“You need not be alarmed, Mr. Orchardson,” said a voice which I recognized as that of Miss Jerry; “my mother is all right again, and quite ready to have another turn at you, if you are anxious to come back.”
“The Lord forbid!” I replied devoutly. “I would run into the hottest of the brick-kilns yonder, rather than meet the good lady again. But I am delighted that it is no worse. It was very kind of you to come and tell me. My best thanks to you, Miss Geraldine.”
“It was not that at all,” she said with some hesitation; “I did not come to set your mind at ease, though I thought that possibly you might be waiting here; which is very good of you. But I came to say how grateful I am for your behaviour. You have done a lot of good; I cannot tell you half of it. Nobody ever dares to contradict mamma; that is what makes her so much what she is. She is very kind and pleasant at the bottom, I am sure. But she has such a very strong will of her own; as a clever man said, when he tried to comfort my dear father many years ago, such a ‘very powerful identity,’ that every one has always given way before her, until she – until she thinks all the world is bound to do it. You spoke very harshly to her, I know. Perhaps a real gentleman would not have done it; and for the moment I hated you. But she is so delightful to us ever since! We shall have a sweet time of it, for at least a week. But won’t Miss Kitty catch it?”
Those last words gave me a bitter pang. This odd girl, who seemed to have some good in her, spoke them, as I thought, with exultation, or at any rate without any sign of sorrow. Her justice, like her mother’s, stopped at home.
“If I have done you any good,” I said, with faint hopes of getting some little myself, “do promise me one thing; I am sure you will. Try to be kind to Miss Fairthorn, and lighten some little of the burden she has to bear.”
“Oh, you don’t know her,” she answered, with a laugh. “You think she is wonderful, I dare say. I can tell you Miss Kitty has a temper of her own. She is awfully provoking, and she won’t be pitied. I believe she hates Frizzy and me, just because we are our mother’s daughters. If you ever marry her, you had better look out. However, I will bear with her, as far as human nature can. And now I will say ‘Good-night.’”
She gave me her hand, which I did not expect; and I saw that she was rather a pretty girl which I had not noticed in the room. She had fine dark eyes, and her voice was much softer than that of her sister; and, it seemed to me that she might come to good, if she got among good people, and away from her terrible mother.
CHAPTER XIX.
DOE DEM. ROE
When I gave Uncle Corny, as I was bound to do, a full account of that day’s work, he was mightily pleased, and clapped me on the back for having spoken so plainly to that haughty woman.
“But now you must make up your mind,” he said, “to have the door slammed in your face, if ever you attempt to get a glimpse of your sweetheart there. Poor thing, what a time of it she will have! What puts my back up is to think that her own father lets her be knocked about like that. She never tells him, you think, because it would only get him into trouble, and do her no good. Well, she is a noble girl, if that is the case. But he must know how she is treated, as I told you, in fifty other ways, – badly dressed, half starved, or at any rate fed on rice and suet-pudding, and kept in the schoolroom away from the others. How was she dressed now? What clothes had she on?”
I answered that I really did not know; and this was the truth, though I blamed myself for it. When first she began to be so much to me, I had noticed how neat and becoming her cloak was, and her hat, and a little tender muff, which held a still tenderer pair of hands. But now that she was all the world to me, and more, I seemed to have no sense of her apparel, but to be filled with herself alone, as if her existence came into mine. I did not tell him that because he would have cried “Stuff!”
But he understood my meaning, so far as to tell me of a case he had known some years ago. A friend of his had married a lovely girl, who had not a penny to bless herself with, and he was most deeply attached to her. But although he was very well off for money, and not at all of a stingy turn, for a long time it never came into his head that his wife had only two gowns, two bonnets, and one cloak. She was too proud to ask him for money; and instead of doing that, went on and on, wearing out all her poor things, until they were scarcely fit to be looked at. And many bitter tears she shed, as she darned, and patched, and let pieces in, convinced more and more, as the light shone through, that her husband must hate her to keep her like that. And perhaps it would have ended in the ruin of them both, for some villain was making love to her, when, luckily a sister of his came to see them, and scolded him roundly for his blind neglect. “Why, bless her heart!” he cried, opening his eyes; “I never see Mary’s clothes – I see Mary.”
“Now mind you are not such a jackanapes as that;” my Uncle drew the moral, as he rubbed his hands, for he loved to have his stories laughed at; “when you have got your Kitty, and I don’t see why you should not, be sure that you praise her dresses and bonnets; not quite so much perhaps as you praise herself, but still every time you can think of it. Women like that sort of thing, somehow. I can hardly tell you why; for if any man praised my coat or my hat, I should be vexed with him, unless it was to say that I had got them dirt-cheap. But perhaps the reason is that a woman’s clothes are a part of her mind and her body too, a sort of another self to her.”
