Dynevor Terrace (Vol. II)

C >> Charlotte M Yonge >> Dynevor Terrace (Vol. II)

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'Poor child, she _must_!' said James. 'She thinks it very hard to
have two sisters so little younger than herself,' and he peeped under
the plaid at the little brown head, and drew it closer round, with a
look of almost melancholy tenderness, guarding carefully against
touching her with his cold hands.

'She will think it all the better by-and-by,' said Louis.

'You had better not stay here in the cold. I'll come when I have
heard that boy's imposition and looked over these exercises.' And he
ran his hand through his hair again.

'Don't! You look like enough to a lion looking out of a bush to
frighten ten boys already,' said Louis. 'I'll do the exercises,'
pulling the copy-books away.

'What, you don't trust me?' as James detained them.

'No, I don't,' said James, his cousin's brightness awakening his
livelier manner. 'It needs an apprenticeship to be up to their
blunders.'

'Let me read them to you. I gave notice to Isabel that I am come to
dinner, and no doubt she had rather I were disposed of.'

James objected no farther, and the dry labour was illuminated by the
discursive remarks and moralizings which Louis allowed to flow in
their natural idle course, both to divert his dispirited cousin, and
to conceal from himself how much cause there was for depression.
When the victim of the imposition approached, Louis prevented the
dreaded clumsy entrance, seized on a Virgil, and himself heard the
fifty lines, scarcely making them serve their purpose as a
punishment, but sending the culprit away in an unusually amiable
temper.

Services from Louis were too natural to James to be requited with
thanks; but he was not uncivil in his notice of a wrong tense that
had been allowed to pass, and the question was argued with an
eagerness which showed that he was much enlivened. On the principle
that Louis must care for all that was his, as he rose to take the
still-sleeping child upstairs, he insisted that his cousin should
come with him, if only for the curiosity of looking at the other two
little animals, and learning the difference between them and Kitty,
at whom he still looked as if her godfather had insulted her.

It was pretty to see his tenderness, as he detached the little girl
from her hold, and laid her in the cot, making a little murmuring
sound; and boasted how she would have shown off if awake, and laughed
over her droll little jealousies of his even touching the twins. As
she was asleep, he might venture; and it was comical to hear him
declaring that no one need mistake them for each other, and to see
him trying to lay them side by side on his knees to be compared, when
they would roll over, and interlace their little scratching fingers;
and Louis stood by teasing him, and making him defend their beauty in
terms that became extravagant. He was really happy here; the
careworn look smoothed away, the sharpness left his tones, and there
was nothing but joyous exultation and fondness in his whole manner.

The smile did not last long, for Louis was well-nigh thrown
downstairs by a dustpan in a dark corner, and James was heard
muttering that nothing in that house was ever in its right place; and
while Louis was suggesting that it was only himself who was not in
the right place, they entered the drawing-room, which, like the lady,
was in the same condition as that in which he had left it. Since
Isabel had lost Marianne and other appliances, she had thought it not
worth while to dress for dinner; so nothing had happened, except that
the hermit had proved to be Adeline's great uncle, and had begun to
clear up the affair of the sacrilege.

He was reluctant to leave off when the gentlemen appeared; but Isabel
shut him up, and quietly held out the portfolio to James, who put it
on the side-table, and began to clear the books away and restore some
sort of order; but it was a task beyond his efforts.

Dinner was announced by Charlotte, as usual, all neat grace and
simplicity, in her black dress and white apron, but flushed and
heated by exertions beyond her strength. All that depended on her
had been well done; but it would not seem to have occurred to her
mistress that three people ate more than two; and to Louis, who had
been too busy to take any luncheon, the two dishes seemed alarmingly
small. One was of haricot mutton, the other of potatoes; and
Charlotte might be seen to blush as she carried Lord Fitzjocelyn the
plate containing a chop resembling Indian rubber, decorated with
grease and with two balls of nearly raw carrot, and followed it up
with potatoes apparently all bruises.

Louis talked vigorously of Virginia and Louisa--secretly marvelling
how his hosts had brought themselves down to such fare. Isabel was
dining without apparently seeing anything amiss, and James attempted
nothing but a despairing toss of his chin, as he pronounced the
carrots underdone. After the first course there was a long interval,
during which Isabel and Louis composedly talked about the public
meeting which he had been attending, and James fidgetted in the
nervousness of hardly-restrained displeasure; but suddenly a
frightful shrieking arose, and he indignantly cried, 'That girl!'

'Poor Charlotte in her hysterics again,' said Isabel, moving off,
quickly for her, with the purple scent-bottle at her chatelaine.

