Chapter 1 Daddy's Girl by L. T. Meade
Philip Ogilvie and his pretty wife were quarrelling, as their custom was, in the drawing-room of the great house in Belgrave Square, but the Angel in the nursery upstairs knew nothing at all about that. She was eight years old, and was, at that critical moment when her father and mother were having words which might embitter all their lives, and perhaps sever them for ever, unconsciously and happily decorating herself before the nursery looking-glass.
The occasion was an important one, and the Angel’s rosebud lips were pursed up in her anxiety, and her dark, pretty brows were somewhat raised, and her very blue eyes were fixed on her own charming little reflection.
“Shall it be buttercups, or daisies, or both?” thought the Angel to herself.
A box of wild flowers, which had come up from the country that day, lay handy. There were violets and primroses, and quantities of buttercups and daisies, amongst these treasures.
“Mother likes me when I am pretty, father likes me anyhow,” she thought, and then she stood and contemplated herself, and pensively took up a bunch of daisies and held them against her small, slightly flushed cheek, and then tried the effect of the buttercups in her golden brown hair. By-and-by, she skipped away from the looking-glass, and ran up to a tall, somewhat austere lady, who was seated at a round table, writing busily.
“What do you want, Sibyl? Don’t disturb me now,” said this individual.
“It is only just for a moment,” replied the Angel, knitting her brows, and standing in such a position that she excluded all light from falling on the severe-looking lady’s writing-pad.
“Which is the prettiest, buttercups or daisies, or the two twisted up together?” she said.
“Oh, don’t worry me, child, I want to catch this post. My brother is very ill, and he’ll be so annoyed if he doesn’t hear from me. Did you say buttercups and daisies mixed? Yes, of course, mix them, that is the old nursery rhyme.”
The little Sibyl stamped a small foot encased in a red shoe with an impatient movement, and turned once more to contemplate herself in the glass. Miss Winstead, the governess, resumed her letter, and a clock on the mantelpiece struck out seven silvery chimes.
“They’ll be going in to dinner; I must be very quick indeed,” thought the child. She began to pull out the flowers, to arrange them in little groups, and presently, by the aid of numerous pins, to deck her small person.
“Mother likes me when I am pretty,” she repeated softly under her breath, “but father likes me anyhow.” She thought over this somewhat curious problem. Why should father like her anyhow? Why should mother only kiss her and pet her when she was downright pretty?
“Do I look pretty?” she said at last, dancing back to the governess’s side.
Miss Winstead dropped her pen and looked up at the radiant little figure. She had contrived to tie some of the wild flowers together, and had encircled them round her white forehead, and mixed them in her flowing locks, and here, there, and everywhere on her white dress were bunches of buttercups and daisies, with a few violets thrown in.
“Do I look pretty?” repeated Sibyl Ogilvie.
“You are a very vain little girl,” said Miss Winstead. “I won’t tell you whether you look pretty or not, you ought not to think of your looks. God does not like people who think whether they are pretty or not. He likes humble-minded little girls. Now don’t interrupt me any more.”
“There’s the gong, I’m off,” cried Sibyl. She kissed her hand to Miss Winstead, her face all alight with happiness.
“I know I am pretty, she always talks like that when I am,” thought the child, who had a very keen insight into character. “Mother will kiss me to-night, I am so glad. I wonder if Jesus Christ thinks me pretty, too.”
Sibyl Ogilvie, aged eight, had a theology of her own. It was extremely simple, and had no perplexing elements about it. There were three persons who were absolutely perfect. Jesus Christ Who lived in heaven, but Who saw everything that took place on earth, and her own father and mother. No one else was absolutely without sin, but these three were. It was a most comfortable doctrine, and it sustained her little heart through some perplexing passages in her small life. She used to shut her eyes when her mother frowned, and say softly under her breath —
“It’s not wrong, ’cos it’s mother. Mother couldn’t do nothing wrong, no more than Jesus could”; and she used to stop her ears when her mother’s voice, sharp and passionate, rang across the room. Something was trying mother dreadfully, but mother had a right to be angry; she was not sinful, like nurse, when she got into her tantrums. As to father, he was never cross. He did look tired and disturbed sometimes. It must be because he was sorry for the rest of the world. Yes, father and mother were perfection. It was a great support to know this. It was a very great honor to have been born their little girl. Every morning when Sibyl knelt to pray, and every evening when she offered up her nightly petitions, she thanked God most earnestly for having given her as parents those two perfect people known to the world as Philip Ogilvie and his wife.
