Hopes and Fears Part 86

'Long or short horns, since Bertha is not here to make me call them antennae. I must take him home to draw, as soon as I have gathered some willow for my puss. You are coming home with me?'

'I meant to drink tea with you, and be sent for in the evening.'

'Good child. I was almost coming to you, but I was afraid of Mervyn.

How has it been, my dear?'

Phoebe's 'he is very kind' was allowed to stand for the present, and Honora led the way by a favourite path, which was new to Phoebe, making the circuit of the Holt; sometimes dipping into a hollow, over which the lesser scabious cast a tint like the gray of a cloud; sometimes rising on a knoll so as to look down on the rounded tops of the trees, following the undulations of the grounds; and beyond them the green valley, winding stream, and harvest fields, melting into the chalk downs on the horizon.

To Phoebe, all had the freshness of novelty, with the charm of familiarity, and without the fatigue of admiration required by the show-places to which Mervyn had taken her. Presently Miss Charlecote opened the wicket leading to an oak coppice. There was hardly any brushwood. The ground was covered with soft gra.s.s and round elastic cus.h.i.+ons of gray lichen. There were a few brackens, and here and there the crimson midsummer men, but the copsewood consisted of the redundant shoots of the old, gnarled, knotted stumps, covered with handsome foliage of the pale sea-green of later summer, and the leaves far exceeding in size those either of the sapling or the full-sized tree--vigorous playfulness of the poor old wounded stocks.

'Ah!' said Honor, pausing, 'here I found my purple emperor, sunning himself, his glorious wings wide open, looking black at first, but turning out to be of purple-velvet, of the opaque mysterious beauty which seems n.o.bler than mere l.u.s.tre.'

'Did you keep him? I thought that was against your principles.'

'I only mocked him by trying to paint him. He was mine because he came to delight me with the pleasure of having seen him, and the remembrance of him that pervades the path. It was just where Humfrey always told me the creatures might be found.'

'Was Mr. Charlecote fond of natural history?' asked Phoebe, shyly.

'Not as natural history, but he knew bird, beast, insect, and tree, with a friendly hearty intimacy, such as c.o.c.kney writers ascribe to peasants, but which they never have. While he used the homeliest names, a dish-washer for a wagtail, cuckoo's bread-and-cheese for wood-sorrel (partly I believe to tease me), he knew them thoroughly, nests, haunts, and all.'

Phoebe could not help quoting the old lines, 'He prayeth well that loveth well both man and bird and beast.'

'Yes, and some persons have a curious affinity with the gentle and good in creation--who can watch and even handle a bird's nest without making it be deserted, whom bees do not sting, and horses, dogs, and cats love so as to reveal their best instincts in a way that seems fabulous. In spite of the Lyra Innocentium, I think this is less often the case with children than with such grown people as--like your guardian, Phoebe--have kept something of the majesty and calmness of innocence.'

Phoebe was all in a glow with the pleasure of hearing him so called, but bashful under that very delight, she said, 'Perhaps part of Solomon's wisdom was in loving these things, since he knew the plants from the cedar to the hyssop.'

'And spoke of Nature so beautifully in his Song, but I am afraid as he grew old he must have lost his healthful pleasure in them when he was lifted up.'

'Or did he only make them learning and ornament, instead of a joy and devotion?' said Phoebe, thinking of the difference between Bertha's love and Miss Charlecote's.

'Nor does he say that he found vanity in them, though he did in his own gardens and pools of water. No, the longer I live, the more sure I am that these things are meant for our solace and minor help through the trials of life. I a.s.sure you, Phoebe, that the crimson leaf of a Herb-Robert in the hedge has broken a strain of fretful repining, and it is one great blessing in these pleasures that one never can exhaust them.'

Phoebe saw that Miss Charlecote was right in her own case, when on coming in, the gra.s.shopper's name and history were sought, and there followed an exhibition of the 'puss' for whom the willow had been gathered, namely a gra.s.s-green caterpillar, with a kitten's face, a curious upright head and shoulders, and two purple tails, whence on irritation two pink filaments protruded,--lashes for the ichneumons, as Honora explained. The lonely woman's interest in her quaint pet showed how thickly are strewn round us many a calm and innocent mode of solace and cheerfulness if we knew but how to avail ourselves of it.

Honora had allowed the conversation to be thus desultory and indifferent, thinking that it gave greater rest to Phoebe, and it was not till the evening was advancing, that she began to discharge herself of an urgent commission from Robert, by saying, 'Phoebe, I want you to do something for me. There is that little dame's school in your hamlet. It is too far off for me to look after, I wish you would.'

'Robin has been writing to me about parish work,' said Phoebe, sadly.

'Perhaps I ought, but I don't know how, and I can't bear that any change in our ways should be observed;' and the tears came more speedily than Honor had expected.

'Dear child,' she said, 'there is no need for that feeling. Parish work, at least in a lay family, must depend on the amount of home duty. In the last years of my dear mother's life I had to let everything go, and I know it is not easy to resume, still less to begin, but you will be glad to have done so, and will find it a great comfort.'

