“Now, why should people be so different?” Cicely said, moralizing; “why should we have so little, and Alice Robinson so much? It don’t seem fair.”
“And we are not even prettier than she is, or gooder – which we ought to be, if there is any truth in compensation,” said Mab, with a laugh.
“Or happier,” said Cicely, with a sigh. “She has the upper hand of us in everything, and no balance on the other side to make up for it. Stay, though; she has very droll people for father and mother, and we have a very fine gentleman for our papa.”
“Poor papa!” said Mab. They interchanged moods with each other every ten minutes, and were never monotonous, or for a long time the same.
“You may say why should people be so different,” said Cicely, forgetting that it was herself who said it. “There is papa, now; he is delightful, but he is trying. When one thinks how altered everything is – and those two little babies. But yet, you know, we ought to ask ourselves, ‘Were we happier at home, or are we happier here?’”
“We have more variety here,” said Mab decisively; “there is the sea, for one thing; there we had only the garden.”
“You forget the common; it was as nice as any sea, and never drowned people, or did anything dangerous; and the forest, and the sunset.”
“There are sunsets here,” said Mab, – “very fine ones. We are not forgotten by the people who manage these things up above. And there is plenty of work; and the girls are amusing, and so are the parents.”
“We should have had plenty of work at home,” said Cicely; and then the point being carried as far as was necessary the discussion suddenly stopped. They were walking along the sands, almost entirely alone. Only here and there another group would pass them, or a solitary figure, chiefly tradespeople, taking their evening stroll. The fresh sea-breeze blew in their young faces, the soft dusk closed down over the blue water, which beat upon the shore at their feet in the softest whispering cadence. The air was all musical, thrilled softly by this hush of subdued sound. It put away the sound of the band at Miss Robinson’s ball out of the girls’ hearts. And yet balls are pleasant things at eighteen, and when two young creatures, quite deprived of such pleasures, turn their backs thus upon the enchanted place where the others are dancing, it would be strange if a touch of forlorn sentiment did not make itself felt in their hearts, though the soft falling of the dusk, and the hush of the great sea, and the salt air in their faces, gave them a pleasure, had they but known it, more exquisite than any mere ball, as a ball, ever confers. One only knows this, however, by reflection, never by immediate sensation; and so there was, as I have said, just a touch of pathos in their voices, and a sense of superiority, comfortable only in that it was superior, but slightly sad otherwise, in their hearts.
“I don’t know what makes me go on thinking of home,” said Cicely, after a pause. “If we had been at home we should have had more pleasure, Mab. The people about would have asked us – a clergyman’s daughters always get asked; and there are very nice people about Brentburn, very different from the Robinsons and their class.”
“We should have had no dresses to go in,” said Mab. “How could we ever have had ball-dresses off papa’s two hundred a year?”
“Ball-dresses sound something very grand, but a plain white tarlatan is not dear when one can make it up one’s self. However, that is a poor way of looking at it,” said Cicely, giving a little toss to her head, as if to throw off such unelevated thoughts. “There are a great many more important things to think of. How will he ever manage to bring up the two boys?”
Mab made a pause of reflection. “To be sure Aunt Jane is not their relation,” she said, “and boys are more troublesome than girls. They want to have tutors and things, and to go to the university; and then what is the good of it all if they are not clever? Certainly boys are far more troublesome than girls.”
“And then, if you consider papa,” said Cicely, “that he is not very strong, and that he is old. One does not like to say anything disagreeable about one’s papa, but what did he want with those children? Surely we were quite enough when he is so poor.”
“There is always one thing he can do,” said Mab. “Everybody says he is a very good scholar. He will have to teach them himself.”
“We shall have to teach them,” said Cicely with energy; “I know so well that this is what it will come to. I don’t mean to teach them ourselves, for it is not much Latin I know, and you none, and I have not a word of Greek – but they will come upon us, I am quite sure.”
“You forget Mrs. St. John,” said Mab.
Cicely gave a slight shrug of her shoulders, but beyond that she did not pursue the subject. Mrs. St. John’s name stopped everything; they could not discuss her, nor express their disapprobation, and therefore they forbore religiously, though it was sometimes hard work.
