IX. FLIGHTS…

IX. FLIGHTS

Have you no wit, manners, nor honesty, but to gabble like tinkers at this time of night? Is there no respect of place, persons, nor time in you?--Twelfth-Night.

The summer holidays not only brought home Allen Brownlow from Eton, but renewed his mother’s intercourse with several of her friends, who so contrived their summer outing as to “see how poor little Mrs. Brownlow was getting on,” and she hailed them as fragments of her dear old former life.

Mr. and Mrs. Acton came to a farmhouse at Redford, about a mile and a half off, where Mr. Acton was to lay up a store of woodland and home sketches, and there were daily meetings for walks, and often out-of-door meals. Mr. Ogilvie declared that he was thus much more rested than by a long expedition in foreign scenery, and he and his sister stayed on, and usually joined in the excursion, whether it were premeditated or improvised, on foot, into copse or glade, or by train or waggonette, to ruined abbey or cathedral town.

Then came two sisters, whom old Mrs. Brownlow had befriended when the elder was struggling, as a daily governess, to provide home and education for the younger. Now, the one was a worthy, hard-working law-copier, the other an artist in a small way, who had transmogrified her name of Jane into Juanita or Nita, wore a crop, short petticoats, and was odd. She treated Janet on terms of equal friendship, and was thus a much more charming companion than Jessie. They always came into cheap sea-side lodgings in the vacation, but this year had settled themselves within ten minutes walk of the Folly, a title which became more and more applicable, in Kenminster eyes, to the Pagoda, and above all in those of its proper owner. Mrs. Robert Brownlow, in the calm dignity of the heiress, in a small way, of a good family, had a bare toleration for professional people, had regretted the vocation of her brother-in-law, and classed governesses and artists as “that kind of people,” so that Caroline’s association with them seemed to her absolute love of low company. She would have stirred up her husband to remonstrate, but he had seen more of the world than she had, and declared that there was no harm in Caroline’s friends. “He had met Mr. Acton in the reading-room, smoked pipes with him in the garden, and thought him a very nice fellow; his wife was the daughter of poor Cartwright of the Artillery, and a sensible ladylike woman as ever he saw.”

With a resigned sigh at the folly of mankind, his wife asked, “How about the others? That woman with the hair? and that man with the velvet coat? Jessie says Jock told her that he was a mere play-actor!”

“Jock told Jessie! Nonsense, my dear! The man is going out to China in the tea trade, and is come to take leave. I believe he did sing in public at one time; but Joe attended him in an illness which damaged his voice, and then he put him in the way of other work. You need not be afraid. Joe was one of the most particular men in the world in his own way.”

Mrs. Brownlow could do no more. She had found that her little sister-in-law could be saucy, and personal squabbles, as she justly thought, had better be avoided. She could only keep Jessie from the contamination by taking her out in the carriage and to garden parties, which the young lady infinitely preferred to long walks that tired her and spoilt her dress; to talk and laughter that she could not understand, and games that seemed to her stupid, though everybody else seemed to find them full of fun. True, Allen and Bobus were always ready to push and pull her through, and to snub Janet for quizzing her; but Jessie was pretty enough to have plenty of such homage at her command, and not specially to prefer that of her cousins, so that it cost her little to turn a deaf ear to all their invitations.

Her brothers were not of the same mind, for Rob was never happy out of sight of Jock. Johnny worshipped his aunt, and Joe was gregarious, so there was generally an accompanying rabble of six or seven boys, undistinguishable by outsiders, though very individual indeed in themselves and adding a considerable element of noise, high spirits, and mischievous enterprise. The man in the velvet coat, whose proper name was Orlando Hughes, was as much of a boy as any of them, and so could Mr. Acton be on occasion, thus giving a certain Bohemian air to their doings.

Things came to a crisis on one of the dog-days. Young Dr. Drake had brought his bride to show to his old friend, and they were staying at the Folly, while a college friend of Mr. Ogilvie’s, a London curate, had come to see him in the course of a cathedral tour, and had stayed on, under the attraction of the place, taking the duty for a few Sundays.

The weather was very sultry, forbidding exertion on the part of all save cricketers; but there was a match at Redford, and Kenminster was eager about it, so that all the boys, grown up or otherwise, walked over to see it, accompanied by Nita Ray with her inseparable Janet, meaning to study village groups and rustic sports. The other ladies walked in the cool to meet them at the Acton’s farmhouse, chiefly, it was alleged, in deference to the feelings of the bride, who could not brave the heat, but had never yet been so long separated from her bridegroom.

The little boys, however, were alone to be found at the farm, reporting that their elders had joined the cricket supper. So Mrs. Acton made them welcome, and spread her cloth in the greensward, whence could be seen the evening glow on the harvest fields. Then there was a feast of cherries, and delicious farmhouse bread and butter, and inexhaustible tea, which was renewed when the cricketers joined them, and called for their share.

Thus they did not set out on their homeward walk, over fragrant heath and dewy lanes, till just as the stars were coming out, and a magnificent red moon, scarcely past the full, was rising in the east, and the long rest, and fresh dewiness after the day’s heat, gave a delightful feeling of exhilaration.

Babie went skipping about in the silvery flood of light, quite wild with delight as they came out on the heath, and, darting up to Mr. Ogilvie, asked if now he did not think they might really see a fairy.

“Perhaps I do,” he said.

“Oh where, where, show me?”

“Ah! you’re the one that can’t see her.”

“What, not if I did my eyes with that Euphrasia and Verbena officinalis?” catching tight hold of his hand, as a bright red light went rapidly moving in a straight line in the valley beneath their feet.

“Robin Goodfellow,” said Mr. Hughes, overhearing her, and immediately began to sing--

“I know a bank”--

Then the curate, as he finished, began to sing some other appropriate song, and Nita Ray and others joined in. It was very pretty, very charming in the moonlight, very like “Midsummer Night’s Dream;” but Mary Ogilvie, who was a good way behind, felt a start of dismay as the clear notes pealed back to her. She longed to suggest a little expediency; but she was impeded; for poor Miss Ray, entirely unused to long country walks and nocturnal expeditions, and further tormented by tight boots, was panting up the hill far in the rear, half-frightened, and a good deal distressed, and could not, for very humanity’s sake, be left behind.

“And after all,” thought Mary, as peals of the boys’ merry laughter came to her, and then again echoes of “spotted snakes with double tongue” awoke the night echoes; “this is such a solitary place that it cannot signify, if they will only have the sense to stop when we get into the roads.”

But they hadn’t. Mary heard a chorus from “Der Freischutz,” beginning just as she was dragging her companion over a stile, which had been formidable enough by day, but was ten times worse in the confusing shadows. That brought them into a lane darkened by its high hedges, where there was nothing for it but to let Miss Ray tightly grapple her arm, while the songs came further and further on the wind, and Mary felt the conviction that middle-aged spinsters must reckon on being forgotten, and left behind alike by brothers, sisters, and friends.

Nor did they come up with the party till they found them waiting in the road, close to the Rays’ lodgings, having evidently just missed them, for Mr. Ogilvie and the clergyman were turning back to look for them when they were gladly hailed, half apologised to, half laughed at by a babel of voices, among which Nita’s was the loudest, informing her sister that she had lost the best bit of all, for just at the turn of the lane there had come on them Babie’s fiery-eyed monster, which had “burst on the path,” when they were in mid song, flashing over them, and revealing, first a horse, and then a brougham, wherein there sat the august forms of Colonel and Mrs. Brownlow, going home from a state dinner, the lady’s very marabouts quivering with horror.

Mary stepped up to Nita, and gave her a sharp, severe grasp.

“Hush! remember their boys are here,” she whispered; and, with an exaggerated gesture, Nita looked about her in affected alarm, and, seeing that none were near, added--

“Thank you; I was just going to say it would be a study for Punch”

“O do send it up, they’ll never know it,” cried Janet; but there Caroline interfered--

“Hush, Janet, we ought to be at home. Don’t stand here, Armine is tired to death! 11.5 at the station to-morrow. Good-night.”

They parted, and Mary and her brother turned away to their own home. If it had not been for the presence of the curate, Mary would have said a good deal on the way home. As it was, she was so silent as to inspire her brother with enough compunction for having deserted her, to make him follow her, when she went to her own room. “Mary, I am sorry we missed you,” he said; “I ought to have looked about for you more, but I thought--”

“Nonsense, David; of course I do not mind that, if only I could have stopped all that singing.”

“That singing; why it was very pretty, wasn’t it?”

“Pretty indeed! Did it never occur to you what a scrape you may be getting that poor little thing into with her relations, and yourself, too?”

David looked more than half-amused, and she proceeded more resolutely--

“Well! what do you think must be Mrs. Brownlow’s opinion of what she saw and heard to-night? I blame myself exceedingly for not having urged the setting off sooner; but you must remember that what is all very well for holiday people, only here for a time, may do infinite mischief to residents.”

David only observed, “I didn’t want all those men, if that’s what you mean. They made the noise, not I.”

“No, nor I; but we swelled the party, and I am much disposed to believe that the best thing we can do is to take ourselves off, or do anything to break up this set.”

He looked for a moment much disconcerted; but then with a little masculine superiority, answered--

“Well, well, we’ll think over it, Mary. See how it appears to you to-morrow when you aren’t tired,” and then, with a smile and a kiss, bade her good-night.

“So that’s what we get,” said Mary, to herself, half amused, half annoyed; “those men think it is all because one is left behind in the dark! David is the best boy in the world, but there’s not a man of them all who has a notion of what gets a woman into trouble! I believe he was rather gratified than otherwise to be found out on a lark. Well, I’ll talk to Clara; she will have some sense!”

They were all to meet at the station the next morning, to go to an old castle, about an hour from Kenminster by railway; and they filled the platform, armed with sketching tools, sandwich baskets, botanical tins, and all other appliances; but when Mr. Ogilvie accosted Mrs. Joseph Brownlow, saying, “You have only half your boys,” she looked up, with a drolly guilty air, saying, “No, there’s an embargo on the other poor fellows.”

They had just taken their seats, and the train was in motion, when a heated headlong boy came dashing over the platform, and clung to the door of the carriage, standing on the step. It was Johnny. Orlando Hughes, who was next the window, grasped his hands, and, in answer to the cries of dismay and blame that greeted him, he called out, “Yes, here I am; Rob and Joe couldn’t run so fast.”

“Then you’ve got leave?” asked his aunt.

Johnny’s grin said “No.”

She looked up at Mr. Ogilvie in much vexation and anxiety.

“Don’t say any more to him now. It might put him in great danger. Wait till the next station,” he said.

It was a stopping train, and ten minutes brought a halt, when the guard came up in a fury, and Johnny found no sympathy for his bold attempt. Carey had no notion of fostering flat disobedience, and she told Johnny that unless he would promise to go home by himself and beg his father’s pardon, she should stay behind and go back with him, for she could have no pleasure in an expedition with him when he was behaving so outrageously.

The boy looked both surprised and abashed. His affection for his aunt was very great, as for one who had opened to him the gates of a new world, both within himself and beyond himself. He would not hear of her giving up the expedition, and promised her with all his heart to walk home, and confess, “Though ‘twasn’t papa, but mamma!” were his last words, as they left him on the platform, crestfallen, but with a twinkle in his eye, and with the station-master keeping watch over him as a dangerous subject.

Mr. Ogilvie said it would do the boy good for life; Caroline mourned over him a little, and wondered how his mother would treat him; and Mary sat and thought till the arrival at their destination, when they had to walk to the castle, dragging their appurtenances, and then to rouse their energies to spread out the luncheon.

Then, when there had been the usual amount of mirth, mischief, and mishap, and the party had dispersed, some to sketch, some to scramble, some to botanize, the “Duck and Drake to spoon,”--as said the boys, Mary Ogilvie found a turfy nook where she could hold council with Mrs. Acton about their poor little friend, for whose welfare she was seriously uneasy.

But Clara did not sympathise as much as she expected, having been much galled by Mrs. Robert Brownlow’s supercilious manner, and thinking the attempt to conciliate her both unworthy and useless.

“Of course I do not mean that poor Carey should truckle to her,” said Mary, rather nettled at the implication; “but I don’t think these irregular hours, and all this roaming about the country at all times, can be well in themselves for her or the children.”

“My dear Mary, did you never take a party of children into the country in the spring for the first time? If not, you never saw the prettiest and most innocent of intoxications. I had once to take the little Pyrtons to their place in the country one April and May, months that they had always spent in London; and I assure you they were perfectly mad, only with the air, the sight of the hawthorns, and all the smells. I was obliged to be content with what they could do, not what ought to be done, of lessons. There was no sitting still on a fine morning. I was as bad myself; the blood seemed to dance in one’s veins, and a room to be a prison.”

“This is not spring,” said Mary.

“No, but she began in spring, and habits were formed.”

“No doubt, but they cannot be good. They keep up flightiness and excitability.”

“Oh, that’s grief, poor dear!”

“We bain’t carousing, we be dissembling grief, as the farmer told the clergyman who objected to merry-making after a funeral,” said Mary, rather severely. Then she added, seeing Clara looked annoyed, “You think me hard on poor dear Carey, but indeed I am not doubting her affection or her grief.”

“Remember, a woman with children cannot give herself entirely up to sorrow without doing them harm.”

“Poor Carey, I am sure I do not want to see her given up to sorrow, only to have her a little more moderate, and perhaps select--so as not to do herself harm with her relations--who after all must be more important to her than any outsiders.”

The artist’s wife could not but see things a little differently from the schoolmaster’s sister, who moreover knew nothing of Carey’s former life; and Clara made answer--

“Sending her down to these people was the greatest error of dear good Dr. Brownlow’s life.”

“I am not sure of that. Blood is thicker than water.”

“But between sisters-in-law it is apt to be only ill-blood, and very turbid.”

“For shame, Clara.”

“Well, Mary, you must allow something for human nature’s reluctance to be treated as something not quite worthy of a handshake from a little country town Serene Highness! I may be allowed to doubt whether Dr. Brownlow would not have done better to leave her unbound to those who can never be congenial.”

“Granting that (not that I do grant it, for the Colonel is worthy), should not she be persuaded to conform herself.”

“To purr and lay eggs? My dear, that did not succeed with the ugly duckling, even in early life.”

“Not after it had been among the swans? You vain Clara!”

“I only lay claim to having seen the swans--not to having brought many specimens down here.”

“Such as that Nita, or Mr. Hughes?”

“More like the other bird, certainly,” said Clara, smiling; “but Mary, if you had but seen what that house was. Joe Brownlow was one of those men who make themselves esteemed and noted above their actual position. He was much thought of as a lecturer, and would have had a much larger practice but for his appointment at the hospital. It was in the course of the work he had taken for a friend gone out of town that he caught the illness that killed him. His lectures brought men of science about him, and his practice had made him acquainted with us poor Bohemians, as you seem to think us. Old Mrs. Brownlow had means of her own, and theirs was quite a wealthy house among our set. Any of us were welcome to drop into five o’clock tea, or at nine at night, and the pleasantness and good influence were wonderful. The motherliness and yet the enthusiasm of Mrs. Brownlow made her the most delightful old lady I ever saw. I can’t describe how good she was about my marriage, and many more would say they owed all that was brightest and best in them to that house. And there was Carey, like a little sunshiny fairy, the darling of everyone. No, not spoilt--I see what you are going to say.”

“Only as we all spoilt her at school. Nobody but her Serene Highness ever could help making a pet of her.”

“That’s more reasonable, Mary,” said Mrs. Acton, in a more placable voice; “she did plenty of hard work, and did not spare herself, or have what would seem indulgences to most women; but nobody could see the light of her eyes and smile without trying to make it sparkle up; and she was just the first thought in life to her husband and his mother. I am sure in my governess days I used to think that house paradise, and her the undoubted queen of it. And now, that you should turn against her, Mary, when she is uncrowned, and unappreciated, and brow-beaten.”

She had worked herself up, and had tears in her eyes.

Mary laughed a little.

“It is hard, when I only want to keep her from making herself be unappreciated.”

“And I say it is in vain!” cried Clara, “for it is not in the nature of the people to appreciate her, and nothing will make them get on together.”

Poor Mary! she had expected her friend to be more reasonable and less defensive; but she remembered that even at school Clara had always protected Caroline whenever she had attempted to lecture her. All she further tried to say was--

“Then you won’t help me to advise her to be more guarded, and not shock them?”

“I will not tease the poor little thing, when she has enough to torment her already. If you had known her husband, and watched her last winter, you would be only too thankful to see her a little more like herself.”

Mary was silent, finding that she should only argue round and round if they went on, and feeling that Clara thought her old-maidish, and could not enter into her sense that, the balance-weight being gone, gusts of wind ought to be avoided. She sat wondering whether she herself was prim and old-maidish, or whether she was right in feeling it a duty to expostulate and deliver her testimony.

There was no doing it on this day. Carey was always surrounded by children and guests, and in an eager state of activity; but though again they all went home in the cool of the evening, an attempt to sing in the second-class carriage, which they filled entirely, was quashed immediately--no one knew how, and nothing worse happened than that a very dusty set, carrying odd botanical, entomological, and artistic wares, trailed through the streets of Kenminster, just as Mrs. Coffinkey, escorted by her maid, was walking primly home from drinking tea at the vicarage.

Still Mary’s reflections only strengthened her resolution. On the next day, which was Sunday, she ascended to the Folly, at about four o’clock in the afternoon, and found the family, including the parrot, spread out upon the lawn under the shade of the acacia, the mother reading to them.

“Oh, please don’t stop, mother,” cried Babie; while the more courteous Armine exclaimed--

“Miss Ogilvie, don’t you like to hear about Bevis and Jocelin Joliffe?”

“You don’t mind waiting while we finish the chapter,” added their mother; “then we break up our sitting.”

“Pray go on with the chapter,” said Mary, rather coolly, for she was a good deal taken aback at finding them reading “Woodstock” on a Sunday; “but afterwards, I do want to speak to you.”

“Oh! don’t want to speak to me. The Colonel has been speaking to me,” she said, with a cowering, shuddering sort of action, irresistibly comic.

“And he ate up half our day,” bemoaned more than one of the boys.

Miss Ogilvie sat down a little way off, not wishing to listen to “Woodstock” on a Sunday, and trying to work out the difficult Sabbatarian question in her mind.

“There!” said Caroline, closing the book, amid exclamations of “I know who Lewis Kerneguy was.” “Wasn’t Roger Wildrake jolly?” “O, mother, didn’t he cut off Trusty Tomkins’ head?” “Do let us have a wee bit more, mother; Miss Ogilvie won’t mind.”

But Carey saw that she did mind, and answered--

“Not now; there won’t be time to feed all the creatures, or to get nurse’s Sunday nosegays, if you don’t begin.” Then, coming up to her guest, she said, “Now is your time, Mary; we shall have the Rays and Mr. Hughes in presently; but you see we are too worldly and profane for the Kencroft boys on Sunday; and so they make experiments in smoking, with company less desirable, I must say, than Sir Harry Lee’s. Am I very bad to read what keeps mine round me?”

“Is it an old fashion with you?”

“Well, no; but then we had what was better than a thousand stories! And this is only a feeble attempt to keep up a little watery reflection of the old sunshine.”

It was a watery reflection indeed!

“And could it not be with something that would be--”

“Dull and goody?” put in Carey. “No, no, my dear, that would be utterly futile. You can’t catch my birds without salt. Can we, Polly?”

To which the popinjay responded, “We are all Mother Carey’s chickens.”

“I did mean salt--very real salt,” said Mary, rather sadly.

“I have not got the recipe;” said Carey. “Indeed I do try to do what must be done. My boys can hold their own in Bible and Catechism questions! Ask your brother if they can’t. And Army is a dear little fellow, with a bit of the angel, or of his father, in him; but when we’ve done our church, I see no good in decorous boredom; and if I did, what would become of the boys?”

“I don’t agree to the necessity of boredom,” said Mary; “but let that pass. There are things I wanted to say.”

“I knew it was coming. The Colonel has been at me already, levelling his thunders at my devoted head. Won’t that do?”

“Not if you heed him so little.”

“My dear, if I heeded, I should be annihilated. When he says ‘My good little sister,’ I know he means ‘You little idiot;’ so if I did not think of something else, what might not be the consequence? Why, he said I was not behaving decently!”

“No more you are.”

“And that I had no proper feeling,” continued she, laughing almost hysterically.

“No one can wonder at his being pained. It ought never to have happened.”

“Are you gone over to Mrs. Grundy? However, there’s this comfort, you’ll not mention Mrs. Coffinkey’s sister-in-law.”

“I’m sure the Colonel didn’t!”

“Ellen does though, with tragic effect.”

“You are not like yourself, Carey.”

