CHAPTER XV.
THE ARTIST AND THE HOUSEKEEPER.
I DO not suppose that Cicely St. John had really any hope in her new acquaintance, or believed, when she looked at the matter reasonably, that his self-renunciation, if he had the strength of mind to carry it out, would really secure for her father the living of Brentburn. But yet a certain amount of faith is natural at her years, and she was vaguely strengthened and exhilarated by that suppressed expectation of something pleasant that might possibly happen, which is so great an element in human happiness; and, with this comfort in her soul, went about her work, preparing for the worst, which, to be sure, notwithstanding her hope, was, she felt, inevitable. Mab, when the stranger’s enthusiastic adoption of her sister’s suggestion was told to her, accepted it for her part with delight, as a thing settled. A true artist has always more or less a practical mind. However strong his imagination may be, he does not confine himself to fancies, or even words, but makes something tangible and visible out of it, and this faculty more or less shapes the fashion of his thinking. Mab, who possessed in addition that delightful mixture of matter-of-factness which is peculiar to womankind, seized upon the hope and made it into reality. She went to her work as gaily as if all the clouds had been in reality dispersed from her path. This time it was little Annie, the nursemaid—Cicely having interfered to protect the babies from perpetual posing—who supplied her with the necessary “life.” Annie did not much like it. She would have been satisfied, indeed, and even proud, had “her picture” been taken in her best frock, with all her Sunday ribbons; but to be thrust into a torn old dingy garment, with bare feet, filled the little handmaiden with disgust and rage great enough for a full-grown woman. “Folks will think as I hain’t got no decent clothes,” she said; and Mab’s injudicious consolation, to the effect that “folks would never see the picture,” did not at all mend the matter. Cicely, however, drew up her slight person, and “looked Miss St. John,” according to Mab’s description; and Annie was cowed. There were at least twenty different representations in Mab’s sketch-books of moments in which Cicely had looked Miss St. John; and it was Mab’s conviction in life as well as in art that no opponent could stand before such a demonstration. Bare-footed, in her ragged frock, Annie did not look an amiable young person, which, I am ashamed to say, delighted the artist. “She will do for the naughty little girl in the fairy tale, the one with toads and frogs dropping from her lips,” cried Mab, in high glee. “And if it comes well I shall send it to Mr. Mildmay, to show we feel how kind he is.”
“Wait till he has been kind,” said Cicely, shaking her head. “I always liked the naughty little girl best, not that complacent smiling creature who knew she had been good, and whom everybody praised. Oh, what a pity that the world is not like a fairy tale! where the good are always rewarded, and even the naughty, when they are sorry. If we were to help any number of old women, what would it matter now?”
“But I suppose,” said Mab, somewhat wistfully, for she distrusted her sister’s words, which she did not understand, and was afraid people might think Cicely Broad Church, “I suppose whatever may happen in the meantime, it all comes right in the end?”
“Papa is not so very far from the end, and it has not come right for him.”
“O Cicely, how can you talk so! Papa is not so old. He will live years and years yet!” cried Mab, her eyes filling.
“I hope so. Oh, I hope so! I did not think of merely living. But he cannot get anything very great now, can he, to make up for so long waiting? So long—longer,” said Cicely, with a little awe, thinking of that enormous lapse of time, “than we have been alive!”
“If he gets the living, he will not want anything more,” said Mab, blithely working away with her charcoal. “How delightful it will be! More than double what we have now? Fancy! After all, you will be able to furnish as you said.”
“But not in amber satin,” said Cicely, beguiled into a smile.
“In soft, soft Venetian stuff, half green, half blue, half no colour at all. Ah! she has moved! Cicely, Cicely, go and talk to her, for heaven’s sake, or my picture will be spoilt!”
“If you please, miss, I can’t stop here no longer. It’s time as I was looking after the children. How is Betsy to remember in the middle of her cooking the right time to give ‘em their cod-liver oil?”
“I’ll go and look after the children,” said Cicely. “What you have got to do, Annie, is to stop here.”
Upon which Annie burst into floods of tears, and fell altogether out of pose. “There ain’t no justice in it!” she said. “I’m put up here to look like a gipsy or a beggar; and mother will never get over it, after all her slaving and toiling to get me decent clothes!”