“Blandina will think we are late,” at last she said, turning round. This was their name for their former instructress, their present employer. Mab turned dutifully, obeying her sister’s touch, but with a faint sigh.
“I hope they will be quiet at the Robinsons as we are passing,” the girl said. “What if they are in full swing, with the ‘Blue Danube’ perhaps! I hate to go in from a sweet night like this with noisy fiddles echoing through my head.”
Cicely gave a slight squeeze of sympathy to her sister’s arm. Do not you understand the girls, young reader? It was not the “Blue Danube” that was being played, but the old Lancers, the which to hear is enough to make wooden legs dance. Cicely and Mab pressed each other’s arms, and glanced up at the window, where dancing shadows and figures were visible. They sighed, and they went into their garret, avoiding the tacit disapproval of Miss Blandy’s good-night. She did not approve of twilight walks. Why should they want to go out just then like the tradespeople, a thing which ladies never did? But if Miss Blandy had known that the girls were quite saddened by the sound of the music from the Robinsons’, and yet could not sleep for listening to it, I fear she would have thought them very improper young persons indeed. She had forgotten how it felt to be eighteen – it was so long ago.
On the very next morning the news came of their stepmother’s death. It was entirely unexpected by them, for they had no idea of the gradual weakness which had been stealing over that poor little woman, and they were moved by deep compunction as well as natural regret. It is impossible not to feel that we might have been kinder, might have made life happier to those that are gone – a feeling experienced the moment that we know them to be certainly gone, and inaccessible to all kindness. “Oh, poor Mrs. St. John!” said Mab, dropping a few natural tears. Cicely was more deeply affected. She was the eldest and had thought the most; as for the young artist, her feeling ran into the tips of her fingers, and got expansion there; but Cicely had no such medium. She went about mournfully all day long, and in the evening Mab found her seated at the window of their attic, looking out with her eyes big with tears upon the darkening sea. When her sister touched her on the shoulder Cicely’s tears fell. “Oh, poor Miss Brown!” she said, her heart having gone back to the time when they had no grievance against their kind little governess. “Oh, Mab, if one could only tell her how one was sorry! if she could only see into my heart now!”
“Perhaps she can,” said Mab, awe-stricken and almost under her breath, lifting her eyes to the clear wistful horizon in which the evening star had just risen.
“And one could have said it only yesterday!” said Cicely, realizing for the first time that mystery of absolute severance; and what light thoughts had been in their minds yesterday! Sighs for Alice Robinson’s ball, depression of soul and spirit caused by the distant strains of the Lancers, and the “Blue Danube” – while this tragedy was going on, and the poor soul who had been good to them, but to whom they had not been good, was departing, altogether and for ever out of reach. Cicely in her sorrow blamed herself unjustly, as was natural, and mourned for the mystery of human shortsightedness as well as for Mrs. St. John. But I do not mean to say that this grief was very profound after the first sting, and after that startling impression of the impossibility of further intercourse was over. The girls went out quietly in the afternoon, and bought black stuff to make themselves mourning, and spoke to each other in low voices and grave tones. Their youthful vigour was subdued – they were overawed to feel as it were the wings of the great Death-Angel overshadowing them. The very sunshine looked dim, and the world enveloped in a cloud. But it was within a week or two of Miss Blandy’s “breaking up,” and they could not go away immediately. Miss Blandy half audibly expressed her satisfaction that Mrs. St. John was only their step-mother. “Had she been their own mother, what should we have done?” she said. So that it was not till the end of July, when the establishment broke up, that the girls were at last able to get home.