'Isabel makes her twice as bad,' exclaimed James; 'to pet her with
eau-de-Cologne is mere nonsense. Some day I shall throw a bucket of
cold water over her.'

Isabel had left the door open, and they heard her softly comforting
Charlotte with 'Never mind,' and 'Lord Fitzjocelyn would not care,'
till the storm lulled. Charlotte crept off to her room, and Isabel
returned to the dinner-table.

'Well, what's the matter now?' said James.

'Poor Charlotte!' said Isabel, smiling; 'it seems that she trusted to
making a grand appearance with the remains of yesterday's pudding,
and that she was quite overset by the discovery that Ellen and Miss
Catharine had been marauding on them.'

'You don't mean that Kitty has been eating that heavy pudding at this
time of night?' cried James.

'Kitty eats everything,' was the placid answer, 'and I do not think
we can blame Ellen, for she often comes down after our dinner to find
something for the nursery supper.'

'Things go on in the most extraordinary manner,' muttered James.

'I suppose Charlotte misses Jane,' said Louis. 'She looks ill.'

'No wonder,' said James, 'she is not strong enough for such work.
She has no method, and yet she is the only person who ever thinks of
doing a thing properly. I wish your friend Madison would come home
and take her off our hands, for she is always alternating between
fits of novel-reading and of remorse, in which she nearly works
herself to death with running after lost time.'

'I should be sorry to part with her,' said Isabel; 'she is so quiet,
and so fond of the children.'

'She will break down some day,' said James; 'if not before, certainly
when she hears that Madison has a Peruvian wife.'

'There is no more to come,' said Isabel, rising; 'shall we come
upstairs?'

James took up the candles, and Louis followed, considerably hungry,
and for once provoked by Isabel's serene certainty that nobody cared
whether there were anything to eat. However, he had forgotten all by
the time he came upstairs, and began to deliver a message from Lady
Conway, that she was going to write in a day or two to beg for a
visit from Isabel during her sojourn at Estminster, a watering-place
about thirty miles distant. Isabel's face lighted with pleasure.
'I could go?' she said, eagerly turning towards James.

'Oh, yes, if you wish it,' he answered, gruffly, as if vexed at her
gratification.

'I mean, of course, if you can spare me,' she said, with an air of
more reserve.

'If you wish it, go by all means. I hope you will.'

'The Christmas holidays are so near, that we may both go,' said
Isabel; but James still had not recovered his equanimity, and Louis
thought it best to begin talking of other things; and, turning to
James, launched into the results of his Inglewood crops, and the
grand draining plan which was to afford Marksedge work for the
winter, and in which his father had become much interested. But he
did not find that ready heed to all that occupied him of which he
used to be certain at the Terrace. Isabel cared not at all for
farming, and took no part in 'mere country squire's talk;' and James
was too much overburthened with troubles and anxieties to enter
warmly into those of others. Of those to whom Louis's concerns had
been as their own, one had been taken from him, the other two were
far away; and the cold 'yes,' 'very good,' fell coldly on his ear.

The conversation reverted to the school; and here it appeared that
two years' experience had taken away the freshness of novelty, and
the cycle of disappointment had begun. More boys were quitting the
school than the new-comers could balance; and James spoke with acute
vexation of the impracticability of the boys, and the folly of the
parents. The attendance at his evening lectures had fallen off; and
he declared that there was a spirit of opposition to whatever he did.
The boys disobeyed, knowing that they should be favoured at home, and
if they were punished, the parents talked of complaints to the
trustees. The Sunday teaching was treated as especially obnoxious:
the genteel mothers talked ridiculously about its resembling a
charity-school, the fathers did not care whether their sons went or
not, and he had scarcely five boys who appeared there regularly, and
of them one was the butcher's son, who came rather in spite of his
parents than with their consent. Attendance at church was more slack
than ever; and when he lectured the defaulters, and gave them
additional tasks in the week, it was resented as an injustice. To
crown all, Mr. Ramsbotham had called, and had been extremely insolent
about a boy whose ears had been boxed for reading Pickwick in school,
under cover of his Latin grammar, and Isabel was almost indignant
with Miss Faithfull for having ventured to hint to her that she
wished Mr. Frost would be a little more gentle with the boys.

Isabel was fully alive now, and almost as vehement as her husband, in
her complaints against his many foes. There was no lack of sympathy
here, indeed, there might be rather too much, for she did not afford
the softening influence that James had hitherto found at home.

'Well, Jem,' said Louis, at last, 'I think you should keep your hands
off the boys.'

