Chapter IV: The Three Charities

To live at Sunninghill, with one’s feet on a level with the highest pinnacle of the big Castle at St. George’s, what a thing it was in summer! All that country is eloquent with trees--big beeches, big oaks, straight elms, sweet birch-trees; even the very holly-bushes, in their dark green, grow tall into prickly, straggling monsters, as big as the elms. But the triumph of the place perhaps is in spring, when the primroses come too thick for counting, and the woods are full of their fairy, indefinable fragrance. In the ripe summer there was no such lovely suggestion about; all was at that perfection which suggests only decay. The wild flowers were foxgloves, with here and there in the marshy places a lingering plume of meadow-sweet. The ferns had grown too strong and tall, like little trees. The woods were in their darkest, fullest garments of green; not another leaflet to come anywhere; all full, and mature, and complete. Wild honeysuckle waved flags of yellow and brown from the high branches of big trees, which it had caught and tangled in; and made the hedge into one big wall of flowers--almost too much when the sun was on it. In the very heart of August it was as cool in these shadowy wood-walks as in a Gothic chapel, and here and there on a little plateau of brown earth a bench underneath a tree offered rest and a view to the wayfarer. Mrs. Burchell was sitting on one of these, panting a little, on the special day we have to record. She was that rector’s wife already mentioned, who was a contemporary of Cherry Beresford, and who grudged so much that ‘two single women’ should have all the delights of Sunninghill. She was just Miss Cherry’s age, fat and fair, but more than forty, and she had seven children, and felt herself inconceivably in advance of Cherry, for whom she retained her old friendship however, modified by a little envy and a good deal of contempt. Cherry was an old maid; that of itself surely was quite enough to warrant the contempt and the envy. You had but to look at Mr. Burchell’s rectory, which lay at the foot of the hill under the shadow of the woods, but facing towards the high road, which was very dusty, and exposed without a tree to the blaze of the west, and to compare it with the beautiful house on the top of the hill, sheltered so carefully, not too much nor too little--set in velvet lawns and dewy gardens, dust and noise kept at arm’s length--to see the difference between them. It was a difference which Mrs. Burchell for her part could not learn not to resent; though, indeed, but for the benefice bestowed by Miss Beresford, the Burchells must have had a much worse lot, or indeed perhaps never would have united their lots at all. The rector’s wife might have been as poor a creature as Miss Cherry, an old maid, and none of the seven Burchells might ever have come into being, but for the gift of that dusty Rectory from the ladies on the hill; but the rectorinn did not think of that. She was seated on the bench under the big oak, fanning herself with her handkerchief, while Agnes, her eldest daughter, and Dolly, her youngest, dutifully waited for her. They were going up to ‘The Hill’ for tea, which was a weekly ceremonial at least.

‘At all events, mamma, you must allow,’ said Agnes, ‘that it is better to live at the foot of the hill than at the top. You never could take any walks if you had this long pull up every time you went out.’

‘They don’t have any long pull,’ said her mother; ‘they have their carriage. Ah, yes, they are very different from a poor clergyman’s wife, who has done her duty all her life without much reward for it. It is not those who deserve them most, or who have most need of them, who get the good things of this life, my dear. I don’t want to judge my neighbours; but Miss Charity Beresford I have heard all my life was not so very much better than a heathen. It may not go so far as that--but I have seen her, with my own eyes, laugh at your papa’s best sermons. I am afraid she is not far removed from the wicked that flourish like a green bay tree; yet look at her lot in life and your papa’s--a gentleman, too, and a clergyman with so many opportunities of doing good--and she in this fine place, a mere old woman!’

‘If papa lived here should we all live here?’ said Dolly, whose small brain was confused by this suggestion; ‘then I should have the pony instead of Cara, and Miss Cherry would be my auntie! Oh, I wish papa lived here!’

‘Hold your tongue,’ said her mother. ‘Cherry Beresford is a ridiculous old creature. Dear me, when I think of the time when she and I were girls together! Who would have thought that I should have been the one to toil up here in the sun, while _she_ drove in her carriage. Oh, yes, that’s very true, she was born the richest--but some girls have better luck than others! It was mine, you see, to marry a poor clergyman. Ah, well, I daresay Cherry would give her head to be in my place now!’

‘And you in hers? Is that what you mean, mamma?’

‘Me in hers! I’d like to be in her house, if that’s what you mean; but me a fanciful, discontented, soured old maid--me!’