'If it be my duty, I must try,' said Phoebe, dejectedly, 'and I suppose it is. Will you come and show me what to do? I never went into a cottage in my life.'

I have spoken too soon! thought Honor; yet Robert urged me, and besides the evil of neglecting the poor, the work will do her good; but it breaks one's heart to see this meek, mournful obedience.

'While we are alone,' continued Phoebe, 'I can fix times, and do as I please, but I cannot tell what Mervyn may want me to do when he is at home.'

'Do you expect that he will wish you to go out with him?' asked Honora.

'Not this autumn,' she answered; 'but he finds it so dull at home, that I fully expect he will have his friends to stay with him.'

'Phoebe, let me strongly advise you to keep aloof from your brother's friends. When they are in the house, live entirely in the schoolroom.

If you begin at once as a matter of course, he will see the propriety, and acquiesce. You are not vexed?'

'Thank you, I believe it is all right. Robert will be the more at ease about us. I only do not like to act as if I distrusted Mervyn.'

'It would not be discreet for any girl so young as you are to be entertaining her brother's sporting friends. You could hardly do so without acquiring the same kind of reputation as my poor Lucy's Rashe, which he would not wish.'

'Thank you,' said Phoebe more heartily. 'You have shown me the way out of a difficulty. I need not go into company at all this winter, and after that, only with our old country neighbours.'

Honora was infinitely relieved at having bestowed this piece of advice, on which she had agreed with Robert as the only means of insuring Phoebe's being sheltered from society that Mervyn might not esteem so bad for his sister as they did.

The quietness of Mervyn's absence did much for the restoration of Phoebe's spirits. The dame's school was not delightful to her; she had not begun early enough in life for ease, but she did her tasks there as a duty, and was amply rewarded by the new enjoyment thus afforded to Maria.

The importance of being surrounded by a ring of infants, teaching the alphabet, guiding them round the gooseberry bush, or leading their songs and hymns, was felicity indescribable to Maria. She learnt each name, and, with the reiteration that no one could endure save Phoebe and faithful Lieschen, rehea.r.s.ed the individual alphabetical acquirements of every one; she painted pictures for them, hemmed pinafores, and was happier than she had ever been in her life, as well as less fretful and more manageable, and she even began to develop more sense and intelligence in this direction than she had seemed capable of under the dreary round of lessons past her comprehension.

It was a great stimulus to Phoebe, and spurred her to personal parish work, going beyond the soup and subscriptions that might have bounded her charities for want of knowing better. Of course the worst and most plausible people took her in, and Miss Charlecote sometimes scolded, sometimes laughed at her, but the beginning was made, and Robert was pleased.

Mervyn did bring home some shooting friends, but he made no difficulties as to the seclusion that Miss Charlecote had recommended for his sister; accepting it so easily that Phoebe thought he must have intended it from the first. From that time he was seldom at home without one or more guests--an arrangement that kept the young ladies chiefly to the west wing, and always, when in the garden, forced them to be on their guard against stumbling upon smoking gentlemen. It was a late-houred, noisy company, and the sounds that reached the sisters made the younger girls curious, and the governess anxious. Perhaps it was impossible that girls of seventeen and fifteen should not be excited by the vicinity of moustaches and beards whom they were bidden to avoid; and even the alternate French and German which Miss Fennimore enforced on Bertha more strongly than ever, merely produced the variety of her descanting on their _knebelbarten_, or on _l'heure a guelle les voix de ces messieurs-la entonnaient sur le grand escalier_, till Miss Fennimore declared that she would have Latin and Greek talked if there were no word for a gentleman in either! There were always stories to be told of Bertha's narrow escapes of being overtaken by them in garden or corridor, till Maria, infected by the panic, used to flounder away as if from a beast of prey, and being as tall as, and considerably stouter than, Phoebe, with the shuffling gait of the imbecile, would produce a volume of sound that her sister always feared might attract notice, and irritate Mervyn.

Honora Charlecote tried to give pleasure to the sisters by having them at the Holt, and would fain have treated Bertha as one of the inherited G.o.dchildren. But Bertha proved by reference to the bra.s.s tablet that she _could_ not be G.o.dchild to a man who died three years before her birth, and it was then perceived that his sponsors.h.i.+p had been to an elder Bertha, who had died in infancy, of water on the head, and whom her parents, in their impatience of sorrow, had absolutely caused to be forgotten. Such a delusion in the exact Phoebe could only be accounted for by her tenderness to Mr. Charlecote, and it gave Bertha a subject of triumph of which she availed herself to the utmost. She had imbibed a sovereign contempt for Miss Charlecote's capacity, and considered her as embodying the pa.s.sive individual who is to be instructed or confuted in a scientific dialogue. So she lost no occasion of triumphantly denouncing all 'cataclysms' of the globe, past or future, of resolving all nature into gases, or arguing upon duality--a subject that fortunately usually brought on her hesitation of speech, a misfortune of which Miss Fennimore and Phoebe would unscrupulously avail themselves to change the conversation. The bad taste and impertinence were quite as apparent to the governess as to the sister, and though Bertha never admitted a doubt of having carried the day against the old world prejudices, yet Miss Fennimore perceived, not only that Miss Charlecote's notions were not of the contracted and unreasonable order that had been ascribed to her, but that liberality in her pupil was more uncandid, narrow, and self-sufficient than was 'credulity' in Miss Charlecote. Honor was more amused than annoyed at these discussions; she was sorry for the silly, conceited girl, though not in the least offended nor disturbed, but Phoebe and Miss Fennimore considered them such an exposure that they were by no means willing to give Bertha the opportunity of launching herself at her senior.