Thus it will be perceived that life studies in the domestic circle are very difficult to manage. After a little interval of mingled coaxing and scolding, something like the lapsed attitude was recovered, and Annie brought back into obedience. “If you will be good, I’ll draw a picture of you in your Sunday frock to give to your mother,” said Mab—a promise which had too good an effect upon her model, driving away the clouds from her countenance; and Cicely went away to administer the cod-liver oil. It was not a very delightful office, and I think that now and then, at this crisis, it seemed to Cicely that Mab had the best of it, with her work, which was a delight to her, and which occupied both her mind and her fingers; care seemed to fly the moment she got that charcoal in her hand. There was no grudge in this sense of disadvantage. Nature had done it, against which there is no appeal. I don’t think, however, that care would have weighed heavily on Mab, even if she had not been an artist. She would have hung upon Cicely all the same if her occupation had been but needlework, and looked for everything from her hands.
But it was not until Annie was released, and could throw off the ragged frock in which she had been made picturesque, and return to her charge, that Cicely could begin the more important business that waited for her. She took this quite quietly, not thinking it necessary to be on the look-out for a grievance, and took her work into the nursery, where the two babies were playing in a solemn sort of way. They had their playthings laid out upon the floor, and had some mild little squabbles over them. “Zat’s Harry’s!” she heard again and again, mingled with faint sounds of resistance. The children were very mysterious to Cicely. She was half afraid of them as mystic incomprehensible creatures, to whom everybody in heaven and earth did injustice. After a while she put down her work and watched them play. They had a large box of bricks before them, playthings which Cicely herself well remembered, and the play seemed to consist in one little brother diving into the long box in search of one individual brick, which, when he produced it, the other snatched at, saying, “Zat’s Harry’s.” Charley, who wanted both his hands to swim with on the edge of the box, did not have his thumb in his mouth this time; but he was silenced by the unvarying claim. They did not laugh, nor did they cry, as other children do; but sat over the box of bricks, in a dumb conflict, of which it was impossible to tell whether it was strife or play.
“Are they all Harry’s?” asked Cicely, suddenly moved to interfere. The sound of the voice startled the little creatures on the floor. They turned right round, and contemplated her from the carpet with round and wondering eyes.
“Zat’s Harry’s,” said the small boy over again with the iteration common to children. Charley was not prepared with any reply. He put his thumb into his mouth in default of any more extended explanation. Cicely repeated her question—I fear raising her voice, for patience was not Cicely’s forte; whereupon Harry’s eyes, who was the boldest, got bigger and bigger, and redder and redder, with fright, and Charley began to whimper. This irritated the sister much. “You little silly things!” she said, “I am not scolding you. What are you crying for? Come here, Harry, and tell me why you take all the bricks? They are Charley’s too.”
Children are the angels of life; but they are sometimes little demons for all that. To see these two pale little creatures sitting half dead with fright, gazing at her sunny young countenance as if she were an ogre, exasperated Cicely. She jumped up, half laughing, half furious, and at that movement the babies set up a unanimous howl of terror. This fairly daunted her, courageous as she was. She went back to her seat again, having half a mind to cry too. “I am not going to touch you,” said Cicely piteously. “Why are you frightened at me? If you will come here I will tell you a story.” She was too young to have the maternal instinct so warmly developed as to make her all at once, without rhyme or reason, “fond of” her little half-brothers; but she was anxious to do her duty, and deeply wounded that they did not “take to her.” Children, she said to herself with an internal whisper of self-pity, had always taken to her before; and she was not aware of that instinctive resistance, half defiance, half fright, which seems to repel the child-dependant from those whose duty it is to take care of it—most unreasonable, often most cruel, but yet apparently most universal of sentiments. Is it that the very idea of a benefactor, even before the mind is capable of comprehending what it is, sets nature on edge? This was rather a hard lesson for the girl, especially as, while they were still howling, little Annie burst in indignant, and threw herself down beside the children, who clung to her, sobbing, one on each side. “You have made ‘em cry, miss,” cried Annie, “and missus’s orders was as they was never to be allowed to cry. It is very dangerous for boys; it busts their little insides. Did she frighten ‘em, then? the naughty lady. Never mind, never mind, my precious! Annie’s here.”