‘Then, mamma dear, if you are better off in one way and she in another, you are equal,’ said Agnes, somewhat crossly; ‘that’s compensation. Have not you rested long enough?’ Agnes was in the uncomfortable position of an involuntary critic. She had been used to hear a great deal about the Miss Beresfords all her life, and only a little while before had awoke out of the tranquil satisfaction of use and wont, to wonder if all this abuse was justifiable. She stood under the tree with her back to her mother, looking out upon the view with an impatient sadness in her face. She was fond of her mother; but to hear so many unnecessary animadversions vexed and ashamed her, and the only way in which she could show this was by an angry tone and demeanour, which sat very badly upon her innocent countenance and ingenuous looks.

Just then they heard the sound of footsteps coming towards them, and voices softly clear in the warm air. ‘But, Cara, we must not be so ready to blame. All of us do wrong sometimes--not only little girls, but people who are grown up.’

‘Then, Aunt Cherry, you ought not, and one ought to blame you. A little child who cannot read--yes, perhaps that ought to be excused--it does not know; but us----’

‘We do wrong, too, every day, every minute, Cara. You will learn that as you grow older, and learn to be kind, I hope, and forgive.’

‘I shall never learn that.’

They came within sight as these words were said. Miss Cherry, in a cool grey gown, with a broad hat which Mrs. Burchell thought far too young for her; little Cara in her white frock, the shadows speckling and waving over her, erect as a little white pillar, carrying herself so straight. They made a pretty picture coming down the brown mossy path all broken up by big roots under the cool shade of the trees. On the bank behind them were low forests of coarse fern, and a bundle of foxgloves flowering high up on a brown knoll. The cool and tranquil look of them felt almost like an insult to the hot and panting wayfarers who had toiled up the path this hot day. Mrs. Burchell was in black silk, as became her age and position; she had a great deal of dark hair, and, though she blamed Miss Cherry for it, she, too, wore a hat; but, though she had been resting for ten minutes, she was still red and panting. ‘Ah, Cherry,’ she said, ‘how lucky you are coming downhill while we have been climbing! Some people have always the best of it. It makes me feel hotter and hotter to see you so cool and so much at your ease.’

‘We have come to meet you,’ said Miss Cherry, ‘and we shall be equal the rest of the way, for we shall all climb. Little Dolly, will you drag me up? You are so big and so strong, and you like to help old ladies. Come.’

Dolly being a very little mite, more fit to be carried, was made very happy by this address. She stretched forth two fat, small hands, and made great pretences to drag her thin charge. ‘But you must want to come, or I can’t drag you,’ she said.

‘Dolly is a little, wise woman, and speaks proverbs and parables,’ said Miss Cherry. ‘Yes, dear, I want to come; but we must wait for mamma.’

‘Oh, go on, you are light and airy; you have not been tried with a large family like me! You had better give me your arm, Agnes, for the rest of the way. What a pull it is! I don’t think I should ever walk if I had my choice. If I could afford a pair of ponies like yours; but with so many children ponies are out of the question,’ said Mrs. Burchell, still aggrieved. Miss Cherry looked wistfully at the pretty daughter upon whose arm her friend laid a heavy hand.

‘Perhaps we both have something that the other would like to have,’ she said, mildly. ‘I believe that is the way in life.’

‘Oh, it would never do for you, a single woman, to wish for children! I consider that most improper,’ said the rector’s wife. ‘Of course we all wished for husbands in our day, and some of us were successful and some weren’t; but it isn’t a subject to be talked of, pardon me, my dear Cherry, before young girls.’

Miss Cherry opened her mild eyes very wide, and then she blushed a delicate, overwhelming old-maidenly blush, one of those demonstrations of feeling which are almost more exquisite in the old than in the young. She did not make any reply. Mrs. Burchell went on in her daughter’s ear: ‘She is an old fool--look at her. Blushing! as if she were a young girl.’

‘I can’t blush when I please, mamma,’ said Agnes; ‘neither, I suppose, can she. Lean on me a little heavier; we shall soon get to the top now.’

‘Why, she _runs_ actually,’ said poor Mrs. Burchell. ‘She is as light as Dolly; she doesn’t mind the hill. So, Cara, your papa and mamma have gone away again? Why don’t they take you with them? I should think you are old enough now to go too. How different people are! Now, I can never bear to be separated from my children. I like them to go everywhere with me. It is quite astonishing the difference. Doesn’t your Aunt Charity think it strange that they should always send you here?’

