Chapter III: The Family

A bright spring morning, sharp and cold, but with floods of sunshine everywhere--sunshine on the grass, turning the delicate rime into a network of pearls, and glittering along all the bare branches, where the brown buds were beginning to swell--colder than autumn, almost colder than winter, but with a different sentiment in the air. Spring cold is like the poverty of a poor man who has had a fortune left him--better days are coming; the trees felt this already, though their buds were pinched, and Nelly felt it as she went out with her garden gloves on, and a pair of scissors. What did she expect to find in the garden, do you ask? Nothing in the garden, where the crocuses had scarcely awakened to the fact that the sun was up and calling them; but away at the end of the lawn, among the roots of that transept of lime trees which crossed the avenue of big elms, there were hosts of hardy little snowdrops peeping up among the half-frozen grass, and growing in handfuls as Nature bade them. By what sweet piece of good fortune this came to be, I cannot tell; but so it was. Nelly herself, in a jacket trimmed with white fur, was too bright to be like her snowdrops. She ran up and down the long avenue to warm her delicate little toes. It was a better way than sitting over the fire. In the little open space before the garden door, Dick, with a book in his coat pocket, was doing what he could to inform the mind of Winks. Dick was supposed to get up at seven to improve his own mind, and, I presume, he believed that the book in his pocket did him some good by mere contact, if nothing else. He had read, at most, one page of it, at the expense of I don’t know how many yawns, but now his soul was set on the more congenial task of teaching Winks to carry a musket and stand on guard. Winks looked at the stick which had fallen from his unwilling paws, sniffing at it with a certain cynical disbelief in the supposed weapon. He was a very dark-coloured Skye, almost black, and had a way of grinning at Dick with all his white teeth displayed from his black lips, in a satirical smile which incensed his instructor greatly. Winks had as great objections to being instructed as Dick had himself, but, being above those prudential reasons which induced his young master to smother his feelings, the four-footed neophyte had distinctly the advantage. He did not believe in the feigned firearm, and words could not have expressed the good-humoured disdain with which he wagged his tail. “You think this is a gun, I suppose,” Winks’s tail said; “but I who am your intellectual superior am not to be taken in. Take up that bit of wood in my paws as if I was a mountebank! Not if I know it.” “Sit up, sir, sit up,” said Dick in a passion. Winks only smiled the more and wagged his tail. But the lesson, though it amused his cynical humour, began to bore him. All at once he put his head on one side, and pricked up his ears, responding to some imaginary call. The pantomime was far cleverer than anything Dick was capable of. “I think I hear my mistress calling me,” Winks said in the plainest English; but he was too clever to escape at once. He paused, contemplative, consulting heaven and earth. “Did I hear my mistress call?” Then suddenly once more came the imaginary summons. “Distressed I am sure, beyond all measure, to leave you,” the polite dog said, with a final wag of his tail, triumphant, yet deprecating. “Confound the little brute!” cried Dick, indignant; and Winks chuckled as he ran off on three legs, pretending to be all eagerness. “Confound the little beast!” repeated the boy; “Nelly, come here, and don’t dance about in that aggravating way;--just when I thought he had got hold of a new trick!”

“Winks is a great deal too clever to do tricks,” said Nelly.

“Yes, he is as knowing as I am,” said innocent Dick. “I wonder now if there is any truth in that stuff about transmigration. He must have been an actor, that brute. I don’t believe my mother called a bit. I don’t believe she is down-stairs yet--cunning little beast! What a jolly lot of snowdrops, Nelly! Are you going in? It’s not nine yet. Come round the walk, I want to speak to you. Oh what an awful bore is this exam.!” said Dick, with a deep sigh. “Now I put it to you, Nell, in the spirit of fairness, how can a fellow be expected to do mathematics before breakfast? It is bad enough when you have been worked up to it, and supported; but at eight o’clock in the morning, without so much as a cup of coffee! What are men supposed to be made of? I am sure it never was so in the old times.”

“Much you know about it,” said Nelly. “When I was at school, and much younger than you, I had to get up and practise for an hour and a half before breakfast--cold fingers and cold keys--and not even a fire.”