'You are not bitten with the nonsense about personal dignity and
corporal punishment?' said James.

'By no means. I have an infinite respect for the great institution
of flogging; but a solemn execution is one thing, a random stroke
another.'

'Theories are very good things till you come to manage two score
dunces without sense or honour. There is only one sort of appeal to
their feelings that tells.'

'Maybe so, but I have my doubts whether you are the man to make it.'

Louis was sorry he had so spoken, for a flush of pain came up in
James's face at the remembrance of what Fitzjocelyn had long ago
forgotten--a passionate blow given to deter him from a piece of
wilful mischief, in which he was persisting for the mere amusement of
provoking. It stood out among all other varieties of cuff, stroke,
and knock, by the traces it had left, by Mrs. Frost's grief at it,
and the forgiveness from the Earl, and it had been the most
humiliating distress of James's childhood. It humbled him even now,
and he answered--

'You may be right, Louis; I may be not sufficiently altered since I
was a boy. I have struck harder than I intended more than once, and
I have told the boys so.'

'I am sure, if they had any generosity, they would have been touched
with your amends,' cried Isabel.

'After all, a schoolmaster's life does not tend to mend the temper,'
concluded James, sighing, and passing his hand over his forehead.

'No,' thought Louis, 'nor does Isabel's mutton!'

CHAPTER XIII.

THE CONWAY HOUSEHOLD.

And ye shall walk in silk attire,
And siller hae to spare,
Gin ye'll consent to be his bride,
Nor think of Donald mair.
Miss BLAMIRE.

What makes you so lame to-day?' asked Lord Ormersfield, as Louis
crossed the library, on returning from an interview to which he had
been summoned in another room.

'I only stumbled over an obstruction on the Frost staircase
yesterday,' aaid Louis. 'Poor Jem chose to have me up to the nursery;
and to see him in the paternal character is the funniest as well as
the pleasantest spectacle the house affords.'

'Ah! it is not what it was,' said the Earl. 'I suppose I must call
there before the holidays, though,' he added, reluctantly. 'But what
did that man, Ramsbotham, want with you?'

'To ask our interest for that appointment for his friend Grant.'

'Indeed! what could bring him here?'

'Why, unluckily, he fancied he had some claim on me, on the score of
Jem Frost's election. I was too innocent then to know what those
things go for.'

'You may say so!' ejaculated the Earl. 'So he was insolent enough to
bring that up, was he?'

'Worse,' said Fitzjocelyn; 'he wanted to threaten that, unless I
would oblige him now, there were matters which it was his duty to lay
before the trustees. I told him he would do, of course, whatever was
his duty; whereupon he thought my Lordship was interested in Mr.
Frost.'

'Intolerably impertinent! I hope you set him down!'

'I told him that neither Mr. Frost nor I should wish him to pretermit
his duty on any consideration whatever. Then he harked back to what
he did for us at the election; and I was forced to tell him that if
he considered that he had thereby established a claim on me, I must
own myself in his debt; but as to reciprocating it, by putting in a
person like Grant, that was against my conscience. He flew into a
passion, informed me that Mr. Frost would take the consequences,
mounted the British Lion, and I bowed him out upon that majestic
quadruped, talking grandly of illiberal prejudices and the rising
generation.'

'You acknowledged that he had a claim on you?'

'As things go in this world, I suppose it is true.'

'Louis! you will never know how to deal with those people.'

'I am afraid not. I could not, either boldly or diplomatically, get
rid of the charge; so there was nothing for it but to confess.
That's not the worst of it. I am afraid he really will be able to
take revenge on poor Jem, and I'm sure he can't afford to lose any
more scholars.'

'Such a fellow as that will not have much in his power against
James,' said Lord Ormersfield. 'What I am afraid of is, that you
have cut the ground from under your feet. I cannot see how you are
ever to stand for Northwold.'

'Nor I,' said Louis. 'In fact, father, I have always thought it most
wonderfully kind forbearance that you never reproached me more for my
doings on that occasion. I believe we were all too happy,' he
presently added, with a sigh, which was re-echoed by his father, at
the same time trying to say something about youthfulness, to which
Louis, who had been leaning thoughtfully on the mantelpiece,
presently answered--'How much wiser old people are than young! An
original axiom, is not it? but it is the last which one learns!'

'You would hardly act in the same way now?' said his father.

'I wonder when it ever answers to interfere with the natural course
of events!' responded Louis, musingly. 'There were two things that
Mr. Calcott told me once upon a time.' Those two things he left
unuttered. They were--that the gentleman would be wasted on the
school, and that the lady was not made for a poor man's wife. No
wonder they made him sigh, but he concluded by exclaiming aloud--
'Well, I hope they will both go to Estminster, and come back with
fresh life!'