To see this child spread out upon the floor with these chicks under her wings would have been amusing to a cool spectator. But Cicely did not take it in that light. She waited till the children were pacified, and had returned to their play, and then she took the little nursemaid by the arm, and led her to the door. “You are not to enter this room again or come near the children,” she said, in a still voice which made Annie tremble. “If you make a noise I will beat you. Go downstairs to your sister, and I will see you afterwards. Not a word! I have nothing more to say to you here.”
Cicely went back again to her seat trembling with the excitement of the moment, and then said to herself, what a fool she was! but, oh! what a much greater fool Miss Brown had been to leave this legacy of trouble to two girls who had never done any harm to her. “Though, I suppose,” Cicely added to herself with a sense of justice, “she was not thinking about us.” And indeed it was not likely that poor Mrs. St. John had brought these babies into the world solely to bother her husband’s daughters. Poor Cicely, who had a thousand other things to do, and who already felt that it was impolitic, though necessary, to dismiss Annie, pondered long, gazing at those pale-faced and terrible infants, how she was to win them over, which looked as hard as any of her other painful pieces of business. At last some kind fairy put it into her head to sing: at which the two turned round once more upon their bases solemnly, and stared at her, intermitting their play till the song was finished. Then an incident occurred almost unparalleled in the nursery chronicles of Brentburn. Charley took his thumb out of his mouth, and looking up at her with his pale eyes, said of his own accord, “Adain.”
“Come here then, and sit on my lap,” said Cicely, holding out her hand. There was a momentary struggle between terror and gathering confidence, and then pushing himself up by the big box of bricks Charley approached gradually, keeping a wary eye upon her movements. Once on her lap, however, the little adventurer felt himself comfortable. She was soft and pleasant, and had a bigger shoulder to support him and a longer arm to enfold him than Annie. He leant back against her, feeling the charm of that softness and sweetness, though he did not know how. “Adain,” said Charley; and put his thumb in his mouth with all the feelings of a connoisseur in a state of perfect bodily ease prepared to enjoy the morceau specially given at his desire.
Thus Cicely conquered the babies once for all. Harry, too much astounded by thus seeing his lead taken from him to make any remonstrance, followed his brother in dumb surprise, and stood against her, leaning on her knee. They made the prettiest group; for, as Mab said, even when they are ugly, how pretty children are! and they “compose” so beautifully with a pretty young woman, making even a commonplace mother into a Madonna and Lady of Blessing. Cicely sang them a song, so very low down in the scale at once both of music and of poetry that I dare not shock the refined reader by naming it, especially after that well-worn comparison; and this time both Harry and Charley joined in the encore, the latter too happy to think of withdrawing that cherished thumb from his mouth, murmuring thickly, “Adain.”
“But, oh, what a waste of time—what a waste of time it will be!” cried poor Cicely, when she took refuge in the garden, putting the delicate children to play upon a great rug, stretched on the grass. “To be sure there will be one mouth less to feed, which is always something. You must help me a little while I write my letters, Mab.”
“Who are you going to write to?” said Mab, with colloquial incorrectness which would have shocked out of their senses the Miss Blandys, and all the excellent persons concerned in bringing her up. “Oh yes, I will try to help; but won’t you forgive Annie, just for this little time, and let her stay?”
“I can’t be defied in my own house,” said Cicely, erecting her head with an air which frightened Mab herself; “and I must take to it sooner or later. Wherever we go, it is I that must look after them. Well! it will be a trouble at first; but I shall like it when I get fond of them. Mab, we ought to be fond of them now.”
Mab looked at the children, and then laughed. “I don’t hate them,” she said; “they are such funny little things, as if they had been born about a hundred years before their time. I believe, really, they are not children at all, but old, old men, that know a great deal more than we do. I am sure that Charley could say something very wonderful if he liked. He has a great deal in him, if he would but take his thumb out of his mouth.”
“Charley is my boy,” said Cicely, brightening up; “he is the one I like best.”
“I like him best, too. He is the funniest. Are you going to write there?”