“How on earth do you know such a lot about women?” I asked, though I thought that he did not know much. “One would think you had been married for forty years! What woman can have taught you all these things!”
“Mind your own business,” my Uncle answered sharply. “You will have quite enough to do with that, as things appear at present. You have made play with this pretty girl, and you have booked your place with her father. Also you have got over me, who meant to have nothing to do with it. And you have given that hateful woman a Roland for her Oliver. But I will go bail that you have no idea whose shoulders will bear the brunt of it. Who should you say was the trump-card now?”
“The learned Professor,” I replied; “the man who could kill that woman with a wire, if he were not so magnanimous. The man who knows everything in this world, except how to manage his own household. He will stand up for me, and I shall win.”
“So you shall, my boy; you are quite right there. But it won’t be done through him, I can tell you; or you would have a precious time to wait. It shall be done through a small market-gardener – as she had the cheek to call me – and she may grind her teeth, and slap her husband. Very few people know what I am; because I don’t care what they think of me. But I see the proper thing to do, and I mean to begin to-morrow. Now go to bed, and dream as you do all day. You’ll be no good to me, till you’ve had too much of Kitty.”
Being weary in body and in mind, I slept until Tabby called out that the breakfast was ready. For this I expected to be well upbraided, as my uncle was always afoot with the sun; but to my surprise he was not come home, and I kept his rasher hot for him. At last he came in, and sat down without a word beyond his short “Good morning, Kit!” His appetite was fine, and his face most cheerful; though his gray curls appeared a little grimy, and his coat had a smell more peculiar than pleasant.
“Shall have to go under the pump again,” he said, as he pushed away his plate; “but it won’t matter now till dinner-time. That twitch does make such a sticky smoke, with the sow-thistles whelmed down over it. But the wind was the right way, and took it very level. Bless my soul, how he did cough, and how he ran from one room to another! ’Twas enough to kill American blight a’most, let alone what they call a ‘human.’ But it’s high time to rouse them up again, my lad; bring one of them runner-sticks, and lend a hand. If he don’t bolt by dinner-time, we’ll try a little sulphur. I would have done it sooner, if it had not been for the Dutch Honeysuckle, and blue creeper.”
Wondering what this device could be, I took a kidney-bean stick and followed him. He marched at a great pace, with a pitchfork on his shoulder, down a long alley of pears and apples; on which, though the leaves hung very late from the wetness of the season, the chill air of some frosty mornings had breathed divers colours. Then we came into an open break, which I had helped to plant with potatoes in the spring, and here were a score of bonfires burning, or rather smoking furiously. Beyond them was “Honeysuckle Cottage,” belonging to my uncle, and standing at the north end of his grounds, against a lane which led to Hanworth.
This cottage had five windows facing us, and receiving the volleys of foul gray smoke, as a smart south-west wind drove it; and the fires being piled with diseased potato-haulm, of which there was abundance in that bad year, as well as bottomed with twitch-grass, beth-wine, cat’s-tail, and fifty other kinds of weed, and still more noxious refuse, the reek was more than any nose could stand, when even a mild puff strayed towards us. But the main and solid mass was rushing, in a flood of embodied stench, straight into the windows of that peaceful cot, penetrating sash and frame and lining. Once or twice as the cloud wisped before the wind, we seemed to catch a brief glimpse of some agitated mortal, holding up his hands in supplication, or wringing them, and applying them in anguish to his nose.
“Pile on some more, Bill, and stir them up again,” shouted Uncle Corny, with his pitchfork swinging in the thick of it. “Agricultural operations must not be suspended to suit the caprice of individuals, – as the County-court judge said, when Noakes tried to stop me from carting manure near his parlour-window. If old Harker won’t hearken, well make him sniff, eh? See the joke, Selsey Bill?”
Selsey Bill saw it, after deep reflection, and shook his long sides with a longer guffaw. “If a’ don’t sniff at this, a’ must have quare nostrils” – he was wheezing himself, as he clapped on another great dollop of rottenness, and stirred it; “I could never have bided it two minutes; though the Lord hathn’t made me too partiklar. Sure us’ll vetch ’un out this time, Maister. Here a’ coom’th, here a’ coom’th. Lookey see!”
Following his point we descried a little man, timidly opening the cottage door, and apparently testing the smells outside, to compare them with those he was quitting. He glanced at the bonfires, and shook his fist wildly; then threw his skirt over his head, and made off, as if he had smelled quite enough of this world.