“No, indeed I’m not! I was a happy creature a little while ago; or was it a very long, long time ago? Then I had everybody to help me and make much of me! And now I’ve got into a great dull mist, and am always knocking my head against something or somebody; and when I try to keep up the old friendships and kindnesses--poor little fragments as they are--everybody falls upon me, even you, Mary.”

“Pardon me, dearest. Some friendships and kindnesses that were once admirable, may be less suitable to your present circumstances.”

“As if I didn’t know that!” said Carey, with an angry, hurt little laugh; “and so I waited to be chaperoned up to the eyes between Clara Acton and the Duck in the very house with me. Now, Mary, I put it to you. Has one word passed that could do harm? Isn’t it much more innocent than all the Coffinkey gossip? I have no doubt Mrs. Coffinkey’s sister-in-law looks up from her black-bordered pocket-handkerchief to hear how Mrs. Brownlow’s sister-in-law went to the cricket-match. Do you know, Robert really thought I had been there? I only wonder how many I scored. I dare say Mrs. Coffinkey’s sister-in-law knows.”

“It just shows how careful you should be.”

“And I wonder what would become of the children if I shut myself up with a pile of pocket-handkerchiefs bordered an inch deep. What right have they to meddle with my ways, and my friends, and my boys?”

“Not the Coffinkeys, certainly,” said Mary; “but indeed, Carey, I myself was uncomfortable at that singing in the lanes at eleven at night.”

“It wasn’t eleven,” said Carey, perversely.

“Only 10.50--eh?”

“But what was the possible harm in it?”

“None at all in itself, only remember the harm it may do to the children for you to be heedless of people’s opinion, and to get a reputation for flightiness and doing odd things.”

“I couldn’t be like the Coffinkey pattern any more than I could be tied down to a rope walk.”

“But you need not do things that your better sense must tell you may be misconstrued. Surely there was a wish that you should live near the Colonel and be guided by him.”

“Little knowing that his guidance would consist in being set at me by Ellen and the Coffinkeys!”

“Nonsense,” said Mary, vexed enough to resume their old school-girl manners. “You know I am not set on by anybody, and I tell you that if you do not pull up in time, and give no foundation for ill-natured comments, your children will never get over it in people’s estimation. And as for themselves, a little steadiness and regularity would be much better for their whole dispositions.”

“It is holiday time,” said Carey, in a tone of apology.

“If it is only in holiday time--”

“The country has always seemed like holiday. You see we used to go--all of us--to some seaside place, and be quite free there, keeping no particular hours, and being so intensely happy. I haven’t yet got over the feeling that it is only for a time, and we shall go back into the dear old home and its regular ways.” Then clasping her hands over her side as though to squeeze something back, she broke out, “O Mary, Mary, you mustn’t scold me! You mustn’t bid me tie myself to regular hours till this summer is over. If you knew the intolerable stab when I recollect that he is gone--gone--gone for ever, you would understand that there’s nothing for it but jumping up and doing the first thing that comes to hand. Walking it down is best. Oh! what will become of me when the mornings get dark, and I can’t get up and rush into those woods? Yes”--as Mary made some affectionate gesture--“I know I have gone on in a wild way, but who would not be wild who had lost him? And then they goad me, and think me incapable of proper feeling,” and she laughed that horrid little laugh. “So I am, I suppose; but feeling won’t go as other people think proper. Let me alone, Mary, I won’t damage the children. They are Joe’s children, and I know what he wanted and wished for them better than Robert or anybody else. But I must go my own way, and do what I can bear, and as I can, or--or I think my heart would break quite, and that would be worse for them than anything.”

Mary had tears in her eyes, drawn forth by the vehement passion of grief apparent in the whole tone of her poor little friend. She had no doubts of Carey’s love, sorrow, or ability, but she did seriously doubt of her wisdom and judgment, and thought her undisciplined. However, she could say no more, for Nita Ray and Janet were advancing on them.

The next day Caroline was in bed with one of her worst headaches. Mary felt that she had been a cruel and prim old duenna, and meekly bore Clara’s reproachful glances.

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X. ELLEN’S MAGNUM BONUMS

He put in his thumb And he pulled out a plum, And cried, “What a good boy am I!” Jack Horner.

Whether it were from the effects of the warnings, or from that of native good sense, from that time forward Mrs. Joseph Brownlow sobered down, and became less distressing to her sister-in-law. Mary carried off her brother to Wales, and the Acton and Ray party dispersed, while Dr. and Mrs. Lucas came for a week, giving much relief to Mrs. Brownlow, who could discuss the family affairs with them in a manner she deemed unbecoming with Mrs. Acton or Miss Ogilvie. Had Caroline heard the consultation, she would have acquitted Ellen of malice; and indeed her Serene Highness was much too good to gossip about so near a connection, and had only confided her wonder and perplexity at the strange phenomenon to her favourite first cousin, who unfortunately was not equally discreet.

With the end of the holidays finished also the trying series of first anniversaries, and their first excitements of sorrow, so that it became possible to be more calm and quiet.

Moreover, two correctives came of themselves to Caroline. The first was Janet’s inordinate correspondence with Nita Ray, and the discovery that the girl held herself engaged to stay with the sisters in November.

“Without asking me!” she exclaimed, aghast.

“I thought you heard us talking,” said Janet, so carelessly, that her mother put on her dignity.

“I certainly had no conception of an invitation being given and accepted without reference to me.”

“Come, now, Mother Carey,” said this modern daughter; “don’t be cross! We really didn’t know you weren’t attending.”

“If I had I should have said it was impossible, as I say now. You can never have thought over the matter!”

“Haven’t I? When I am doing no good here, only wasting time?”

“That is my fault. We will set to work at once steadily.”

“But my classes and my lectures!”

“You are not so far on but that our reading together will teach you quite as much as lectures.”

Janet looked both sulky and scornful, and her mother continued--

“It is not as if we had not modern books, and I think I know how to read them so as to be useful to you.”

“I don’t like getting behindhand with the world.”

“You can’t keep up even with the world without a sound foundation. Besides, even if it were more desirable, the Rays cannot afford to keep you, nor I to board you there.”

“I am to pay them by helping Miss Ray in her copying.”

“Poor Miss Ray!” exclaimed Carey, laughing. “Does she know your handwriting?”

“You do not know what I can do,” said Janet, with dignity.

“Yes, I hope to see it for myself, for you must put this notion of going to London out of your head. I am sure Miss Ray did not give the invitation--no, nor second it. Did she, Janet?”

Janet blushed a little, and muttered something about Miss Ray being afraid of stuck-up people.

“I thought so! She is a good, sensible person, whom grandmamma esteemed very much; but she has never been able to keep her sister in order; and as to trusting you to their care, or letting you live in their set, neither papa nor grandmamma would ever have thought of it.”

“You only say so because her Serene Highness turns up her nose at everything artistic and original.”

“Janet, you forget yourself,” Caroline exclaimed, in a tone which quelled the girl, who went muttering away; and no more was ever heard of the Ray proposal, which no doubt the elder sister at least had never regarded as anything but an airy castle.

However, Caroline was convinced that the warnings against the intimacy had not been so uncalled for as she had believed; for she found, when she tried to tighten the reins, that her daughter was restive, and had come to think herself a free agent, as good as grown up. Spirit was not, however, lacking to Caroline, and when she had roused herself, she made Janet understand that she was not to be disregarded or disobeyed. Regular hours were instituted, and the difficulty of getting broken into them again was sufficient proof to her that she had done wrong in neglecting them. Armine yawned portentously, and declared that he could not learn except at his own times; and Babie was absolutely naughty more than once, when her mother suffered doubly in punishing her from the knowledge of whose fault it was. However, they were good little things, and it was not hard to re-establish discipline with them. After a little breaking in, Babie gave it to her dolls as her deliberate opinion that “Wegulawity settles one’s mind. One knows when to do what.”

Janet could not well complain of the regularity in itself, though she did cavil at the actual arrangements, and they were altered all round to please her, and she showed a certain contempt for her teacher in the studies she resumed with her mother; but after the dictionary, encyclopaedia and other authorities, including Mr. Ogilvie, proved almost uniformly to be against her whenever there was a difference of opinion, she had sense enough to perceive that she could still learn something at home.

Moreover, after one or two of these references, Mr. Ogilvie offered to look over her Latin and Greek exercises, and hear her construe on his Saturday half-holidays, declaring that it would be quite a refreshment. Caroline was shocked at the sacrifice, but she could not bear to affront her daughter, so she consented; but as she thought Janet was not old enough to need a chaperon, and as her boys did want her, she was hardly ever present at the lessons.

Moreover, Mr. Ogilvie had a lecturer from London to give weekly lectures on physical science to his boys, and opened the doors to ladies. This was a great satisfaction, chiefly for the sake of Bobus and Jock, but also for Janet’s and her mother’s. The difficulty was to beat up for ladies enough to keep one another in countenance; but happily two families in the country, and one bright little bride in the town, were found glad to open their ears, so that Ellen had no just cause of disapproval of the attendance of her sister and niece.

Ellen had more cause to sigh when Michaelmas came, and for the first time taught poor Carey what money matters really meant. Throughout her married life, her only stewardship had concerned her own dress and the children’s; Mrs. Brownlow’s occasional plans of teaching her housekeeping had always fallen through, Janet being always her grandmamma’s deputy.

Thus Janet and nurse had succeeded to the management when poor Carey was too ill and wretched to attend to it; and it had gone on in their hands at the Pagoda. Janet was pleased to be respected accordingly by her aunt, who always liked her the best, in spite of her much worse behaviour, for were not her virtues her own, and her vices her mother’s?

Caroline had paid the weekly books, and asked no questions, until the winding up of the executor’s business; and the quarterly settlement of accounts made startling revelations that the balance at her bankers was just eleven shillings and fourpence halfpenny, and what was nearly as bad, the discovery was made in the presence of her fellow executor, who could not help giving a low whistle. She turned pale, and gasped for breath, in absolute amazement, for she was quite sure they were living at much less expense than in London, and there had been no outgoings worth mentioning for dress or journeys. What were they to do? Surely they could not live upon less! Was it her fault?

She was so much distressed, that the good-natured Colonel pitied her, and answered kindly--

“My good little sister, you were inexperienced. You will do better another year.”

“But there’s nothing to go on upon!”

He reminded her of the rent for the London house, and the dividends that must soon come in.

“Then it will be as bad as ever! How can we live more cheaply than we do?”

“Ellen is an excellent manager, and you had better consult her on the scale of your expenditure.”

Caroline’s spirit writhed, but before she had time to say anything, or talk to Janet, the Colonel had heard his excellent housewife’s voice, and called her into the council. She was as good as possible, too serenely kind to manifest surprise or elation at the fulfilment of her forebodings. To be convicted of want of economy would have been so dreadful and disgraceful, that she deeply felt for poor Caroline, and dealt with her tenderly and delicately, even when the weekly household books were opened, and disclosed how much had been spent every week in items, the head and front of which were oft repeated in old nurse’s self-taught writing--

“Man...... Glas of beare. 1d. Creme........... 3d.”

For had not the Colonel’s wife warned against the endless hospitality of glasses of beer to all messengers; and had not unlimited cream with strawberries and apple-tarts been treated as a kind of spontaneous luxury produced at the Belforest farm agent’s? To these, and many other small matters, Caroline was quite relieved to plead guilty, and to promise to do her best by personal supervision; and Ellen set herself to devise further ways of reduction, not realising how hopeless it is to prescribe for another person’s household difficulties. It is not in the nature of things that such advice should be palatable, and the proverb about the pinching of the shoe is sure to be realised.

“Too many servants,” said prudence. “If old nurse must be provided for--and she ought to have saved enough to do without--it would be much better to pension her off, or get her into an almshouse.”

Caroline tried to endure, as she made known that she viewed nurse as a sacred charge, about whom there must be no question.

Ellen quietly said--

“Then it is no use to argue, but she must be allowed no more discretion in the housekeeping.”

“No, I shall do that myself,” said Caroline.

“An extravagant cook.”

“That may be my fault. I will try to judge of that.”

“Irregular hours.”

“They shall end with the holidays.”

There was still another maid, whom Ellen said was only kept to wait on nurse, but who, Caroline said, did all their needlework, both making and mending.

“That,” said Ellen, “I should have thought you and Janet could do. I do nearly all our work with the girls’ help; I am happy to say that Jessie is an excellent needlewoman, and Essie and Ellie can do something. I only direct the nursery maid; I never trust anything to servants.”

“I could never bear not to trust people,” said Caroline.

Ellen sighed, believing that she would soon be cured of that; and Carey added--

“On true principles of economy, surely it is better that Emma, who knows how, should mend the clothes, than that I should botch them up in any way, when I can earn more than she costs me!”

“Earn!”

“Yes; I can model, and I can teach. Was I not brought up to it?”

“Yes, but now it is impossible! It is not a larger income that you want, but proper attention to details in the spending of it, as I will show you.”

Whereupon Mrs. Brownlow, in her neat figures, built up a pretty little economical scheme, based on a thorough knowledge of the subject. Caroline tried to follow her calculations, but a dreaminess came over her; she found herself saying “Yes,” without knowing what she was assenting to; and while Ellen was discoursing on coals and coke, she was trying to decide which of her casts she could bear to offer for sale, and going off into the dear old associations connected with each, so that she was obliged at the end, instead of giving an unqualified assent, to say she would think it over; and Ellen, who had marked her wandering eye, left off with a conviction that she had wasted her breath.

Certainly she was not prepared for the proposal with which Mother Carey almost rushed into the room the next day, just as she was locking up her wine, and the Colonel lingering over his first glance at the day’s Times.

“I know what to do! Miss James is not coming back? And you have not heard of any one? Then, if you would only let me teach your girls with mine! You know that is what I really can do. Yes, indeed, I would be regular. I always was. You know I was, Robert, till I came here, and didn’t quite know what I was about; and I have been regular ever since the end of the holidays, and I really can teach.”

“My dear sister,” edged in the Colonel, as she paused for breath, “no one questions your ability, only the fitness of--”

“I had thought over two things,” broke in Caroline again. “If you don’t like me to have Jessie, and Essie, and Ellie, I would offer to prepare little boys. I’ve been more used to them than to girls, and I know Mr. Ogilvie would be glad. I could have the little Wrights, and Walter Leslie, and three or four more directly, but I thought you might like the other way better.”

“I can see no occasion for either,” said Ellen. “You need no increase in income, only to attend to details.”

“And I had rather do what I can--than what I can’t,” said Caroline.

“Every lady should understand how to superintend her own household,” said her Serene Highness.

“Granted; oh, granted, Ellen! I’m going to superintend with all my might and main, but I don’t want to be my own upper servant, and I know I should make no hand of it, and I had much rather earn something by my wits. I can do it best in the way I was trained; and you know it is what I have been used to ever since my own children were born.”

Ellen heaved a sigh at this obtuseness towards what she viewed as the dignified and ladylike mission of the well-born woman, not to be the bread-winner, but the preserver and steward, of the household. Here was poor little Caroline so ignorant as actually to glory in having been educated for a governess!

The Colonel, wanting to finish his Times in peace, looked up and said, with the gracious tone he always used to his brother’s wife--

“My good little sister, it is very praiseworthy in you to wish to exert yourself, and very kind and proper to desire to begin at home, but you must allow us a little time to consider.”

She took this as a hint to retreat; and her Serene Highness likewise feeling it a dismissal, tried at once to obviate all ungraciousness by saying, “We are preserving our magnum bonums, Caroline dear; I will send you some.”

“Magnum bonum!” gasped Caroline, hearing nothing but the name. “Do you know--?”

“I know the recipe of course, and can give you an excellent one. I will come over by-and-by and explain it to you.”

Caroline stood confounded. Had Joe revealed all to his brother? Was it to be treated as a domestic nostrum? “Then you know what the magnum bonum is?” she faltered.

“Are you asking as a philosopher,” said the Colonel, amused by her tone

“I don’t know what you mean, Colonel,” said his wife. “I offered Caroline a basket of magnum bonums for preserving, and one would think I had said something very extraordinary.”

“Perhaps it is my cockney ignorance,” said Caroline, beginning to breathe freely, and thinking it would have been less oppressive if Sua Serenita would have either laughed or scolded, instead of gravely leading her past the red-baize door which shut out the lower regions to the room where white armies of jam-pots stood marshalled, and in the midst two or three baskets of big yellow plums, which awoke in her a remembrance of their name, and set her laughing, thanking, and preparing to carry home the basket.

This, however, as she was instantly reminded, was not country-town manners. The gardener was to be sent with them, and Ellen herself would copy out the recipe, and by-and-by bring it, with full directions.

Each lady felt herself magnanimously forbearing, as Caroline went home to the lessons, and Ellen repaired to her husband on his morning inspection of his hens and chickens.

“Poor thing,” she said, “there are great allowances to be made for her. I believe she wishes to do right.”

“She knows how to teach,” rejoined the Colonel. “Bobus is nearly at the head of the school, and Johnny has improved greatly since he has been so much with her.”

“Johnny was always clever,” said his mother. “For my part, I had rather see them playing at good honest games than messing about with that museum nonsense. The boys did not do half so much mischief, nor destroy so many clothes, before they were always running down to the Pagoda. And as to this setting up a school, you would never consent to have Joe’s wife doing that!”

“There is no real need.”

“None at all, if she only would--if she only knew how to attend to her proper duties.”

“At the same time, I should be very glad of an excuse for making her an advance, enough to meet the weekly bills, till her rent comes in, so that she may not begin a debt. Could you not send the girls to her for a few hours every day?”

“That’s not so bad as her taking pupils, for nobody need know that she was paid for it,” said his wife, considering. “I don’t believe it will answer, or that she will ever keep to it steadily; but it can hardly hurt the children to try, if Jessie has an eye on Essie and Ellie. I will not have them brought on too fast, nor taught Latin, and all that poor little Babie is learning. I am sure it is dreadful to hear that child talk. I am always expecting that she will have water on the brain.”

The decision, which really involved a sacrifice and a certain sense of risk on the part of these good people, was conveyed in a note, together with a recipe for the preservation of magnum bonums, and a very liberal cheque in advance for the first quarter of her three pupils, stipulating that no others should be admitted, that the terms should be kept secret, that the hours should be regular, and above all, that the pupils should not be forced.

Caroline was touched and grateful, but could hardly keep a little satire out of her promise that Essie and Ellie should not be too precocious. She wrote her note of thanks, despatched it, and then, in the interest of some arithmetical problems which she was working with Janet, forgot everything else, till a sort of gigantic buzz was heard near at hand. A sudden thought struck her, and out she darted into the hall. There stood the basket in the middle of the table, just where the boys were wont to look for refections of fruit or cake when they tumbled in from school. Six boys and Babie hovered round, each in the act of devouring a golden-green, egg-like plum, and only two or three remained in the leaves at the bottom!

“Oh, the magnum bonums!” she cried; and Janet came rushing out in dismay at the sound, standing aghast, but not exclaiming.

“Weren’t they for us?” asked Bobus, the first to get the stone out of his mouth.

“No; oh, no!” answered his mother, as well as laughter would permit; “they are your aunt’s precious plums, which she gave us as a great favour, and I was going to be so good and learn to preserve and pickle them! Oh, dear!”

“Never mind, Mother Carey,” mumbled her nephew Johnny, with his stone swelling out his cheek, where it was tucked for convenience of speech; “I’ll go and get you another jolly lot more.”

“You can’t,” grunted Robin; “they are all gathered.”

“Then we’ll get them off the old tree at the bottom of the orchard, where they are just as big and yellow, and mamma will never know the difference.”

“But they taste like soap!”

“That doesn’t matter. She’d no more taste a magnum bonum, before it is all titivated up with sugar, than--than--than--”

“Babie’s head with brain sauce,” gravely put in Bobus, as his cousin paused for a comparison. “It’s a wasting of good gifts to make jam of these, for jam is nothing but a vehicle for sugar.”

“Then the grocer’s cart is jam,” promptly retorted Armine, “for I saw a sugarloaf come in one yesterday.”

“Come on, then,” cried Jock, ripe for the mischief; “I know the tree! They are just like long apricots. Aunt Ellen will think her plums have been all a-growing!”

“No, no, boys!” cried his mother, “I can’t have it done. To steal your aunt’s own plums to deceive her with!”

“We always may do as we like with that tree,” said Johnny, “because they are so nasty, and won’t keep.”

“How nice for the preserves!” observed Bobus.

“They would do just as well to hinder Mother Carey from catching it.”

“No, no, boys; I ought to ‘catch it!’ It was all my fault for not putting the plums away.”

“You won’t tell of us,” growled Robin, between lips that he opened wide enough the next moment to admit one of three surviving plums.

“If I tell her I left them about in the boys’ way, she will arrive at the natural conclusion.”

“Do they call those things magnum bonum?” asked Janet, as the boys drifted away.

