesman, if she comes of a modest mother, and has been gently influenced in her home, may be as nice about herself as the first duchess in the land — are very delicate about themselves, and would never completely recover the grosser humiliation to which I advert. Though I hope and believe that the most ignominious form of flogging is in vogue in very few boys' schools, that boys should be flogged as by prescriptive right is, to my thinking, disgraceful.* But if it is cruel, if only by reason of the humiliation it involves, to flog boys in an ignominious manner, the cruelty is aggravated tenfold in the case of girls, whose natural sensibilities are indisputably finer.

For instance, are boys — even the little apple-cheeked boys of ten and twelve who, a famous English novelist boldly affirms, could put their mothers and sisters to the blush — at all revolted by their secret knowledge ? On the other hand I will take upon myself to assert that every young girl of any refinement of feeling, when the laws of nature are first whispered to her — for I fear that few are left to solve the mystery by the light of their maturer reason, but are early apprised of the origin of our being by some depraved senior, who, without scruple, ruthlessly blasts childhood's happy unthinking innocence — is, in her first horror, utterly revolted by the knowledge, and, in her revulsion, is perhaps almost in clined to doubt the divinity of a God whose ordinance is so contrary7 to all her preconceived notions of purity.

I do not pretend to * That the practice admits of gross cruelty is undeniable. A poor old woman lately applied in one of the Dublin police courts for a summons against a schoolmaster who had flogged her little grandson so severely as to cut and scar his person : the child's wounds were exhibited in court. Another flagrant case of cruelty recently occurred in Manchester. On the 25th September, 1890, an inquest was held in Manchester on the body of a school-boy, aged eleven years. This boy had been harshly beaten on more than one occasion by the assistant schoolmistress of the school he attended : he was taken ill on the occasion of his last punishment, and died in the infirmary. "Death from natural causes" was the verdict, but the jury censured the assistant mistress. Nor would flogging seem to be the only form of cruelty practised on boys.

The Rev. Mr. Cotton, manager of a Protestant orphanage at Carogh, County Kildare, Ireland, has been con victed — the conviction being upheld on appeal — of an aggravated assault on four children by chaining logs to their legs. The reverend gentleman pleaded in defence of his action that he considered logging a much more merciful form of punishment than flogging. I concede him the point with all my heart ; but is it to be tolerated that children should be logged or flogged at the whim of an irresponsible tyrant ? The Rev. Mr. Cotton is still manager of the Carogh Orphanage, which has attained an unenviable notoriety.

PREFACE.

. XIV assert that the majority of women retain these sentiments ; but that the first girlish shrinking is so great proves all the more how abominably cruel are the people who wantonly trample on a little girl's nice feelings, and perhaps lay up for her a store of suffering, physical as well as mental. Far-fetched as it may appear, I have myself known of a convent girl who, as a child, had been rendered so morbid about nerselt through sheer dread of a shameful punishment that, through the best years of her youth, she endured intervals of absolute torture, rather than submit to a medical examination. I have known this girl, who had no more fortitude than a child, to be in such a state that she would lie on the floor, whining like a dumb animal in her horrible pain. I have known her to declare between tears and sobs, when quieted by the stimulants she so eagerly craved, that it would be a hundred times better for her that she had never been born.

I have known her to resolve that if these agonising paroxysms ever became of anything like frequent occurrence, she would destroy herself. And, all through, she ascribed her insur mountable objection to do what anyone else would have done in her place, to the fact that she had been kept in fear for herself while a child in a convent school. No doubt she was naturally morbid on such points, but her school experience had developed the feeling into a positive mania. " I would rather die twice over, than let any one come near me ! " was her answer to every entreaty. When a doctor, in the kindest and most considerate manner possible, urged her to give him a chance of curing her, and warned her that if she persisted in her refusal she ran a very great risk of contracting an agonising and incurable uterine disease, she still returned him the same answer.

Will any man of ordinary human seeling — and as it is men who make the laws it is they who have it in their power to put an effectual stop to this gross abuse, and restrain the depraved appetites of some who would only too willingly gloat over the shame stricken writhings of their hapless child-victims — will any man born of woman stand up and say that such risks should be incurred ? In the foregoing case the affection proved to be of a neuralgic character, but had an operation been necessary the girl must have died. If it is better that ninety-nine guilty should go free than that one innocent man should suffer, so is it better that ninety-nine children on whom the punishment would have no lasting effect for good or harm should go unwhipped than that one to whom the mere threat of ignominious treatment would be a source of life-long unhappiness, and perhaps of positive danger, should be thus threatened, not to say actually outraged.

The subject is unsavoury to a degree, yet not on that account should it be shirked. Children are so completely at the mercy of their elders ; and though we may, I hope, safely suppose that there

PREFACE.

. XV are few parents who would not gladly protect their girls from all grosser humiliations, there are orphan children who have no parents to appeal to, and there are motherless children who would be ashamed to confide such fears to a father's ear ; and even those who have mothers and homes may be reluctant to acknowledge among their own brothers and sisters that they could ever have been so treated or threatened, for the more sensitive a child is on such points the more loth will she be to make complaint. That girls, even when arrived at womanhood, have an innate repugnance to allude to such matters, was amply demonstrated when, some few years ago, the Freeman's Journal, the most influential organ of Catholic opinion in Ireland, opened its columns to the discussion of the grievances of pupils in conventual institutions.

The letters then published dwelt mostly on the indifferent quality of the food supplied, the long matutinal fast common in such establishments, the custom that obtains in some convents of requiring the girls to wash their own knives and forks, make up their own beds, etc. Not one of the numerous letters published contained the remotest allusion to this crying wrong, though it is safe to suppose that some among the correspondents must have been cognisant of the practices prevalent in the schools of at least one Order of religious, and it is equally safe to conclude that had any of the letters touched on this matter of corporal punishment, instead of suppressing them, the then proprietor of the paper,* who was renowned for having the courage of his convictions, and whose sympathies were invariably ranged on the just and generous side, would have lent his trenchant eloquence to scourge those who, while pretending to the most refined purity, could be capable of degrading female youth.