“Oh, as for that,” said Dick, “of course I never minded getting up at Eton; all the other fellows did it, and for one thing, the masters were punished just as much as we were, and looked just as blue. But when you are all of you in your comfortable beds, and only me at work!”

“If that was all, I should not mind in the least getting up and sitting with you,” said Nelly; “but then we should only chatter, and no work would be done. And if you work hard, you know it will soon be over.”

“Soon over? yes, till the next one,” said Dick the disconsolate; “and then India at the end. There’s Frederick now, a lazy beggar, comes down at ten o’clock, and everybody thinks it quite right. Why should there be such a difference between him and me? You’re a girl, and don’t count; but why should he be in clover at the Sealing Wax Office, while I am to be sent to India?”

“Frederick will never get rich in the Sealing Wax Office, but you may in India. Besides, you know,” said Nelly, who was impressionable on this point, though she did not altogether trust her elder brother, “he would have been in the Church had he not been too conscientious. Quantities of men go into the Church without thinking what they are doing; but Frederick had scruples--he had doubts even on some points----”

“Much anybody would care if I had doubts,” said Dick; “if I were to set up opinions, Nell----”

But this was more than Nelly’s gravity could stand. The idea of Dick having opinions, and the injured look with which he announced the probable indifference of the world to them, sent his sister off into that _fou rire_ which no one can stop. “I will race you to the end of the walk,” she said, trying to subdue herself; and, undismayed by the indifference thus shown to his metaphysical difficulties, Dick accepted the challenge. He allowed her to dart past him with all a boy’s contempt. He regarded her, indeed, with something of the same sentiment with which Winks had regarded him. “Girls spend all their strength at the first outset,” Dick said composedly, going steadily on with his squared elbows. “They’re like greased lightning for ten yards or so, and then they’re done--like you, Nell,” he said, passing her when she paused, panting, to take breath. She had made a hard fight for it, however. She had run to within a few yards of the goal before she allowed herself to be beaten. Dick immediately began a lecture to her upon the deficiency of feminine performances, which was perhaps too technical for these pages, but so like many lectures on the same subject that the reader will have little difficulty in imagining it. “You never can ‘stay,’” was the conclusion, made with much patronizing good-humour. Altogether, it was apparent that Dick’s general opinion of his sister coincided wonderfully with Winks’s opinion of himself. Great wits jump.

“Miss Ellinor, your mamma has been a-waiting breakfast this half-hour,” said Brownlow solemnly, addressing them from the end of the walk. Brownlow was large and stout, and filled up the vista formed by the branches. They had known his sway all their lives, and they laughed at him between themselves; but the young Eastwoods had not yet learned to disobey Brownlow. They put themselves in motion with the utmost docility. “We are coming directly,” said Nelly, running to pick up her basket with the snowdrops. Even Frederick did instinctively what Brownlow told him. The brother and sister went on to the house, following the large black shadow which moved with dignity before them. “What an awful old bore he is,” said Dick: “look here, Nell, what will you bet that I couldn’t hit that big red ear of his with this chestnut? One, two, three----”

“Oh, don’t, Dick, for heaven’s sake!” said Nelly, catching his hand; “though he is an old bore. I wonder how it is that we have none but old servants? Mamma prefers them, I suppose; though Frederick, I know, would like another cook, and I,--oh, no, I couldn’t part with old Alice. What a wretch I am to think of it! But she never can help one to a new way of doing one’s hair.”

“I always do my hair exactly the same,” said Dick. “I never require any one to help me.”

“Oh, you!” said Nelly taking her revenge; “who cares how a boy looks?” And thus they went in, breathing youth, and fun, and nonsense, and mischief. Mrs. Eastwood stood warming her hands by the fire, but Dick and Nelly put themselves on the other side of the table. Their young blood was dancing, their young limbs too light to be touched by the cold.