“Yes,” said her mother, looking at her rather wonderingly; and adding, as Janet coloured up to the eyes, “My dear, have you any other association with the name?”

Many a time Janet had longed to tell all she knew; now, when so good an opportunity had come, all was choked back by the strange leaden weight of reserve, and shame in that long reserve.

She opened her eyes and stared as stupidly at her mother as Robin could have done, feeling an utter incapacity of making any reply; and Caroline, who had for a moment thought she understood, was baffled, and durst not pursue the subject for fear of betraying her own secret, deciding within herself that Janet might have caught up the word without understanding.

They were interrupted the next minute, and Janet ran away, feeling that she had had an escape, yet wishing she had not.

Caroline did effectually shelter her nephews under her general term “the boys,” and if their mother was not conciliated, their fellow-feeling with her was strengthened, as well as their sense of honour. Nay, Johnny actually spent the next half-holiday in walking three miles and back to his old nurse, whom he beguiled out of a basket of plums--hard, little blue things, as unlike magnum bonums as could well be, but which his aunt received as they were meant, as full compensation; nay, she took the pains to hunt up a recipe, and have them well preserved, in hopes of amazing his mother.

It was indeed one difficulty that the two sisters-in-law had such different notions of the aim and end of economy. The income at Kencroft had not increased with the family, which numbered eight, for there were two little boys in the nursery, and it was only by diligent housewifery that Mrs. Brownlow kept up the somewhat handsome establishment she had started with at her marriage. Caroline felt that she neither could nor would have made herself such a slave to domestic details; yet this was life and duty and interest to Ellen. Where one sister would be unheeding of shabby externals, so that all her children might be free and on an equality, if they did not go beyond her, in all enjoyments, physical, artistic, or intellectual; the other toiled to keep up appearances, kept her children under restraint and in the background, and made all sorts of unseen sacrifices to the supposed duty of always having a handsome dinner for whomsoever the Colonel might bring in, and keeping the horses, carriages, and servants that she thought his due.

But then Ellen had a husband, and, as Caroline sighed to herself, that made all the difference! and she was no Serene Highness, and had no dignity.

The three girls from Kencroft did actually become pupils at the Folly, but the beginnings were not propitious, for, in her new teacher’s eyes, Jessie knew nothing accurately, but needed to have her foundations looked to--to practise scales, draw square boxes, and work the four first rules of arithmetic.

“Simple things,” complained Jessie to her mother, “that I used to do when I was no bigger than Essie, and yet she is always teasing one about how and why! She wanted me to tell why I carried one.”

“Have a little patience for the present, my dear, your papa wants to help her just at present, and after this autumn we will manage for you to have some real good music lessons.”

“But I don’t like wasting time over old easy things made difficult,” sighed Jessie.

“It is very tiresome, my dear; but your papa wishes it, and you see, poor thing, she can’t teach you more than she knows herself; and while you are there, I am sure it is all right with Essie and Ellie.”

“She does not teach them a bit like Miss James,” said Jessie. “She makes their sums into a story, and their spelling lessons too. It is like a game.”

Indeed, Essie and Ellie were so willing to go off to their lessons every morning, that their mother often thought it could not be all right, and that the progress, which they undoubtedly made, must be by some superficial trick; but as their father had so willed it, she submitted to the present arrangement, deciding that “poor Caroline was just able to teach little children.”

The presence of Essie and Ellie much assisted in bringing Babie back to methodical habits; nor was she, in spite of her precocious intelligence, too forward in the actual drill of education to be able to work with her little cousins.

The incongruous elements were the two elder girls, who could by no means study together, since they were at the two opposite ends of the scale; but as Jessie was by no means aggressive, being in fact as sweet and docile a shallow girl as ever lived, things went on peaceably, except when Janet could not conceal her displeasure that Bobus would not share her contempt for Jessie’s intellect.

If she told him that Jessie thought that the Odyssey was about a voyage to Odessa, and was written by Alfred Tennyson, he only declared that anything was better than being a spiteful cat; and when he came in from school, and found his cousin in wild despair over the conversion of 2,861 florins into half-crowns, he stood by, telling her every operation, and leaving her nothing to do but to write down the figures. He was reckless of Janet, who tried to wither them both by her scorn; but Jessie looked up with her honest eyes, saying--

“I wish you hadn’t put it into my head, Janet, for now I must rub it out and do it again, and it won’t be so hard now Bobus has shown me how.”

“No, no, Jessie,” said Bobus; “I wouldn’t be bullied.”

“For shame, Bobus,” said his sister; “how is she to learn anything in that way?”

“And if she doesn’t?” said Bobus.

“That’s a disgrace.”

“A grace,” said provoking Bobus. “She is much nicer as she is, than you will ever be.”

“Don’t talk such nonsense,” said Janet, with an elder sisterly air. “It is not kind to encourage Jessie to think anyone can care for an empty-headed doll.”

“Empty-headed dolls are all the go,” said Bobus. “Never mind, Jessie, a girl’s business is to be pretty and good-humoured, not to stuff herself with Latin and Greek. You should leave that to us poor beggars!”

“Yes, I know, that’s all your envy and jealousy,” retorted Janet.

All the time Jessie stood by, plump, gentle, and pretty, though with a certain cloud of perplexity on her white open brow, and as her aunt returned into the room, she said--

“I think my sum is right now, Aunt Caroline; but Bobus helped me. Must I do it over again?”

“You shall begin with it to-morrow, my dear,” said her aunt; “then I daresay it will go off easily.”

Jessie thanked with an effusion of gratitude which made her prettier than ever, and then was claimed by Bobus to help him in the making of some paper bags that he needed for some of his curiosities.

Janet liked to fancy that it was beauty versus genius that made Jessie the greater favourite. She had not taken into account that she was always too much engrossed with her own concerns to be helpful, while Jessie’s pretty dexterous hands were always at everyone’s service, and without in the least entering into the cause of science, she was invaluable in the museum, whenever her ideas of neatness and symmetry were not in too absolute opposition to the requirements of system.

The two little ones, Essie and Ellie, were equally graceful, or indeed still more so, as being still in their kittenhood, and their attitudes were so charming as to revive their aunt’s artistic instincts.

All the earlier part of the year, when her time was her own, it had been mere wretchedness and heart-sickness to think of the art which had given her husband so much pleasure, and, but for Allen, the studio would never have been arranged. But no sooner was her time engrossed, than the artist fever awoke in her, and all the time she could steal by early rising, or on wet afternoons, and birthday holidays, was devoted to her clay.

Before the end of the autumn she had sent up to Mr. Acton some lovely little groups of children, illustrating Wordsworth’s poems. She had been taught anatomy enough to make her work superior to that of most women, and Mr. Acton found no difficulty in disposing of them to a porcelain manufactory, to be copied in Parian, bringing in a sum that made her feel rich.

Vistas opened before her sanguine eyes of that clay educating her son for the Magnum Bonum, her great thought. Her boys must be brought up to be worthy of the quest, high-minded, disinterested, and devoted, as well as intellectual and religious. So said their father; and thus the Magnum Bonum had become very nearly a religion to her, giving her a definite aim and principle.

Unfortunately there was not much in her present surroundings to lead her higher. The vicar, Mr. Rigby, was a dull, weak man, of a wornout type, a careful visitor of the sick and poor, but taking little heed to the educated, except as subscribers and Sunday-school teachers. Carey had done little in the first capacity, Janet had refused to act in the latter.

His sermons were very sleepy performances, except for a tendency to jumble up metaphors, that kept the audience from the Folly just awake enough to watch for them. The hearer was proud who could repeat by heart such phrases as “let us not, beloved brethren, as gaudy insects, flutter out life’s little day, bound to the chariot wheels of vanity, whirling in the vortex of dissipation, until at length we lie moaning over the bitter dregs of the intoxicating draught.” Some of these became household proverbs at “the Folly,” under the title of “Rigdum Funnidoses,” and might well be an extreme distress to the good, reverent, and dutiful Jessie.

Mrs. Rigby was an inferior woman, a sworn member of the Coffinkey clique, admiring and looking up to her Serene Highness as the great lady of the place, and wearing an almost abject manner when receiving good counsels from her. Neither of them commanded respect, nor were they likely to change the belief, which prevailed at the Folly, that all ability resided among the London clergy.

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XI. UNDINE

Lithest, gaudiest harlequin, Prettiest tumbler ever seen, Light of heart and light of limb. Wordsworth.

Long walks continued to be almost a necessity to Mrs. Joseph Brownlow, even when comparatively sobered down, and there were few days on which she was not to be met a mile or two from Kenminster, attended by a train of boys larger or smaller, according to the demands of the school for work or play.

The winter was of the description least favourable to collective boyish sports, as there was no snow and very little frost. The Christmas holidays led to more walking than ever. The gravelled roads of Belforest were never impassable, even in moist weather; and even the penetralia of the place had been laid open to the Brownlows, in consequence of a friendship which the two Johns had established with Alfred Richards, the agent’s son. They had brought him in to see the museum, and he had proved so nice and intelligent a lad, that Mother Carey, to the great scandal of her Serene Highness, allowed Jock to ask him to partake of a birthday feast.

When Allen came home at Christmas, he introduced stilt walking, and the Coffinkey world had the pleasure of communicating to one another that “Mrs. Folly Brownlow” had been seen with all her boys walking on stilts; and of course in the next stage, Mrs. “Folly” Brownlow herself was said to have been walking on stilts with all her boys, a libel, which caused Mrs. Robert Brownlow much pain and trouble in the contradiction.

“Poor Caroline! walking seemed to be necessary to her health, and she was out a great deal, but always walking along in the lanes on foot with her little girls--yes, I assure you, always on foot!”

It was thus that Caroline, with Babie and Armine, was descending a hill on the other side of Belforest Park, fully employed in picking the way through the mud from stone to stone, when a cry of dismay came to them from a distance, and whilst they were still struggling towards a gate, which broke the line of the high hedge, the two Johns came back at speed, crying--“Mother, Mother Carey! come quick, here’s Allen had a spill--came down on his shoulder--his stilt went into a hole, and he went right over; they think he must have broken something, he howls so when they touch him.”

Feeling her limbs and breath inadequate to bear her on as fast as her spirit flew forward, Caroline dashed through the slippery mud far too swiftly for poor little Babie to keep up with her, leaving one boy to take care of the little ones, while the other acted as her guide down the long steep lane. She was unable to see over the hedges till she came through a gate into a meadow, where Jock looked about, rubbed his eyes, and exclaimed--“Hallo, where are they?” pointing to the place where Allen had fallen, but whence he seemed to have been spirited away like Sir Piercie Shafton. However, Rob and Joe came running out of a farmyard at a little distance, with tidings that Allen had been taken in there, and replying to her breathless question, that they could not tell how much he was hurt.

A fine looking white-haired farmer met her next, saying--“Your young gentleman is not very seriously hurt, ma’am. I think a dislocation of the shoulder is the extent of the injury. He is feeling rather faint, but you must not be alarmed.”

It was spoken with a kind courtesy that gave her confidence, and the old man led her to the parlour, where his daughter-in-law, a gentle looking person, was most kindly attending on Allen, who lay on the sofa, exceedingly white, and in much pain, but able to smile at his mother, and assure her that he should soon be all right.

“Had they sent for a surgeon?”

“No, but they had sent for a bone-setter, who would be there in a minute.”

The old farmer explained that it would be two hours at the least before a surgeon could be fetched from Kenminster, while Higg, the blacksmith, who lived close at hand, was better for man and beast than any surgeon he had known, and his son had instantly set out to fetch him. As the mother doubtfully asked of his fitness, instances were quoted of his success. The family had a “gift,” inherited and kept up from time immemorial, and the farmer’s wife declared that he was as tender as possible; she had seen him operate on a neighbour’s child, and should not be afraid to trust him with one of her own.

The man’s voice was heard; they went out to speak to him, and Caroline was left with her boy.

“What do you think, Ali, my dear,” she said, kneeling by him, “I have often heard dear papa speak of the wonderful instinct of those bone-setting families.”

“I’d have nothing to do with a humbugging quack,” put in Bobus.

“He may humbug as much as he likes, if he’ll only get me out of this pain,” said poor Allen.

“He will only make it ever so much worse, and then you’ll have to have it done over again,” croaked Bobus.

“That is not the way to talk of it, Bobus,” said his mother. “I know a dislocated shoulder does not require any great skill, and that promptness is of greater use than knowledge in such a case.”

“Well, if you like to encourage abominable humbug and have Allen lamed for life, I don’t,” said Bobus. “I shan’t stay in the house with the blackguard.”

He stalked out of the room with great loftiness of demeanour, just as the operator was being introduced--a tall, sinewy man, with one of those strong yet meek faces often to be found among the peasantry. He came in after the old farmer, pulling his forelock to the lady, and waiting for orders as if he had been sent for to mend the grate; but Caroline saw in a moment that he was a man to trust in, and that his hands were not only clean, but were well-formed, and powerful, with a great air of dexterity.

“I am afraid my boy’s arm is put out,” she said, trembling a good deal.

“Yes, ma’am.”

“And--and,” said she, feeling sick, and more desolate and left to her own judgment than ever before. “Can you undertake to push it in again.”

“Please God, ma’am,” Higg said, gravely, coming nearer for examination.

Allen shrank and shuddered.

“Won’t it hurt awfully?” he asked.

“Well, sir, it won’t just be a bed of roses, but it won’t last, not long, if you sets your will to it.”

He asked for various needments, and while he was inspecting them, Allen’s courage began to fail, and he breathed out whispers that the man was rougher and more ignorant than he expected, and they had better wait and send to Kenminster for a doctor; but those who thought Caroline helpless and childish would have been amazed at the gentle resolution with which she refused to listen to his falterings, and braced him to endure, knowing well that her husband had said that skill was hardly needed in such a case, only resolution. She would not let herself be taken out of the room, and indeed never thought of herself, only of Allen, whose other hand she held, and to whom she seemed to give patience and courage. When all was well over, there was a hospitable invitation to the patient to remain till he was fit to return, and an extension of the invitation to his mother, but with promises of every care if she must leave him, and this she was forced to decide on doing, as such a household as hers could not well spare her, especially on a Saturday evening; and she also saw that the inconvenience to her hosts would have been great.

Allen was so much relieved, that she had no fear of leaving him to these kind people, to whom she had taken a great fancy.

“I shall learn the habits of the genuine species, British farmer,” said he, as his mother kissed him, and declared him the best and most conformable of boys.

Old Mr. Gould would not be denied driving her home in his gig, and when she thought about it, she found she had a strange relaxed aching of the knees, which made her glad of kindness for herself and the little ones. In the fine old kitchen she found that Armine had had an overpowering fit of crying, which had been kindly soothed by motherly Mrs. Gould, and the whole party were partaking of a luxurious tea, enlivened by mince pies and rosy-cheeked apples, which had diverted his attention to the problem why the next year’s prosperity should depend on the number of mince pies consumed before Christmas.

Bobus was not among them, having marched off in his contempt of the bone-setter, and his mother was not without fears that he might bring a real surgeon down on her at any moment, so she quickly drank off her cup of tea, and took her seat in Farmer Gould’s gig with Babie as bodkin in front, and Joe and Armine in the little seat behind. Robin and the two Johns were to stilt themselves home, while she was taken so long and rugged a way, that at every jolt she was ready to renew her thanks for sparing it to her son’s shoulder; and they were at home before her.

The whole family came pouring out to meet her, and the Colonel made warm acknowledgments of the farmer’s kindness, speaking of him when he was gone as one of the most estimable men in the neighbourhood, staunch in his politics, and very ill-used by old Barnes of Belforest.

Caroline looked anxiously for Bobus; and Janet, who had stayed at home to finish some papers for her essay society, said that he had only hurried in to tell her and take off his stilts, and had then gone down to Dr. Leslie’s.

“Then has Dr. Leslie gone? We did not meet him, but he may have gone through Belforest,” exclaimed Caroline.

“O no, he has not gone; he would not when he heard about that Higg,” said Janet, with uneasy and much disgusted face. “He couldn’t do any good after his meddling.”

“Do you mean that he said so?” asked Carey, much alarmed.

“Never mind,” said the Colonel, “you did quite right, Caroline, whatever the doctor says. Any man of sense, with good strong hands, can manage a shoulder like that, and I should have thought Leslie had sense to see it; but those professional men can’t stand outsiders.”

“Where is Bobus?” asked Caroline; “I should like to distinguish between what Dr. Leslie said to him and what he told Janet. He might be more zealous for Dr. Leslie than Dr. Leslie for himself.”

Bobus was unearthed, and by much pumping was made to allow that Dr. Leslie had told him that there was nothing more to be done, and that his brother was quite safe in Higg’s hands; but Bobus evidently did not believe it. He kept silence while his uncle remained, but he had hunted up his father’s surgical books, and went on about humeral clavicles and ligatures all the evening, till his mother felt sick, in the nervous contemplation of possibilities, though her better sense was secure that she had done right, while Janet was moodily silent and angered with her, in the belief that she had weakly let Allen be injured for life; and Bobus seemed as if he had rather it should be so than that he should be wrong, and Higg’s native endowments turn out a reality.

Caroline abstained from looking at the book herself, partly because she thought she might only alarm herself the more without confuting Bobus, and partly because she knew that the old law which forbade Janet to meddle with the medical books, would be considered as abrogated if she touched them herself.

Both she and Janet were much more anxious than they confessed, except by the looks which betrayed their broken rest the next morning. Each was bent on walking to River Hollow, and they would fain have done so immediately after breakfast, but to take the whole tribe was impossible; and to let them go to Church without her, would infallibly lead to Jock’s getting into a scrape with his relatives, if not with the whole congregation. Was it not all her eyes could do to hinder palpable smiles in the sermon, and her monkey from playing tricks on his bear, who, by some fatality, always sat in front, with his irresistible broad back, down which, in spite of all her vigilance, Jock had once thrust a large bluebottle fly. She also knew that both her husband and his mother would have thought she ought to go to Church, and that if matters went amiss with her boy, she should reproach herself with the omission. Her children, too, influenced her, though very oppositely, for Janet was found preparing to start for River Hollow, and on being told that she must wait, to go with her mother, till after Church, declared defiantly that “she saw no sense in staying at home to hear Rigdum when she did not know how ill Allen might be.”

“You would not have said that to grandmamma,” said Carey.

“Well, if you like to go to Church, you can. I can go alone.”

“No, I will not have you take that long walk alone.”

“Then I will take one of the boys.”

“No, Janet, I mean to be obeyed. Go and put on your other hat, and do not make us late for Church.”

Janet was forced to submit, for she never came to the point of actual disobedience to her mother. Caroline’s ruffled feelings were soothed by little Armine, who ran in from feeding his rabbits to ask to have the place in his Prayer-book shown to him where he should pray for poor Allen. She marked the Litany sentence for him, and meant to have thrown her own heart into it, but when the moment came, her mind was far astray, building vague castles about her boys.

Still she felt as if her church going had its reward, for Dr. Leslie met her a little way outside the porch, and, after asking after her boy, said--

“I hope his brother explained to you that Higg is quite to be trusted. He always knows what he can do, and when a case is beyond him. If I had come there would have been nothing for me to do.”

“There!” said Jock, triumphantly to his brother and sister.

“Much you know about it,” grunted Bobus.

“Mother Carey was right. She always is,” persisted Jock.

“It would have been just the same if the man had known nothing about it,” said Janet. “I hate your irregular practitioners, and it was very weak in mother to encourage them.” Then, as Bobus snarled at the censure of his mother--“You said so yourself yesterday.”

“I didn’t say any such beastly thing of mother. She could tell whether it was just a simple dislocation, and she was right, having ever so much more sense than you, Janet.”

“You didn’t say so yesterday,” repeated Janet.

“I don’t like irregular practitioners a bit better than you do, Janet,” said Bobus with dignity; “and I thought it right to call in a qualified surgeon, but I never said mother couldn’t judge.”

However, Bobus would not countenance the irregular practitioner by escorting his mother to River Hollow; and as he was in one of the surly moods in which he was dangerous to any one who meddled with him, especially Janet, his mother was glad not to have to keep the peace between them.

Janet, though not in the most amiable mood, chose to go with her, and they set forth by the shorter way, across Belforest park, skirting the gardens where the statues stood up, looking shivery and forlorn, as if they were not suited to English winters, and the huge house looked down on them like a London terrace that had lost its way, with a dreary uninhabited air about it. Even by this private way they had two miles and a half of park to traverse, before they reached a heavy miry lane, where the beds of mud, alternated with rugged masses of stone, intended to choke them. It led up between high hedges to the brow of one of the many hills of the county, whence they could look down into the hollow, a perfect cup, scooped out as it were between the hills that closed it in, except at the outlet of the river that intersected it, making the meadow on either side emerald green, even in the winter. Corn lands of rich red soil, pasture fields dotted with cattle, and broad belts of copse wood between clothed the slopes; and a picturesque wooden bridge, with a double handrail, crossed the river. The farm-house, built of creamy stone, stood on the opposite side of the river, some way above the bank, and the mother and daughter agreed that it deserved to be sketched next summer.