The state of the household likewise perplexed Phoebe. She had been bred up to the sight of waste, ostentation, and extravagance, and they did not distress her; but her partial authority revealed to her glimpses of dishonesty; detected falsehoods destroyed her confidence in the housekeeper; her attempts at charities to the poor were intercepted; her visits to the hamlet disclosed to her some of the effects on the villagers of a vicious, disorderly establishment; and she understood why a careful mother would as soon have sent her daughter to service at the lowest public-house as at Beauchamp.

Mervyn had detected one of the footmen in a flagrant act of peculation, and had dismissed him, but Phoebe believed the evil to have extended far more widely than he supposed, and made up her mind to entreat him to investigate matters. In vain, however, she sought for a favourable moment, for he was never alone. The intervals between other visitors were filled up by a Mr. Hastings, who seemed to have erected himself into so much of the domesticated friend that he had established a bowing and speaking acquaintance with Phoebe; Bertha no longer narrated her escapes of encounters with him; and, being the only one of the gentlemen who ever went to church, he often joined the young ladies as they walked back from thence. Phoebe heartily wished him gone, for he made her brother inaccessible; she only saw Mervyn when he wanted her to find something for him or to give her a message, and if she ventured to say that she wanted to speak to him, he promised--'Some time or other'--which always proved _sine die_. He was looking very ill, his complexion very much flushed, and his hand heated and unsteady, and she heard through Lieschen of his having severe morning headaches, and fits of giddiness and depression, but these seemed to make him more unable to spare Mr.

Hastings, as if life would not be endurable without the billiards that she sometimes heard knocking about half the night.

However, the anniversary of Mr. Fulmort's death would bring his executor to clear off one branch of his business, and Mervyn's friends fled before the coming of the grave old lawyer, all fixing the period of their departure before Christmas. Nor could Mervyn go with them; he must meet Mr. Crabbe, and Phoebe's heart quite bounded at the hope of being able to walk about the house in comfort, and say part of what was on her mind to her brother.

'Whose writing is this?' said Phoebe to herself, as the letters were given to her, two days before the clearance of the house. 'I ought to know it--It is! No! Yes, indeed it is--poor Lucy. Where can she be?

What can she have to say?'

The letter was dateless, and Phoebe's amaze grew as she read.

'DEAR PHOEBE,

'You know it is my nature to do odd things, so never mind that, but attend to me, as one who knows too well what it is to be motherless and undirected. Gossip is long-tongued enough to reach me here, in full venom as I know and trust, but it makes my blood boil, till I can't help writing a warning that may at least save you pain. I know you are the snowdrop poor Owen used to call you, and I know you have Honor Charlecote for philosopher, and friend, but she is nearly as unsophisticated as yourself, and if report say true, your brother is getting you into a sc.r.a.pe. If it is a fact that he has Jack Hastings dangling about Beauchamp, he deserves the lot of my unlucky Charteris cousins! Mind what you are about, Phoebe, if the man is there. He is plausible, clever, has no end of amusing resources, and keeps his head above water; but I _know_ that in no place where there are womankind has he been received without there having been cause to repent it! I hope you may be able to laugh--if not, it may be a wholesome cure to hear that his friends believe him to have secured one of the heiresses at Beauchamp. There, Phoebe, I have said my say, and I fear it is cutting and wounding, but it came out of the love of a heart that has not got rid of some of its old feelings, and that could not bear to think of sorrow or evil tongues busy about you. That I write for your sake, not for my own, you may see by my making it impossible to answer.

'LUCILLA SANDBROOK.

'If you hold council with Honor over this--as, if you are wise, you will--you may tell her that I am learning grat.i.tude to her. I would ask her pardon if I could without servility.'

'Secured one of the heiresses!' said Phoebe to herself. 'I should like to be able to tell Lucy how I can laugh! Poor Lucy, how very kind in her to write. I wonder whether Mervyn knows how bad the man is! Shall I go to Miss Charlecote? Oh, no; she is spending two days at Moorcroft!

Shall I tell Miss Fennimore? No, I think not, it will be wiser to talk to Miss Charlecote; I don't like to tell Miss Fennimore of Lucy. Poor Lucy--she is always generous! He will soon be gone, and then I can speak to Mervyn.'

This secret was not a serious burthen to Phoebe, though she could not help smiling to herself at the comical notion of having been secured by a man to whom she had not spoken a dozen times, and then with the utmost coldness and formality.

The next day she approached the letter-bag with some curiosity. It contained one for her from her sister Juliana, a very unusual correspondent, and Phoebe's mind misgave her lest it should have any connection with the hints in Lucilla's note. But she was little prepared for what she read.

'Acton Manor, Dec. 24th.