Patience Holt

Chapter I

" "pRITZ ! " shouted Patience. "What d'you want?" growled a boy's sleepy voice. " I want to know what you're doing. I can't see you. You're in the dark." " Well, let me be. I want to be in the dark." " But that's nonsense," said Patience with decision ; and she ran forward into the gloom. The boy was lying on a heap of hay, at full length, in a state of lazy enjoyment. The place was a big old barn ; the time was VOL. I. I nearly an hour after sunset ; the shadows all round him were very deep, so that even Patience's sharp eyes for a few moments could scarcely discover him in his luxurious retirement. When after a brief space, how ever, those keen organs detected his recum bent figure, she paused in her advance, and addressed him again, with indignation. " Well, of all the idle boys I ever knew ! — of all the horrible lazy boys ! — " she cried.

" Now — come, shut up," said Fred com posedly. But Patience had no intention of obeying this injunction, and she continued her address with undiminished force. "You're lazier than any one else I ever knew. You're like a pig. You're not like a boy at all." "Well, all right," said Fred, Avith coolness. " You're like one, at any rate." " I believe you've been fast asleep," said Patience. " You're taking good care, anyway, that I shan't sleep noAv," retorted Fred .; and he gave a great yawn, and stretched his arms out over his head. " But, Fritz," said Patience, in rather a more alluring and pathetic tone, " I think it's so nasty of you. I think it's horrid, — Avhen I've nobody else to play with." " Oh, bother ! " remarked Fred succinctly. " Of course, if there was anybody else it Avouldn't matter."

Fred gave a chuckle. " No, I know that Avell enough. You're a little beast," he said Avith cutting coolness. " You only care for people for what you can get out of them." And then all at once Patience fell upon him. She made a rushing, hissing sound, and swooped down on him, and hit him on the chest blindly, with both her doubled fists, like a young fury. This attack, however, if fierce, was brief, for she was a very little person, and before she had been striking out for two or three seconds, her brother lifted himself up, and seized her by the wrists. " Well, you're a pretty spitfire ! " he said. " You're a nice sister to have ! " " Oh, Fritz ! " cried poor Patience, with swift contrition, " don't say that ! " " You get worse every day you live, — worse and nastier," said Fred, unmoved. " Oh, no — no, I don't," quavered Patience.

" It's only when you say — such — horrid — things. But, Fritz, I'm— very — sorry." " Much any one would care for your sorrow ! " retorted Fritz, contemptuously. And then, being by this time on his feet, he marched out of the barn Avithout another word ; and poor Patience in her turn dropped down upon the hay, with the tears running down her cheeks. The tears ran down her cheeks for about half a minute, but after the half-minute had expired she took out her pocket-handkerchief and wiped them away. "Well, it's no use crying," she said, Avith sudden philosophy ; " and if I did hit him I'm sure he was aggravating. One can't help hitting people sometimes ; I don't know how anybody can. One must either hit, or do something worse. I think it's ever so much worse to say things. When one says things it's so horrid afterwards.

I don't think I said — much now." And then she sat pensively for a little Avhile, trying rather vainly to recollect what words had dropped from her lips ; after which unproductive exercise she jumped at last rather suddenly to her feet. " Oh, dear, it's getting quite dark even out there," she all at once exclaimed, gazing towards the open door ; " and for anything I know," she prudently added, " there may be ghosts about." With which reflection she sped across the barn floor with remarkable haste, and bolted into the yard. She was not in a general way afraid of ghosts ; still, in an unfamiliar place, she felt it was best to err on the side of circumspection. And this was an entirely unfamiliar place : it was a farm in one of the southern counties, and Patience's natural home was in London, where she lived for ten months and a half out of every year.

She lived in London, and she never thought of wanting to live anywhere else ; but yet, when her father and mother and she and Fred made their yearly migration for six summer weeks to some country or seaside quarters, that period to Patience was a period of the utmost interest and delight. Fred did not care for it as she did, — but then, " Fritz was so odd," as she continually remarked to herself. He would loll about all day, if you let him, doing nothing, indifferent to all those exquisite privileges of boyhood Avhich, had he cared to avail himself of them, would have permitted him a freedom that, as compared with the freedom attainable by herself, seemed to Patience's imaginative mind as wide almost as a bird's. " To think that he might do anything, and that he does — nothing ! " she would reflect day after day with an immeasurable wonder, and, to tell the truth, occasionally with an immeasurable scorn.