They had to pick their way down a lane that was almost a torrent, and emerging at the foot of the bridge, they stood still in amazement, for in the very centre was something vibrating rapidly, surrounded by a perfect halo of gold and scarlet. It was like a gigantic humming-bird moth at first, but it presently resolved itself into a little girl, clad in something dark purple below, and above with a bright scarlet cloaklet, which flew out and streamed back, beneath the floating locks of glistening gold that glinted in the sun, as with a hand on each rail of the bridge she swung herself backwards and forwards with the most bewildering rapidity. Suddenly becoming aware of the approach of strangers, she stood for one moment gazing in astonishment, then fled so swiftly that she almost seemed to fly, and vanished in the farm buildings!

They stood laughing and declaring that Babie would be convinced that fairies came out on Sunday, then crossed the river and were beginning to ascend the path when a volley of sounds broke on them, a shrill yap giving the alarm, louder notes joining in, and the bass being supplied by a formidable deep-mouthed bark, as out of the farmyard-gate dashed little terrier, curly spaniel, slim greyhounds, surly sheep-dog of the old tailless sort, and big and mighty Newfoundland, and there they stood in a row, shouting forth defiance in all gradations of note, so that, though frightened, Carey and Janet could not help laughing, as the former said--

“This comes of gadding about on Sunday.”

“If we went on boldly they would see we are not tramps,” said Janet.

“Depend on it they will let no one pass in Church time.”

So it proved, for Janet’s attempt to move forward elicited a growl from the sheep-dog, and a leap forward of the “little dogs and all,” which daunted even her stout heart.

However, calls were heard, and the bright vision of the bridge came darting among the dogs, scolding and driving them in, and Allen himself came out to the gate, all bandaged up on one side, but waving his arm as a signal to his mother and sister to advance. They did so nervously but safely, while the growls of the sheep-dog sounded like distant thunder, and the terrier uttered his protest from the door. Allen declared himself much better, and said he should be quite able to go home to-morrow, only this was such a jolly place; and then he brought them into the beautiful old kitchen with a magnificent open hearth, inclosed by two fine dark walnut-wood settles, making a little carpeted chamber between them. Here Allen had the farmer’s armchair and a footstool, and with “Foxe’s Martyrs” open at a flaming illustration on the little round table before him, appeared to be spending his Sunday as luxuriously as the big tabby cat who shared the hearth with him.

“They have only one service at Woodbridge, morning and afternoon by turns,” he explained, “and so they are all gone to it.”

“Who is that girl?” asked Janet.

“Undine,” he coolly replied.

“She certainly appeared on the bridge,” said his mother, “but I should think Undine’s colouring had been less radiant--more of the blue and white.”

“She had not a whiter skin nor bluer eyes,” said Allen, “nor made herself more ridiculous either. Did you ever see such hair, mother? Hullo, Elfie. There she is, peeping in at the window, just as Undine did; Come in!” he cried at the door. “No, not she,” as he returned baffled; “she is off again!”

“But, Allen, who is she? Not Farmer Gould’s daughter.”

“Of course not. Don’t you know she was fished up in a net, and belonged to a palace under the ocean full of pearls and diamonds. She took such a fancy to me that no power on earth would make her go to Church with the rest. She ran away, and hid, and when they were all gone she came out and curled herself up at my feet and chattered, till I happened to offend her majesty, and off she went like a shot. I’m only thankful that she did not make her pearly teeth meet in my finger in true Undine fashion.”

“But who is she, really?”

“I can’t quite make out. They call her Elfie, and she calls them grandpapa, and uncle and aunt, but she has been sitting here complaining of everything being cold and dull, and talking about seas and islands, palm-trees, and coral caves, and humming birds, yes, and black slaves, and strings of pearls, so that if she is romancing, like Armine and Babie, she does it uncommonly naturally.”

They saw no more of this mysterious little being, and the family soon returned from Church. The father was a fine, old-fashioned yeoman, the son had the style of a modern farmer, and the wife was so quiet, sensible, and matronly as to be almost ladylike. Her two little girls were dressed as well as Essie and Ellie, but all were essentially commonplace. They were very kind and friendly, anxious that Allen should stay as long as was good for him, as well as pressing in their hospitality to the two ladies. Mr. Gould was very anxious to drive them home in his gig, though he allowed that the road was very rough unless you went through Belforest Park, and that he never did.

This was surprising, for Belforest had always seemed as free as the turnpike-road, and River Hollow was apparently part of the estate, but there was an air of discouraging questions, so Carey suspected quarrels and asked none.

She was enlightened the next day when Colonel Brownlow brought his phaeton to fetch Allen home over the smooth park road. He told her that the Goulds were freeholders who had owned River Hollow from time immemorial, though each successive lord of Belforest tried to buy them out. The alienation between them and Mr. Barnes, the present master, had however much stronger grounds than these. His nephew and intended heir has stolen a match with the old man’s pretty daughter, and this had never been forgiven. The young couple had gone out to the West Indian isles, where the early home of her husband had been, and where he held some government office, and there fell a victim to the climate. Old Mr. Gould had gone home to fetch his daughter and her child, but the former had died before he reached her, and he had only brought back the little girl about two years ago.

Mr. Barnes ignored her entirely, and the Goulds, who had a good deal of pride, did not choose to apply to him. It was very unfortunate, for unless he had any other relations the child must be heiress to his immense wealth, though it was as likely as not that he would leave it all to hospitals out of pure vindictiveness.

They found Allen out of doors attended by the three little girls, all eagerly watching the removal of a sheep-fold. He was a pleasant-mannered boy, ready to adapt himself to all circumstances and to throw ready intelligent interest into everything, and he had won the hearts of the whole River Hollow establishment, from old Mr. Gould down to the smallest puppy.

Elfie, as he called her, stood her ground, and as she looked up under her brown mushroom hat Caroline was struck with her beauty, fair, but with a southern richness of bloom and glow--the carnation cheek of a depth of tint more often found in brunette complexions. The eyes were not merely blue by courtesy, but of a wonderful deep azure, shaded by very long lashes, dark except when the sun glinted them with gold, and round her shoulders hung masses of hair of that exquisite light auburn which cannot be accused of being red.

She let herself be greeted by the strangers with much more ease and grace than the other two children, but the slow walk of her grandfather and Colonel Brownlow seemed more than she could brook, and she went off, flying and spinning round like a little dog.

While all the acknowledgments and farewells were being made, and Colonel Brownlow was taking directions for finding Higg’s house and forge so as to remunerate him for his services, Elfie came hurrying up to Allen, holding out a great, gorgeous pink-lined shell, and laid within it two heads of scarlet geranium on a green leaf.

“O Elfie, Elfie! how could you?” exclaimed he, knowing them to be the only flowers in bloom.

“You must have them. There’s nothing else pretty to give you, and I love you,” said the child, holding up her face to kiss him.

“Elvira!” said her aunt in warning, “how can you! What will this lady think of you?”

Elvira’s gesture would in any other child have seemed a sulky thrust of the elbow, but in her it was more like the flutter of the wing of a brilliant bird.

“You must,” she repeated; and when he hesitated with “If Mrs. Gould,” she broke away, dashed the flowers, shell and all, into the middle of a clump of rosemary, and rushed out of sight like a little fury.

“You will excuse her, Mrs. Brownlow,” said Mrs. Gould, much annoyed. “She has been sadly spoilt, living among negro servants and having her own way, so that she is sometimes quite ungovernable.”

“Nay, nay, she is a warm-hearted little thing if you don’t cross her,” said the old farmer; “and the young gentleman has been very kind to her.”

Mrs. Gould looked as if she thought she knew her niece better than grandpapa did, but she was too wise to speak; and the little girls, having assisted Allen in the recovery of the shell and the flowers, he tendered them again to her.

“You had better keep them, Mr. Brownlow,” she said. “The shell is her own, and if you did not take it she is so tenacious that she would be sure to smash it to atoms.”

Allen accepted perforce and proceeded with his farewells, but as he was stooping down to kiss little five-year-old Kate Gould, something wet, cold, and sloppy came with great force on them both, almost knocking them down and bespattering them both with black drops. The missile proved to be a dripping sod pulled up from the duck-pond in the next field, and a glimpse might be caught of Elvira’s scarlet legs disappearing over the low wall between.

Over poor Mrs. Gould’s apologies a veil had best be drawn. Mother Carey pitied her heartily, but it was impossible not to make fun at home over the black tokens on Allen’s shirt-collar. His brothers and sisters laughed excessively, and Janet twitted him with his Undine, till he, contrary to his wont, grew so cross as to make his mother recollect that he was still a suffering patient, and insist on his lying quiet on the sofa, while she banished every one, and read Tennyson to him. Poetry, read aloud by her, was Allen’s greatest delight, but not often enjoyed, as Bobus and Jock scouted it, and Janet was getting too strong-minded and used to break in with inopportune, criticisms.

So to have Mother Carey to read “Elaine” undisturbed was as great an indulgence as Allen could well have, but she had not gone far before he broke out--

“Mother, please, I wish you could do something for that girl. She really is a lady.”

“So it appears,” said Carey, much disposed to laugh.

“Now, mother, don’t be tiresome. You have more sense than Janet. Her father was Vice-consul at Sant Ildefonso, one of the Antilles.”

“But, my dear, I am afraid that is not quite so grand as it sounds--”

“Hush, mother. He was nephew to Mr. Barnes, and they lived out of the town in a perfect paradise of a place, looking out into the bay. Mr. Gould says he can hardly believe he ever saw anything so gorgeously beautiful, and there this poor little Elvira de Menella lived like a princess with a court of black slaves. Just fancy what it must be to her to come to that farm, an orphan too, with an aunt who can’t understand a creature like that.”

“Poor child.”

“Then she can’t get any education. Old Gould is a sensible man, who says any school he could afford would only turn her out a sham, and he means, when Mary and Kate are a little older, to get some sort of governess for the three. But, mother, couldn’t you just let him bring her in on market days and teach her a little?”

“My dear boy, what would your aunt do? We can’t have sods of mud flying about the house.”

“Now, mother, you know better! You could make anything of her, you know you could! And what a model she would make! Think what a poor little desolate thing she is. You always have a fellow feeling for orphans, and we do owe those people a great deal of gratitude.”

“Allen, you special pleader, it really will not do! If I had not undertaken Essie and Ellie, I might think about it, but I promised your aunt not to have any other pupils.”

Allen bothered Essie and Ellie, but was forced to acquiesce, which was fortunate, for when on the last day of the holidays it was found that he had walked to River Hollow to take leave of the Goulds, his aunt administered to his mother a serious warning on the dangers of allowing him to become intimate there.

Caroline tingled all over during the discourse, and at last jumped up, exclaiming--

“My dear Ellen, half the harm in the world is done by making a fuss. Things don’t die half so hard when they die a natural death.”

Ellen knew Carey thought she had said something very clever, but was all the more unconvinced.

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XII. KING MIDAS

When I did him at this advantage take, An ass’s nowl I fixed upon his head. Midsummer Night’s Dream.

In the early spring an unlooked-for obstacle arose to all wanderings in the Belforest woods. The owner returned and closed the gates. From time that seemed immemorial, the inhabitants of Kenminster had disported themselves there as if the grounds had been kept up for their sole behoof, and their indignation at the monopoly knew no bounds.

Nobody saw Mr. Barnes save his doctor, whose carriage was the only one admitted within the lodge gates, intending visitors being there informed that Mr. Barnes was too unwell to be disturbed.

Mrs. “Folly” Brownlow’s aberrations lost their interest in the Coffinkey world beside the mystery of Belforest. Opinions varied as to his being a miser, or a lunatic, a prey to conscience, disease, or deformity; and reports were so diverse, that at the “Folly” a journal was kept of them, with their dates, as a matter of curiosity--their authorities marked:--

March 4th.--Mr. Barnes eats nothing but fresh turtle. Brings them down in tubs alive and flapping. Mrs. Coffinkey’s Jane heard them cooing at the station. Gives his cook three hundred pounds per annum.

5th.--Mr. Barnes so miserly, that he turned away the housemaid for burning candles eight to the pound. (H. S. H.)

6th.--Mr. B. keeps a bloodhound trained to hunt Indians, and has six pounds of prime beef steaks for it every day. (Emma.)

8th.--Mr. B.’s library is decorated with a string of human ears, the clippings of his slaves in “the Indies.” (Nurse.)

12th.--Mr. B. whipped a little black boy to death, and is so haunted by remorse, that he can’t sleep without wax-candles burning all round him. (Mrs. Coffinkey’s sister-in-law.)

14th.--Mr. Barnes’s income is five hundred thousand pounds, and he does not live at the rate of two hundred pounds. (Col. Brownlow.)

l5th.--He has turned off all his gardeners, and the place will be desolation. (H. S. H.)

16th.--He did turn off one gardener’s boy for staring at him when he was being wheeled about in his bath-chair. (Alfred Richards.)

17th.--He threw a stone, which cut the boy’s head open, and he lies at the hospital in a dangerous state. (Emma.)

18th.--Mr. Barnes was crossed in love when he was a young man by one Miss Anne Thorpe, and has never been the same man since, but has hated all society. (Query: Is this a version of being a misanthrope?)

19th.--He is a most unhappy man, who has sacrificed all family affections and all humanity to gold, and whose conscience will not let him rest. He is worn to a shadow, and is at war with mankind. In fine, he is a lesson to weak human nature. (Mrs. Rigby.)

22nd.--All his toilet apparatus is of “virgin gold;” he lets nothing else touch him. (Jessie.)

“Exactly like King Midas.” (Babie.)

The exclusion from the grounds was a serious grievance, entailing much loss of time and hindrance to the many who had profited by the private roads. The Sunday promenade was a great deprivation; nurses and children were cut off from grass and shade, and Mother Carey and her brood from all the delights of the enchanted ground.

She could bear the loss better than in that first wild restlessness, which only free nature could allay. She had made her occupations, and knew of other haunts, though many a longing eye was cast at the sweet green wilderness, and many regrets spent on the rambles, the sketches, the plants, and the creatures that had seemed the certain entertainment of the summer.

To one class of the population the prohibition only gave greater zest--namely, the boys. Should there be birds’ nests in Belforest unscathed by the youth of St. Kenelm’s? What were notice-boards, palings, or walls to boys with arms and legs ready to defy even the celebrated man-traps of Ellangowan, “which, if a man goes in, they will break a horse’s leg?” The terrific bloodhound alarmed a few till his existence was denied by Alfred Richards, the agent’s son; and dodging the keepers was a new and exciting sport. At first, these men were not solicitous for captures, but their negligence was so often detected, that they began to believe that their master kept telescopes that could penetrate through trees, and their vigilance increased.

Bobus, in quest of green hellebore, got off with a warning; but a week later, Robin and Jock were inspecting the heronry, when they caught sight of a keeper, and dashed off to find themselves running into the jaws of another. Swift as lightning, Jock sprung up into an ivied ash; but the less ready Bob was caught by the leg as he mounted, and pulled down again, while his captor shouted, “If there’s any more of you young varmint up yonder, you’d best come down before I fires up into the hoivy.”

He made a click and pointed his gun, and Robin shrieked, “Oh, don’t! We are Colonel Brownlow’s sons; at least, I mean nephews. Don’t! I say. Skipjack, come down.”

“You ass!” muttered Jack, as he crackled down, and was collared by the keeper. “Hollo! what’s that for?”

“Now, young gents, why will you come larking here to get a poor chap out of his situation. It’s as much as my place is worth not to summons you, and yet I don’t half like to do it to young gents like you.”

“What could they do to us?” asked Jock.

“Well, sir, may be they’d keep you in the lock-up all night; and what would your papa and mamma say to that?”

“My father is Colonel Brownlow,” growled Robin.

“More shame for you, sir, to want to get a poor man out of his place.”

“Look here, my man,” said Jock with London sharpness and impudence, “if you want to bully us into tipping you, it’s no go. We’ve only got one copper between us, and nothing else but our knives; and if we had, we wouldn’t do such a sneaking thing!”

“I never meant no such thing, sir,” said the keeper; “only in case Mr. Barnes should hear of our good nature.”

“Come along, Robin,” said Jock; “if we are had up, we’ll let ‘em know how Leggings wanted us to buy off!”

Wherewith Jock made a rush, Rob plunged after him into the brambles, and they never halted till they had tumbled over the park wall, and lay in a breathless heap on the other side. The adventure was the fruitful cause of mirth at the Folly, but not a word was breathed of it at Kencroft.

A few other lads did actually pay toll to the keepers, and some penniless ones were brought before the magistrates and fined for trespass, “because they could not afford it,” as Caroline said, and to the Colonel’s great disgust she sent two sovereigns by Allen to pay their fines and set them free.

“It was my own money,” she said, in self-defence, “earned by my models of fungi.”

The Colonel thought it an unsatisfactory justification, and told her that she would lay up trouble for herself by thus encouraging insubordination. He little thought that the laugh in her eyes was at his complacent ignorance of his own son’s narrow escape.

Allen was at home for Easter, when Eton gave longer holidays than did St. Kenelm, so that his brothers were at work again long before he was. One afternoon, which had ended in a soaking mist, the two pairs of Roberts and Johns encountered him at the Folly gate so disguised in mud that they hardly recognised the dainty Etonian.

“That brute Barnes,” he ejaculated; “I had to come miles round through a disgusting lane. I wish I had gone on. I’d have proved the right of way if he chose to prosecute me!”

“Father says that’s no go,” said Robin.

“I say, Allen, what a guy you are,” added Johnny.

“And he’s got his swell trousers on,” cried Jock, capering with glee.

“I see,” gravely observed Bobus, “he had got himself up regardless of expense for his Undine, and she has treated him to another dose of her native element.

“She had nothing to do with it,” asseverated Allen, “she was as good as gold--”

“Ah! I knew he wasn’t figged out for nothing,” put in Jock.

“Don’t be ashamed, Ali, my boy,” added Bobus. “We all understand her little tokens.”

“Stop that!” cried Allen, catching hold of Jock’s ear so as to end his war-dance in a howl, bringing the ponderous Rob to the rescue, and there was a general melee, ending by all the five rolling promiscuously on the gravel drive. They scrambled up with recovered tempers, and at the sight of an indignant housemaid rushed in a general stampede to the two large attics opening into one another, which served as the lair of the Folly lads. There, while struggling, with Jock’s assistance, to pull off his boots, Allen explained how he had been waylaid “by a beast in velveteens,” and walked off to the nearest gate.

“Will he summons you, Ali? We’ll all go and see the Grand Turk in the dock,” cried Jock.

“Don’t flatter yourself; he wouldn’t think of it.”

“How much did you fork out?” asked Bobus.

Allen declaimed in the last refinement of Eton slang (carefully treasured up by the others for reproduction) against the spite of the keeper, who he declared had grinned with malice as he turned him out at a little back gate into a lane with a high stone wall on each side, and two ruts running like torrents with water, leading in the opposite direction to Kenminster, and ending in a bottom where he was up to the ankles in red clay.

“The Eton boots, oh my!” cried Jock, falling backwards with one of them, which he had just pulled off.

“And then,” added Allen, “as I tried to get along under the wall by the bank, what should a miserable stone do, but turn round with me and send me squash into the mud and mire, floundering like a hippopotamus. I should like to get damages from that villain! I should!”

Allen was much more angry than was usual with him, and the others, though laughing at his Etonian airs, fully sympathised with his wrath.

“He ought to be served out.”

“We will serve him out!”

“How?”

“Get all our fellows and make a jolly good row under his windows,” said Robin.

“Decidedly low,” said Allen.

“And impracticable besides,” said Bobus. “They’d kick you out before you could say Jack Robinson.”

“There was an old book of father’s,” suggested Jock, “with an old scamp who starved and licked his apprentices, till one of them dressed himself up in a bullock’s hide, horns and hoofs, and tail and all, and stood over his bed at night and shouted--

“‘Old man, old man, for thy cruelty, Body and soul thou art given to me; Let me but hear those apprentices’ cries, And I’ll toss thee, and gore thee, and bore out thine eyes.’

And he was quite mild to the apprentices ever after.”

Jock acted and roared with such effect as to be encored, but Rob objected. “He ain’t got any apprentices.”

“It might be altered,” said Allen.

“Old man, old man, thy gates thou must ope,”

Bobus chimed in.

“Nor force Eton swells in quagmire to grope.”

“Bother you, don’t humbug and put me out.