But whatever good might have been thus effected would necessarily have been very limited : individual effort is, at the best, practically powerless to cope with the evil : the only effectual and far-reaching safeguard for the protection of girls of every grade throughout the United Kingdom from the brutalities of poorhouse matrons, and of schoolmistresses, religious and secular — one w7hich should equally protect the convent pupil and the Scottish pauper — would be to convert indecent outrages on women-children into a criminal offence, and thus effectually protect the daughters of the nation from the contamination of shameful threats, not to speak of the actual perpetration of in dignities that to a sensitive nature would render life well-nigh insupportable. So far I have dealt with the effect produced by debasing arguments on ultra-sensitive natures, when, indeed, they are not utterly perverted in the school of shame. But if in some rare cases shameful menaces tend to render girls inordinately and painfully * The late Edmund Dwyer Gray, Esq., M.P

PREFACE.

. XVI sensitive about themselves, the far more general effect mcontestably is to render them utterly shameless and insensible to ail considerations of delicacy. " In the morn and liquid dew of youth, con tagious blastments are most imminent." If a girl's natural nice feeling about herself is made of no account, rather if it is made a source of torment, it is impossible that she should retain it in its pristine freshness. If modesty is a desideratum in woman, rear the girl-child apart from all contaminating influences : guide her childish steps to right, not by brutal or unseemly arguments, but by reasonable rebuke. What if she should scoff at rebuke ? I grant you, ill-con ditioned damsels of fifteen and sixteen are apt to jeer at rebuke, and are occasionally very hard to deal with ; but no little girls of ten and twelve— and it is these little girls Lord Meath proposed to flog — are inaccessible to remonstrance.

But even supposing a girl of tender years to be utterly intractable, whatever other means may be adopted to reduce her to submission, she should neither be beaten nor buffeted, while, on no pretence, should the most igno minious form of whipping be resorted to. That such outrages should have been committed in the past is sufficiently revolting ; but the past is past : all that can be done now is to prevent a possible repetition of these disgusting offences. The improvement-, if any, resulting from physical chastisement is, at best, ofthe most temporary description : it stands to reason that no nature save the coarsest and most depraved could possibly be bettered by such methods ; while a gentle and sensiti%7e child might be for ever perverted by a single blow. Then is it not a hundred times better that those few animal natures that personal chastisement might influence for good, should be spoiled for lack of it, if spoiled they could be, than that some of gentler mould should be permanently embittered through its infliction, or the mere threat of its infliction.

When children are reported to be difficult and troublesome, be sure they are more sinned against than sinning. If they did not occasionally commit faults, if they were perfect in self-control, and never gave way to outbursts of passion, they would no longer be children but automatons ; but penalties proportionate to childish faults may be easily devised, without any recourse to violent and demoralising measures. My chief care is for girls, but I cannot lay down the pen without putting in a plea for their brothers. Why should not the rod be banished from every boys' school throughout the kingdom ? In those schools in which flogging has fallen into desuetude are the boys more vicious or ungovernable than in others in which, for venial offences, boys are liable to be beaten like brutes ? On the contrary, when the rod is le droit supreme the moral tone of those who live under its shadow must inevitably become perverted.

PREFACE.

. XVII " When judgment, tact, and good feeling are engaged in the management of youth punishment will be but seldom required." But if it be found occasionally necessary to punish, surely there are various modes of punishment — such as reprimands, imposi tions, and deprivation of privileges — which would not rob the culprit of self-respect and degrade him to the level of the brute creation. A woman's words on such a point may carry small weight : in reprobation ofthe practice of flogging boys, I quote the opinion of one better entitled to speak on the subject. " It may be admitted that there are boys of brutish nature who seem insensible to any influence but the lash, and that there are juvenile immoralities so base and degraded that a sharp instrument like corporal punishment seems needful for their extirpation ; but still it must be maintained that any benefit which might accrue from its use under such circumstances and on such subjects, would be more than counterbalanced by the deleterious influence of its retention on boys of purer and better disposition and on those charged with its infliction.

To boys of spirit and refinement it is humiliating to reflect that they are liable to what De Quincey calls bestial and brutal punishments, and to masters it is corrupting to be left in possession of such a power over helpless children — ' the long baneful influence to inflict pain.' Corporal punishment is to be condemned because it degrades the sufferer and diminishes his self-respect, which is' so powerful an agent in all moral reformation ; because, however equitably it may be doled out, it affects very differently different tempers, ard is felt most acutely by those least deserving of punishment ; because it creates a feeling of estrangement from the authority by whom it is inflicted, stores up not infrequently malign feelings, and shuts the door against gentler but more potent influences ; because it is apt when tolerated to be abused, and to degenerate in the hands of miscreants into insensate and hideous cruelties ; and because it often fails lamentably to exert any good effect."* There is another view of the case, applicable to both boys and girls, which might appeal to some more forcibly than any senti mental considerations.

It is asserted by the same eminent medical authority that each cut of a lash or stroke of a rod is a sharp shock to the nervous system ; that a series of such shocks leaves the nerve centres in a state of exhaustion and debility ; moreover, that flogging has sometimes induced brain disease in children. In fatal corroboration of this theory Dalziel's telegram very recently recorded the death of a Berlin school-boy, aged eleven years, who was caned so severely on the hand by a teacher that meningitis set in and the child died. In the face of * " Education and the Nervous System " : J. Crichton Browne, M.D., LL.D., F.R.S., Lord Chancellor's Visitor.