CHAPTER IV.
SISTER AND BROTHER.
FROM the two old men and their consultations it was a relief, even in that chilly and dismal day, to get outside into the free air, though it was heavy with the chill of moisture turning into frost. It was not a cheerful world outside. The sky was the color of lead, and hung low in one uniform tint of dullness over the wet world, with all its wetness just on the point of congealing. The common stretched out its low green broken lines and brown divisions of path to touch the limited horizon. Mrs. Stone’s school, the big white house which stood on the north side, had a sort of halo of mist hanging round it, and everything that moved moved drearily, as unable to contend against the depression in the air. But little Jock Trevor was impervious to that depression; it was the moment of all the twenty-four hours in which he was happy. Though he had lain as still on the rug as if there was no quicksilver at all in his little veins he could scarcely stand quietly now to have his little great-coat put on, which his sister did with great care. She was seventeen, a staid little person, with much composure of manners, dressed in a gray walking-dress, trimmed with gray fur, very neat, comfortable, and sensible, but not quite becoming to Lucy, who was of that kind of fair complexion which tends toward grayness; fair hair, with no color in it, and a face more pale than rosy. Ill-natured people said of her that she was all the same color, hair, cheeks, and eyes—which was not true, and yet so far true as to make the gray dress the least favorable envelope that could have been chosen. There was no irregularity of any kind about her appearance; all was exact, the very impersonation of neatness; a ribbon awry, an irregularity of line anywhere, would have been a relief, but no such relief was afforded to the spectator. Whoever might be found fault with for untidiness in Mrs. Stone’s establishment, it never was Lucy; her collars were always spotless; her ribbons always neatly tied; her dress the very perfection of good order and completeness. She put on her brother’s little coat, and buttoned it to the last button, though he was dancing all the time with impatience; then enveloped his throat with a warm woolen scarf, and tucked in the ends. “Now your gloves, Jocky,” she said, and she would not move till he had dragged these articles on, and had them buttoned in their turn. “What does it matter if you are two minutes earlier or later,” she said, “you silly little Jock? far better to have them buttoned before you go out than to struggle with them all the way. Now, have you got your handkerchief, and has your hat been brushed properly? Well,” Lucy added, surveying him with mingled satisfaction in the result and reluctance to allow it to be complete, “now we may go.”
If she had not held him by the hand, there is no telling what caracoling Jock might have burst into by way of exhausting the first outburst of exhilaration. The contact with the fresh air, though it was not anything very lively in the way of air, moved all the childhood in his veins. He strained Lucy’s arm, as a hound strains at a leash, jumping about her as they went on. Almost her staid steps were beguiled out of their usual soft maidenly measure by the gambols of the little fellow.
“Let’s have a run to the gate,” he said. “Oh, Lucy, come, run me to the gate,” and he dragged at her hand to get loose from its hold. But when he escaped Jock did not care to run alone. He came back to her, out of breath.
“I wish I could have a real run—just once,” he said, with a sigh; then brightening up, “or a wrestling like Shakespeare. I’ll tell you who I’d like to be, Lucy; I’d like to be Orlando when he had just killed that big bully of a man—”
“Jock! you wouldn’t like to kill any one, I hope?”
“Oh, shouldn’t I!” cried the boy; “just to see him go down, and turn over on his face, and clinch his hands. Do they always do that, I wonder? You see them in the pictures all with their fists clinched, clawing at the ground. Well,” he added, with magnanimity, “he needn’t quite die, you know; I’d like him only to be badly hurt, as bad as if he were killed, and then to get better. I dare say,” said the child, “Charles got better, you know, after Orlando threw him. It isn’t said that he was regularly killed.”
“Is it a pretty story you’ve been reading, dear?” said Lucy, sweetly, altogether ignorant of Orlando. And she was not ashamed of her ignorance, nor did Jock know that she had any reason to be ashamed.
“That’s the best bit,” he said, impartially. “The rest is mostly about girls. It was the Duke’s wrestler, you know, a big beast like—oh, I don’t know anybody so big—a drayman,” said Jock, as a big wagon lumbered by, laden with barrels, with one of those huge specimens of humanity (and beer) moving along like a clumsy tower by its side. “Like him; and Orlando was quite young, you know, not so very big—like me, when I am grown up.”