CHAPTER VI
THE GIRLS AT HOME
WE are so proud in England of having a word which means home, which some of our neighbours we are pleased to think have not, that, perhaps, it is a temptation to us to indulge in a general rapture over the word which has sometimes little foundation in reality. When Cicely and Mab walked to the rectory together from the station a suppressed excitement was in their minds. Since they first left for school, they had only come back for a few days each year, and they had not liked it. Their stepmother had been very kind, painfully kind; and anxious above measure that they should find everything as they had left it, and should not be disappointed or dull; but this very anxiety had made an end of all natural ease, and they had been glad when the moment came that released them. Now, poor woman, she had been removed out of their way; they were going back to take care of their father as they might have done had there been no second Mrs. St. John; and everything was as it had been, with the addition of the two babies, innocent little intruders, whom the girls, you may be sure, could never find it in their hearts to be hard upon. Cicely and Mab took each others’ hands instinctively as they left the station. It was the first of August, the very prime and glory of summer; the woods were at their fullest, untouched by any symptom of decay. The moorland side of the landscape was more wealthy and glorious still in its flush of heather. The common was not indeed one sheet of purple, like a Scotch moor; but it was all lighted up between the gorse bushes with fantastic streaks and bands of colour blazing in the broad sunshine, and haunted by swarms of bees which made a hum in the air almost as sweet and all-pervading as the murmur of the sea. As they drew near the house their hearts began to beat louder. Would there be any visible change upon it? Would it look as it did when they were children, or with that indefinable difference which showed in her time? They did not venture to go the familiar way by the garden, but walked up solemnly like visitors to the front door. It was opened to them by a new maid, whom they had never seen before, and who demurred slightly to giving them admittance, “Master ain’t in,” said the girl; “yes miss, I know as you’re expected,” but still she hesitated. This was not the kind of welcome which the daughters of a house generally receive. They went in to the house nevertheless, Betsy following them. The blinds were drawn low over the windows, which were all shut, and though the atmosphere was stifling with heat, yet it was cold, miserably cold to Cicely and Mab. Their father’s study was the only place that had any life in it. The rectory seemed full of nothing but old black heavy furniture, and heavier memories of some chilled and faded past.
“What a dreadful old place it is,” said Mab; “it is like coming home to one’s grave,” and she sat down on the black haircloth easy-chair and shivered and cried; though this was coming home, to the house in which she had been born.
“Now it will be better,” said Cicely pulling up the blinds and opening the window. She had more command of herself than her sister. She let the sunshine come down in a flood across the dingy carpet, worn with the use of twenty years.
“Please, miss,” said Betsy interposing, “missis would never have the blinds up in this room ‘cause of spoiling the carpet. If master says so, I don’t mind; but till he do – ” and here Betsy put up her hand to the blind.
“Do you venture to meddle with what my sister does?” cried Mab, furious, springing from her chair.
Cicely only laughed. “You are a good girl to mind what your mistress said, but we are your mistresses now; you must let the window alone, for don’t you see the carpet is spoiled already? I will answer to papa. What is it? Do you want anything more?”
“Only this, miss,” said Betsy, “as it’s the first laugh as has been heard here for weeks and weeks, and I don’t like it neither, seeing as missis is in her grave only a fortnight to-day.”
“I think you are a very good girl,” said Cicely: and with that the tears stood in that changeable young woman’s eyes.
No Betsy that ever was heard of could long resist this sort of treatment. “I tries to be, miss,” she said with a curtsy and a whimper. “Maybe you’d like a cup of tea?” and after following them suspiciously all over the house, she left them at last on this hospitable intent in the fading drawing-room, where they had both enshrined the memory of their mother. Another memory was there now, a memory as faded as the room, which showed in all kinds of feeble feminine decorations, bits of modern lace, and worked cushions and foolish foot-stools. The room was all pinafored and transmogrified, the old dark picture-frames covered with yellow gauze, and the needlework in crackling semi-transparent covers.
“This was how she liked things, poor soul! Oh, Mab,” cried Cicely, “how strange that she should die!”
“No stranger than that any one else should die,” said Mab, who was more matter of fact.
“A great deal stranger! It was not strange at all that little Mary Seymour should die. One saw it in her eyes; she was like an angel; it was natural; but poor Miss Brown, who was quite happy working cushions and covering them up, and keeping the sun off the carpets, and making lace for the brackets! It looks as if there was so little sense or method in it,” said Cicely. “She won’t have any cushions to work up there.”
“I dare say there won’t be anything to draw up there,” said Mab; “and yet I suppose I shall die too in time.”
“When there are the four walls for Leonardo, and Michel Angelo and Raphael and poor Andrea,” said the other. “How you forget! Besides, it is quite different. Hark! what was that?” she cried, putting up her hand.
