THE SCRATCHELLS AT HOME.
MR. SCRATCHELL occupied a large red brick house at the beginning of the village street, a house that had once been one of the best, if not the best in Little Yafford, but which, in its present degenerated state, looked a very shabby habitation as compared with the smart Gothic villas of the Great Yafford professional men and tradesmen who had retired into gentility at Little Yafford. It had been built by a wealthy brewer, and still adjoined a thriving brewery. But as the age grew more civilized, the brewer removed his domestic life from the immediate vicinity of his vats and casks to a stuccoed mansion in fifteen acres of meadow land, par excellence Park. There was a good garden behind the substantial roomy old house, and more outbuildings than the Scratchells had any worthy use for—but which made a wilderness or playground for the children, and for Mrs. Scratchell’s poor little family of fowls, which always had a shabby uncombed look, as of neglected poultry, but which laid more eggs than Mrs. Piper’s pampered Dorkings and Cochin Chinas.
Here the Scratchells had lived for the last twenty years, Mr. Scratchell holding his tenement upon a repairing lease, which seemed to mean that he was to grub on in the best way he could in dilapidated premises, and never ask his landlord to do anything for him. Perhaps when the lease ran out there would be complications; but Mr. Scratchell hoped that, being a lawyer himself, he should be a match for any lawyer his landlord might set upon him, and that he should find a loophole whereby to escape the question of dilapidations.
It was a gaunt, dreary-looking house in its present state of decay. The garden was all at the back, and the front of the house came straight upon the village street, an advantage in the eyes of the younger Scratchells, as the few passers-by who enlivened the scene came within half a yard of their inquisitive young noses, which were generally glued against the window-panes in all intervals of leisure.
The Scratchell girls did not go to school. That was a luxury which their father’s limited means could not afford them. They were educated at home by their mother, in that desultory and somewhat spasmodic form which maternal education, where the poor house-mother has a multitude of other duties, is apt to assume.
Taking all things into consideration, it must be allowed that Mrs. Scratchell did her work very well. She turned the four girls into the shabby old schoolroom at eleven o’clock every morning—after they had helped her to make the beds, dust the rooms, and wash the breakfast-things. She set them down to their French exercises or their ciphering, their maps or their English analysis, while she went to the kitchen to see after the dinner, which generally meant to cook it, and at twelve she came into the schoolroom with her huge motherly workbasket—full of stockings to be darned, and under garments to be pieced—some of them arrived at a stage when piecing seemed little short of the miraculous—and sat down to hear her children read history or polite literature in their shrill monotonous voices, while the busy needle never ceased from its labour.
Pinnock’s Goldsmith and darning cotton must have been curiously interwoven in poor Mrs. Scratchell’s mind, and it must have been a little difficult for her to dissociate the embarrassments of Telemachus from the intricacies of her domestic patchwork.
In this wise, however, the young Scratchell girls contrived to get educated, perhaps pretty nearly as well as the general run of girls, at home or abroad. The humble and old-fashioned education which Mrs. Scratchell had received herself she handed down to her daughters. She could not teach them German, or Italian, for she had never learnt those languages. She could not ground them in the Latin tongue, for in her day Latin had been considered an exclusively masculine accomplishment. She could not teach them the use of the globes, for she had no globes; nor natural science, for she scarcely knew what it meant. But she made them plough laboriously through Noel and Chapsal’s French grammar, until they knew it thoroughly. She taught them English, and Roman, and Grecian history till they could have set you right upon the dates and details of any great event you could mention. She made them very familiar with the geography of this globe, and the manners and customs of its inhabitants; and she taught them a good deal about common things, which might or might not be useful to them in after life.
Upon this particular afternoon Mrs. Scratchell and her five daughters were assembled in the schoolroom busied with a task of all-absorbing interest. They were making their winter dresses, and the threadbare carpet was strewed with shreds and patches of dark blue merino, while the somewhat stuffy atmosphere was odorous with glazed lining.