“I wonder where Frederick will be by this time; I wonder when he will reach Pisa,” said the mother. “I suppose it is not to be expected that a young man would go right through Paris without stopping. But when I think of that poor little thing all alone----”

“The wind blew nice and strong last night,” said Dick; “it would be pleasant in the Channel. I say, mamma, I hope Frederick liked it. How queer he would look this morning! What a thing it is not to be able to stand a breeze at sea! You should have seen us off the Needles in the last equinoctial, in old Summerdale’s yacht.”

“Don’t tell me about it,” said Mrs. Eastwood, closing her eyes and setting down her tea-cup. “Some of these days you will hear that Mr. Summerdale and his yacht have gone to the bottom: and I am sure, though I would not be uncharitable to any man, I think he deserves it: carrying boys away in a storm without the knowledge of their people. I thought I should have died.”

“I was a good bit more like dying, and I did not mind,” cried Dick. “It was glorious. The noise, so that you couldn’t hear yourself talk, and the excitement, and the confusion, and the danger! Hadn’t we just a squeak for it? It was gloriously jolly,” cried Dick, rubbing his hands at the recollection. He looked so wickedly pleased with the escapade that his mother could not help snubbing him on the spot.

“I hope you have got a great deal of work done this morning. Alice tells me you got up directly when you were called. And you must remember, Dick, how very short the time is getting,” she said, in her softest tones. “I would not for the world deprive you of a single advantage; but seven-and-sixpence an hour is a very great deal to pay unless you take the full advantage of it. And now I shall have another child to provide for,” Mrs. Eastwood added, sighing faintly. Poor Dick’s random mood was over. He said something about mathematics in general which was not complimentary to that lofty science.

“If it was to be of any use to a fellow after I should not mind,” he said. “It is the doing it all for no good that riles one. If I were to be mathematical master somewhere, or head accountant, or even a bookkeeping fellow----. You need not cry ‘Oh, oh!’ You ain’t in Parliament, Nell, and never can be; that’s a comfort. Girls ought to talk of things they understand. I don’t interfere with your fiddle-de-jigs. That’s what discourages a fellow. Besides, mathematics are horribly hard; ladies that never opened a Euclid,” said Dick, with dignity, “are quite incapable of forming an idea.”

“They tell the best in the examination,” said Mrs. Eastwood. “When you have passed you will have no more trouble with them. But we must not forget how many marks there are for mathematics; and you must not be discouraged, Dick. But you know, children, if we are to have a new member in the family, we shall require to think of economy more than ever. I do not see anything we can actually put down,” the mother said, with deliberation, and a sigh to the memory of the carriage. “The only thing I could think of was the fires in our bedrooms, and really that would not be good for your healths. But we must be generally economical. And the very first principle of economy is making the best use of what we have. So recollect, Dick.”

“I’m going, mamma,” he said, and pulled the book out of his coat pocket which had been keeping him company all the morning. Mrs. Eastwood followed him to the door with her kind eyes.

“I really think, though he is such a harum-scarum, that he is doing his work, poor boy,” she said, with that fond maternal confidence which is often so indifferently deserved.

“Yes, yes, mamma,” cried Nelly, with some impatience, not feeling all the interest in the subject her mother did. “But never mind Dick, he’ll do very well, I daresay. Come and see what I want to have done to the little room.”

The Elms was an old-fashioned house. It was built, as houses in England are rarely built now-a-days, in those suites of rooms which are so general on the Continent. Mrs. Eastwood’s room occupied the whole width of the wing. It had an alcove, which was like an inner room, for the bed, and abundance of space for reading tables and writing tables, and sofas and book-cases in the rest of the spacious chamber, which was like a French room in every way, with its dressing-closet opening from the alcove, and all the less beautiful accessories of the toilet kept well out of sight. Ellinor’s room opened from her mother’s, and opening from that again was the little room which was to be prepared for the new-comer. Already it was all pulled to pieces by Nelly’s commands, and under her supervision; and a brisk little workwoman sat in Nelly’s own chamber surrounded by billows of bright new chintz, with a running pattern of rose buds and fern leaves. A tall old woman, in a black gown and cap, stood beside this artist, advising it seemed and disapproving. Ellinor stopped with the anxious and indeed servile politeness of fear to speak to this personage. “How kind of you, Alice, to come and help,” she said; “I hope you like the chintz. Don’t you think we shall make the room look nice after all, when it has been papered and cleaned?”

