The Little White Horse

chapter 1

The carriage gave another lurch, and Maria Merryweather, miss Heliotrope, and Wiggins once more fell into each other's arms, signed, gasped, righted themselves, and fixed their attention upon those objects which were for each of them at this trying moment the source of courage and strength.

Maria gazed at her boots. Miss Heliotrope restored her spectacles to their proper position, picked up the worn brown volume of french essays from the floor, popped a peppermint into her mouth and peered once more in the dim light at the wiggly black print on the yellowed page. Wiggins meanwhile pursued with his tongue the taste of the long-since-digested dinner that still lingered among his whiskers.

Humanity can be roughly divided into three sorts of people- those who find comfort in literature, those who find comfort in personal adornment, and those who find comfort in food; and miss Heliotrope, Maria, and Wiggins were typical representatives of their own sort of people.

Maria must be described first, because she is the heroine of the story. In this year of grace 1842 she was thirteen years old and was considered plain, with her queer silvery-grey eyes that were so disconcertingly penetrating, her straight reddish hair and thin pale face with it's distressing freckles. Yet her little figure, small as that of a fairy's child, with a backbone as straight as a poker, was very dignified, and she had exquisitely tiny feet, of which she was inordinately proud. They were her chief beauty, she knew, which was why she took, if possible, a more burning interest in her boots than in her mittens and gowns and bonnets.

And the boots she had on today we're calculated to raise the lowest spirits, for they were made of sofest grey leather, sewn with crystal beads round the tops, and we're lined with snow-white lamb's wool. The crystal beads, as it happened, could not be seen, because Maria's grey silk dress and warm grey wool pelisse, also trimmed with white lamb's wool, reached to her ankles, but she herself knew they were there, and the thought of them gave her a moral strength that can scarcely be overestimated.

She rested herself against the thought of those beads, just as in a lesser degree she rested herself against the thought of the piece of purple ribbon that was wound about her slender waist beneath the pelisse, the little bunch of violets that was tucked so far away inside the recesses f her grey velvet bonnet it was scarcely visible, and the grey silk mittens adorning the small hands that were hidden inside the big white muff. For Maria was one of your true aristocrats; the perfection of the hidden things was even more important to her than the outward show. Not that she did not like the outward show. She did. She was a snowy little thing, even when dressed in the greys and purples of the bereaved.

For Maria was an orphan. Her mother had died in her babyhood and her father just two months ago, leaving so many debts that everything he possessed, including the beautiful London house with the fanlight over the door and the tall windows looking out over the garden of the quite London square, where maria had live throughout the whole of her short life, had had to be sold to pay them. When the lawyers had at last settled everything to their satisfaction, it was that there was only just enough money left to convey her and miss Heliotrope and Wiggins by coach to the west country, a part of the world that they had never seen, where they were to live with Maria's second cousin, her nearest living relative, sir Benjamin Merryweather, whom they had never seen either, in his manor-house of moonacre in the village of silverydew.

But it was not her orphaned state that had depressed maria and made her turn to the contemplation of her boots of comfort. Her mother she did not remember, her father, a soldier, who had nearly always been abroad with his regiment, and who did not care for children anyhow, had never had much hold upon her affections; not the hold that's miss Heliotrope had, who had come to her when she was only a few months old, had been first her nurse and then her governess, and had lavished upon her all the love that she had ever known. No, what was depressing Maria was the wretchedness of this journey and the discomfort of country life that it surely foreboded.