It was a shabby old panelled room, from whose wainscot almost all the paint had been worn and scrubbed away in the progress of years. But though the paint was mostly gone a general drabness remained. Narrow drab moreen curtains hung beside the straight windows—an oblong mahogany table, with those treacherous contrivances called flaps, occupied the centre of the room, and was now covered with bodices, and sleeves, and pockets, and skirts, in various stages of being. There was an old horsehair sofa against the wall, loaded with books, slates, and desks which had been thrust aside to make room for the more agreeable pursuit of dressmaking. There were a dozen chairs of various shapes and make, the odds and ends of a sale-room or a broker’s shop. No ornament or beautification of any kind had ever been attempted in the schoolroom. The apartment was unpretendingly hideous; and yet the Scratchell children were fond of it, and looked back to it in after years as the dearest room in the world. Perhaps the only thing that could be called good in it was the wide old fireplace, with its blue and white Dutch tiles, basket grate, and capacious hobs, which were so convenient for cooking toffy or roasting chestnuts.
Bella was at work with her mother and sisters. She had a natural gift for dressmaking, as she had for many things, and was the general cutter out and contriver, and the family arbiter upon fashion. It was she who decided how the sleeves were to be made, and whether the skirts were to be plain or flounced.
She sat among them this afternoon, her busy scissors crunching and grinding over the table, cutting and slashing with quite a professional ease and audacity.
‘What a correct eye and what a steady hand you have, Bella!’ said her mother, admiringly. ‘It’s quite wonderful.’
‘I’d need have something, mother,’ sighed Bella, ‘as I’ve no money.’
‘True, my dear. There’s a great deal wanted to make up for the loss of that. One feels it every day.’
‘Every day,’ echoed Bella. ‘Why not say every hour, every moment? When doesn’t one feel it? It is a steady gnawing pain, like toothache.’
‘But Providence has made you so bright and clever, dear. That’s a great consolation. There’s Miss Harefield now, I don’t suppose she could make herself a dress.’
‘I doubt if she could thread a needle,’ said Bella. ‘But I’d change places with her any day.’
‘What, Bella! and be almost alone in the world? Without a mother—or sisters—or brothers!’
Bella did not say whether she would have borne this latter loss, but she looked at the four lanky girls in shabby frocks and grubby holland pinafores, dubiously, as if her mind was not quite made up as to their value in the sum of life.
Just then there came a sharp double knock at the street door, and the four girls rushed to the window and glued their noses against the panes, like four small jelly-fishes holding on by suction.
Bella ran across the room and pushed her four sisters on to the floor in a tumbled heap of brown holland and faded green merino.
‘You horrid vulgar creatures!’ she exclaimed to these blessings. ‘Don’t you know that a visitor can see you? Gracious!’ she exclaimed, ‘it’s Mrs. Dulcimer, and in her best bonnet. Run up and change your gown, mother, and do your hair up better. I can go and receive her. I’m tidy.’
Bella was more than tidy. She would have been presentable anywhere, with her shining plaits of fair hair, her fresh pink and white complexion, perfectly fitting black silk dress, and neat collar and ribbon. Bella was a young woman who would have moved heaven and earth for the sake of a good gown, and who knew how to take care of her clothes and make them last twice as long as other people’s—an invaluable wife for a poor curate, surely, as Mrs. Dulcimer thought.
Bella went smiling into the best parlour. It was a very shabby old room to be called best, but it was always kept clean and tidy, and Bella had taken a good deal of pains with it, and had even spent a little of her hardly-earned money to brighten it. The faded chintz was enlivened with starched muslin antimacassars. There was a rustic basket of ferns and flowers in each of the windows, there were a few little bits of Oriental china, the relics of bygone prosperity, on the narrow mantelpiece, there were some water-colour fruit and flower pieces of Bella’s on the walls, neatly framed, and hung with smart blue ribbons, instead of the commonplace picture cord.
Mrs. Dulcimer had taken an approving survey of everything, while waiting for Bella’s appearance.
‘Mamma will be down in a minute,’ said Bella, when they had shaken hands. ‘She has been working at our blue merino dresses, and her hands were all over dye. She is so pleased at the idea of your coming to see her.’
‘It is such a time since I have called on her. I feel quite ashamed. But I have so many calls to make.’
‘Yes, and you are so good to every one. Mamma is so grateful for your kindness to me.’
‘It is nothing, Bella. I only wish I could be kinder. You are such a good industrious girl. I wish I could see you comfortably settled in life.’
Bella blushed and smiled. Mrs. Dulcimer’s mania for match-making was notorious. It was an amiable propensity, but did not always work well.
‘Don’t worry yourself about me, dear Mrs. Dulcimer. I have no wish to get settled. I should be sorry to leave poor mamma. I can help her in so many little ways, you know.’