‘Aunt Charity likes to have me,’ said Cara; ‘for mamma travels very fast, and I should get very tired. I think I like the Hill best. Mamma is not very strong, and I should have to stop all my lessons.’

‘But you would not mind that, I should think. My girls are always so glad to get lessons over. They would go mad with joy to have their month’s holiday, and I am sure so would you.’

‘No,’ said Cara; ‘I am nearly twelve, and I can only play three or four tunes, and talk a little French with Aunt Cherry. We pronounce very badly,’ she continued, with a blush. ‘I know by the French people who come to see us in the Square.’

‘You poor child! do you mean to say they let you stay up at night, and hear people talking in the drawing-room? How very wrong for you, both for your mind and health! that is what makes you so thin, I am sure; and you must hear a great many things that you ought not to hear.’

Cara opened her blue eyes very wide. She was on the whole gratified by the idea that she had heard things she ought not to hear. That perhaps accounted for her superior wisdom which she felt in herself.

‘Mamma says I ought to learn to judge for myself,’ she said, with dignity. ‘When there is an argument going on I like to listen, and often she makes me tell her what I thought, and which side I take.’

Mrs. Burchell gave Agnes a significant look; and Agnes, it must be allowed, who heard little conversation which did not turn on personal subjects, was slightly horrified too.

‘Poor child!’ repeated the rector’s wife; ‘at your age!--and what kind of subjects do they talk about? It must be very bad for you.’

‘Oh, about books chiefly,’ said Cara, ‘and pictures--but I don’t understand pictures--and sometimes about politics. I like that--about Ireland and Mr. Gladstone they talked once. And to hear the Frenchmen talk about Ireland--just as if it were Poland, papa said.’

‘Well, I am sure it could not be much worse,’ Mrs. Burchell said, after a pause of alarm. She did not know much about Ireland, except that they shot landlords there, and that when she advertised for a housemaid she said ‘No Irish need apply;’ and she knew nothing at all about Poland, and what the analogy was between them she had not an idea. She looked at Cara after this with a little awe; but naturally held fast by her censure, which no doubt must be just, though she could not tell how.

‘It cannot be good for you to hear such talk as that,’ she said. ‘A good romp and go to bed at eight o’clock, that is what I hold with for my girls. You are a great deal too old for your age. Before you are eighteen, people will be taking you for five-and-twenty. To hear you talk, one would think you were eighteen now.’

‘I wish they would,’ said Cara; ‘I don’t like to be always thought a child. I have often things I want to say just on my very lips. I know I could set the people right if I might but speak. But mamma holds up her finger, and I dare not. If I were eighteen, I should be grown up, and I might give my opinion--and twenty-five! Is Agnes twenty-five?’

‘Agnes! you spiteful little thing!’ cried the mother, getting redder and redder. Agnes was sixteen, and the eldest of five, so that to add anything to her age was very undesirable. Cara was too much bewildered to ask what it was which made her a ‘spiteful little thing,’ for just then they came to the final plateau, where the path reached the level of the lawn. And there, snipping away at her roses, was Miss Beresford herself, in a deep sun-bonnet and garden gloves, with a large pair of scissors in her hand, and two baskets at her feet. The roses were in the full flush of their second bloom, notwithstanding their mistress’s fears. She was snipping off the withered flowers, the defective buds, and yellow leaves on one hand, and here and there making a savage dash at a sound twig infested by a colony of green flies, while she cut roses for the decoration of the room. One of the baskets was filled with these flowers, and Miss Cherry, who had preceded them, had lifted this basket from the path, and was looking at it with a perplexed face.

‘There’s a “Malmaison” which is perfect,’ said Miss Charity; ‘and as for those “Giant of Battles”----’ She liked to pronounce their names in her own way, scorning pretence, as she said; and she put down her nose into the basket with true satisfaction. The one thing in the world Miss Charity was a little ‘off her head’ about was a fine rose.

‘They are fine flowers,’ said Miss Cherry, very seriously, her soft voice relaxing, with no smile; ‘but the stalks are so short! How am I to arrange them? unless you put them bolt upright, each one by itself, as they are in a rose show?’

‘You don’t think I’m going to sacrifice my buds,’ said Miss Charity; ‘never! I see you do it, and that dolt of a gardener, and it goes to my heart. Put them bolt upright; what could be better? or they do very well in flat dishes. You can’t go wrong with roses; but sacrifice my buds--not for the world!’