“Old man, old man, if for aught thou wouldst hope, Thy heart, purse, and gates thou must instantly ope. Let me but--”

“Get Mother Carey to write it,” suggested his cousin John.

“No; she must know nothing about it,” said Bobus.

“She’d think it a jolly lark,” said Jock.

“When it’s over,” said Allen. “But it’s one of the things that the old ones are sure to stick at beforehand, if they are ever so rational and jolly.”

“‘Tis a horrid pity she is not a fellow,” sighed Johnny.

“And who’ll do the verses?” said Rob.

“Oh, any fool can do them,” returned Bobus. “The point is to bell the cat.”

“There’d be no getting in to act the midnight ghost,” said Allen.

“No,” said Jock; “but one could hide in the big rhododendron in the wolf-skin rug, and jump out on him in his chair.”

In Allen’s railway rug, Jock rehearsed the scene, and was imitated if not surpassed by both cousins; but Allen and Bobus declared that it could not be carried out in the daylight.

“I could do it still better,” said Jock, “if I blacked myself all over, not only my face, but all the rest, and put on nothing but my red flannel drawers and a turban. They’d take me for the ghost of the little nigger he flogged to death, and Allen could write something pathetic and stunning.”

“You might cut human ears out of rabbit-skins and hang them round your neck,” added Bobus.

“You’d be awfully cold,” said Allen.

“You could mix in a little iodine,” suggested Bobus. “That stings like fun, and a coppery tinge would be more natural.”

There was great acclamation, but the difficulty was that the only time for effecting an entrance into the garden was between four and five in the morning, and it would be needful to lurk there in this light costume till Mr. Barnes went out. No one would be at liberty from school but Allen, and he declined the oil and lamp-black even though warmed up with iodine.

“Could it not be done by deputy?” said Bobus; “we might blacken the little fat boy riding on a swan, the statue, I mean.”

“What, and gild the swan, to show how far his golden goose can carry him?” said Jock.

“Or,” said Allen, “there’s the statue they say is himself, though that’s all nonsense. We could make a pair of donkey’s ears in Mother Carey’s clay, and clap them on him, and gild the thing in his hand.”

“What would be the good of that?” asked Robert.

However, the fun was irresistible, and the only wonder was that the secret was kept for the whole day, while Allen moulded in the studio two things that might pass for ass’s ears, and secreted cement enough to fasten them on. The performance elicited such a rapture of applause that the door had to be fast locked against the incursion of the little ones to learn the cause of the mirth. When Mother Carey asked at tea what they were having so much fun about they only blushed, sniggled, and wriggled in their chairs in a way that would have alarmed a more suspicious mother, but only made her conclude that some delightful surprise was preparing, for which she must keep her curiosity in abeyance.

“Nor was she dismayed by the creaking of boots on the attic stairs before dawn, and when the boys appeared at breakfast with hellebore, blue periwinkle, and daffodils, clear indications of where they had been, she only exclaimed--

“Forbidden sweets! O you naughty boys!” when ecstatic laughter alone replied.

She heard no more till the afternoon, when the return from school was notified by shouts from Allen, and the boys rushed up to the verandah where he was reading.

“I say! here’s a go. He thinks Richards has done it, and has written to Ogilvie to have him expelled.”

“How do you know?”

“He told me himself.”

“But Ogilvie has too much sense to expel him!”

“Of course, but there’s worse, for old Barnes means to turn off his father. Nothing will persuade the old fellow that it wasn’t his work, for he says that it must be a grammar-school boy.”

“Does Dicky Bird guess?”

“Yes, but he’s all right, as close as wax. He says he was sure no one but ourselves could have done it, for nobody else could have thought of such things or made them either.”

“Then he has seen it?”

“Yes, and he was fit to kill himself with laughing, though his father and old Barnes were mad with rage and fury. His father believes him, but old Barnes believes neither of them, and swears his father shall go.”

“We shall have to split on ourselves,” elegantly observed Johnny.

“We had better tell Mother Carey. Hullo! here she is, inside the window.”

“Didn’t you know that,” said Allen.

Therefore the boys, leaning and sprawling round her, half in and half out of the window, told the story, the triumph overcoming all compunction, as they described the morning raid, the successful scaling of the park-wall, the rush across the sward, the silence of the garden, the hoisting up of Allen to fasten on the ears, and the wonderful charms of the figure when it wore them and held a golden apple in its hand. “Right of Way,” and “Let us in,” had been written in black on all the pedestals.

“It is a peculiar way of recommending your admission,” said Caroline.

“That’s Rob’s doing,” said Allen. “I couldn’t look after him while I was gilding the apple or I would have stopped him. He half blacked the little boy on the swan too--”

“And broke the swan’s bill off, worse luck,” added Johnny.

“Yes,” said Allen, “that was altogether low and unlucky! I meant the old fellow simply to have thought that his statue had grown a pair of ears in the night.”

“And what would have been the use of that?” said Robin.

“What was the use of all your scrawling,” said Allen, “except just to show it was not the natural development of statues.”

“Yes,” added Bobus, “it all came of you that poor Dickey Bird is suspected and it is all blown up.”

“As if he would have thought it was done by nobody,” said Rob.

“Why not?” said Jock. “I’m sure I’d never wonder to see ass’s ears growing on you. I think they are coming.”

There was a shout of laughter as Rob hastily put up his hands to feel for them, adding in his slow, gruff voice--“A statue ain’t alive.”

“It made a fool of the whole matter,” proceeded Bobus. “I wish we’d kept a lout like you out of it.”

“Hush, hush, Bobus,” put in his mother, “no matter about that. The question is what is to be done about poor Mr. Richards and Alfred.”

“Write a poetical letter,” said Allen, beginning to extemporise in Hiawatha measure.

“O thou mighty man of money, Barnes, of Belforest, Esquire, Innocent is Alfred Richards; Innocent his honest father; Innocent as unborn baby Of development of Midas, Of the smearing of the Cupid, Of the fracture of the goose-bill, Of the writing of the mottoes. All the Brownlows of St. Kenelm’s, From the Folly and from Kencroft. Robert, the aspiring soldier, Robert, too, the sucking chemist, John, the Skipjack full of mischief, John, the great originator, Allen, the--”

“Allen the uncommon gaby,” broke in Bobus. “Come, don’t waste time, something must be done.”

“Yes, a rational letter must be written and signed by you all,” said his mother. “The question is whether it would be better to do it through your uncle or Mr. Ogilvie.”

“I don’t see why my father should hear of it, or Mr. Ogilvie either,” growled Rob. “I didn’t do those donkeyfied ears.”

“You did the writing, which was five hundred times more donkeyfied,” said Jock.

“It is quite impossible to keep either of them in ignorance,” said Caroline.

“Yes,” repeated all her own three; Jock adding “Father would have known it as soon as you, and I don’t see that my uncle is much worse.”

“He ain’t so soft,” exclaimed Johnny, roused to loyal defence of his parent.

“Soft!” cried Jock, indignantly; “I can tell you father did pitch into me when I caught the old lady’s bonnet out at the window with a fishing-rod.”

“He never flogged you,” said Johnny contemptuously.

“He did!” cried Jock, triumphantly. “At least he flogged Bobus, when--”

“Shut up, you little ape,” thundered Bobus, not choosing to be offered up to the manes of his father’s discipline.

“You think you must explain it to my uncle, mother,” said Allen, rather ruefully.

“Certainly. He ought to be told first, and Mr. Ogilvie next. Depend upon it, he will be far less angry if it is freely confessed and put into his hands and what is more important, Mr. Barnes must attend to him, and acquit the Richardses.”

The general voice agreed, but Rob writhed and muttered, “Can’t you be the one to tell him, Mother Carey?”

“That’s cool,” said Allen, “to ask her to do what you’re afraid of.”

“He couldn’t do anything to her,” said Rob.

However, public opinion went against Rob, and the party of boys dragged him off in their train the less reluctantly that Allen would be spokesman, and he always got on well with his uncle. No one could tell how it was, but the boy had a frank manner, with a sort of address in the manner of narration, that always went far to disarm displeasure, and protected his comrades as well as himself. So it was that, instead of meeting with unmitigated wrath, the boys found that they were allowed the honours and graces of voluntary confession. Allen even thought that his uncle showed a little veiled appreciation of the joke, but this was not deemed possible by the rest.

To exonerate young Richards was the first requisite, and Allen, under his uncle’s eye, drew up a brief note to this effect:--

“SIR,--We beg to apologise for the mischief done in your grounds, and to assure you on our word and honour that it was suggested by no one, that no one admitted us, and no one had any share in it except ourselves.

“ALLEN BROWNLOW. “ROBERT FRIAR BROWNLOW. “ROBERT OTWAY BROWNLOW. “JOHN FRIAR BROWNLOW. “JOHN LUCAS BROWNLOW.”

This letter was taken up the next morning to Belforest by Colonel Brownlow, and the two eldest delinquents, one, curious, amused, and with only compunction enough to flavour an apology, the other cross, dogged, and sheepish, dragged along like a cur in a sling, “just as though he were going to be hanged,” said Janet.

The report of the expedition as given by Allen was thus:--“The servant showed us into a sort of anteroom, and said he would see whether his master would see us. Uncle Robert sent in his card and my letter, and we waited with the door open, and a great screen in front, so that we couldn’t help hearing every word. First there was a great snarl, and then a deferential voice, ‘This alters the case, sir.’ But the old man swore down in his throat that he didn’t care for Colonel Brownlow or Colonel anybody. ‘A gentleman, sir; one of the most respected.’ ‘Then he should bring up his family better.’ ‘Indeed, sir, it might be better to accept the apology. This might not be considered actionable damage.’ ‘We’ll see that!’ ‘Indeed, don’t you agree with me, Mr. Richards, the magistrates would hardly entertain the case.’ ‘Then I’ll appeal; I’ll send a representation to the Home Office.’ ‘Is it not to be considered, sir, whether some of these low papers might not put it in a ludicrous light?’ Then,” continued Allen, who had been most dramatically mimicking the two voices, “we heard a crackling as if he were opening my letter, and after an odd noise or two he sent to call us in to where he was sitting with Richards, and the attorney he had got to prosecute us. He is a regular old wizened stick, the perfect image of an old miser; almost hump-backed, and as yellow as a mummy. He looked just ready to bite off our heads, but he was amazingly set on finding out which was which among us, and seemed uncommonly struck with my name and Bobus’s. My uncle told him I was called after your father, and he made a snarl just like a dog over a bone. He ended with, ‘So you are Allen Brownlow! You’ll remember this day’s work, youngster.’ I humbly said I should, and so the matter ended.”

“He did not mean any prosecution?”

“O no, that was all quashed, even if it was begun. He must have been under an hallucination that he was a stern parent, cutting me off with a shilling.”

The words had also struck the Colonel, who sought the first opportunity of asking his sister-in-law whether she knew the names of any of her mother’s relations.

“Only that her name was Otway,” said Caroline. “You know I lived with my father’s aunt, who knew nothing about her, and I have never been able to find anything out. Do you know of any connection? Not this old man? Then you would have known.”

“That does not follow, for I was scarcely in Jamaica at all. I had a long illness immediately after going there, was sent home on leave, and then to the depot, and only joined again after the regiment had gone to Canada, when the marriage had taken place. I may have heard the name of Mrs. Allen’s uncle, but I never bore it in my mind.”

“Is there any way of finding out?”

“I will write to Norton. If he does not remember all about it, his wife will.”

“He is the present lieutenant-colonel, I think.”

“Yes, and he was your father’s chief friend. Now that they are at home again, we must have him here one of these days.”

“It would be a wonderful thing if this freak were an introduction to a relation,” said Caroline.

“There was no doubt of his being struck by the combination of Allen and Otway. He chose to understand which were my sons and which my nephews, and when I said that Allen bore your maiden name he assented as if he knew it before, and spoke of your boy having cause to remember this; I am afraid it will not be pleasantly.”

“No,” said Caroline, “it sounded much like a threat. But one would like to know, only I thought Farmer Gould’s little granddaughter was his niece.”

“That might be without preventing your relationship; I will do my best to ascertain it.”

Colonel Norton’s letter gave decisive information that Barnes was the name of the uncle with whom Caroline Otway had been living at the time of her marriage. She had been treated as a poor relation, and seemed to be half-slave, half-governess to the children of the favoured sister, little semi-Spanish tyrants. This had roused Captain Allen’s chivalry, and his friend remembered his saying that, though he had little or nothing of his own, he could at least make her happier than she was in such a family. The uncle was reported to have grown rich in the mahogany trade, and likewise by steamboat speculations, coupled with judicious stock-jobbing among the distressed West Indians, after the emancipation.

“He was a sinister-looking old fellow,” ended Colonel Norton, “and I should think not very particular; but I should be glad to hear that he had done justice to poor Allen’s daughter. He was written to when she was left an orphan, but vouchsafed no answer.”

“Still he may have kept an eye upon you,” added Uncle Robert. “I do not think it was new to him that you had married into our family.”

“If only those unfortunate boys have not ruined everything,” sighed Ellen.

“Little Elvira’s father must have been one of those cousins,” said Caroline. “I wonder what became of the others? She must be--let me see--my second cousin.”

“Not very near,” said Ellen.

“I never had a blood relation before since my old aunt died. I am so glad that brilliant child belongs to me!”

“I daresay old Gould could tell you more,” said the Colonel.

“Is it wise to revive the connection?” asked his wife.

“The Goulds are not likely to presume,” said the Colonel; “and I think that if Caroline takes up the one connection, she is bound to take up the other.”

“How am I to make up to this cross old man?” said Carey. “I can’t go and fawn on him.”

“Certainly not,” said her brother-in-law; “but I think you ought to make some advance, merely as a relation.”

On the family vote, Caroline rather unwillingly wrote a note, explaining that she had only just discovered her kinship with Mr. Barnes, and offering to come and see him; but not the smallest notice was taken of her letter, rather to her relief, though she did not like to hear Ellen augur ill for the future.

Another letter, to old Mr. Gould, begging him to call upon her next market day, met with a far more ready response. When at his entrance she greeted him with outstretched hands, and--“I never thought you were a connection;” the fine old weather-beaten face was strangely moved, as the rugged hand took hers, and the voice was husky that said--

“I thought there was a likeness in the voice, but I never imagined you were grandchild to poor Carey Barnes; I beg your pardon, to Mrs. Otway.”

“You knew her? You must let me see something of my little cousin! I know nothing of my relations and my brother-in-law said he thought you could tell me.”

“I ought to be able, for the family lived at Woodbridge all my young days,” said the farmer.

The history was then given. The present lord of the manor had been the son of a land surveyor. He was a stunted, sickly, slightly deformed lad, noted chiefly for skill in cyphering, and therefore had been placed in a clerkship. Here a successful lottery ticket had been the foundation of his fortunes; he had invested it in the mahogany trade, and had been one of those men with whom everything turned up a prize. When a little over thirty, he had returned to his own neighbourhood, looking any imaginable age. He had then purchased Belforest, furnished it sumptuously, and laid out magnificent gardens in preparation for his bride, a charming young lady of quality. But she had had a young Lochinvar, and even in her wedding dress, favoured by sympathising servants, had escaped down the back stairs of a London hotel, and been married at the nearest Church, leaving poor Mr. Barnes in the case of the poor craven bridegroom, into whose feelings no one ever inquired.

Mr. Barnes had gone back to the West Indies at once, and never appeared in England again till he came home, a broken and soured old man, to die. There had been two sisters, and Caroline fancied that the old farmer had had some tenderness for the elder one, but she had married, before her brother’s prosperity, a poor struggling builder, and both had died young, leaving their child dependent on her uncle. His younger sister had been the favourite; he had taken her back with him to America, and, married her to a man of Spanish blood, connected with him in business. The only one of her children who survived childhood was educated in England, treated as his uncle’s heir, and came to Belforest for shooting. Thus it was that he had fallen in love with Farmer Gould’s pretty daughter, and as it seemed, by her mother’s contrivance, though without her father’s consent, had made her his wife.

The wrath of Mr. Barnes was implacable. He cast off the favourite nephew as entirely as he had cast off the despised niece, and deprived him of all the means he had been led to look on as his right. The young man had nothing of his own but an estate in the small island of San Ildefonso, of very little value, and some of his former friends made interest to obtain a vice-consulship for him at the Spanish town. Then, after a few years, both husband and wife died, leaving this little orphan to the care of her grandfather, who had written to Mr. Barnes on her father’s death, but had heard nothing from him, and had too much honest pride to make any further application.

“My little cousin,” said Caroline, “the first I ever knew. Pray bring her to see me, and let her stay with me long enough for me to know her.”

The old man began to prepare her for the child’s being shy and wild, though perhaps her aunt was too particular with her, and expected too much. Perhaps she would be homesick, he said, so wistfully that it was plain that he did not know how to exist without his darling; but he was charmed with the invitation, and Caroline was pleased to see that he did not regard her as his grandchild’s rival, but as representing the cherished playmate of his youth.

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XIII. THE RIVAL HEIRESSES

You smile, their eager ways to see, But mark their choice when they To choose their sportive garb are free, The moral of their play. Keble.

One curious part of the reticence of youth is that which relates to its comprehension of grown-up affairs. There is a smile with which the elders greet any question on the subject, half of wonder, half of amusement, which is perfectly intolerable to the young, who remain thinking that they are regarded as presumptuous and absurd, and thus will do anything rather than expose themselves to it again.

Thus it was that Mrs. Brownlow flattered herself that her children never put two and two together when she let them know of the discovery of their relationship. Partly she judged by herself. She was never in the habit of forecasting, and for so clever and spirited a woman, she thought wonderfully little. She had plenty of intuitive sense, decided rapidly and clearly, and could easily throw herself in other people’s thoughts, but she seldom reflected, analysed or moralised, save on the spur of the moment. She lived chiefly in the present, and the chief events of her life had all come so suddenly and unexpectedly upon her, that she was all the less inclined to guess at the future, having always hitherto been taken by surprise.

So, when Jock observed in public--“Mother, they say at Kencroft that the old miser ought to leave you half his money. Do you think he will?” it was with perfect truth that she answered, “I don’t think at all about it.”

It was taken in the family as an intimation that she would not talk about it, and while she supposed that the children drew no conclusions, they thought the more.

Allen was gone to Eton, but Janet and Bobus had many discussions over their chemical experiments, about possibilities and probabilities, odd compounds of cleverness and ignorance.

“Mother must be heir-at-law, for her grandmother was eldest,” said Janet.

“A woman can’t be heir-at-law,” said Bobus.

“The Salique law doesn’t come into England.”

“Yes it does, for Sir John Gray got Graysnest only last year, instead of the old man’s daughter.

“Then how comes the Queen to be Queen?”

“Besides,”--Bobus shifted his ground to another possibility--“when there’s nobody but a lot of women, the thing goes into abeyance among them.”

“Who gets it, then?”

“Chancery, I suppose, or some of the lawyers. They are all blood-suckers.”

“I’m sure,” said Janet, superior by three years of wisdom, “that abeyance only happens about Scotch peerages; and if he has not made a will, mother will be heiress.”

“Only halves with that black Undine of Allen’s,” sturdily persisted Bobus. “Is she coming here, Janet?”

“Yes, to-morrow. I did not think we wanted another child about the house; Essie and Ellie are quite enough.”

“If mother gets rich she won’t have all that teaching to bother her,” said Bobus.

“And I can go on with my education,” said Janet.

“Girl’s education does not signify,” said Bobus. “Now I shall be able to get the very best instruction in physical science, and make some great discovery. If I could only go and study at Halle, instead of going on droning here.”

“Oh! boys can always get educated if they choose. You are going to Eton or Winchester after this term.”

“Not if I can get any sense into mother. I don’t want to waste my time on those stupid classics and athletics. I say, Janet, it’s time to see whether the precipitation has taken place.”

The two used to try experiments together, in Bobus’s end of the attic, to an extent that might make the presence of a strange child in the house dangerous to herself as well as to everyone else.

Mrs. Gould herself brought the little girl, trying to impress on Mrs. Brownlow that if she was indocile it was not her fault, but her grandfather could not bear to have her crossed.

The elders did not wonder at his weakness, for the creature was wonderfully lovely and winning, with a fearless imperiousness that subdued everyone to her service. So brilliant was she, that Essie and Ellie, though very pretty little girls, looked faded and effaced beside this small empress, whose air seemed to give her a right to bestow her favours.

“I am glad to be here!” she observed, graciously, to her hostess, “for you are my cousin and a lady.”

“And pray what are you?” asked Janet.

“I am la Senora Dona Elvira Maria de Guadalupe de Menella,” replied the damsel, with a liquid sonorousness so annihilating, that Janet made a mocking courtesy; and her mother said it was like asking the head of the house of Hapsburg if she were a lady!