‘Yes, my dear, I know what an excellent daughter you are. A good daughter will always make a good wife. But in a large family like yours the sooner a girl marries the better. Let me see, now, how many sisters have you?’
‘Four.’
‘Four! good gracious! Five girls in one family! That’s quite dreadful! I can’t see where five husbands are to come from. Not out of Little Yafford, I am afraid.’
‘But, dear Mrs. Dulcimer, we are not all obliged to marry.’
‘My poor child, what else are you to do? There is nothing between that and being governesses.’
‘Then we must all be governesses. I had rather be a tolerably contented governess than a miserable wife.’
‘But you might be a very happy wife—if you marry the man who loves you.’
Bella blushed again, and this time more deeply. Did Mrs. Dulcimer know or suspect anything? Bella’s heart thrilled strangely. To be loved, how sweet it sounded! To have her life all at once transformed to something new and strange, lifted out of this dull level of poverty-stricken monotony, in which it had crept on for all the years she could remember!
‘I must wait till the true lover appears, Mrs. Dulcimer,’ she answered quietly, though the beating of her heart had quickened. ‘I have never met him yet.’
‘Haven’t you, Bella? You may have met him without knowing it. I have an idea that Cyril Culverhouse is very fond of you.’
Now if Bella had heard Mrs. Dulcimer express such an idea in relation to any one but herself, she would have given the notion exactly its just value, which would have been nothing—for it was Mrs. Dulcimer’s peculiar faculty to evolve ideas of this kind from her inner consciousness—but, applied to herself, the notion had a startling effect upon Bella’s nerves and brain.
Could it be? Cyril—her ideal preacher—the man whose earnest eyes had made her tremble strangely, at odd times, when her own eyes met them suddenly. Cyril, the only being who had ever made her feel the littleness of her own views and aspirations, and that, despite all her gifts, she was a very poor creature. That Cyril could care for her—value her—love her—it was too bright a dream! She forgot that he was little better off than herself—that he could do nothing to lift her out of her dull life of aching poverty. She forgot everything, except that it would be the sweetest thing in the world to be loved by him.
‘Indeed, Mrs. Dulcimer, you must be mistaken’, she said, her voice trembling a little. ‘Mr. Culverhouse has not given me a thought—he has never said one word that——’
‘My dear, he is too honourable to say anything until he felt himself in a position to speak plainly, and that would hardly be till he has got a living. But the Church will not be such slow work for him as it is for most young men, you may depend. He has great gifts.’
‘He has indeed,’ sighed Bella.
This idea of a living opened quite a delicious picture before the eye of fancy. Bella saw herself a vicar’s wife—a person of importance in the village—like Mrs. Dulcimer—inhabiting some pretty vicarage, full of old china, and modern furniture, surrounded with smiling lawns and flower-beds, instead of the gooseberry bushes, cabbage rows, and general utilitarianism and untidiness of the Scratchell garden. And with Cyril—her Cyril—for the companion of her days. Imagination could paint no fairer life.
‘I don’t say that anything has been said, my love, even to me,’ said Mrs. Dulcimer. ‘But I am long-sighted in these matters. I can see very far ahead.’
This was true, for Mrs. Dulcimer’s apprehension had often been so far in advance of fact that she had seen inclinations and nascent loves that had never existed—and had sometimes worried the victims of these fancied affections into ill-advised matrimony. Most of Mrs. Dulcimer’s happy couples began, like Benedick and Beatrice, with a little aversion.
Mrs. Scratchell now appeared, smooth as to her hair and shiny as to her complexion, and with an unmistakable appearance of having just changed her gown. She saluted the Vicar’s wife with the old-fashioned curtsey which had been taught her in her boarding-school days, and seemed almost overcome when Mrs. Dulcimer shook hands with her.
‘I’m sure I don’t know how I can thank you for all your goodness to Bella,’ said the grateful mother.
‘Indeed, I want no thanks, Mrs. Scratchell. We are all very fond of Bella at the Vicarage. She is so bright and clever. What a help she must be to you!’
‘She is indeed. I don’t know what we should do without her. She’s the only one of us that can manage her father when he’s out of temper.’
‘What a good wife she would make for a man of limited means!’