" I think that Patience ought to have been the boy," her mother sometimes said of her ; but she never said this in her husband's hearing, for Dr. Holt would have regarded such an expression of opinion as indicating a desire to interfere with the acts of Providence, and savouring of spiritual presumption, and other heinous sins. He himself drew no contrast between the characters of his children. To his calmly receptive mind they simply were as God had made them — two gifts bestowed upon him, in wrath or mercy, to be dealt with according to his lights ; and according to his lights he did consequently deal with them, not without a painful sense that one of them, at any rate, presented herself at times, to such imagination as he possessed, almost in the light of an instrument of Satan sent to buffet him.

For Dr. Holt had come of Quaker blood, and Patience, in spite of her name, was not Quaker like. She had been christened Patience after her paternal grandmother, but from her earliest infancy it must be confessed that she had begun sadly to dishonour her appellation, nor up to the present time, when she was eleven years old, had her habit in this respect become amended in the least. Her grandmother had been a gentle, sweet-voiced, sweet-faced, placid woman, the incarnation of Quaker virtues and Quaker limitations ; but the young Patience was as a creature made all of blood and fire, un-Quakerlike in every fibre of her nature. She could not take her vigorous life quietly ; she seemed impervious to the meaning of composure and self-restraint. She Avas not an ill-intentioned child, but there was that in her composition that sent her grave father often to his knees, Avith a bewildered prayer that Heaven in its mercy Avould cast the evil spirits out of her.

Dr. and Mrs. Holt had only these two children, Patience and Fred, — or Fritz, as his sister preferred, from some one of her many fancies, to call him. Fred was a handsome, fair, stolid-looking boy, with a fine physique and a slow brain, and a certain Quaker phlegm about him that his sister found peculiarly exasperating. But though she found him exasperating, and though in their intercourse together she made a fine show at times of lording it over him, in reality it was he who was her master, and she his slave ; for the dark, spare, bright eyed little sprite in her heart admired this fair, big, cool young lord of the creation, in these early years, with an immense, if a frequently provoked, admiration, and as an inevitable consequence of such admiration, laid her small being at his feet with a devotion that, stolid as he seemed, was very evident to Master Fred, and that won from him a deep if silent approval.

Fred was two years older than Patience. He was thirteen at this time, and a Rugby boy. He was slow and lazy, with no in conA-enient fire about him, and his father looked upon him with thankfulness, and felt that he was a creature he could under stand. Not like Patience, whom no man could understand. " But they are both our children ; we must be content with what God has given us," the good man always piously thought ; and indeed he never treated his little daughter with severity, though her ways were at times almost ter rifying to him, like the ways of some being from another world. It Avas lovely, Patience thought, in this quiet, old-world, southern farm, with its quaint interior, and its solid, multitudinous farm buildings. It was an old place that had been connected with a monastery once, and there were some remains of ruins still adjoining it, which were in fact not very ancient ruins, but which Patience liked to consider ancient, and to people in imagination with the spirits of departed monks — Avho had certainly never had any living habitation there.

"Just think of them sitting in this very spot, and looking out on those actual hills, and eating, — and drinking, — and saying their prayers ! " she would exclaim to Fred, with enthusiasm. But Fred, who held the monkish theory in supreme contempt, would seldom to such an outburst make any sympathetic response. "It's all bosh!" he exclaimed one day. " I don't believe there was ever a monk in the place. And as for these ruins — they're no more fifteenth century ruins than I am." " But, Fritz," she cried eagerly, " everybody says " Oh, bother what everybody says ! " inter rupted Fred, with a lordly scorn for popular tradition. " ' Everybody,' I knoAv, doesn't say that these are fifteenth century ruins. You just ask father. They're last century ruins. Father has been reading all about them." " And were there never any monks here ?

" asked Patience solemnly. " Well, not in these ruins — not a man Jack of them," said Fred. " Oh, dear ! " murmured Patience sorroAv fully, and subsided into a grave and thoughtful silence. But after she had meditated on Fred's state ment for a little while, to tell the truth her spirits rose again, for after all, she began to reflect, old monks, even if once extant, were after their decease rather dull subjects for ■3 continued contemplation ; and Avhen one had some dozen times or so endeavoured in imagination to picture them within their ancient Avails, "eating, and drinking, and saying their prayers," as she had comprehen sively put it, there did not seem — well, there did not seem to be very much more to think of about them ; whereas, if this had been an ordinary house, and other people had lived in it — ladies and gentlemen, and boys and girls ! — Patience's eyes suddenly brightened ; her imagination took fire.