“You don’t know what you will be when you are grown up, you silly little boy. Perhaps you will never grow up at all,” said Lucy, somewhat against her conscience improving the occasion.
Jock stood for a moment with wide open eyes. Then resumed:
“I sha’n’t be big or fat like that fellow—when I am about seventeen, or perhaps twenty-two, and never taught to box or anything. I would have gone in at him,” cried Jock, throwing out his poor arm, with a very tightly clinched woolen glove at the end of it, “just like Orlando, just like this; and down he’d go, like, like—” But imagination did not serve him in this particular. “Like Charles did,” he concluded, with a dropping of his voice, which betrayed a consciousness of the failure, not in grammar, but in force of metaphor. Jock’s experience did not furnish any parallel incident.
“You must never fight when you grow up,” said Lucy. “Gentlemen never do; except when they are soldiers, and have to go and fight for the queen.”
“Does the queen want to be fighted for?” said Jock. “If any fellow was to bully her or hit her—”
“Oh,” cried Lucy, horrified, “nobody would do that, but people sometimes go against the country, Jock, and then the people that are fighting for England are said to be fighting for the queen.”
Jock’s mind, however, went astray in the midst of this discourse. There passed the pair in the road a very captivating little figure—a small boy, much smaller even than Jock, with long fair locks streaming down his shoulders, in the most coquettish of dresses, mounted upon a beautiful cream-colored pony, as tiny as its rider. What child could pass this little equestrian and not gaze after him? The children sighed out of admiration and envy when they saw him, for he was a very well-known figure about Farafield; but the elders shook their heads and said, “Poor child!” Why should the old people say “Poor child!” and the young ones regard him with such admiring eyes? It was little Gerald Ridout, the son of the circus proprietor. Nobody was better known. As he rode along, the most daring little rider, on his pretty little Arab, which was as pretty as himself, with his long flowing curls waving, there could have been no such attractive advertisement. The circus traveled for a great part of the year, but its home was in Farafield, and everybody knew little Gerald. Jock fixed his glistening eyes upon him from the moment of his appearance—eyes that shone with pleasure and sympathy, and that wistful longing to be as beautiful and happy, which is not envy. There was nothing of the more hateful sentiment in little Jock’s heart, but because he admired he would have liked to resemble, had that been within his power. He followed the child with his eyes as long as he was visible. Then he asked, “Do people who are rich have ponies, Lucy?” with much gravity and earnestness.
“Very often, dear, and horses too; but that poor little fellow is not rich, you know.”
“I should like to be him,” said Jock.
“A little circus-boy? to ride upon the stage, and have all the most horrid people staring at you?”
“And jump through the hoop, and gallop, gallop, and have a pony like that all to myself. A—h!” Jock cried with a long-drawn breath.
“Would you like a pony so very much, Jocky? Then some day you shall have one,” said his sister in her tranquil voice. “I will buy you one when I am rich.”
“Are you soon going to be rich?” said the little boy doubtfully. Like wiser people, he preferred the smallest bird in the hand to a whole aviary in the dim and doubtful distance. But Lucy had not a very lively sense of humor. She knew the circumstances better than he did, and said, “Hush! hush!” with a little awe.
“Not for a very long time, I hope,” she said.
Her little brother looked at her with wondering eyes; but this mystery was too deep for him to solve. He had no insight into those deep matters which occupied his father’s time, nor had he the least notion that Lucy’s wealth depended upon that father’s death, though it had all been discussed with so much detail day by day over his dreaming head.
“When you are rich, shall I be rich too, Lucy?” he said.
“I am afraid not, Jock; but if I am rich, it will not matter; you shall have whatever you please. Won’t that do just as well?”
Jock paused and thought.
“Why shouldn’t I be rich too?” he remarked. It was not said as a question; it was an observation. The fact did not trouble him, but en passant he noticed it as a thing which might perhaps want explaining. It was not of half so much importance, however, as the next thing that came into his head.
“I say, Lucy, do you think that boy on the pony has to go to school? What do you think he can be learning at school? I should like to go there too.”