What it was soon became very distinctly evident – a feeble little cry speedily joined by another, and then a small weak chorus, two voices entangled together. “No, no; no ladies. Harry no like ladies,” mixed with a whimpering appeal to “papa, papa.”
“Come and see the pretty ladies. Harry never saw such pretty ladies,” said the encouraging voice of Betsy in the passage.
The girls looked at each other, and grew red. They had made up their minds about a great many things, but never how they were to deal with the two children. Then Betsy appeared at the door, pushing it open before her with the tea-tray she carried. To her skirts were hanging two little boys, clinging to her, yet resisting her onward motion, and carried on by it in spite of themselves. They stared at the new-comers with big blue eyes wide open, awed into silence. They were very small and very pale, with light colourless limp locks falling over their little black dresses. The girls on their side stared silently too. There was not a feature in the children’s faces which resembled their elder sisters. They were both little miniatures of Miss Brown.
“So these are the children,” said Cicely, making a reluctant step forward; to which Harry and Charley responded by a renewed clutch at Betsy’s dress.
“Yes, miss; them’s the children! and darlings they be,” said Betsy, looking fondly at them as she set down the tea. Cicely made another step forward slowly, and held out her hands to them; when the little boys set up a scream which rang through the house, and hiding their faces simultaneously in Betsy’s gown, howled to be taken away. Mab put up her hands to her ears, but Cicely, more anxious to do her duty, made another attempt. She stooped down and kissed, or tried to kiss the little tear-stained faces, to which caress each small brother replied by pushing her away with a repeated roar.
“Don’t you take no notice, miss. Let ‘em alone and they’ll get used to you in time,” said Betsy.
“Go away, go away! Harry no like ‘oo,” screamed the spokesman brother. No one likes to be repulsed even by a child. Cicely stumbled to her feet very red and uncomfortable. She stood ruefully looking after them as they were carried off after a good preliminary “shake,” one in each of Betsy’s red hands.
“There is our business in life,” she said in a solemn tone. “Oh, Mab, Mab, what did papa want with these children? All the trouble of them will come on you and me.”
Mab looked at her sister with a look of alarm, which changed, however, into laughter at sight of Cicely’s solemn looks and the dreary presentiment in her face.
“You are excellent like that,” she said; “and if you had only seen how funny you all looked when the little demons began to cry. They will do for models at all events, and I’ll take to painting children. They say it’s very good practice, and nursery pictures always sell.”
These lighter suggestions did not, however, console Cicely. She walked about the room with clasped hands and a very serious face, neglecting her tea.
“Papa will never trouble himself about them,” she said half to herself; “it will all fall on Mab and me. And boys! that they should be boys. We shall never be rich enough to send them to the University. Girls we might have taught ourselves; but when you think of Oxford and Cambridge – ”
“We can’t tell,” said Mab; “how do you know I shan’t turn out a great painter, and be able to send them wherever you like? for I am the brother and you are the sister, Ciss. You are to keep my house and have the spending of all my money. So don’t be gloomy, please, but pour out some tea. I wish, though, they were not quite so plain.”
“So like their mother,” said Cicely with a sigh.
“And so disagreeable; but it is funny to hear one speak for both as if the two were Harry. I am glad they are not girls. To give them a share of all we have I don’t mind; but to teach them! with those white little pasty faces – ”
“One can do anything when one makes up one’s mind to it,” said Cicely with a sigh.
At this moment the hall door opened, and after an interval Mr. St. John came in with soft steps. He had grown old in these last years; bowed down with age and troubles. He came up to his daughters and kissed them, laying his hand upon their heads.
“I am very glad you have come home,” he said, in a voice which was pathetic in its feebleness. “You are all I have now.”
“Not all you have, papa,” said Mab; “we have just seen the little boys.”
A momentary colour flushed over his pale face. “Ah, the babies,” he said. “I am afraid they will be a great deal of trouble to you, my dears.”
Cicely and Mab looked at each other, but they did not say anything – they were afraid to say something which they ought not to say. And what could he add after that? He took the cup of tea they offered him, and drank it standing, his tall frame with a stoop in it, which was partly age and partly weakness, coming against one tall window and shutting out the light. “But that you are older looking,” he said at last, “all this time might seem like a dream.”