Here all at once was food for endless fancy — food of a decidedly more exciting sort than any that the defunct monks were likely to afford her. " Then who did live here ?" she abruptly demanded, shooting out her question at Fred like an arrow. But Fred was whittling a stick, and, not desiring in any sense to raise the dead, took no interest in responding to his sister's question. " Oh, / don't know," he merely said con temptuously. " Some big old gun. Father can tell you." And with that he closed his lips and walked off, leaving Patience all alive with curiosity. " Papa, who built that old house that used to be here ? " she asked her father on the first opportunity ; and Dr. Holt, who liked to see signs of a rational spirit of inquiry in his daughter, placed forthwith in her hands a quarto volume of the history of the county, and pointed out the pages in it from which she could derive all the information she desired.

So Patience set herself forthwith to read them, and her eyes began presently to dance in her head. For this ruined house, she found, had been built by a noble lady, and lords and ladies had lived in it — some of them Avith the loveliest names, Patience thought. There was a Lady Adelberta, and a Lady Elfrida, and a Lady Rosamond. They did not belong to the middle ages, and yet they almost sounded as if they did. They ap pealed to Patience's active imagination in the liveliest Avay ; and she took mental possession of them, one and all, straightway, and began so swiftly to weave their person ality into stories that, within a few hours of her having first heard of their existence, she recounted to Fred so thrilling a tale about the Lady Elfrida that, told as it was in the great barn at twilight, with a rainy wind sighing outside, it gave Fred a distinct sense of feeling creepy.

She was always telling Fred stories, to which he listened with mingled curiosity and reluctance, half-interested in them, half resenting them — for she made them out of her head, as he was well aware, and he did not like things that were made out of people's heads ; and yet he could not keep himself from feeling an unprofitable sort of interest in them. He used to let her begin her recitations, whistling to himself perhaps, and affecting entire inattention to them, but in reality, before more than two or three minutes had passed, he would be listening with both his ears ; and some times, before she had reached the middle of her tale, he would even betray himself by some sudden question or remark that showed an interest in her silly narration such as he naturally felt was unworthy either of his years or of his sex.

For of course it was all rubbish, and she was nothing but a chit of a girl ; and besides, what business had she to be telling lies ? What Avere all her tales except a pack of lies ? " You'd catch it if father kneAV ! " he said to her on the occasion on which she had been making the departed Lady Elfrida live again for his entertainment (which was in deed an ungracious return for the interest that the poor lady's apocryphal adventures had afforded him). " I'd like to see you telling such a cock-and-bull story to him." " Oh, but then I shouldn't," replied Patience prudently. " No, because you wouldn't dare " I don't know that I shouldn't dare." Patience sat with her hands upon her knees, and her eyes, with a halfpuzzled expression in them, gazing out through the great barn doors. "I think I might dare, but — it wouldn't come," she said after a little pause.

"You see, Fritz, papa wouldn't believe." " I should think he wouldn't ! " cried Fred, with a loud guffaw. " But, you little goose, do you suppose anybody else would ? Do you suppose / do ? " And then Patience turned her strange eyes upon him, and looked through him, as Fred suddenly and uncomfortably felt, and — " Oh, yes, you do — in a way," she said Avith composure. "You don't want to, but A'OL. I. you do it — quite as much as one cares about. You see," she added explanatorily, " you're young." "I'm not so young as to be the fool you take me for," retorted Fred. But he spoke dubiously — not quite resolved whether to be offended by her last remark or the reverse. " Yes ; but poor papa isn't young," said Patience. " It's very nice, of course, to be like papa " (this was a salvo to her con science), " but it's best of all to be young.

It's lovely to be young, isn't it, Fritz ? One seems to think of so many things." . " Oh, bosh ! " said Fred. " / don't think of many things." "Don't you?" asked Patience; and she looked at him regretfully. She used to look at him a great deal, and Fred never liked it. "Well, I often think you don't seem as if you did ; but then one never knows — and some great people even, I believe, have looked stupid. But I'll tell you of one old person Avho thinks of a great many things, Fritz. Mamma does." "Why, how do you know that?" asked Fred sharply. " Oh," returned Patience with composure, " I can't help knoAving it. I know it by the Avay she understands. She's awfully good at understanding. Papa's nothing to her." " I say, Miss Impudence, you'd better shut up," cried Fred at this, and turned on her belligerently ; for Fred felt a great instinctive sympathy Avith his father's make of intellect, so that a disparaging remark concerning it affected him, unconsciously, almost like a disparaging remark about his own.