With some disappointment at Allen’s absence, the little Donna motioned Bobus to sit by her side at dinner-time, and when her grandfather looked in somewhat later to wish her good-bye, in mingled hope and fear of her insisting on going home with him, she cared for nothing but his admiration of her playing at kings and queens with Armine and Barbara, in the cotton velvet train of the dressing up wardrobe.

“No, she did not want to go home. She never wanted to go back to River Hollow.”

Nor would she even kiss him till she had extorted the assurance that he had been shaved that morning.

The old man went away blessing Mrs. Brownlow’s kindness to his child, and Janet was universally scouted for muttering that it was a heartless little being. She alone remained unenthralled by Elvira’s chains. The first time she went to Kencroft, she made Colonel Brownlow hold her up in his arms to gather a bough off his own favourite double cherry; and when Mother Carey demurred, she beguiled Aunt Ellen into taking her on her own responsibility to the dancing lessons at the assembly rooms.

There she electrified the dancing-master, and all beholders, seeming to catch inspiration from the music, and floating along with a wondrous swimming grace, as her dainty feet twinkled, her arms wreathed themselves, and her eyes shone with enjoyment.

If she could only have always danced, or acted in the garden! Armine’s and Babie’s perpetual romantic dramas were all turned by her into homage to one and the same princess. She never knew or cared whether she were goddess or fairy, Greek or Briton, provided she had the crown and train; but as Babie much preferred action to magnificence, they got on wonderfully well without disputes. There was a continual performance, endless as a Chinese tragedy, of Spenser’s Faery Queene, in which Elfie was always Gloriana, and Armine and Babie were everybody else in turn, except the wicked characters, who were represented by the cabbages and a dummy.

“Reading was horrid,” Elvira said, and certainly hers deserved the epithet. Her attainments fell far behind those of Essie and Ellie, and she did not mean to improve them. Her hostess let her alone till she had twice shaken her rich mane at her grandfather, and refused to return with him; and he had shown himself deeply grateful to Mrs. Brownlow for keeping her there, and had said he hoped she was good at her lessons.

The first trial resulted in Elvira’s going to sleep over her book, the next in her playing all sorts of ridiculous tricks, and sulking when stopped, and when she was forbidden to speak or go out till she had repeated three answers in the multiplication table, she was the next moment singing and dancing in defiance in the garden. Caroline did not choose to endure this, and went to fetch her in, thus producing such a screaming, kicking, rolling fury that Mrs. Coffinkey might have some colour for the statement that Mrs. Folly Brownlow was murdering all her children. The cook, as the strongest person in the house, was called, carried her in and put her to bed, where she fell sound asleep, and woke, hungry, in high spirits, and without an atom of compunction.

When called to lessons she replied--“No, I’m going back to grandpapa.”

“Very well,” was all Caroline answered, thinking wholesome neglect the best treatment.

In an hour’s time Mr. Gould made his appearance with his grandchild. She had sought him out among the pigs in the market-place, pulled him by the coat, and insisted on being taken home.

His politeness was great, but he was plainly delighted, and determined to believe that her demand sprang from affection, and not naughtiness. Elvira stood caressing him, barely vouchsafing to look at her hostess, and declaring that she never meant to come back.

Not a fortnight had passed, however, before she burst upon them again, kissing them all round, and reiterating that she hated her aunt, and would live with Mother Carey. Mr. Gould had waited to be properly ushered in. He was distressed and apologetic, but he had been forced to do his tyrant’s behest. There had been more disturbances than ever between her and her aunt, and Mrs. Gould had declared that she would not manage the child any longer, while Elvira was still more vehement to return to Mother Carey. Would Mrs. Brownlow recommend some school or family where the child would be well cared for? Mrs. Brownlow did more, offering herself to undertake the charge.

Spite of all the naughtiness, she loved the beautiful wild creature, and could not bear to think of intrusting her to strangers; she knew, too, that her brother and sister-in-law had no objection, and it was the obvious plan. Mr. Gould would make some small payment, and the child was to be made to understand that she must be obedient, learn her lessons, and cease to expect to find a refuge with her grandfather when she was offended.

She drew herself up with childish pride and grace saying, “I will attend to Mrs. Brownlow, for she is my cousin and my equal.”

To a certain degree the little maiden kept her word. She was the favourite plaything of the boys, and got on well with Babie, who was too bright and yielding to quarrel with any one.

But Janet’s elder-sisterly authority was never accepted by the newcomer. “I couldn’t mind her, she looked so ugly,” said she in excuse; and probably the heavy, brown, dull complexion and large features were repulsive in themselves to the sensitive fancy of the creature of life and beauty. At any rate, they were jarring elephants, as said Eleanor, who was growing ambitious, and sometimes electrified the public with curious versions of the long words more successfully used by Armine and Babie.

Caroline succeeded in modelling a very lovely profile in bas-relief of the exquisite little head, and then had it photographed. Mary Ogilvie, coming to Kenminster as usual when her holidays began in June, found the photograph in the place of honour on her brother’s chimney-piece, and a little one beside it of the artist herself.

So far as Carey herself was concerned, Mary was much better satisfied. She did not look so worn or so flighty, and had a quieter and more really cheerful tone and manner, as of one who had settled into her home and occupations. She had made friends, too--few, but worth having; and there were those who pronounced the Folly the pleasantest house in Kenminster, and regarded the five o’clock tea, after the weekly physical science lecture at the school, as a delightful institution.

Of course, the schoolmaster was one of these; and when Mary found how all his paths tended to the Pagoda, she hated herself for being a suspicious old duenna. Nevertheless, she could not but be alarmed by finding that her project of a walking tour through Brittany was not, indeed, refused, but deferred, with excuses about having work to finish, being in no hurry, and the like.

“I think you ought to go,” said Mary at last.

“I see no ought in the case. Last year the work dragged, and was oppressive; but you see how different it has become.”

“That is the very reason,” said Mary, the colour flying to her checks. “It will not do to stay lingering here as we did last summer, and not only on your own account.”

“You need not be afraid,” was the muttered answer, as David bent down his head over the exercise he was correcting. She made no answer, and ere long he began again, “I don’t mean that her equal exists, but I am not such a fool as to delude myself with a spark of hope.”

“She is too nice for that,” said Mary.

“Just so,” he said, glad to relieve himself when the ice had been broken. “There’s something about her that makes one feel her to be altogether that doctor’s, as much as if he were present in the flesh.”

“Are you hoping to wear that out? For I don’t think you will.”

“I told you I had no hope,” he answered, rather petulantly. “Even were it otherwise, there is another thing that must withhold me. It has got abroad that she may turn out heiress to the old man at Belforest.”

“In such a hopeless case, would it not be wiser to leave this place altogether?”

“I cannot,” he exclaimed; then remembering that vehemence told against him, he added, “Don’t be uneasy; I am a reasonable man, and she is a woman to keep one so; but I think I am useful to her, and I am sure she is useful to me.”

“That I allow she has been,” said Mary, looking at her brother’s much improved appearance; “but--”

“Moths and candles to wit,” he returned; “but don’t be afraid, I attract no notice, and I think she trusts me about her boys.”

“But what is it to come to?”

“I have thought of that. Understand that it is enough for me to live near her, and be now and then of some little service to her.”

They were interrupted by a note, which Mr. Ogilvie read, and handed to his sister with a smile:--

“DEAR MR. OGILVIE,--Could you and Mary make it convenient to look in this evening? Bobus has horrified his uncle by declining to go up for a scholarship at Eton or Winchester, and I should be very glad to talk it over with you. Also, I shall have to ask you to take little Armine into school after the holidays.

“Yours sincerely,

“C. O. BROWNLOW.”

“What does the boy mean?” asked Mary. “I thought he was the pride of your heart.”

“So he is; but he is ahead of his fellows, and ought to be elsewhere. All measures have been taken for sending him up to stand at one of the public schools, but I thought him very passive about it. He is an odd boy--reserved and self-concentrated--quite beyond his uncle’s comprehension, and likely to become headstrong at a blind exercise of authority.”

“I used to like Allen best,” said Mary.

“He is the pleasantest, but there’s more solid stuff in Bobus. That boy’s school character is perfect, except for a certain cool opinionativeness, which seldom comes out with me, but greatly annoys the undermasters.”

“Is he a prig?”

“Well, yes, I’m afraid he is. He’s unpopular, for he does not care for games; but his brother is popular enough for both.”

“Jock?--the monkey!”

“His brains run to mischief. I’ve had to set him more impositions than any boy in the school, and actually to take his form myself, for simply the undermasters can’t keep up discipline or their own tempers. As to poor M. le Blanc, I find him dancing and shrieking with fury in the midst of a circle of snorting, giggling boys; and when he points out ce petit monstre, Jock coolly owns to having translated ‘Croquons les,’ let us croquet them; or ‘Je suis blesse,’ I am blest.”

“So the infusion of brains produces too much effervescence.”

“Yes, but the whole school has profited, and none more so than No. 2 of the other family, who has quite passed his elder brother, and is above his namesake whenever it is a case of plodding ability versus idle genius. But, after all, how little one can know of one’s boys.”

“Or one’s girls,” said Mary, thinking of governess experiences.

It was a showery summer evening when the brother and sister walked up to the Folly in a partial clearing, when the evening sun made every bush twinkle all over with diamond drops. Childish voices were heard near the gate, and behind a dripping laurel were seen Elvira, Armine, and Barbara engaged in childhood’s unceasing attempt to explore the centre of the earth.

“What do you expect to find there?” they were asked.

“Little kobolds, with pointed caps, playing at ball with rubies and emeralds, and digging with golden spades,” answered Babie.

“And they shall give me an opal ring,” said Elfie, “But Armine does not want the kobolds.”

“He says they are bad,” said Babie. “Now are they, Mr. Ogilvie? I know elder women are, and erl kings and mist widows, but poor Neck, that sat on the water and played his harp, wasn’t bad, and the dear little kobolds were so kind and funny. Now are they bad elves?”

Her voice was full of earnest pleading, and Mr. Ogilvie, not being versed in the spiritual condition of elves could best reply by asking why Armine thought ill of their kind.

“I think they are nasty little things that want to distract and bewilder one in the real great search.”

“What search, my boy?”

“For the source of everything,” said Armine, lowering his voice and looking into his muddy hole.

“But that is above, not below,” said Mary.

“Yes,” said Armine reverently; “but I think God put life and the beginning of growing into the earth, and I want to find it.”

“Isn’t it Truth?” said Babie. “Mr. Acton said Truth was at the bottom of a well. I won’t look at the kobolds if they keep one from seeing Truth.”

“But I must get my ring and all my jewels from them,” put in Elfie.

“Should you know Truth?” asked Mr. Ogilvie. “What do you think she is like?”

“So beautiful!” said Babie, clasping her fingers with earnestness. “All white and clear like crystal, with such blue, sweet, open eyes. And she has an anchor.”

“That’s Hope?” said Armine.

“Oh! Hope and Truth go hand in hand,” said Babie; “and Hope will be all robed in green like the young corn-fields in the spring.”

“Ah, Babie, that emerald Hope and crystal Truth are not down in the earth, earthy,” said Mary again.

“Nay, perhaps Armine has got hold of a reality,” said Mr. Ogilvie. “They are to be found above by working below.”

“Talking paradox to Armine?” said the cheerful voice of the young mother. “My dear sprites, do you know that it is past eight! How wet you are! Good night, and mind you don’t go upstairs in those boots.”

“It is quite comfortable to hear anything so commonplace,” said Mary, when the children had run away, to the sound of its reiteration after full interchange of good nights. “Those imps make one feel quite eerie.”

“Has Armine been talking in that curious fashion of his,” said Carey, as they began to pace the walks. “I am afraid his thinker is too big--as the child says in Miss Tytler’s book. This morning over his parsing he asked me--‘Mother, which is realest, what we touch or what we feel?’ knitting his brows fearfully when I did not catch his meaning, and going on--‘I mean is that fly as real as King David?’ and then as I was more puzzled he went on--‘You see we only need just see that fly now with our outermost senses, and he will only live a little while, and nobody cares or will think of him any more, but everybody always does think, and feel, and care a great deal about King David.’ I told him, as the best answer I could make on the spur of the moment, that David was alive in Heaven, but he pondered in and broke out--‘No, that’s not it! David was a real man, but it is just the same about Perseus and Siegfried, and lots of people that never were men, only just thoughts. Ain’t thoughts realer than things, mother?’”

“But much worse for him, I should say,” exclaimed Mary.

“I thought of Pisistratus Caxton, and wrote to Mr. Ogilvie. It is a great pity, but I am afraid he ought not to dwell on such things till his body is grown up to his mind.”

“Yes, school is the approved remedy for being too clever,” said Mr. Ogilvie. “You are wise. It is a pity, but it will be all the better for him by-and-by.”

“And the elder ones will take care the seasoning is not too severe,” said Caroline, with a resolution she could hardly have shown if this had been her first launch of a son. “But it was about Bobus that I wanted to consult you. His uncle thinks him headstrong and conceited, if not lazy.”

“Lazy he is certainly not.”

“I knew you would say so, but the Colonel cannot enter into his wish to have more physical science and less classics, and will not hear of his going to Germany, which is what he wishes, though I am sure he is too young.”

“He ought not to go there till his character is much more formed.”

“What do you think of his going on here?”

“That’s a temptation I ought to resist. He will soon have outstripped the other boys so that I could not give him the attention he needs, and besides the being with other boys, more his equals, would be invaluable to him.”

“Well, he is rather bumptious.”

“Nothing is worse for a lad of that sort than being cock of the walk. It spoils him often for life.”

“I know exactly the sort of man you mean, always liking to lay down the law and talking to women instead of men, because they don’t argue with him. No, Bobus must not come to that, and he is too young to begin special training. Will you talk to him, Mr. Ogilvie? You know if my horse is not convinced I may bring him to the water, but it will be all in vain.”

They had reached the outside of the window of the dining-room, where the school-boys were learning their lessons for the morrow. Bobus was sitting at the table with a small lamp so shaded as to concentrate the light on him and to afford it to no one else. On the floor was a servant’s flat candlestick, mounted on a pile of books, between one John sprawling at full length preparing his Virgil, the other cross-legged, working a sum with ink from a doll’s tea-cup placed in the candlestick, and all the time there was a wonderful mumbling accompaniment, as there always was between those two.

“I say, what does pulsum come from?”

“What a brute this is of a fraction! Skipjack, what will go in 639 and 852?”

“Pulsum, a pulse--volat, flies. Eh! Three’ll do it. Or common measure it at once.”

“Bother common measure. The threes in--”

“Fama, fame; volat, flies; pulsum, the pulse; cecisse, to have ceased; paternis regnis, in the paternal kingdom. I say wouldn’t that rile Perkins like fun?”

“The threes in seven--two--in eighteen--”

“I say, Johnny, is pulsum from pulco?”

“Never heard of it.”

“Bobus, is it pulco, pulxi, pulsum?”

“Pulco--I make an ass of myself,” muttered Bobus.

“O murder,” groaned Johnny, “it has come out 213.”

“Not half so much murder as this pulsum. Why it will go in them both. I can see with half an eye.”

“Isn’t it pello--pulsum?”

“Pello, to drive out. Hurrah! That fits it.”

“Look out, Skipjack, there’s a moth.”

“Anything worth having?” demanded Bobus.

“Only a grass eggar. Fama, fame; volat, flies; Idomoeea ducem, that Idomaeeus the leader; pulsum, expelled. Get out, I say, you foolish beggar” (to the moth).

“Never mind catching him,” said Bobus, “we’ve got dozens.”

“Yes, but I don’t want him frizzling alive in my candle.”

“Don’t kick up such a shindy,” broke out Johnny, as a much stained handkerchief came flapping about.

“You’ve blotted my sum. Thunder and ages!” as the candlestick toppled over, ink and all. “That is a go!”

“I say, Bobus, lend us your Guy Fawkes to pick up the pieces.”

“Not if I know it,” said Bobus. “You always smash things.”

“There’s a specimen of the way we learn our lessons,” said Caroline, in a low voice, still unseen, as Bobus wiped, sheathed, and pocketed his favourite pen, then proceeded to turn down the lamp, but allowed the others to relight their candle at the expiring wick.

“The results are fair,” said Mr. Ogilvie.

“I think of your carpet,” said Mary, quaintly.

“We always lay down an ancient floorcloth in the bay window before the boys come home,” said Carey, laughing. “Here, Bobus.”

And as he came out headforemost at the window, the two ladies discreetly drew off to leave the conversation free.

“So, Brownlow,” said Mr. Ogilvie, “I hear you don’t want to try your luck elsewhere.”

“No, sir.”

“Do you object to telling me why?”

“I see no use in it,” said Bobus, never shy, and further aided by the twilight; “I do quite well enough here.”

“Should you not do better in a larger field among a higher stamp of boys?”

“Public school boys are such fools!”

“And what are the Kenites?”

“Well, not much,” said Bobus, with a twitch in the corner of his mouth; “but I can keep out of their way.”

“You mean that you have gained your footing, and don’t want to have to do it again.”

“Not only that, sir,” said the boy, “but at a public school you’re fagged, and forced to go in for cricket and football.”

“You would soon get above that.”

“Yes, but even then you get no peace, and are nobody unless you go in for all that stuff of athletics and sports. I hate it all, and don’t want to waste my time.”

“I don’t think you are quite right as to there being no distinction without athletics.”

“Allen says it is so now.”

“Allen may be a better judge of the present state of things, but I should think there was always a studious set who were respectable.”

“Besides,” proceeded Bobus, warming with his subject, “I see no good in nothing but classics. I don’t care what ridiculous lies some old man who never existed, or else was a dozen people at once, told about a lot of ruffians who never lived, killing each other at some place that never was. I like what you can lay your finger on, and say it’s here, it’s true, and I can prove it, and explain it, and improve on it.”

“If you can,” said Mr. Ogilvie, struck by the contrast with the little brother.

“That’s what I want to do,” said Bobus; “to deal with real things, not words and empty fancies. I know languages are necessary; but if one can read a Latin book, and understand a Greek technical term, that’s all that is of use. If my uncle won’t let me study physical science in Germany, I had rather go on here, where I can be let alone to study it for myself.”

“I do not think you understand what you would throw away. What is the difference between Higg, the bone-setter, and Dr. Leslie?”

“Higg can do that one thing just by instinct. He is uneducated.”

“And in a measure it is so with all who throw themselves into some special pursuit without waiting for the mind and character to have full training and expansion. If you mean to be a great surgeon--”

“I don’t mean to be a surgeon.”

“A physician then.”

“No, sir. Please don’t let my mother fancy I mean to be in practice, at everyone’s beck and call. I’ve seen too much of that. I mean to get a professorship, and have time and apparatus for researches, so as to get to the bottom of everything,” said the boy, with the vast purposes of his age.

“Your chances will be much better if you go up from a public school, trained in accuracy by the thorough work of language, and made more powerful by the very fact of not having followed merely your own bent. Your contempt for the classics shows how one-sided you are growing. Besides, I thought you knew that the days are over of unmitigated classics. You would have many more opportunities, and much better ones, of studying physical science than I can provide for you here.”

This was a new light to Bobus, and when Mr. Ogilvie proved its truth to him, and described the facilities he would have for the study, he allowed that it made all the difference.

Meantime the two ladies had gone in, Mary asking where Janet was.

“Gone with Jessie and her mother to a birthday party at Polesworth Lawn.”

“Not a good day for it.”

“It is the perplexing sort of day that no one knows whether to call it fine or wet; but Ellen decided on going, as they were to dance in the hall if it rained. I’m sure her kindness is great, for she takes infinite trouble to make Janet producible! Poor Janet, you know dressing her is like hanging clothes on a wooden peg, and a peg that won’t stand still, and has curious theories of the beautiful, carried out in a still more curious way. So when, in terror of our aunt, the whole female household have done their best to turn out Miss Janet respectable, between this house and Kencroft, she contrives to give herself some twitch, or else is seized with an idea of the picturesque, which sets every one wondering that I let her go about such a figure. Then Ellen and Jessie put a tie here, and a pin there, and reduce the chaotic mass to order.”

It was not long before Janet appeared, and Jessie with her, the latter having been set down to give a message. The two girls were dressed in the same light black-and-white checked silk of early youth, one with pink ribbons and the other with blue; but the contrast was the more apparent, for one was fresh and crisp, while the other was flattened and tumbled; one said everything had been delightful, the other that it had all been very stupid, and the expression made even more difference than the complexion, in one so fair, fresh, and rosy, in the other so sallow and muddled. Jessie looked so sweet and bright, that when she had gone Miss Ogilvie could not help exclaiming, “How pretty she is!”

“Yes, and so good-tempered and pleasant. There is something always restful to me in having her in the room,” said Caroline.