“Run and get the key, Bill,” my uncle cried, as soon as he could speak for laughing; “lock the door, and bring the key to me. We’ll send for the fire-engine by-and-by, and wash down the front, and then put your wife in, and scrub the whole place out. Beat abroad the fires, men, and throw some earth upon them. That’s what I call something like an ejectment. The old rogue has paid no rent since Lady Day; though he had it dirt cheap at three and six a week, and me to pay the rates and taxes. Come, you shall have a pint of beer all round. I am sure you want something to take the taste out.”
As we went home, to have a good wash, and change our coats, I learned all the meaning of this strong measure, and felt no more pity for the tenant evicted. He had occupied this cottage for some seven years now, and although he lived so close to us and on our land, scarcely any one had exchanged ten words with him. He was of a morose and silent nature, living all alone, though he had some money, and never going out of doors when he could help it. His name was Ben Harker, and throughout the village his nickname was “Old Arkerate;” for when anything was said to him that he could pick a hole in, if it were only a remark about the weather, he would always say – “No. That isn’t arkerate.” It was said that he had lost a considerable fortune, before he came to Sunbury, by some inaccuracy in a will, or title-deeds, and thence he had taken to challenge the correctness of even the most trivial statement. My uncle had been longing for months to recover possession of his own premises; but old Harker took advantage of the obstacles richly provided by English law in such a case, and swore he would never go out without a law-suit. But he had never spent a halfpenny on repairs, though he had it so cheap through his promises; and by his own default he was thus smoked out, and the key was in the landlord’s pocket.
Mrs. Selsey Bill, mother of seventeen living children, was very fat and stumpy – as behoves a giant’s wife – and was blest with a cold in her head just now, which redeemed all her system from prejudice. The greatest philosophers assure us that all things – if there be anything – are good or bad, simply as we colour them in our own minds – that is to say, if we have minds – and to Mrs. Bill Tompkins the stench of that house was as sweet as the perfumes of Araby. She flung up the windows, from the force of habit, and not from “æsthetic preference,” and she scrubbed away with soda, and fuller’s earth, and soft soap, and bristle, and cocoa-fibre. And the next day, as soon as we had finished dinner (which we never left for nightfall, as if it were a burglary), my uncle said, “let us go and see how that place looks, after Old Arkerate has had to cut and run.”
When we got there, fat little Mrs. Tompkins was scrubbing almost as hard as ever. It is quite wrong to talk as if fat people cannot work. Many of them can, and can even carry on, by drawing on their own resources, when a lean person having hollow places down her begins to pant, and has no stuff to fill them out. She drew her breath a little, as she got up from the bucket; but neither of her hands went to her waist, because there was no such place to go to. She had three of the young ones strapped down on the floor of the room she had not yet grappled with; for her husband was of an ingenious mind, and necessity had taught him invention. Mrs. Selsey Bill stood up and faced us; she thought that we were come to say she had not done enough.
“Honourable gents,” she began with the lead, as women love to do, “it don’t look much; and you might think you got the worst of one and ninepence for a day, with the days going on for dusk at five o’clock. But when you has to find your own soap and flannels – ”
“I think you have done wonders, Mrs. Tompkins;” my uncle made answer with his pleasant smile. “If I only got the best of every bargain like this, I need never be out of elbows, ma’am. Why the stairs are as white as a scraped horse-radish. May we go up and see the view from the best bedroom? Not if it will upset any of your clever doings. You are the mistress now; and we take your orders.”
With a laugh, which challenged our criticism (for no man, except a sailor, knows the rudiments of scrubbing), she loosed for us a cord which she had tied across, lest any Selsey baby might break bonds, and crawl upstairs; and presently we stood in a pretty little bedroom, with an ample but rickety window, facing southwards. The room was not too lofty, and I might have knocked my hat against the ceiling, if I had not doffed it. But Uncle Corny, being not so tall though wider, had plenty of head-room, and asked what man could want more. And when I looked out of the window, I agreed that a man deserved less, who could not be pleased with this.
For Honeysuckle Cottage stood at the very highest corner of all his pleasant fruit-grounds; and I was much surprised, having never been inside this house before, at the rich view of gardening ever varied, and of fair land and water beyond the fruit-alleys, which shone in the soft spread of sunshine far away. Over the heads of countless trees, and betwixt their coats of many colours, matched by the motherly hands of autumn, the broad reaches of the flooded Thames, with many a bend of sheen and shadow, led the eye to dwell with pleasure, and the heart with wonder. And across the wide water, sloping meadows, streaked and rounded with hedge and breastland, spread a green footing for the dark and distant hills.