“A sad dream, papa,” said Cicely, not knowing what to say.
“I cannot say that, my dear. I thank God I have had a great deal of happiness in my life; because we are sad for the moment we must not forget to thank Him for all His mercies,” said Mr. St. John; and then with a change in his voice, he added, “Your aunt sends me word that she is coming soon to see you. She is a very strong woman for her years; I look older than she does; and it is a trouble to me now to go to town and back in one day.”
“You have not been ill, papa?”
“No, Cicely, not ill; a little out of my usual,” he said, “that is all. Now you are here, we shall fall into our quiet way again. The changes God sends we must accept; but the little worries are trying, my dear. I am getting old, and am not so able to brave them; but all will be well now you are here.”
“We shall do all we can,” said Cicely; “but you must remember, papa, we are not used to housekeeping, and if we make mistakes at first – ”
“I am not afraid of your mistakes,” said Mr. St. John, looking at her with a faint smile. He had scarcely looked full at her before, and his eyes dwelt upon her face with a subdued pleasure. “You are your mother over again,” he said. “You will be a blessing to me, Cicely, as she was.”
The two girls looked at him strangely, with a flood of conflicting thoughts. How dared he speak of their mother? Was he relieved to be able to think of their mother without Miss Brown coming in to disturb his thoughts? If natural reverence had not restrained them, what a cross-examination they would have put him to! but as it was, their eager thoughts remained unsaid. “I will do all I can, papa, and so will Mab,” said Cicely, faltering. And he put down his cup, and said, “God bless you, my dears,” and went to his study as if they had never been absent at all, only out perhaps, as Mab said, for a rather long walk.
“I don’t think he can have cared for her,” said Cicely; “he is glad to get back to the idea of mamma; I am sure that is what he means. He is always kind, and of course he was kind to her; but there is a sort of relief in his tone – a sort of ease.”
“That is all very well for us,” said Mab; “but if you will think of it, it seems a little hard on poor Miss Brown.”
This staggered Cicely, who loved justice. “But I think she should not have married him,” she said. “It was easy to see that anybody could have married him who wished. I can see that now, though I never thought of it then. And, kind as it was of Aunt Jane, perhaps we should not have left him unprotected. You ought to have gone to school, Mab, because of your talent, and I should have stayed at home.”
They decided, however, after a few minutes, that it was needless to discuss this possibility now, so long after it had become an impossibility. And then they went upstairs to take off their travelling-dresses and make themselves feel at home. When they came down again, with their hair smooth, Cicely carrying her work-basket and Mab her sketch-book, and seated themselves in the old faded room, from which the sunshine had now slid away, as the sun got westward, a bewildered feeling took possession of them. Had they ever been absent? had anything happened since that day when Aunt Jane surprised them in their pinafores? The still house, so still in the deep tranquillity of the country, after the hum of their schoolroom life and the noises of a town, seemed to turn round with them, as they looked out upon the garden, upon which no change seemed to have passed. “I declare,” cried Mab, “there is exactly the same number of apples – and the same branch of that old-plum-tree hanging loose from the wall!”
Thus the first evening passed like a dream. Mr. St. John came from his study to supper, and he talked a little, just as he had been in the habit of talking long ago, without any allusion to the past. He told them a few pieces of news about the parish, and that he would like them to visit the school. “It has been very well looked after lately,” he said. Perhaps this meant by his wife – perhaps it did not; the girls could not tell. Then Betsy came in for prayers, along with a small younger sister of hers who had charge of the little boys; and by ten o’clock, as at Miss Blandy’s, the door was locked, and the peaceful house wrapped in quiet. The girls looked out of their window upon the soft stillness with the strangest feelings. The garden paths were clearly indicated by a feeble veiled moon, and the trees which thickened in clouds upon the horizon. There was not a sound anywhere in the tranquil place except the occasional bark of that dog, who somewhere, far or near, always indicates existence in a still night in the country. The stillness fell upon their souls. “He never asked what we were going to do,” said Mab, for they were silenced too, and spoke to each other only now and then, chilled out of the superabundance of their own vitality. “But he thinks with me that the children are to be our business in life,” said Cicely, and then they went to bed, taking refuge in the darkness. For two girls so full of conscious life, tingling to the finger points with active faculties and power, it was a chilly home-coming, yet not so unusual either. When the young creatures come home, with their new lives in their hands to make something of, for good or evil, do not we often expect them to settle down to the level of the calm old lives which are nearly worn out, and find fault with them if it is a struggle? Mr. St. John felt that it was quite natural his girls should come home and keep his house for him, and take the trouble of the little boys, and visit the schools – so naturally that when he had said, “Now you are here, we shall fall into our quiet way again,” it seemed to him that everything was said that needed to be said.