“When you go, it shall be to a much nicer place,” she said, with energy. “There is one thing I should like to be rich for, and that is for you, little Jock. You don’t know anything at all yet. You ought to be learning Greek and Latin, and mathematics, and a great many other things. It makes me quite unhappy when I think of it. I go to school, but it does not matter for me; and you are living all your time, not learning anything, reading nonsense on the hearth-rug. I could cry when I think of it,” Lucy said. She said it very quietly, but this was vehemence in her.
Jock looked up at her with wondering eyes; for his own part he had no enthusiasm for study, nor, except for the pleasure of being with the circus boy, whom he vaguely apprehended as caracoling about the very vague place which his imagination conceived of as “School,” on his pretty pony, had he any desire to be sent there; but it did not occur to him to enter into any controversy on the subject.
“Are you going up-town, Lucy?” he asked; “have you got to go to shops again? I wish you would buy all your ribbons at one time, and not be always, always buying more. Aunty Ford when she goes out goes to shops too, and you have to stand and stare about, and there’s nothing to look at, and nothing to do.”
“What would you like to do, Jock?”
“Oh, I don’t know—nothing,” said the boy; “if I had a pony I’d get on its back and ride off a hundred miles before I stopped.”
“The horse couldn’t go a hundred miles, nor you either, dear.”
“Oh, yes, I could, or ten at least, and if I met any one on the road I’d run races with him; and I’d call the horse Black Bess, or else Rozinante, or else Chiron; but Chiron wasn’t only a horse, you know, he was a horseman.”
“Well, dear,” said Lucy, calmly, “I wish you were a horseman, too, if you would like it so very much.”
“You don’t understand,” cried the child, “you don’t understand! I couldn’t be like Chiron; he had four legs, he was a man-horse. He brought up a little boy once, lots of little boys, and taught them. I say, Lucy, if Chiron was living now I should like to go to school to him.”
“You are a silly little boy,” said Lucy. “Who ever heard of a school-master that had four legs? I wonder papa lets you read so many silly books.”
“They are not silly books at all; it is only because you don’t know,” said Jock, reddening. “Suppose we were cast on a desert island, what would you do? You don’t know any stories to tell round the fire; but I know heaps of stories, I know more stories than any one. Aunty Ford is pretty good,” the little fellow went on, reflectively: “she knows some; and she likes me to tell her out of Shakespeare, and about the ‘Three Calenders’ and the ‘Genii in the Bottle,’ and that improves her mind; but if you were in a desert island what should you do? You don’t know one story to tell.”
“I should cook your suppers, and mend your clothes, and make the fire.”
“Ah!” said the boy with a little contempt; “bread and milk would do, you know, or when we shot a deer we’d just put him before the fire and roast him. We shouldn’t want much cooking; and the skin would do for clothes.”
“You would not be at all comfortable like that,” said Lucy gravely, shocked by the savagery of the idea; “even Robinson Crusoe had to sew the skins together and make them into a coat; and how could you have milk,” she added, “without some one to milk the cow?”
“I will tell you something that is very strange,” said Jock: “Aunty Ford never read ‘Robinson Crusoe;’ but she knows Christian off by heart, and all about Mary and Christiana and the children. And she knows the history of Joseph, and David, and Goliath; so you can not say she is quite ignorant; and she makes me tell her quantities of things.”
“You should not mix up your stories,” said Lucy; “the Bible is not like other books. About Joseph and David and those other—” (Lucy had almost said gentlemen, which seemed the most respectful expression; but she paused, reflecting with a little horror that this was too modern and common a title for Bible personages). “They are for Sunday,” she went on, more severely, to hide her own confusion; “they are not like ‘Robinson Crusoe’ or the ‘Genii in the Bottle;’ you ought not to mix them up.”
“It is Christian that is the most Sunday,” said Jock; “she explains it to me, and all what it means, about the House Beautiful and the ladies that lived there. There is a Punch, Lucy! and there’s Cousin Philip; never mind him, but run, run, and let us have a good look at the Punch.”
“I mustn’t run,” said Lucy, holding him back, “and I can not stand and look at Punch. If Mrs. Stone were to see me she never would let me come out with you any more.”