The Estminster invitation was already on the road; but,
unfortunately, Lady Conway had been unable to secure lodgings large
enough to receive the children. She was urgent, however, that Isabel
should come as soon as possible, since Louisa had been more unwell
than usual, and was pining for her eldest sister; and she hoped that
James would join her there as soon as the holidays should set him
free.

James was hurt to find Isabel so much delighted to go, but resolved
that she should not be deprived of the pleasure, and petulantly
denied the offers, which became even entreaties, that she might wait
till he could accompany her. He arranged, therefore, that he should
follow her in a fortnight's time, the Miss Faithfulls undertaking the
charge of their small namesakes; and Lady Conway wrote to fix a day
when Delaford should come to take care of Isabel on her journey.

James and Isabel laughed at this measure. Mrs. James Frost was
certainly not in circumstances to carry such a hero of the buttery in
her suite; and Lady Conway herself had more sense than to have
proposed it, but for Delaford's own representations. In fact, there
was a pretty face at Dynevor Terrace, and he had been piqued enough
by the return of his letters to be resolved on re-establixhing his
influence. Therefore did he demonstrate to my Lady that the only
appropriate trains would bring him to Northwold at seven in the
evening, and take him and Mrs. James Frost Dynevor away at eleven
next morning; and therefore did Isabel look up in a sudden fit of
recollection, as the breakfast was being removed, and say,
'Charlotte, Delaford is coming on Tuesday to fetch me to Estminster,
and will sleep here that night.'

Isabel little guessed that in the days when she viewed the fantastic
Viscount as her greatest enemy, the announcement of his approach
would have been far less appalling to her.

'The wretch! the traitor! the vile deceiver!' thought Charlotte, not
chary of her epithets, and almost ready to wreak her vengeance on the
silver spoons. 'He has gone and broken poor Marianne's heart, and
now he wants to treat me the same, and make me faithless to poor Tom,
that is up in the mountain-tops and trusts to me! O me, what shall I
do? Mrs. Beckett is gone, and there's no one to give me an advice!
If I speak to him or scorn him, he'll take his advantage all alike--
and his words are so fine and so soft, that do what I will to hate
him when I'm away, he is sure to wind round me when he's there; and I
can't get away, and I'm a poor, lonely, fatherless and motherless
orphan, and a vain girl, that has listened already to his treacherous
suit more than poor Tom would think for.'

Charlotte worked on in much grief and perplexity for some minutes,
revolving the vanity that had led to her follies, and humbling
herself in her own eyes. Suddenly, a flash of thought crossed her,
and woke a smile upon her face, almost a look of mischief. She tied
on a clean apron, and running upstairs, opened the drawing-room door,
and said, 'If you please, ma'am, might I ask Miss Faithfull's Martha
to tea on Tuesday night?'

'Oh yes, if you like,' said Isabel, never raising her eyes from the
rebuilding of the ruined chapel in the valley.

Away skipped Charlotte, and in two minutes was at the back door of
the House Beautiful. Mrs. Martha had been grimly kind to her ever
since she had been afflicted with the cook for a fellow-servant, and
received her only with a reproof for coming gadding out, when she
ought to be hard at work; but when she heard the invitation, she
became wrathful--she had rather go ten miles out of her way than even
look at 'that there Ford.'

But Charlotte explained her purpose, and implored, and put her in
mind that Mrs. Beckett was gone, and she had no protector; and Martha
relented, told her that if she had minded her she would never have
been in the scrape at all, but agreed, not without satisfaction, to
afford Mr. Delaford the society of his old acquaintance.

And so when Mr. Delaford, with his whiskers freshly curled and his
boots in a state of fascinating polish, walked up Dynevor Terrace,
the door was opened by Ellen, and the red-faced cook and the upright
Mrs. Martha sat on either side the fire. Daintily did he greet them,
and stand warming himself before the fire, adapting his conversation
to them for the next ten minutes, before he ventured to ask whether
Miss Arnold were still an inmate. 'Taking out dinner--taking in
tea,' gruffly replied Martha.

Mr. Delaford waited, but Ellen only ran in for one moment to fetch
the kettle, and Martha discoursed as usual on the gold mines in Peru.
By-and-by, when the parlour tea could by no possibility be supposed
to be farther prolonged, there swept into the kitchen the stately
nurse. Charlotte had run up to the nursery, and begged as a favour
that she might be left to watch the children, while Mrs. Nurse
entertained Mr. Delaford below-stairs; and in pity to so grand a
gentleman, constrained to mix with such 'low servants,' the nurse had
yielded, and Charlotte sat safe and sound by the nursery fire,
smiling at his discomfiture, and reading over Tom's letters with an
easier conscience than for many a day.