“I must keep my eye upon them,” said Cicely, with great solemnity. She was pleased with her victory, and felt it to be of the most prodigious importance that she should not lose the “influence” she had gained; for she was silly, as became her age, as well as wise. She had brought out her little desk—a very commonplace little article, indeed, of rosewood, with brass bindings—and seated herself under the old mulberry-tree, with the wind ruffling her papers, and catching in the short curling locks about her forehead. (N.B.—Don’t suppose, dear reader, that she had cut them short; those stray curls were carefully smoothed away under the longer braids when she brushed her hair; but the breeze caught them in a way which vexed Cicely as being untidy). It was as pretty a garden scene as you could see; the old mulberry bending down its heavy branches, the babies on the rug at the girl’s feet; but yet, when you look over Cicely’s shoulder, a shadow falls upon the pretty scene. She had two letters to write, and something still less agreeable than her letters—an advertisement for the Guardian. This was very difficult, and brought many a sigh from her young breast.
“‘An elderly clergyman who has filled the office of curate for a very long time in one parish, finding it now necessary to make a change, desires to find a similar——‘”
“Do you think that will do?” said Mab. “It is as if poor papa were a butler, or something—‘filled the office of curate for a long time in one parish’—it does not sound nice.”
“We must not be bound by what sounds nice,” said Cicely. “It is not nice, in fact—is it? How hard it is to put even such a little thing as this as one ought! Will this do better?—‘A clergyman, who has long occupied the position of curate in charge, in a small parish, wishes to hear of a similar——‘ What, Mab? I cannot say situation, can I? that is like a butler again. Oh, dear, dear; it is so very much like a butler altogether. Tell me a word.”
“Position,” said Mab.
“But I have just said position. ‘A clergyman who has long held the—an appointment as curate in charge’—there, that is better—‘wishes to hear of a similar position in a small parish.’ I think that will do.”
“Isn’t there a Latin word? Locum something or other; would not that be more dignified?” said Mab.
“Locum tenens. I prefer English,” said Cicely; “and now I suppose we must say something about his opinions. Poor dear papa! I am sure I do not know whether he is High, or Low, or Broad.”
“Not Broad,” said Mab, pointedly; for she was very orthodox. “Say sound; I have often seen that, and it does not commit you to anything,—sound, but not extreme, like Miss Blandy’s clergyman.”
“‘Of sound, but not extreme principles,’” wrote Cicely. “That sounds a little strange, for you might say that a man who could not tell a lie, but yet did not mind a fib, was sound, but not extreme. ‘Church principles’—is that better? But I don’t like that either. Stop, I have it—‘He is a sound, but not extreme Churchman’—that is the very thing—‘and has much experience’ (Ah, poor papa!) ‘in managing a parish. Apply’—but that is another question. Where ought they to apply? We cannot give, I suppose, the full name and address here?”
“I wonder if any one will apply? But, Cicely, suppose all comes right, as I am sure it will, you may be deceiving some one, making them think—Here is the very person I want; and then how disappointed they will be!”
“Oh, if there is only their disappointment to think of! Mab, you must not think there is any reliance to be put on Mr. Mildmay. He meant it; yes, tears came into his eyes,” cried Cicely, with a look of gratitude and pleasure in her own. “But when he goes back among those Oxford men, those dons, do you think they will pay any attention to him? They will laugh at him; they will say he is a Quixote; they will turn it all into fun, or think it his folly.”
“Why should Oxford dons be so much worse than other men?” said Mab, surprised. “Papa is an Oxford man—he is not hard-hearted. Dons, I suppose, are just like other people?”
“No,” said Cicely, who was arguing against herself, struggling against the tide of fictitious hope, which sometimes threatened to carry her away. “They live by themselves among their books; they have nobody belonging to them; their hearts dry up, and they don’t care for common troubles. Oh, I know it: they are often more heathens than Christians. I have no faith in those sort of people. He will have a struggle with them, and then he will find it to be of no use. I am as sure as if it had happened already,” cried Cicely, her bright eyes sparkling indignant behind her tears.
“At least we need not think them so bad till we know,” said Mab, more charitably.