“Let me see, to-day is Friday – an unlucky day, Kit, for you to come first to the house. If I had thought of that, we might have waited for to-morrow. But it can’t be helped now; and I am not superstitious. On Monday I’ll have Joe and Jimmy Andrews in, and put all these window-frames and doors to rights. Then we’ll have Tilbury from Hampton, to see to the papering and painting, and all that. By the end of the week, we’ll have it snug and tidy. I have sent all old Harker’s traps after him to-day. They tell me he has taken that tumbledown barn of Osborne’s, over by Halliford. I suppose I may whistle for my back rents. I ought to have distrained upon his sticks; but I laughed so, when I saw how he bolted, that I could not do it. But you’ll have to pay an improved rent, my lad. You can’t have it under five shillings a week, and cheap enough at that, I can tell you.”
“Why, what do you mean?” I asked. “I don’t want a house; and if I did, how am I to keep it up? I haven’t got a sixpence to call my own.”
“Then a pretty fellow you are, to make up to Captain Fairthorn’s daughter! Where did you intend to put her, I should like to know? But we’ll make that all right, between you and me and the bedpost. I have got a little nest-egg of your mother’s money for you, and a heel-tap of your father’s. Didn’t you know why I smoked that old rogue out? Why, that this might be a little home for Kit and Kitty.”
CHAPTER XX.
AUNT PARSLOW
It is a bad thing for any man to be always beating his own bounds, and treading the track of his own grounds, and pursuing the twist of his own affairs – though they be even love affairs – as a dog spins round to catch his own tail. Under the hammer of incessant thought, and in the hot pincers of perpetual yearning, I was getting as flat as a horseshoe twice removed, when Sam Henderson gave a boy twopence to slip into our grounds, when my uncle’s back was turned, and put into my hand an envelope addressed to “Samuel Henderson, Esquire, The Paddocks, Halliford, Middlesex.” At first I thought, in my slow way, that his object was to let me see what deference he had won in racing circles; and I smiled at the littleness of the man. But the boy, who was shaking in his ventilated shoes, with dread of Uncle Corny, said – “’Tain’t that side; turn ’un over.” I obeyed his instructions, and beheld in pencil – “Come down the lane a bit. I have news for you, important.”
What mortal, dwelling wholly on his own affairs, would not have concluded that this concerned him, on his own account, and unselfishly? I hurried on my coat, which had been thrown off for a job of winter pruning, and in less than two minutes I had turned the corner and was face to face with the mighty Sam.
“All right, old fellow,” he said as coolly as if I had come to recover a loan. “You needn’t turn a hair. It is not about your Kitty, but my skittish little Sally – Sally Chalker. You know I told you all about her, the daughter of the old bloke down at Ludred.”
“Oh, I remember now,” I answered, with a sudden chill of disappointment. “I might have known that it was not for me you were in such a precious hurry. You were very wise not to come into our place. My uncle is a man of short measures.”
“A man of uncommonly short measures. He will get fined some fine day, I’m afraid.” Sam laughed wonderfully at his own wit. “But I know he don’t want me to see his little tricks. Don’t bluster, beloved Kit; we all do it, and we respect one another all the more for it. Free trade has turned John Bull into Charley Fox. I can feel for you, my boy; for now there’s a foreign rogue come poaching on my preserves at Ludred. And he doesn’t know how many legs make a horse.”
Sam tapped his own dapper and well-curved legs with a light gold-headed riding-whip, and his favourite mare, who was under the charge of a lad down the lane, gave a whinny to him. “There’s nothing she don’t know,” said Sam; “and her name it is Sally.”
I was not sure which of the two fillies – for I knew that he called his sweetheart one, and her name too was “Sally” – my friend was thus commending. But I rose to the situation, and said – “Let us go, and rout the fellow out.”
“I was sure you would stand by a brother Briton,” cried Sam, shaking hands very heartily; “and you won’t find me forget it, Kit, when old Crumbly Pot comes back again. I am keeping a look-out for you there, as I gave you my word to do. It has been kettles to mend, I am told, in the fen-land where he hails from. I know a Jew fellow who brought him to book, and was very nearly quodding him. He won’t be back this side of Christmas, unless my friend is a liar, and then I shall do you as good a turn as you are going to do me now. Can you make it fit to come to-morrow? I’ll put my Sally in the spider, and call for you about ten o’clock. You can tell old Punnets, that you want to see your Aunt Parslow about important business – for important it is and no mistake. Think of a dirty Frenchman nobbling sweet Sally Chalker, and all her cash!”
Old Punnets – as he insolently called my uncle – was glad enough that I should pay a visit to my aunt, or rather my mother’s aunt, Miss Parslow, who was said to be worth at least 10,000
l.