‘She would know how to make the most of things,’ answered Mrs. Scratchell, with a sigh; ‘but I really think I’d rather my daughters kept single all their lives than that they should have to cut and contrive as I have had. I’ve not a word to say against poor Scratchell. Poverty tries all our tempers, and his has been more tried than most men’s. He’s a good father, and a good husband, and I’ve as good children as any woman need wish to have; but, for all that, I’d rather my daughters should never marry than that they should marry like me.’
‘Oh, Mrs. Scratchell,’ cried the Vicar’s wife, shocked at this slander against her favourite institution. ‘Surely now, as a wife and mother, you have fulfilled woman’s noblest mission. You ought to be proud of having brought up such a nice family and managed things respectably upon so little.’
‘Perhaps I ought,’ sighed Mrs. Scratchell. ‘But I don’t feel anything, except very tired. I was forty-one last birthday, but I feel as if I were eighty.’
Mrs. Dulcimer did not know what to say. Life had been so easy for her. All good things had fallen unsolicited into her lap. She had never known an ungratified want, except her yearning for a new drawing-room carpet. This glimpse of a pinched, overworked existence came upon her like a revelation.
‘But you must be so proud of your fine family,’ said Mrs. Dulcimer, bent on being cheerful; ‘so many of them—and all well and thriving.’
‘Yes,’ sighed the house-mother, ‘they grow very fast, and they have fine healthy appetites. It’s better to pay the baker than the doctor, as I always say to Mr. Scratchell when he complains, but the bills are very heavy.’
‘Now mind, Bella, I shall expect to see you often at the Vicarage,’ said Mrs. Dulcimer, with her sweetest smile. ‘You are not to wait for Miss Harefield to bring you, but you are to come and see me, you know, in a friendly way—and bring your work. I know you are clever at fancy work.’
‘She is clever at everything,’ said the mother, with a doleful pride. ‘I never knew such hands as Bella’s. She can turn them to anything.’
‘Bring your work of an afternoon then, Bella, when your mother can spare you, and come and sit with me. Mr. Culverhouse often drops in after tea.’
And then with much hand-shaking and cordiality, kindly Mrs. Dulcimer took her leave, and went home happy, her mind glowing with triumphant benevolence, feeling that she had employed her afternoon in a manner that St. Paul himself must have approved.
‘It’s all very well for Clement to talk about charity being a passive virtue,’ she reflected. ‘Passive good nature would never get that girl comfortably married. Five daughters, and the father without a sixpence to give them! Poor dear girls! Husbands must be found for them somehow.’
Bella Scratchell felt curiously fluttered after the Vicar’s wife was gone. The noise of the home tea-table, those rough boys, those boisterous unkempt girls, with hair like horses’ manes, and an uncomfortable habit of stretching across the table for everything they wanted, seemed a shade more trying than usual.
‘Now then, Greedy,’ cried Adolphus, the second boy, to his sister Flora. ‘I would scrape the pot if I was you. Yah!’ looking into an empty marmalade pot. ‘Not a vestige left. I say, Bella, you might stand a pot of marmalade now and then.’
The boys were in the habit of making random demands upon Bella’s private means, but were not often successful.
‘I’m sure you want no temptation to eat bread and butter,’ she said. ‘It would be sheer cruelty to ma.’
What bliss to be away from them all! This noisy circle—the odour of Dorset butter—the poor mother’s worried looks, and frequent getting up to see after this and that—the scolding and disputing—the domestic turmoil.
A lonely old bachelor, looking in through the window at the firelit room, might perchance have envied Mr. Scratchell his healthy young family might have thought that this circle of eager faces, and buzz of voices, meant happiness; yet for Bella home meant anything but happiness. She was heartily tired of it all.
She pictured herself in that ideal vicarage, with the only man she had ever admired for her husband. She was thinking of him all through the confusion of tea-time—the clinking of tea-spoons and rattling of cups—the spilling of tea—an inevitable feature in every Scratchell tea party—the fuss about the kettle, with much argumentation between Mrs. Scratchell and the maid of all work as to whether it boiled or did not boil—the scrambling for crusts, and general squabbling—through all she was thinking of Cyril’s earnest face—hearing his thrilling voice close at her ear.
‘Can it be true?’ she asked herself. ‘Can it be true that he cares for me—ever so little even? Oh, it would be too much—it would be heaven!’
Here Bertie’s cup of hot tea came into collision with his sister’s elbow, foundered and went down, amidst a storm of shrill young voices and maternal expostulation.