The colour was in his fair face now ; he looked at Patience with contempt. " But I only mean they're different," explained Patience, hastily. " Of course papa's the cleverest." " I should think he was ! " exclaimed Fred. " Well, men always are, I suppose," said Patience simply. " But still, women are quickest. That's all I meant. And I think mamma is very quick ; she sees in a moment. She is always able to understand. It's so nice. One can say anything to her. It's — different with papa. "Well, I should hope it was! It would be a rum thing if father were to care about your trumpery stories and things," retorted Fred, scornfully. And then Patience meekly acknowledged that it would. "I suppose fathers never do?" she suggested dubiously ; and Fred nodded his head with confidence. "If they did, they'd be queer old muffs he said.

But it was so nice that mothers could do these things, and yet escape being old muffs ! Patience made this reflection to herself, and sighed with satisfaction as she made it. She had always had such a rare amount of comfort in her mother. And indeed Mrs. Holt AA*as one of those pillowy women whose gentle breasts seem made for daughters' heads and hearts to rest on. Not that she Avas like Patience : she was an ordinary Avoman enough ; there was little even that was clever in her. Perhaps in reality, when Patience gave her so much credit for com prehension, she often did not comprehend more than very vaguely ; but she was gifted Avith a wide and tender sympathy that stood her in stead of a keener understanding. She could always listen and smile as her little daughter talked to her, and look with her light gentle eyes into Patience's bright dark ones.

Possibly sometimes, as that melodiously intelligent regard rested on her child, she was not, as Patience thought, paying much heed to the fanciful talk that flowed from the girl's lips, but was thinking, it may be, of quite other things — of Patience's new frocks perhaps, or the amount of wear left in Fred's last pair of trousers ; but Patience always saw her look of attention, and met her tender smile, and believed that her fantastic talk was being followed in the minutest particulars, — and was content. " You let her talk too much, Agatha. I fear you encourage her in her strange, un practical fancies," Dr. Holt would at times say to his wife. But when he did so his wife would smile upon him too, and soothe him, and continue quietly to go her OAA-n way. She was a woman who never opposed any one, but yet in her own house she went her own way always, and ruled, though she never seemed to rule.

It was summer-time, and dry weather, and the children were out of doors all day. Fred did a good deal of his outing alone, putting Patience frequently down when she offered to accompany him, as if his pedes trian exploits were of a sort too great for accomplishment by a girl, — though in truth, as Patience well knew, he performed no pedestrian exploits at all, but for the most part contented himself with lying on his back in the sun, or sitting and whistling on a gate — occupations that often fulfilled his ideas of enjoyment far more completely than Patience's sometimes exhausting companionship and conversation. Yet, though Patience was quite aware of this, her restless imagination excited her, whenever he was out of her sight, to weave tales about his doings of the wildest and most improbable, and sometimes even of the most alarming and tragic, sort, all which she would recount to him afterwards with the liveliest interest.

" I never saw anything like you ; I believe if something did really happen to me, you'd be off your head with joy ! " Fred was goaded into exclaiming to her one day when, with certainly peculiar zest, she had been detailing to him a most doleful story, of which himself and his imaginary misadventures had formed the theme. It had been a peculiarly harrowing tale, but she had told it with surprising gusto, and perhaps Fred's ejacu lation at the end of it was not unnatural, though it struck her to the heart. " Oh, Fritz ! " she gasped, and for a moment or two could say no more, but the tears sprang to her eyes. " Fritz, it was all make-believe ! " " Well, I should hope it was," retorted Fred, indignantly. " But if it hadn't been — if it had really happened, — I believe you'd dance. I don't know what it is that comes into you sometimes.

It's something horrid. It makes your eyes like live coals. I believe there are times when, if you were left alone with me in the dark, you'd do something to me — if you could. You're like a demon ; you know you are." And with this bitter speech he left her ; and poor Patience when he was gone literally boAved her head in the dust. It was quite true — she did feel like a demon sometimes. She did not think that she had felt so just now, but there were times — aAvful times — Avhen — yes, when she believed she could almost come behind some one who had offended her, and — and do something to him. It was dreadful ! She must be one of the devil's own children ; it was no wonder Fritz hated her, she thought. And so she rolled herself on the ground, Avith such curious consequence to her dark hair (for it was very dry, dusty weather) that, meeting her mother presently as she was creeping indoors after having terminated this act of humiliation, Mrs. Holt looked at her with astonishment, and called to her to stop.