‘There is not one long enough to put in one’s belt,’ said Miss Cherry, who looked half disposed to cry. ‘We have more roses than any one, but they never look nice, for they never have any stalks. I must think what is to be done. The flat dishes are not effective, and the pyramids are wearisome, and specimen glasses make the table like a child’s garden.’

‘There’s a dinner party to-night,’ said Miss Beresford; ‘that’s why Cherry is put out. Come to the arbour and sit down, you poor hot people. How very hot you look, to be sure. That is what it is to be stout. Neither Cherry nor I are stout, and it is a great advantage to us, especially in summer. Come, Maria, you shall have some tea.’

‘I don’t consider myself stout,’ said Mrs. Burchell, offended. ‘The mother of a large family naturally develops a little. “It would not do, my dear, if you were as slim as you were at twenty,” my husband says to me; “only old maids are thin:” and if _he_ likes it----’

‘Yes; you see we’re all old maids here,’ said Miss Charity, with one of her hearty laughs. Her handsome old face shone cool at the bottom of the deep tunnel of her sun-bonnet, clear red and white, as if she had been twenty; and with large, blue, undimmed eyes, from which little Cara had taken hers, and not from either father’s or mother’s. Cara, indeed, was considered by everybody ‘the very image’ of Miss Charity, and copied her somewhat, it must be allowed, in a longer step and more erect carriage than was common to little girls. Miss Charity put down her scissors in her other basket, while Miss Cherry bent her reflective and troubled countenance over the roses, and drew off her big garden gloves, and led the way to the arbour or bower, which was not so cockney an erection as its name portended. At that height, under the shadow of a group of big fragrant limes, in which two openings cleverly cut revealed the broad beautiful plain below, one with St. George’s noble Castle in the midst of the leafy frame, the air was always fresh and sweet. By stretching your neck, as all the young Burchells knew, you could see the dusty road below, and the Rectory lying deep down in the shadow of the trees; but not a speck of dust made its way up to the soft velvet lawn, or entered at the ever-opened windows. ‘Ah, yes, there’s our poor little place, children; a very different place from this!’ Mrs. Burchell said, plaintively, as she sat down and began to fan herself once more.

‘You once thought it a very nice little place, Maria,’ said Miss Charity. ‘I am afraid you are getting tired of the rector, good man---- ’

‘I?’ said Mrs. Burchell, ‘tired of my husband! You little know him or me, or you would not say such a thing. Nobody except those who have a husband like mine can understand what a blessing it is----’

‘We don’t keep anything of the kind up here,’ said Miss Charity; ‘and here comes the tea. Cherry has gone in to have a cry over her roses. When one has not one thing to trouble about, one finds another. You because your house is not so big as ours; she because I cut the roses too short. We are but poor creatures, the best of us. Well, what’s the news, Maria? I always expect a budget of news when I see you.’

The rector’s wife, offended, began by various excuses, as that she was the last person in the world to hear anything, and that gossips knew better than to bring tales to her; but in the end unfolded her stores and satisfied Miss Charity, who took a lively interest in her fellow-creatures, and loved to hear everything that was going on. By the time this recital was fairly begun Miss Cherry came back, carrying with her own hands a bowl of creamy milk for little Dolly, who clung to her skirts and went with her wherever she went. Mrs. Burchell sat in the summer-house, which afforded a little shelter, and was safer as well as more decorous than the grass outside. When Cherry sat down with the children, Agnes had her gossip, too, to pour into the gentle old maiden’s sympathetic ears. Agnes was in the crotchety stage of youth, when the newly-developed creature wants to be doing something for its fellows. She had tried the school and the parish, not with very great success. She wanted Miss Cherry to tell her what to do. ‘The schoolmistress can teach the girls better than I can. She shrugs her shoulders at me. She is certificated, and knows everything; and the old women are not at their ease. They talk about my dear papa, and what a beautiful sermon it was last Sunday. And mamma is busy with her housekeeping. Couldn’t you tell me, dear Miss Cherry, anything a girl can do?’ Miss Cherry somehow was a girl herself, though she was old. It was more natural to appeal to her than even to mamma.

Dolly for her part drank her milk, and dipped her biscuit in it, and made ‘a figure’ of herself unnoticed by anybody, carrying on a monologue of her own all the time. And Cara sat on the lawn, with the leaves playing over her, flecking her pretty head and white frock with a perpetual coming and going of light and shadow. Cara said nothing to any one. She was looking out with her blue eyes well open, through the branches over big St. George’s, upon that misty blueness which was the world.