“Oh, run, run!” cried the little boy, straining at her hand like a hound in a leash. He had dragged her half across the street when Cousin Philip came up. This was the only other relative with whom Mr. Trevor had kept up any intercourse. He was the young man to whom the old school-master had made over his school, and he, too, like Lucy, was taking advantage of the half holiday. In Farafield, where young men were scarce, Philip Rainy had already made what his friends called a very good impression. He was not, it was true (to his eternal confusion and regret) a University man; but neither was he a certified school-master. He had greatly raised the numbers of old John Trevor’s school, and he occupied a kind of debatable position on the borders of gentility, partly because of his connection with the enriched family perhaps, but partly because his appearance and manners were good, and his aspirations were lofty from a social point of view. He had begun with a determination, to resist steadily all claims upon him from below, and to assert courageously a right to stand upon the dais of Farafield society; and though there may be many discouragements in the path of a young man thus situated, it is astonishing how soon a steady resolution of this kind begins to tell. He had been five years in old John Trevor’s school, and already many people accredited him with a B.A. to his name. Philip told no fibs on that or any subject that concerned his position. “When it was necessary,” as he said, he was perfectly frank on the subject; but there are so few occasions on which it is necessary to be explanatory, a modest man does not thrust himself before the notice of the world; and he was making his way—he was making an impression. Though he had been brought up a Dissenter like his uncle, he had soon seen the entire incompatibility of Sectarianism with society, and he had now the gratification of hearing himself described as a sound if moderate churchman. And he was now permanently upon the list of men who were asked to the dinner-parties at the rectory, when single men were wanted to balance a superabundance of ladies, an emergency continually recurring in a country town. This of itself speaks volumes. Philip Rainy was making his way.
He was a slim and a fair young man, bearing a family resemblance to his cousin Lucy; and he had always been very “nice” to Lucy and to Jock. He came up to them now to solve all their difficulties, taking Jock’s eager hand out of his sister’s, and arresting their vehement career.
“Stop here, and I’ll put you on my shoulder, Jock; you’ll see a great deal better than among the crowd, such a little fellow as you are; and Lucy will talk to me.”
They made a very pretty group, as they stood thus at a respectful distance from Punch and his noisy audience, Jock mounted on his cousin’s shoulder, clapping his hands and crowing with laughter, while Lucy stood, pleased and smiling, talking to Philip, who was always so “nice.” The passers-by looked at them with an interest which was inevitable in the circumstances. Wherever Lucy went people looked at her and pointed her out as the heiress, and naturally the young man who was her relation was the subject of many guesses and speculations. To see them standing together was like the suggestion of a romance to all Farafield. Were they in love with each other? Would she marry him? To suppose that Philip, having thus the ball at his foot, should not be “after” the heiress, passed all belief.
But the talk that passed between them, and which suggested so many things to the lookers-on, was of the most placid kind.
“How is my uncle?” Philip asked. Old John Trevor was not his uncle, but the difference between age and youth made the cousinship resolvable into a more filial bond, and it sounded much nearer, which pleased the young man. “May I come and see him one of these evenings, Lucy? I am dining out to-day and to-morrow; but Friday perhaps—”
“How many people you must know!” said Lucy, half admiring, half amused; for young persons at school have a very keen eye for everything that looks like “showing off.”
“Yes, I know a good many people—thanks chiefly to you and my uncle.”
“To me? I don’t know anybody,” said Lucy.
“But they know you; and to be a cousin to a great heiress is a feather in my cap.”
Lucy only smiled; she was neither pleased nor annoyed by the reference, her fortune was so familiar a subject to her. She said, “Papa will be glad to see you. But I must not stand here on the street; Mrs. Stone will be angry; and I think Jock must have seen enough.”
“Don’t knock my hat off, Jock. Have you seen enough? I will walk with you to the Terrace,” said Philip, and the little family group as they went along the street attracted a great deal of interest. What more natural than that Philip should be “nice” to his young cousins, and turn with them when he met them on a half holiday? and it is so good to be seen to have relations who are heiresses for a young man who is making his way.