“Restful?” said Janet, with one of her unamiable sneers. “Yes, she and H. S. H. sent me off to sleep with their gossip on the way home! O mother, there’s another item for the Belforest record. Mr. Barnes has sent off all his servants again, even the confidential man is shipped off to America.”

“You seem to have slept with one ear open,” said her mother. “And oh!” as Janet took off her gloves, “I hope you did not show those hands!”

“I could not eat cake without doing so, and Mr. Glover supposed I had been photographing.”

“And what had you been doing?” inquired Mary, at sight of the brown stains.

“Trying chemical experiments with Bobus,” said her mother.

“Yes!” cried Janet, “and I’ve found out why we did not succeed. I thought it out during the dancing.”

“Instead of cultivating the ‘light fantastic toe,’ as the Courier calls it.”

“I danced twice, and a great plague it was. Only with Mr. Glover and with a stupid little middy. I was thinking all the time how senseless it was.”

“How agreeable you must have been!”

“One can’t be agreeable to people like that. Oh, Bobus!” as he came into the room with Mr. Ogilvie, “I’ve found out--”

“I thought Jessie was here,” he interrupted.

“She’s gone home. I know what was wrong yesterday. We ought to have isolated the hypo--”

“Isolated the grandmother,” said Bobus. “That has nothing to do with it.”

“I’m sure of it. I’ll show you how it acts.”

“I’ll show you just the contrary.”

“Not to-night,” cried their mother, as Bobus began to relight the lamp. “You two explosives are quite perilous enough by day without lamps and candles.”

“You endure a great deal,” said Mr. Ogilvie.

“I’m not afraid of either of these two doing anything dangerous singly, for they are both careful, but when they are of different minds, I never know what the collision may produce.”

“Yes,” said Bobus, “I’d much sooner have Jessie to help me, for she does what she is bid, and never thinks.”

“That’s all you think women good for,” said Janet.

“Quite true,” said Bobus, coolly.

And Mr. Ogilvie was acknowledged by his sister to have done a good deed that night, since the Folly might be far more secure when Janet tried her experiments alone.

Spotted a typo or a problem in this chapter? Tell us

XIV. PUMPING AWAY

The rude will scuffle through with ease enough, Great schools best suit the sturdy and the rough. Soon see your wish fulfilled in either child, The pert made perter, and the tame made wild. Cowper.

Robert Otway Brownlow came out fourth on the roll of newly-elected scholars of S. Mary, Winton, and his master was, as his sister declared, unwholesomely proud of it, even while he gave all credit to the Folly, and none to himself.

Still Mary had her way and took him to Brittany, and though her present pupils were to leave the schoolroom at Christmas, she would bind herself to no fresh engagement, thinking that she had better be free to make a home for him, whether at Kenminster or elsewhere.

When the half-year began again Bobus was a good deal missed, Jock was in a severe idle fit, and Armine did not come up to the expectations formed of him, and was found, when “up to Mr. Perkins,” to be as bewildered and unready as other people.

All the work in the school seemed flat and poor, except perhaps Johnny’s, which steadily improved. Robert, whose father wished him to be pushed on so as to be fit for examination for Sandhurst, opposed, to all pressure, the passive resistance of stolidity. He was nearly sixteen, but seemed incapable of understanding that compulsory studies were for his good and not a cruel exercise of tyranny. He disdainfully rejected an offer from his aunt to help him in the French and arithmetic which had become imminent, while of the first he knew much less than Babie, and of the latter only as much as would serve to prevent his being daily “kept in.”

One chilly autumn afternoon, Armine was seen, even by the unobservant under-master, to be shivering violently, and his teeth chattering so that he could not speak plainly.

“You ought to be at home,” said Mr. Perkins. “Here, you, Brownlow maximus, just see him home, and tell his mother that he should be seen to.”

“I can go alone,” Armine tried to say; but Mr. Perkins thought the head-master could not say he neglected one who was felt to be a favoured scholar if he sent his cousin with him.

So presently Armine was pushed in at the back door, with these words from Rob to the cook--“Look here, he’s been and got cold, or something.”

Rob then disappeared, and Armine struggled in to the kitchen fire, white, sobbing and panting, and, as the compassionate maids discovered, drenched from head to foot, his hair soaked, his boots squishing with water. His mother and sisters were out, and as cook administered the hottest draught she could compound, and Emma tugged at his jacket, they indignantly demanded what he had been doing to himself.

“Nothing,” he said. “I’ll go and take my things off; only please don’t tell mother.”

“Yes,” said old nurse, who had tottered in, but who was past fully comprehending emergencies; “go and get into bed, my dear, and Emma shall come and warm it for him.”

“No,” stoutly said the little boy; “there’s nothing the matter, and mother must not know.”

“Take my word for it,” said cook, “that child have a been treated shameful by those great nasty brutes of big boys.”

And when Armine, too cold to sit anywhere but by the only fire in the house, returned with a book and begged humbly for leave to warm himself, he was installed on nurse’s footstool, in front of a huge fire, and hot tea and “lardy-cake” tendered for his refreshment, while the maids by turns pitied and questioned him.

“Have you had a haccident, sir,” asked cook.

“No,” he wearily said.

“Have any one been doing anything to you, then?” And as he did not answer she continued: “You need not think to blind me, sir; I sees it as if it was in print. Them big boys have been a-misusing of you.”

“Now, cook, you ain’t to say a word to my mother,” cried Armine, vehemently. “Promise me.”

“If you’ll tell me all about it, sir,” said cook, coaxingly.

“No,” he answered, “I promised!” And he buried his head in nurse’s lap.

“I calls that a shame,” put in Emma; “but you could tell we, Master Armine. It ain’t like telling your ma nor your master.”

“I said no one,” said Armine.

The maids left off tormenting him after a time, letting him fall asleep with his head on the lap of old nurse, who went on dreamily stroking his damp hair, not half understanding the matter, or she would have sent him to bed.

Being bound by no promise of secrecy, Emma met her mistress with a statement of the surmises of the kitchen, and Caroline hurried thither to find him waking to headache, fiery cheeks, and aching limbs, which were not simply the consequence of the position in which he had been sleeping before the fire. She saw him safe in bed before she asked any questions, but then she began her interrogations, as little successfully as the maids.

“I can’t, mother,” he said, hiding his face on the pillow.

“My little boy used to have no secrets from me.”

“Men must have secrets sometimes, though they rack their hearts and--their backs,” sighed poor Armine, rolling over. “Oh, mother, my back is so bad! Please don’t bother besides.”

“My poor darling! Let me rub it. There, you might trust Mother Carey! She would not tell Mr. Ogilvie, nor get any one into trouble.”

“I promised, mother. Don’t!” And no persuasions could draw anything from him but tears. Indeed he was so feverish and in so much pain that she called in Dr. Leslie before the evening was over, and rheumatic fever was barely staved off by the most anxious vigilance for the next day or two. It was further decreed that he must be carefully tended all the winter, and must not go to school again till he had quite got over the shock, since he was of a delicate frame that would not bear to be trifled with.

The boy gave a long sigh of content when he heard that he was not to return to school at present; but it did not induce him to utter a word on the cause of the wetting, either to his mother or to Mr. Ogilvie, who came up in much distress, and examined him as soon as he was well enough to bear it. Nor would any of his schoolfellows tell. Jock said he had had an imposition, and was kept in school when “it” happened; John said “he had nothing to do with it;” and Rob and Joe opposed surly negatives to all questions on the subject, Rob adding that Armine was a disgusting little idiot, an expression for which his father took him severely to task.

However there were those in Kenminster who never failed to know all about everything, and the first afternoon after Armine’s disaster that Caroline came to Kencroft she was received with such sympathetic kindness that her prophetic soul misgave her, and she dreaded hearing either that she was letting herself be cheated by some tradesman, or that she was to lose her pupils.

No. After inquiries for Armine, his aunt said she was very sorry, but now he was better she thought his mother ought to know the truth.

“What--?” asked Caroline, startled; and Jessie, the only other person in the room, put down her work, and listened with a strange air of determination.

“My dear, I am afraid it is very painful.”

“Tell me at once, Ellen.”

“I can’t think how he learnt it. But they have been about with all sorts of odd people.”

“Who? What, Ellen? Are you accusing my boy?” said Caroline, her limbs beginning to tremble and her eyes to flash, though she spoke as quietly as she could.

“Now do compose yourself, my dear. I dare say the poor little fellow knew no better, and he has had a severe lesson.”

“If you would only tell me, Ellen.”

“It seems,” said Ellen, with much regret and commiseration, “that all this was from poor little Armine using such shocking language that Rob, as a senior boy, you know, put him under the pump at last to put a stop to it.”

Before Caroline’s fierce, incredulous indignation had found a word, Jessie had exclaimed “Mamma!” in a tone of strong remonstrance; then, “Never mind, Aunt Carey, I know it is only Mrs. Coffinkey, and Johnny promised he would tell the whole story if any one brought that horrid nonsense to you about poor little Armine.”

Kind, gentle Jessie seemed quite transported out of herself, as she flew to the door and called Johnny, leaving the two mothers looking at each other, and Ellen, somewhat startled, saying “I’m sure, if it is not true, I’m very sorry, Caroline, but it came from--”

She broke off, for Johnny was scuffling across the hall, calling out “Holloa, Jessie, what’s up?”

“Johnny, she’s done it!” said Jessie. “You said if the wrong one was accused you would tell the whole story!”

“And what do they say?” asked John, who was by this time in the room.

“Mamma has been telling Aunt Carey that Rob put poor little Armine under the pump for using bad language.”

“I say!” exclaimed John; “if that is not a cram!”

“You said you knew nothing of it,” said his mother.

“I said I didn’t do it. No more I did,” said John.

“No more did Rob, I am sure,” said his mother.

But Johnny, though using no word of denial, made it evident that she was mistaken, as he answered in an odd tone of excuse, “Armie was cheeky.”

“But he didn’t use bad words!” said Caroline, and she met a look of comfortable response.

“Let us hear, John,” said his mother, now the most agitated. “I can’t believe that Rob would so ill-treat a little fellow like Armie, even if he did lose his temper for a moment. Was Armine impertinent?”

“Well, rather,” said John. “He wouldn’t do Rob’s French exercise.” And then--as the ladies cried out, he added--“O yes, he knows ever so much more French than Rob, and now Bobus is gone Rob could not get anyone else.”

“Bobus?”

“O yes, Bobus would do anybody’s exercises at a penny for Latin, two for French, and three for Greek,” said John, not aware of the shock he gave.

“And Armine would not?” said his mother. “Was that it?”

“Not only that,” said John; “but the little beggar must needs up and say he would not help to act a falsehood, and you know nobody could stand that.”

Caroline understood the gravity of such an offence better than Ellen did, for that good lady had never had much in common with her boys after they outgrew the nursery. She answered, “Armine was quite right.”

“So much the worse for him, I fear,” said Caroline.

“Yes,” said John, “it would have been all very well to give him a cuff and tell him to mind his own business.”

“All very well!” ejaculated his mother.

“But you know,” continued Johnny to his aunt, “the seniors are always mad at a junior being like that; and there was another fellow who dragged him to the great school pump, and put him in the trough, and they said they would duck him till he swore to do whatever Rob ordered.”

“Swore!” exclaimed his mother. “You don’t mean that, Johnny?”

“Yes, I do, mamma,” said John. “I would tell you the words, only you wouldn’t like them. And Armine said it would be breaking the Third Commandment, which was the very way to aggravate them most. So they pumped on his head, and tried if he would say it. ‘No,’ he said. ‘You may kill me like the forty martyrs, but I won’t,’ and of course that set them on to pump the more.”

“But, Johnny, did you see it all?” cried Caroline. “How could you?”

“I couldn’t help it, Aunt Carey.”

“Yes, Aunt Carey,” again broke in Jessie, “he was held down. That horrid--well, I won’t say whom, Johnny--held him, and his arm was so twisted and grazed that he was obliged to come to me to put some lily-leaves on it, and if he would but show it, it is all black and yellow still.”

Carey, much moved, went over and kissed both her boy’s champions, while Ellen said, with tears in her eyes, “Oh, Johnny, I’m glad you were at least not so bad. What ended it?”

“The school-bell,” said Johnny. “I say, please don’t let Rob know I told, or I shall catch it.”

“Your father--”

“Mamma! You aren’t going to tell him!” cried Jessie and Johnny, both in horror, interrupting her.

“Yes, children, I certainly shall. Do you think such wickedness as that ought to be kept from him? Nearly killing a fatherless child like that, because he was not as bad as they were, and telling falsehoods about it too! I never could have believed it of Rob. Oh! what school does to one’s boys!” She was agitated and overcome to a degree that startled Carey, who began to try to comfort her.

“Perhaps Rob did not understand what he was about, and you see he was led on. Armine will soon be all right again, and though he is a dear, good little fellow, maybe the lesson may have been good for him.”

“How can you treat it so lightly?” cried poor Ellen, in her agitated indignation. “It was a mercy that the child did not catch his death; and as to Rob--! And when Mr. Ogilvie always said the boys were so improved, and that there was no bullying! It just shows how much he knows about it! To think what they have made of my poor Rob! His father will be so grieved! I should not wonder if he had a fit of the gout!”

The shock was far greater to her than to one who had never kept her boys at a distance, and who understood their ways, characters, and code of honour; and besides Rob was her eldest, and she had credited him with every sterling virtue. Jessie and Johnny stood aghast. They had only meant to defend their little cousin, and had never expected either that she would be so much overcome, or that she would insist on their father knowing all, as she did with increasing anger and grief at each of their attempts at persuading her to the contrary. Caroline thought he ought to know. Her children’s father would have known long ago, but then his wrath would have been a different thing from what seemed to be apprehended from his brother; and she understood the distress of Jessie and John, though her pity for Rob was but small. Whatever she tried to say in the way of generous mediation or soothing only made it worse; and poor Ellen, far from being her Serene Highness, was, between scolding and crying, in an almost hysterical state, so that Caroline durst not leave her or the frightened Jessie, and was relieved at last to hear the Colonel coming into the house, when, thinking her presence would do more harm than good, and longing to return to her little son, she slipped away, and was joined at the door by her own John, who asked--

“What’s up, mother?”

“Did you know all about this dreadful business, Jock?”

“Afterwards, of course, but I was shut up in school, writing three hundred disgusting lines of Virgil, or I’d have got the brutes off some way.”

“And so little Armie is the brave one of all!”

“Well, so he is,” said Jock; “but I say, mother, don’t go making him cockier. You know he’s only fit to be stitched up in one of Jessie’s little red Sunday books, and he must learn to keep a civil tongue in his head, and not be an insufferable little donkey.”

“You would not have had him give in and do it! Never, Jock!”

“Why no, but he could have got off with a little chaff instead of coming out with his testimony like that, and so I’ve been telling him. So don’t you set him up again to think himself forty martyrs all in one, or there will be no living with him.”

“If all boys were like him.”

Jock made a sound of horror and disgust that made her laugh.

“He’s all very well,” added he in excuse; “but to think of all being like that. The world would be only one big muff.”

“But, Jock, what’s this about Bobus being paid for doing people’s exercises?”

“Bobus is a cute one,” said Jock.

“I thought he had more uprightness,” she sighed. “And you, Jock?”

“I should think not!” he laughed. “Nobody would trust me.”

“Is that the only reason?” she said, sadly, and he looked up in her face, squeezed her hand, and muttered--

“One mayn’t like dirt without making such a row.”

“That’s like father’s boy,” she said, and he wrung her hand again.

They found Armine coiled up before the fire with a book, and Jock greeted him with--

“Well, you little donkey, there’s such a shindy at the Croft as you never heard.”

“Mother, you know!” cried Armine, running into her outstretched arms and being covered with her kisses. “But who told?” he asked.

“John and Jessie,” said Jock. “They always said they would if anyone said anything against you to mother or Uncle Robert.”

“Against me?” said Armine.

“Yes,” said Jock. “Didn’t you know it got about through some of the juniors or their sisters that it was Brownlow maximus gently chastising you for bad language, and of course Mrs. Coffinkey told Aunt Ellen.”

“Oh, but Jock,” cried Armine, turning round in consternation, “I hope Rob does not know.”

And on further pressing it was extracted that Rob, when sent home with him, had threatened him with the great black vaulted cellars of Kencroft if he divulged the truth. When Jock left them the relief of pouring out the whole history to the mother was evidently great.

“You know, mother, I couldn’t,” he cried, as if there had been a physical impossibility.

“Why, dear child. How did you bear their horrid cruelty?”

“I thought it could not be so bad as it was for the forty soldiers on the Lake. Dear grandmamma read us the story out of a little red book one Sunday evening when you were gone to Church. They froze, you know, and it was only cold and nasty for me.”

“So the thought of them carried you through?”

“God carried me through,” said the child reverently. “I asked Him not to let me break His Commandment.”

Just then the Colonel’s heavy tread was heard, and with him came Mr. Ogilvie, whom he had met on the road and informed. The good man was indeed terribly grieved, and his first words were, “Caroline, I cannot tell you how much shocked and concerned I am;” and then he laid his hand on Armine’s shoulder saying--“My little boy, I am exceedingly sorry for what you have suffered. One day Robert will be so too. You have been a noble little fellow, and if anything could console me for the part Robert has played it would be the seeing one of my dear brother’s sons so like his father.”

He gave the downcast brow a fatherly kiss, so really like those of days gone by that the boy’s overstrained spirits gushed forth in sobs and tears, of which he was so much ashamed that he rushed out of the room, leaving his mother greatly overcome, his uncle distressed and annoyed, and his master not much less so, at the revelation of so much evil, so hard either to reach or to understand.

“I would have brought Robert to apologise,” said the Colonel, “if he had been as yet in a mood to do so properly.”

“Oh! that would have been dreadful for us all,” ejaculated Caroline, under her breath.

“But I can make nothing of him,” continued he, “He is perfectly stolid and seems incapable of feeling anything, though I have talked to him as I never thought to have to speak to any son of mine; but he is deaf to all.”

The Colonel, in his wrath, even while addressing only Caroline and Mr. Ogilvie, had raised his voice as if he were shouting words of command, so that both shrank a little, and Carey said--

“I don’t think he knew it was so bad.”

“What? Cheating his masters and torturing a helpless child for not yielding to his tyranny?”

“People don’t always give things their right names even to themselves,” said Mr. Ogilvie. “I should try to see it from the boy’s point of view.”

“I have no notion of extenuating ill-conduct or making excuses! That’s the modern way! So principles get lowered! I tell you, sir, there are excuses for everything. What makes the difference is only the listening to them or not.”

“Yes,” ventured Caroline, “but is there not a difference between finding excuses for oneself and for other people?”

“All alike, lowering the principle,” said the Colonel, with something of the same slowness of comprehension as his son. “If excuses are to be made for everything, I don’t wonder that there is no teaching one’s boys truth or common honesty and humanity.”

“But, Robert,” said Caroline, roused to defence; “do you really mean that in your time nobody bullied or cribbed?”

“There was some shame about it if they did,” said the Colonel. “Now, I suppose, I am to be told that it is an ordinary custom to be connived at.”

“Certainly not by me,” said Mr. Ogilvie. “I had hoped that the standard of honour had been raised, but it is very hard to mete the exact level of the schoolboy code from the outside.”

“And your John and mine have never given in to it,” added Caroline.

“What do you propose to do, Mr. Ogilvie?” said the Colonel. “I shall do my part with my boy as a father. What will you do with him and the other bully, who I find was Cripps.”

“I shall see Cripps’s father first. I think it might be well if we both saw him before deciding on the form of discipline. We have to think not only of justice but of the effect on their characters.”

“That’s the modern system,” said the Colonel indignantly. “Fine work it would make in the army. I know when punishment is deserved. I don’t set up to be Providence, to know exactly what work it is to do. I leave that to my Maker and do my duty.”

He was cut short by his son Joe rushing in headlong, exclaiming--

“Papa, papa, please come! Rob has knocked Johnny down and he doesn’t come round.”

Colonel Brownlow hurried off, Caroline trying to make him hear her offer to follow if she could be useful, and sending Jock to see whether there was any opening for her. Unless the emergency were very great indeed she knew her absence would be preferred, and so she and Mr. Ogilvie remained, talking the matter over, with more pity for the delinquent than his own family would have thought natural.

“It really is a terrible thing to be stupid,” she said. “I don’t imagine that unlucky boy ever entered into his father’s idea of truth and honour, which really is fine in its way.”

“Very fine, and proved to have made many fine fellows in its time. I dare say the lad will grow up to it, but just now he simply feels cruelly injured by interference with a senior’s claim to absolute submission.”

“Which he sees as singly as his father sees the simple duty of justice.”