Mr. Delaford was too much of a gentleman to be uncivil to the three
dames by the kitchen fire, but he watched every step and every
creaking door. He even went the length of coming up to family
prayers, in hopes of there meeting Charlotte; but she only joined the
procession at the parlour door, and had flown upstairs, like a little
bird, before he was out again.

The gentleman was affronted, and resolved to make her feel it. They
could not but meet at the kitchen breakfast, and he barely
acknowledged her. This was the most trying stroke of all, for it set
her, in the eyes of the cook and nurse, on a level with the inferior
servants, to whom he would not have deigned a look, and it was not
easy to resist showing that she was on more familiar terms with him
than all. But the instinct of self-protection and the wisdom of
sincerity came to her aid. She abstained from raising her eyes to
his face, from one conscious word or glance; she locked herself into
her pantry when she took down the breakfast-things, and avoided every
encounter, even when she had begun to feel that it would have been
more flattering had he made more efforts. At last, dire necessity
obliged her to accept his aid in carrying her mistress's box down the
stairs. He walked backwards, she forwards. She would not meet his
eye, and he was too well-bred for one word on the stairs; but in the
garden he exclaimed, 'Miss Arnold, what have I done?'

'I never ought to have listened to you,' said Charlotte. 'It was not
right by neither of us; so please say no more.'

'If you could understand--'

'I don't want to understand nothing.'

Charlotte drove him on with the box till they were close to the fly,
and then, leaving him and the man to adjust the packing, flew back to
announce that all was ready for her mistress. The last kisses were
given to the children, and a message left with Charlotte for her
master, who was in school; then she stood with Miss Catharine in her
arms, and saw the fly drive off.

'Well,' said Mrs. Cook, 'that butler thinks himself a great beau, no
doubt! I asked him whether he thought you pretty, Charlotte, and he
said you hadn't no air nor no complexion. It's as I tells you--
nobody will never take no notice of you while you goes about so
dowdy.'

Charlotte did not know whether she was glad that the cook could not
tease her about Delaford, or mortified to be supposed beneath his
notice. No air, forsooth! She who had often heard it said that she
looked like any lady!

'But oh,' said Charlotte to herself, as she spent her daily five
minutes at noonday in quiet thought, 'am I not a poor silly thing not
to be thankful that care has been round me this time, and that I have
not been let to do nothing giddy nor false by Tom, whatever I may
have thought!'

Meanwhile, Isabel had found it much harder to part with her babies
for three weeks than it had seemed at the first proposal; and there
were tears in her eyes as she gazed at the peaked, red-tiled roof of
the old grammar-school, and reckoned the days and hours before her
husband would join her.

Other associations revived when she found herself at Estminster, and
was received with shrieks of joy, caresses, and exclamations too fond
and foolish to bear repetition; and then the pale Louisa rested
against her, stroking her hand, and Lady Conway fondled her, and
Virginia, looking formed and handsome, retreated a little way to
study her and declare that she was the same Isabel, neither altered
nor grown older--it was all a dream that she had ever left them.

She almost felt it so herself, so entirely did she fit into the old
habits, the little quiet dinner (only it seemed unusually good), the
subsequent closing round the fire with the addition of Miss King and
Louisa, the easy desultory chat, the books with Mudie's stamp lying
about, the music which must be practised. It was very like being
Miss Conway still; and when she awoke the next morning to find it
late, and to the impulse of hurrying up, or _not_ hurrying, expecting
to find James making breakfast himself, and cross at being made late
for school, she turned on her pillow, half doubting whether she had
dreamt these two years in one long night, and remembering that
captive mermaid, who had but to resume her maritime headgear and
return to her native element, to forget the very existence of her
fisherman husband and children. No! Isabel was not come to that! but
she was almost ashamed to enjoy her extra hour's repose; and then the
leisurely breakfast--nay, even the hot rolls and clear coffee were
appreciated; and she sighed as she called up the image of the
breakfast over an hour ago, the grim kettle, the bad butter, the
worse fire, and James, cold and hurried, with Kitty on his knee
gnawing a lump of crust. It was a contrast to Lady Conway reading
her letters and discussing engagements with comfortable complacency,
and Virginia making suggestions, and Louisa's grave bright eyes
consulting hers, and Miss King quietly putting in a remark, and the
anticipation of Walter's return, as if he were the only person
wanting.

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