“It was so awfully kind of you, Jesus,” Sibyl would say, “and I must try to grow up as nearly good as I can, because of You and father and mother. I must try not to be cross, and I must try not to be vain, and I must try to love my lessons. I don’t think I am really vain, Jesus. It is just because my mother likes me best when I am pretty that I want to be pretty. It’s for no other reason, really and truly; but I don’t like lessons, particularly spelling lessons. I cannot pretend I do. Can I?”
Jesus never made any audible response to the child’s query, but she often felt a little tug at her heart which caused her to fly to her spelling-book and learn one or two difficult words with frantic zeal.
As she ran downstairs now, she reflected over the problem of her mother’s kisses being softest and her mother’s eyes kindest when her own eyes were bright and her little figure radiant; and she also thought of the other problem, of her grave-eyed father always loving her, no matter whether her frock was torn, her hair untidy, or her little face smudged.
Because of her cherubic face, Sibyl had been called the Angel when quite a baby, and somehow the name stuck to her, particularly on the lips of her father. It is true she had a sparkling face and soft features and blue eyes; but she was, when all is said and done, a somewhat worldly little angel, and had, both in the opinions of Miss Winstead and nurse, as many faults as could well be packed into the breast of one small child. Both admitted that Sibyl had a very loving heart, but she was fearless, headstrong, at times even defiant, and was very naughty and idle over her lessons.
Miss Winstead was fond of taking complaints of Sibyl to Mrs. Ogilvie, and she was fond, also, of hoping against hope that these complaints would lead to satisfactory results; but, as a matter of fact, Mrs. Ogilvie never troubled herself about them. She was the sort of woman who took the lives of others with absolute unconcern; her own life absorbed every thought and every feeling. Anything that added to her own comfort was esteemed; anything that worried her was shut as much as possible out of sight. She was fond of Sibyl in her careless way. There were moments when she was proud of the pretty and attractive child, but she had not the slightest idea of attempting to mould her character, nor of becoming her instructress. One of Mrs. Ogilvie’s favorite theories was that mothers should not educate their children.
“The child should go to the mother for love and petting,” she would say. “Miss Winstead may complain of the darling as much as she pleases, but need not suppose that I shall scold her.”
It was Sibyl’s father, after all, who now and then spoke to her about her unworthy conduct.
“You are called the Angel, and you must try to act up to your name,” he said on one of these occasions, fixing his own dark-grey eyes on the little girl.
“Oh, yes, father,” answered the Angel, “but, you see, I wasn’t born that way, same as you was. It seems a pity, doesn’t it? You’re perfect and I am not. I can’t help the way I was born, can I, father?”
“No; no one is perfect, darling,” replied the father.
“You are,” answered the Angel, and she gave her head a defiant toss. “You and my mother and my beautiful Lord Jesus up in heaven. But I’ll try to please you, father, so don’t knit up your forehead.”
Sibyl as she spoke laid her soft hand on her father’s brow and tried to smooth out some wrinkles.
“Same as if you was an old man,” she said: “but you’re perfect, perfect, and I love you, I love you,” and she encircled his neck with her soft arms and pressed many kisses on his face.
On these occasions Philip Ogilvie felt uncomfortable, for he was a man with many passions and beset with infirmities, and at the time when Sibyl praised him most, when she uttered her charming, confident words, and raised her eyes full of absolute faith to his, he was thinking with a strange acute pain at his heart of a transaction which he might undertake and of a temptation which he knew well was soon to be presented to him.
“I should not like the child to know about it,” was his reflection; “but all the same, if I do it, if I fall, it will be for her sake, for hers alone.”