“There’s nothing to be said against the room,” said Alice, in a Scotch accent, and with a solemnity of tone that spoke more than words.

“And then we shall all be together. It will be very handy for everything,” said Nelly, with a sickly smile, trying to bear up; “all the ladies of the family----”

“I would like to speak a word to your mamma about that,” said Alice. She pronounced the word “Mammaw,” and somehow those broad vowels added ten-fold weight--or so, at least, Ellinor thought--to the speech.

“Mamma has gone into the little room,” said Nelly, with an effort. Mrs. Eastwood was a very persuadable woman, and she looked still more persuadable than she was. Most people thought they themselves could influence her to anything, unless, indeed, some one else had forestalled them; and, to tell the truth, even her own family attributed to Mrs. Everard, or failing her to Alice, everything in their mother’s conduct which was not attributable to their own sage advices. It required a more subtle observer than Nelly to make out that her mother had in reality a great deal of her own way; therefore she was deeply alarmed by Alice’s unfriendly looks, and followed her into the little room with but slightly disguised terror.

“Alice is in a bad humour,” she whispered to her mother; “You won’t mind what she says? She thinks the new paper and the chintz are extravagant. Don’t listen to her, mamma.”

“So they are,” said Mrs. Eastwood, shaking her head. She was fond of pretty paper and pretty chintz, and of change and novelty. She liked furnishing a room almost as well as her daughter did, and she thought she had “taste.” Therefore she had defences against any attack on that side of the question, which Ellinor had not dreamt of. However, even Nelly was startled and taken aback by the unexpected line taken by Alice, who looked as if she might have something very important to say.

“You remember Miss Isabel, mem?” was what she said, looking her mistress full in the face.

“Dear me, Alice, what a question! Remember my sister?” cried Mrs. Eastwood, turning abruptly away from the paper and chintz.

“It’s a queer question to ask,” said Alice, with a grim smile; “but dinna go too fast. You mind your sister, and yet you are going to put her child--her only child--here in a room next to your own, next to Miss Ellinor’s? Between mother and daughter? That’s where you place Miss Isabel’s bairn?”

“Alice!” cried Mrs. Eastwood, almost angrily. She looked at Nelly’s wondering face and then at her maid with a half-frightened, half-threatening gesture. She was annoyed, but she was startled too.

“I say it before Miss Ellinor that you may not do it with your eyes shut,” said Alice. “I’m only a servant, with no right to interfere; but I cannot stand by, and no say a word. I’m no in favour of it,” she cried, turning round. “It would be best to provide for her, and no bring her home; but if you will bring her home--and, mem, you are always wilful, though nobody thinks so--put her in any place but here.”

“You are dreadfully prejudiced, Alice--dreadfully prejudiced!”

“Maybe I am; and, mem, you like your own way. We are none of us perfect. But your sister Isabel’s bairn, the child of an ill father to the boot, should never come into my house. Maybe you think, mem, that the features of the mind are no transmitted? Poor leddy! Poor leddy! There’s enough of her in your blood already without searching out of your way to find more.”

Mrs. Eastwood grew crimson to her hair. “If you think any of my children resemble my sister, Alice, I can assure you you are very much mistaken,” she said, walking up and down the little room in her agitation. “Nelly, look here, you would think she meant something very dreadful. Your poor aunt Isabella was very secret in her way, and liked to make a mystery. She got me into some trouble when I was a girl through it. That was all. Why it should be remembered against her child, or change my natural affections, I can’t imagine. Oh, I know you mean well, Alice, you mean well; but that does not make it a bit more pleasant. Put down those curtains and things, Nelly, put them down. I hate so much fuss. There is plenty of time. You are always so hasty and premature in everything. I am going to speak to cook. Don’t trouble me about this any more.”

“It is all your doing, Alice,” said Ellinor, as her mother went away.