, as well as a very nice house, and large garden, and three or four meadows by the river Mole.
“You should never neglect such folk,” he said; “you have no proper sense of the plainest duty. She has only one relation as near as you are, and he has got plenty of tin of his own. You might cut him out easy enough, if you tried, and now is the nick of time for it. Hannah Parslow is as proud as Punch, I know; and if you can only put it to her, with a little of the proper grease, of course, that your mother’s son is considered unfit to marry a young lady, because he cannot cut a shine, – who can tell what she might do for you? She doesn’t spend half of her income, I know. I was thinking of it only the other night. And she might allow you two hundred a year, without stinting a pinch of Keating’s powder. You love dogs, and dogs love you. Half the dogs in the village come to see you home. Make up to Jupiter, and Juno, and the other bow-wows she has taken to her bosom, and you’ll never want my thirty shillings a week, nor yet the little balance of your father and mother’s money. You go and see her, Kit. Don’t lose a day. You may accept a lift from that fast Sam Henderson; but throw him over, as soon as you have got it.”
Now, this little speech was as like as two peas to Uncle Corny’s nature. He had never said a word about meaning to give me any one pound ten a week – though Heaven knows that I was worth it; for let the weather be what it would, there was I making the best of it. On the contrary, I had very seldom put into the purse (which I carried more for the husk than kernel) so much as five shillings on a Sunday morning, which was my uncle’s particular time for easing his conscience about me. Of course I had my victuals, and my clothes to a certain extent, and the power to pay his bills (which made people offer me something sometimes); also I could talk as if the place belonged to me; but people knew better for at least three miles away. So that his talking of thirty shillings proved, without another word on his part, his high and holy views of marriage.
And again it was like him, to try to put me up to get something good out of good Aunt Parslow. Whatever I could get from her would mean so much relief for the Orchardson firm – as he often called us in his prouder times; though if I had asked for a penny of the proceeds, he would have banged his big desk upon my knuckles. But do not let me seem to say a word against him; for a better uncle never lived; and I felt his generosity very deeply, until I began to think of it.
Few things have been more successful yet, and very few have been better managed, than that drive of ours to Leatherhead. Possibly Sam was a luckier fellow than myself; and I think it likely, because he was less deserving. Not that there was much harm about him, except a kind of laxity in talk, and a strained desire to be accounted sharp, and a strong ambition to rise in the world, without cleaning the steps ere he mounted them. But he showed a fine heart by his words just now – although he was much ashamed of it – and the pace we were going at brought it out, for a brisk air stirs up the best part of us.
“Ain’t she a stepper?” he said, as we crossed Walton bridge, and dashed through the flood-water, for the high-road was not made up then; “wet or dry is all alike to Sally. That’s the way to go through the world, my boy. Julius Cæsar crossed the river here; and I have got a yearling named after him. What makes it all the kinder on my part is that he hasn’t got Latin in his family. How proud the old chap would have been for me to go out of the custom so! It will set a whole lot of the Emperors going, if the colt cuts the shine I expect of him.”
Knowing nothing about the turf, and caring very little, I let him rattle on about pedigrees, and strains of double blood, and Waxy, and Whalebone, and I know not what, as bad as the Multiplication table; and I wondered that such stuff should form his discourse, when he should have been full of young ladies. Even the beauty of the country, which was more than enough to delight the eyes and hold the mind still with pleasure, seemed nothing to Sam beyond – “Yes, very pretty. Nice bit of training-ground up there. That’s the sort of grass that suits milk teeth.”
At last, as we came within a mile of our mark, and followed the fair valley of the river, I brought him to the business of the day, having heard enough of Spider-wheels, and flyers, and so forth; and requiring to know what he expected of me. We had gone at such a pace, up hill and down, scarcely ever varying from one long stride, which left every other “trap” far in the lurch, that but for my boyish remembrance of the place, I could scarcely have believed that we were almost in the village.
“Fifteen or five,” he said, “that’s her pace; there’s no halfway house for Sally. She walks a good five. Walk is the word, old gal. Well, all you have got to do, Kit, is just this. I put up at the ‘Dolphin,’ and you make a call, with your best gloves on, and your hat brushed up, at Valley-view House, where your good aunt lives. You have not seen her for years. So much the better. Tell her that a distinguished friend of yours, especially esteemed by your uncle, and well known in the best London circles, has important business in the town; and that you took occasion to pay your respects, where they have been due so long. Admire her dogs, and all that sort of thing; and when she insists on your staying to lunch, regret very deeply that you cannot leave your distinguished friend, etc. Then if she is any good, she will s