“It would be comfortable if we poor moderns could deal out our measures with that straightforward military simplicity. I cannot help seeing in that unfortunate boy the victim of examinations for commissions. Boys must be subjected to high pressure before they can thoroughly enter into the importance of the issues that depend upon it; and when a sluggish, dull intellect is forced beyond endurance, there is an absolute instinct of escape, impelling to shifts and underhand ways of eluding work. Of course the wrong is great, but the responsibility rests with the taskmaster in the same manner as the thefts of a starved slave might on his owner.”

“The taskmaster being the country?”

“Exactly so. Happy those boys who have available brains, like yours.”

“Ah! I am very sorry about Bobus; what ought I to do?”

“Hardly more than write a few words of warning, since the change may probably have put an end to the practice.”

Jock presently brought back tidings that his namesake was all right, except for a black eye, and was growling like ten bears at having been sent to bed.

“Uncle Robert was more angry than ever, in a white heat, quiet and terrible,” said Jock, in an awe-struck voice. “He has locked Rob up in his study, and here’s Joe, for Aunt Ellen is quite knocked up, and they want the house to be very quiet.”

No tragical consequences, however, ensued. Mother and sons both appeared the next morning, and were reported as “all right” by the first inquirer from the Folly; but Jessie came to her lessons with swollen eyelids as if she had cried half the night; and when her aunt thanked her for defending Armine, she began to cry again, and Essie imparted to Barbara that Rob was “just like a downright savage with her.”

“No; hush, Essie, it is not that,” said Jessie; “but papa is so dreadfully angry with him, and he is to be sent away, and it is all my fault.”

“But Jessie, dear, surely it is better for Rob to be stopped from those deceitful ways.”

“O yes, I know. But that I should have turned against him!” And Jessie was so thoroughly unhappy that none of her lessons prospered and her German exercise had three great tear blots on it.

Rob’s second misdemeanour had simplified matters by deciding his father on sending him from home at once into the hands of a professed coach, who would not let him elude study, and whose pupils were too big to be bullied. To the last he maintained his sullen dogged air of indifference, though there might be more truth than the Folly was disposed to allow in his sister’s allegations that it was because he did feel it so very much, especially mamma’s looking so ill and worried.

Ellen did in truth look thoroughly unhinged, though no one saw her give way. She felt her boy’s conduct sorely, and grieved at the first parting in her family. Besides, there was anxiety for the future. Rob’s manner of conducting his studies was no hopeful augury of his success, and the expenses of sending him to a tutor fell the more heavily because unexpectedly. A horse and man were given up, and Jessie had to resign the hope of her music lessons. These were the first retrenchments, and the diminution of dignity was felt.

The Colonel showed his trouble and anxiety by speaking and tramping louder than ever, ruling his gardener with severe precision, and thundering at his boys whenever he saw them idle. Both he and his wife were so elaborately kind and polite that Caroline believed that it was an act of magnanimous forgiveness for the ill luck that she and her boys had brought them. At last the Colonel had the threatened fit of the gout, which restored his equilibrium, and brought him back to his usual condition of kindly, if somewhat ponderous, good sense.

He had not long recovered before Number Nine made his appearance at Kencroft, and thus his mother had unusual facilities for inquiries of Dr. Leslie respecting the master of Belforest.

The old man really seemed to be in a dying state. A hospital nurse had taken charge of him, but there was not a dependent about the place, from Mr. Richards downwards, who was not under notice to quit, and most were staying on without his knowledge on the advice of the London solicitor, to whom the agent had written. There was even more excitement on the intelligence that Mr. Barnes had sent for Farmer Gould.

On this there was no doubt, for Mr. Gould, always delicately honourable towards Mrs. Brownlow, came himself to tell her about the interview. It seemed to have been the outcome of a yearning of the dying man towards the sole survivor of the companions of his early days. He had talked in a feeble wandering way of old times, but had said nothing about the child, and was plainly incapable of sustained attention.

He had asked Mr. Gould to come again, but on this second visit he was too far gone for recognition, and had returned to his moody instinctive aversion to visitors, and in three days more he was dead.

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XV. THE BELFOREST MAGNUM BONUM

Where is his golden heap? Divine Breathings.

Mrs. Robert Brownlow was churched with all the expedition possible, in order that she might not lose the sight of the funeral procession, which would be fully visible from the studio in the top of the tower.

The excitement was increased by invitations to attend the funeral being sent to the Colonel and to his two eldest nephews, who were just come home for the holidays, also to their mother to be present at the subsequent reading of the will.

A carriage was sent for her, and she entered it, not knowing or caring to find out what she wished, and haunted by the line, “Die and endow a college or a cat.”

Allen met her at the front door, whispering--“Did you see, mother, he has still got his ears?” And the thought crossed her--“Will those ears cost us dear?”

She was the only woman present in the library--a large room, but with an atmosphere as if the open air had not been admitted for thirty years, and with an enormous fire, close to which was the arm-chair whither she was marshalled, being introduced to the two solicitors, Mr. Rowse and Mr. Wakefield, who, with Farmer Gould, the agent, Richards, the Colonel, and the two boys, made up the audience.

The lawyers explained that the will had been sent home ten years ago from Yucatan, and had ever since been in their hands. Search had been made for a later one, but none had been found, nor did they believe that one could exist.

It was very short. The executors were Charles Rowse and Peter Ball, and the whole property was devised to them, and to Lieutenant-Colonel Robert Brownlow, as trustees for the testator’s great-niece, Mrs. Caroline Otway Brownlow, daughter of John and Caroline Allen, and wife of Joseph Brownlow, Esq., M.D., F.R.C.S., the income and use thereof to be enjoyed by her during her lifetime; and the property, after her death, to be divided among her children in such proportions as she should direct.

That was all; there was no legacy, no further directions.

“Allow me to congratulate--” began the elder lawyer.

“No--no--oh, stay a bit,” cried she, in breathless dismay and bewilderment. “It can’t be! It can’t mean only me. There must be something about Elvira de Menella.”

“I fear there is not,” said Mr. Rowse; “I could wish my late client had attended more to the claims of justice, and had divided the property, which could well have borne it; but unfortunately it is not so.”

“It is exactly as he led us to expect,” said Mr. Gould. “We have no right to complain, and very likely the child will be much happier without it. You have a fine family growing up to enjoy it, Mrs. Brownlow, and I am sure no one congratulates you more heartily than I.”

“Don’t; it can’t be,” cried the heiress, nearly crying, and wringing the old farmer’s hand. “He must have meant Elvira. You know he sent for you. Has everything been hunted over? There must be a later will.”

“Indeed, Mrs. Brownlow,” said the solicitor, “you may rest assured that full search has been made. Mr. Richards had the same impression, and we have been searching every imaginable receptacle.”

“Besides,” added Colonel Brownlow, “if he had made another will there would have been witnesses.”

“Yes,” said Mr. Richards; “but to make matters certain, I wrote to several of the servants to ask whether they remembered any attestation, but no one did; and indeed I doubt whether, after his arrival here, poor Mr. Barnes ever had sustained power enough to have drawn up and executed a will without my assistance, or that of any legal gentleman.”

“It is too hard and unjust,” cried Caroline; “it cannot be. I must halve it with the child, as if there had been no will at all. Robert! you know that is what your brother would have done.”

“That would be just as well as generous, indeed, if it were practicable,” said Mr. Rowse; “but unfortunately Colonel Brownlow and myself (for Mr. Ball is dead) are in trust to prevent any such proceeding. All that is in your power is to divide the property among your own family by will, in such proportion as you may think fit.”

“Quite true, my dear sister,” said the Colonel, meeting her despairing appealing look, “as regards the principal, but the ready money at the bank and the income are entirely at your own disposal, and you can, without difficulty, secure a very sufficient compensation to the little girl out of them.”

“No doubt,” said Mr. Rowse.

“You’ll let me--you’ll let me, Mr. Gould,” implored Caroline; “you’ll let me keep her, and do all I can to make up to her. You see the Colonel thinks it is only justice; don’t you, Robert?”

“Mrs. Brownlow is quite right,” said the Colonel, seeing that her vehemence was a little distrusted; “it will be only an act of justice to make provision for your granddaughter.”

“I am sure, Colonel Brownlow, nothing can be handsomer than your conduct and Mrs. Brownlow’s,” said the old man; “but I should not like to take advantage of what she is good enough to say on the spur of the moment, till she has had more time to think it over.”

Therewith he took leave, while Caroline exclaimed--

“I always say there is no truer gentleman in the county than old Mr. Gould. I shall not be satisfied about that will till I have turned everything over and the partners have been written to.”

Again she was assured that she might set her mind at rest, and then the lawyers began to read a statement of the property which made Allen utter, under his breath, an emphatic “I say!” but his mother hardly took it in. The heated room had affected her from the first, and the bewilderment of the tidings seemed almost to crush her; her heart and temples throbbed, her head ached violently, and while the final words respecting arrangements were passing between the Colonel and the lawyers, she was conscious only of a sickening sense of oppression, and a fear of committing the absurdity of fainting.

However, at last her brother-in-law put her into the brougham, desiring the boys to walk home, which they did very willingly, and with a wonderful air of lordship and possession.

“Well, Caroline,” said the Colonel, “I congratulate you on being the richest proprietor in the county.”

“O Robert, don’t! If--if,” said a suffocated voice, so miserable that he turned and took her hand kindly, saying--

“My dear sister, this feeling is very--it becomes you well. This is a fearful responsibility.”

She could not answer. She only leant back in the carriage, with closed eyes, and moaned--

“Oh! Joe! Joe!”

“Indeed,” said his brother, greatly touched, “we want him more than ever.”

He did not try to talk any more to her, and when they reached the Pagoda, all she could do was to hurry up stairs, and, throwing off her bonnet, bury her face in the pillow.

Janet and her aunt both followed, the latter with kind and tender solicitude; but Caroline could bear nothing, and begged only to be left alone.

“Dear Ellen, it is very kind, but nothing does any good to these headaches. Please don’t--please leave me alone.”

They saw it was the only true kindness, and left her, after all attempts at bathing her forehead, or giving her sal volatile, proved only to molest her. She lay on her bed, not able to think, and feeling nothing but the pain of her headache and a general weight and loneliness.

The first break was from Allen, who came in tenderly with a cup of coffee, saying that they thought her time was come for being ready for it. His manner always did her good, and she sat up, pushed back her hair, smiled, took the cup, and thanked him lovingly.

“Uncle Robert is waiting to hear if you are better,” he said.

“Oh yes,” she said; “thank him; I am sorry I was so silly.”

“He wants me to dine there to-night, mother, to meet Mr. Rowse and Mr. Wakefield,” said Allen, with a certain importance suited to a lad of fifteen, who had just become “somebody.”

“Very well,” she said, in weary acquiescence, as she lay down again, just enough refreshed by the coffee to become sleepy.

“And mother,” said Allen, lingering in the dark, “don’t trouble about Elfie. I shall marry her as soon as I am of age, and that will make all straight.”

Her stunned sleepiness was scarcely alive to this magnanimous announcement, and she dreamily said--

“Time enough to think of such things.”

“I know,” said Allen; “but I thought you ought to know this.”

He looked wistfully for another word on this great avowal, but she was really too much stupefied to enter into the purport of the boy’s words, and soon after he left her she fell sound asleep. She had a curious dream, which she remembered long after. She seemed to have identified herself with King Midas, and to be touching all her children, who turned into hard, cold, solid golden statues fixed on pedestals in the Belforest gardens, where she wandered about, vainly calling them. Then her husband’s voice, sad and reproachful, seemed to say, “Magnum Bonum! Magnum Bonum!” and she fancied it the elixir which alone could restore them, and would have climbed a mountain in search of it, as in the Arabian tale; but her feet were cold, heavy, and immovable, and she found that they too had become gold, and that the chill was creeping upwards. With a scream of “Save the children, Joe,” she awoke.

No wonder she had dreamt of cold golden limbs, for her feet were really chilly as ice, and the room as dark as at midnight. However it was not yet seven o’clock; and presently Janet brought a light, and persuaded her to come downstairs and warm herself. She was not yet capable of going into the dining-room to the family tea, but crept down to lie on the sofa in the drawing-room; and there, after taking the small refreshment which was all she could yet endure, she lay with closed eyes, while the children came in from the meal. Armine and Babie were the first. She knew they were looking at her, but was too weary to exert herself to speak to them.

“Asleep,” they whispered. “Poor Mother Carey.”

“Armie,” said Babie, “is mother unhappy because she has got rich?”

Armine hesitated. His brief experience of school had made him less unsophisticated, and he seldom talked in his own peculiar fashion even to his little sister, and she added--

“Must people get wicked when they are rich?”

“Mother is always good,” said faithful little Armine.

“The rich people in the Bible were all bad,” pondered Babie. “There was Dives, and the man with the barns.”

“Yes,” said Armine; “but there were good ones too--Abraham and Solomon.”

“Solomon was not always good,” said Babie; “and Uncle Robert told Allen it was a fearful responsibility. What is a responsibility, Armie? I am sure Ali didn’t like it.”

“Something to answer for!” said Armine.

“To who?” asked the little girl.

“To God,” said the boy reverently. “It’s like the talent in the parable. One has got to do something for God with it, and then it won’t turn to harm.”

“Like the man’s treasure that changed into slate stones when he made a bad use of it,” said Babie. “Oh! Armie, what shall we do? Shall we give plum-puddings to the little thin girls down the lane?”

“And I should like to give something good to the little grey workhouse boys,” said Armine. “I should so hate always walking out along a straight road as they do.”

“And oh! Armie, then don’t you think we may get a nice book to write out Jotapata in?”

“Yes, a real jolly one. For you know, Babie, it will take lots of room, even if I write my very smallest.”

“Please let it be ruled, Armie. And where shall we begin?”

“Oh! at the beginning, I think, just when Sir Engelbert first heard about the Crusade.”

“It will take lots of books then.”

“Never mind, we can buy them all now. And do you know, Bab, I think Adelmar and Ermelind might find a nice lot of natural petroleum and frighten Mustafa ever so much with it!”

For be it known that Armine and Barbara’s most cherished delight was in one continued running invention of a defence of Jotapata by a crusading family, which went on from generation to generation with unabated energy, though they were very apt to be reduced to two young children who held out their fortress against frightful odds of Saracens, and sometimes conquered, sometimes converted their enemies. Nobody but themselves was fully kept au courant with this wonderful siege, which had hitherto been recorded in interlined copy-books, or little paper books pasted together, and very remarkably illustrated.

The door began to creak with an elaborate noisiness intended for perfect silence, and Jock’s voice was heard.

“Bother the door! Did it wake mother? No? That’s right;” and he squatted down between the little ones while Bobus seated himself at the table with a book.

“Well! what colour shall our ponies be?” began Jock, in an attempt at a whisper.

“Oh! shall we have ponies?” cried the little ones.

“Zebras if we like,” said Jock. “We’ll have a team.”

“Can’t,” growled Bobus.

“Why not? They can be bought!”

“Not tamed. They’ve tried it at the Jardin d’Acclimatisation.”

“Oh, that was only Frenchmen. A zebra is too jolly to let himself be tamed by a Frenchman. I’ll break one in myself and go out with the hounds upon him.”

“Jack-ass on striped-ass--or off him,” muttered Bobus.

“Oh! don’t, Jock,” implored Babie, “you’ll get thrown.”

“No such thing. You’ll come to the meet yourself, Babie, on your Arab.”

“Not she,” said Bobus, in his teasing voice. “She’ll be governessed up and kept to lessons all day.”

“Mother always teaches us,” said Babie.

“She’ll have no time, she’ll be a great lady, and you’ll have three governesses--one for French, and one for German, and one for deportment, to make you turn out your toes, and hold up your head, and never sit on the rug.”

“Never mind, Babie,” said Jock. “We’ll bother them out of their lives if they do.”

“You’ll be at school,” said Bobus, “and they’ll all three go out walking with Babie, and if she goes out of a straight line one will say ‘Fi donc, Mademoiselle Barbe,’ and the other will say, ‘Schamen sie sich, Fraulein Barbara,’ and the third will call for the stocks.”

“For shame, Robert,” cried his mother, hearing something like a sob; “how can you tease her so!”

“Mother, must I have three governesses?” asked poor little Barbara.

“Not one cross one, my sweet, if I can help it!”

“Oh! mother, if it might be Miss Ogilvie?” said Babie.

“Yes, mother, do let it be Miss Ogilvie,” chimed in Armine. “She tells such jolly stories!”

“She ain’t a very nasty one,” quoted Jock from Newman Noggs, and as Janet appeared he received her with--“Moved by Barbara, seconded by Armine, that Miss Ogilvie become bear-leader to lick you all into shape.”

“What do you think of it, Janet?” said her mother.

“It will not make much difference to me,” said Janet. “I shall depend on classes and lectures when we go back to London. I should have thought a German better for the children, but I suppose the chief point is to find some one who can manage Elfie if we are still to keep her.”

“By the bye, where is she, poor little thing?” asked Caroline.

“Aunt Ellen took her home,” said Janet. “She said she would send her back at bed-time, but she thought we should be more comfortable alone to-night.”

“Real kindness,” said Caroline; “but remember, children, all of you, that Elfie is altogether one of us, on perfectly equal terms, so don’t let any difference be made now or ever.”

“Shall I have a great many more lessons, mother?” asked Babie.

“Don’t be as silly as Essie, Babie,” said Janet. “She expects us all to have velvet frocks and gold-fringed sashes, and Jessie’s first thought was ‘Now, Janet, you’ll have a ladies’ maid.’”

“No wonder she rejoiced to be relieved of trying to make you presentable,” said Bobus.

“Shall we live at Belforest?” asked Armine.

“Part of the year,” said Janet, who was in a wonderfully expansive and genial state; “but we shall get back to London for the season, and know what it is to enjoy life and rationality again, and then we must all go abroad. Mother, how soon can we go abroad?”

“It won’t make a bit of difference for a year. We shan’t get it for ever so long,” said Bobus.

“Oh!”

“Fact. I know a man whose uncle left him a hundred pounds last year, and the lawyers haven’t let him touch a penny of it.”

“Perhaps he is not of age,” said Janet.

“At any rate,” said Jock, “we can have our fun at Belforest.”

“O yes, Jock, only think,” cried Babie, “all the dear tadpoles belong to mother!”

“And all the dragon-flies,” said Armine.

“And all the herons,” said Jock.

“We can open the gates again,” said Armine.

“Oh! the flowers!” cried Babie in an ecstasy.

“Yes,” said Janet. “I suppose we shall spend the early spring in the country, but we must have the best part of the season in London now that we can get out of banishment, and enjoy rational conversation once more.”

“Rational fiddlestick,” muttered Bobus.

“That’s what any girl who wasn’t such a prig as Janet would look for,” said Jock.

“Well, of course,” said Janet. “I mean to have my balls like other people; I shall see life thoroughly. That’s just what I value this for.”

Bobus made a scoffing noise.

“What’s up, Bobus?” asked Jock.

“Nothing, only you keep up such a row, one can’t read.”

“I’m sure this is better and more wonderful than any book!” said Jock.

“It makes no odds to me,” returned Bobus, over his book.

“Oh! now!” cried Janet, “if it were only the pleasure of being free from patronage it would be something.”

“Gratitude!” said Bobus.

“I’ll show my gratitude,” said Janet; “we’ll give all of them at Kencroft all the fine clothes and jewels and amusements that ever they care for, more than ever they gave us; only it is we that shall give and they that will take, don’t you see?”

“Sweet charity,” quoth Bobus.

Those two were a great contrast; Janet had never been so radiant, feeling her sentence of banishment revoked, and realising more vividly than anyone else was doing, the pleasures of wealth. The cloud under which she had been ever since the coming to the Pagoda seemed to have rolled away, in the sense of triumph and anticipation; while Bobus seemed to have fallen into a mood of sarcastic ill-temper. His mother saw, and it added to her sense of worry, though her bright sweet nature would scarcely have fathomed the cause, even had she been in a state to think actively rather than to feel passively. Bobus, only a year younger than Allen, and endowed with more force and application, if not with more quickness, had always been on a level with his brother, and felt superior, despising Allen’s Eton airs and graces, and other characteristics which most people thought amiable. And now Allen had become son and heir, and was treated by everyone as the only person of importance. Bobus did not know what his own claims might be, but at any rate his brother’s would transcend them, and his temper was thoroughly upset.

Poor Caroline! She did not wholly omit to pray “In all time of our tribulation, in all time of our wealth, deliver us!” but if she had known all that was in her children’s hearts, her own would have trembled more.

And as to Ellen, the utmost she allowed herself to say was, “Well, I hope she will make a good use of it!”

While the Colonel, as trustee and adviser, had really a very considerable amount of direct importance and enjoyment before him, which might indeed be--to use his own useful phrase--“a fearful responsibility,” but was no small boon to a man with too much time on his hands.

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