"My dear, what in the world have you been doing to yourself ? " she said. " Come here — let me look at you. Why, you are perfectly covered with dust ! " And then poor Patience's lips quivered, and she looked up piteously, and — "Yes, I rolled myself on the ground," she whispered. " I lay down in the dust, and rubbed it all over me. It's because— it's because — " she said, and threw herself suddenly into her mother's arms, and burst out sobbing. What better could she do than sob on that tender bosom ? And after she had sobbed for a little while, and had tried pretty confusedly to pour out her woes, what better could Mrs. Holt do than take her up-stairs (as she did) and wash her head ? It would cool her, — and clean her too, the sensible woman thought. So, amidst gentle, consoling words, Patience had her head washed, and her raiment changed, and was calmed and comforted.

" And you won't say anything to papa, will you, mother dear ? " she inquired plead ingly, when the refreshing work had been accomplished. " Nor to Fritz ?" Whereupon Mrs. Holt promised that she would preserve the strictest silence in both these quarters, and Patience gave a sigh of relief. " It's so horrid when they knoAv things," she said simply. " I like you to know everything, because you understand ; but other people don't understand." And then Mrs. Holt smiled one of her tender smiles. Perhaps she too understood less than Patience thought ; but if Patience mistook love for comprehension, was she, after all, any the worse for that ?

Chapter II

TC"FŒD never learnt how his sister had put dust upon her head ; in fact, the incident that had led her to that act of self humiliation probably never again crossed his mind, for there was a certain unimpression able sweetness of nature about the boy that (to Patience's secret envy and admir ation) made most unpleasant things slide off his memory in the easiest and most rapid way. Patience took her own small troubles pretty seriously and keenly, but Fred never took his seriously at all. "Why, what would be the good?" he demanded of her one day. " If a thing's done, you can't help it. If fellows were to mind all the nasty things that happened to them at school, I wonder Avhere you suppose they'd be!" " But I thought it was so nice at school — at least at Rugby?" cried Patience, sur prised at this speech.

And then Fred pulled himself together, and feeling that his last remark had been rather a slip of the tongue, stood up for his school manfully. " Why, of course, it's nice ! Who said it wasn't ? " he exclaimed in a challenging tone. " It's the jolliest school in England. But if you imagine that with such a lot of fellows all together, and some beasts of masters too, there's nothing to put up with, then you are a simpleton ! Why, there's lots to put up with. I don't know how ever you would get on there. You'd think it awful." " Well, I don't know," said Patience dubiously, and with her small heart full of unlawful longing. " Ah, but / know," responded Fred con fidently. " The idea of any girl getting on at Rugby ! Good gracious ! Why, girls haven't a notion " And then Fred all at once stopped, with a sudden air of " I could an if I would," that, naturally, Patience found extraordinarily exasperating.

Was Rugby really so much better than her own school in London ? She was a High School girl, and High Schools were great and beautiful institutions, she thought. She did not see why they should not be quite as good as Rugby ; indeed she be lieved they probably were quite as good (if not even a little better), only Fritz would never let her say so. Fritz was so horrid always about her school — never caring to hear a word about it, though she had tried hard to enlarge upon its excellences to him many a time. " I believe we work twice as hard as you do," she all at once blurted out explosively noAv. But Fred only looked at her, and smiled benignly, and made the simple response — " Well, Avhat's that got to do Avith it ? " " What has work to do with it ? " asked Patience disdainfully. " I know lots of felloAvs at Rugby who never work at all," said Fred with serenity.

"Yes; and what becomes of them in the end ? " demanded Patience with scorn. " Oh, theyre all right," said Fred. " It isn't only work that counts at a great school like ours. That's where your trumpery High Schools make such a mistake. I've told you that before, but you never believe me. You're so pig-headed. Girls are all so pig headed. That High School lot make me sick." " Oh, Fritz ! " cried Patience, flushing crimson. "Well, they do. They're a parcel of prigs. And you'll get to be one too if you don't look out. You're going hard for it now — and it's a sort of thing I hate. And you know I hate it," said Fred, with the indignation of a young moral censor. " Oh dear ! " murmured Patience, half in jest. Fritz was provoking sometimes. There was a cabbage-stalk lying in the path before them, and she took it up and threw it at him.

She knew indeed that she had that unlawful longing for a personal acquaintance with Fritz's life at Rugby, and yet with half her mind did she not almost despise Rugby, and long — metaphorically — to throw cabbage-stalks at it too ? " I don't believe you learn anything at school but how to play games," she broke out almost with venom. " / shouldn't like to go to a school where I learnt nothing but games. But boys are lazy creatures." "You shut up!" growled Fred threateningly. "And even though they're always at them, I can play some games better than you. And I can run better than you ! " cried Patience, with her eyes sparkling. "That's gammon!" said Fred. Whereupon Patience instantly took to her heels, and, spurred on by his righteous in dignation, Fred unwisely took to his heels too, and pursued her.