Cicely had excited herself by this impassioned statement, in which indeed the Oxford men were innocent sufferers enough, seeing that she knew nothing about them. “I must not let myself believe it; I dare not let myself believe it,” she said in her heart; “but, oh! if by chance things did happen so!” What abundant compensation, what lavish apology, did this impetuous young woman feel herself ready to offer to those maligned dons!
The advertisement was at last fairly written out, with the exception of the address to be given. “Papa may surely tell me where they are to apply,” Cicely said, though with doubts in her mind as to whether he was good even for this; and then she wrote her letters, one of which was in Mr. St. John’s name to the lawyer who had written to him about the furniture, asking that the sale might not take place until the curate’s half-year, which ended in the end of September, should be out. Mr. St. John would not do this himself. “Why should I ask any favour of those people who do not know me?” he said; but he had at length consented that Cicely might write “if she liked;” and in any case the lawyer’s letter had to be answered. Cicely made this appeal as business-like as possible. “I wonder how a man would write who did not mind much—to whom this was only a little convenience,” she said to her sister. “I don’t want to go and ask as if one was asking a favour of a friend—as if we cared.”
“But we do care; and it would be a favour——”
“Never mind. I wish we knew what a man would say that was quite independent and did not care. ‘If it is the same to you, it would be more convenient for me not to have the furniture disturbed till the 22nd of September’—that is the kind of thing. We girls always make too much of a favour of everything,” said Cicely, writing; and she produced an admirable imitation of a business letter, to which she appended her own signature, “Cecil St. John,” which was also her father’s, with great boldness. The curate’s handwriting was almost more womanlike than hers, for Cicely’s generation are not taught to write Italian hands, and I do not think the lawyer suspected the sex of the production. When she had finished this, she wrote upon another sheet of paper, “My dear Aunt, I am——” and then she stopped sharply. “It is cool now, let us take them out for a walk on the common,” she said, shutting up her desk. “I can finish this to-night.”
It was not, however, the walk on the common Cicely wanted, but to hide from her sister that the letter to Aunt Jane was much less easy than even those other dolorous pieces of business. Poor Cicely looked upon the life before her with a shudder. To live alone in some new place, where nobody knew her, as nursemaid to these babies, and attendant upon her father, without her sweet companion, the little sister, who, though so near in age, had always been the protected one, the reliant dependent nature, believing in Cicely, and giving her infinite support by that belief! How could she do it? Yet she herself, who felt it most, must insist upon it; must be the one to arrange and settle it all, as so often happens. It would not be half so painful to Mab as to Cicely; yet Mab would be passive in it, and Cicely active; and she could not write under Mab’s smiling eyes betraying the sacrifice it cost her. Mab laughed at her sister’s impetuosity, and concluded that it was exactly like Cicely to tire of her work all in a moment, and dash into something else. And, accordingly, the children’s out-door apparel was got from the nursery, and the girls put on their hats, and strayed out by the garden door upon the common, with its heathery knolls and furze bushes. Harry and Charley had never in all their small lives had such a walk as this. The girls mounted them upon their shoulders, and ran races with them, Charley against Harry, till first one twin, and then the other, was beguiled into shrill little gusts of laughter: after which they were silent—themselves frightened by the unusual sound. But when the races ended, Charley, certainly the hero of the day, opened his mouth and spoke, and said “Adain!” and this time when they laughed the babies were not frightened. Then they were set down and rolled upon the soft grass, and throned in mossy seats among the purple fragrant heather. What an evening it was! The sky all ablaze with the sunset, with clouds of rosy flame hanging like canopies over the faint delicious openings of that celestial green which belongs to a summer evening. The curate, coming from a distant round into the parish, which had occupied him all the day, found them on the grass under the big beech-tree, watching the glow of colour in the west. He had never seen his girls “taking to” his babies before so kindly, and the old man was glad.
“But it is quite late enough to have them out; they have been used to such early hours,” he said.
“And Harry wants his tea,” piped that small hero, with a half whimper.
Then the girls jumped up, and looked at each other, and Cicely grew crimson. Here was a beginning to make, an advantage terrible to think of, to be given to the dethroned Annie, who no doubt was enjoying it keenly. Cicely had already forgotten the children’s tea!