In the morning the children were found less inaccessible, and made friends with by dint of lumps of sugar and bits of toast, of which Mab was prodigal. They were very tiny, delicate, and colourless, with pale hair and pale eyes; but they were not wanting in some of the natural attractions of children. Charley was the backward one, and had little command of language. Harry spoke for both; and I will not say it was easy for these girls, unaccustomed to small children, to understand even him. Mr. St. John patted their heads and gave them a smile each by way of blessing; but he took little farther notice of the children. “I believe Annie, the little maid, is very kind to them,” he said. “I cannot bear to hear them crying, my dears; but now you are here all will go well.”
“But, papa,” said Cicely, “will it be right for us to stay at home, when you have them to provide for, and there is so little money?”
“Right for you to stay? Where could you be so well as at home?” said the curate, perturbed. The girls looked at each other, and this time it was Mab who was bold, and ventured to speak.
“Papa, it is not that. Supposing that we are best at home” (Mab said this with the corners of her mouth going down, for it was not her own opinion), “yet there are other things to consider. We should be earning something – ”
Mr. St. John got up almost impatiently for him. “I have never been left to want,” he said. “I have been young, and now I am old, but I have never seen the righteous forsaken, nor his seed begging their bread. Providence will raise up friends for the children; and we have always had plenty. If there is enough for me, there is enough for you.”
And he went out of the room as nearly angry as it was possible for his mild nature to be. Cicely and Mab once more looked at each other wondering. “Papa is crazy, I think,” said Mab, who was the most self-assertive; but Cicely only heaved a sigh, and went out to the hall to brush his hat for him, as she remembered her mother used to do. Mr. St. John liked this kind of tendance. “You are a good girl, Cicely; you are just such another as your mother,” he said, as he took the hat from her; and Cicely divined that the late Mrs. St. John had not shown him this attention, which I think pleased her on the whole.
“But, papa, I am afraid Mab was right,” she said. “You must think it over, and think what is best for Mab.”
“Why should she be different from you?” said Mr. St. John, feeling in his breast pocket for the familiar prayer-book which lay there. It was more important to him to make sure it was safe, than to decide what to do with his child.
“I don’t know why, but we are different. Dear papa, you must think, if you please, what is best.”
“It is nonsense, Cicely; she must stay where she is, and make herself happy. A good girl is always happy at home,” said Mr. St. John; “and, of course, there is plenty – plenty for all of us. You must not detain me, my dear, nor talk about business this first morning. Depend upon it,” said Mr. St. John, raising his soft, feeble hand to give emphasis to his words, “it is always best for you to be at home.”
What a pity that children and women are not always convinced when the head of the house thus lays down the law! Cicely went back into the dining-room where they had breakfasted, shaking her head, without being aware of the gesture. “Why should I depend upon it?” she said. “Depend upon it! I may be quite willing to do it, for it is my duty; but why should I depend upon it as being the best?”
“What are you saying, Cicely?”
“Nothing, dear; only papa is rather odd. Does he think that two hundred a year is a great fortune? or that two of us, and two of them, and two maids (though they are little ones), and himself, can get on upon two hundred a year?”
“I must paint,” said Mab; “I must paint! I’ll tell you what I shall do. You are a great deal more like a Madonna than most of the women who have sat for her. I will paint a Holy Family from you and them– They are funny little pale things, but we could light them up with a little colour; and they are real babies, you know,” Mab said, looking at them seriously, with her head on one side, as becomes a painter. She had posed the two children on the floor: the one seated firmly with his little legs stretched out, the other leaning against him; while she walked up and down, with a pencil in her hand, studying them. “Stay still a moment longer, and I will give you a lump of sugar,” she said.