CHAPTER IV.
POOR LALLY.
Time and tide, we are assured, wait for no man; which, though a truth, is but a portion of one, since happy would we be if, in this world, time and tide were the only things that refused to delay their departure for our convenience.
There are many circumstances of our daily lives against which it would be as vain to appeal—to which it would serve quite as good a purpose to cry aloud for mercy, as the typical hour and tide.
For the first time in his life, Alick Dudley realised this fact, when he found he must depart for London, and leave Heather in the very midst of her trouble, with no one at hand to “see after her,” so the lad expressed himself.
“I will,” said Agnes, reassuringly.
“Yes; but you are not a man, Aggy,” he answered; “that is the worst of it.” And though, in some respects, Agnes was almost as good as a man, still she sighed deeply, feeling her inferiority.
What was there a man could not do? A man could lift heavy weights, and think nothing about them; a man could fling a saddle on a horse, and put a bridle in his mouth, and gallop off for a doctor, without first going about the house wondering whom he could send; a man could jump into the mill-pond and bring Lally out, holding her suspended in mid-air, as a cat does its kitten; a man could go out in all weathers, he could undertake to break bad news; the very sound of his voice in the house was a reassurance; his very tone of command a trumpet which recalled the scattered senses of a tribe of frightened females. Without Alick—boy though he almost was—what would Berrie Down be? a camp without a chief. Even if Arthur were back, they would all miss Alick. He was so prompt, he was so daring, he was so utterly unfeminine in every respect.
Now, many feminine qualities were possessed by Arthur; and, therefore, even if the Squire had been at home, he could never have proved of the same use in the house as his much younger brother Alick.
There has been a great deal written of late years about masculine women. It seems rather one-sided for no one to preach against feminine men; for if a woman be objectionable in so far as she resemble a man, a man must surely be objectionable in so far as he is dependent, and weak, and timid, and faint-hearted, and undecided, and variable, and impulsive, and easily influenced, and speedily depressed, and equally speedily rejoiced, and governed by the opinions of others, and dependent on external influences, like a woman.
I lift my hand in supplications, and cry earnestly for mercy, ladies, as I finish this sentence, which I believe to be true as sorrow and pain. There is another cry which is popular now-a-days, and the man or the woman who raises an opposition shout is likely to find small favour in the crowd; but the opposition shout is none the worse for that.
A man is a divine institution, even in a domestic point of view. He may not be charming pottering about a house, counting the camellias, and instituting inquiries into the items of a grocer’s bill; but he is at a premium when a gun wants cleaning, or a troublesome tramp grows insolent.
In precise proportion as he fails to load his pistols, or face a danger, whether moral or physical, as he is lazy, self-indulgent, wanting in energy, his merits fall below par; and the man, spite of his sex, in point of usefulness is at a discount.
Never at a discount Alick Dudley was likely to be; and that truth, even while she sighed, Agnes dimly grasped. She did not know, she really could not imagine, what they were all to do without her brother; more especially at that juncture, when there was terrible sickness in the house—when, more than ever before in her life, Heather wanted help, and consolation, and encouragement. And yet Alick must go; the laws of the Medes and Persians were as likely to be reversed as the rules hung up in the clerks’ office in the great warehouse of Messrs. Elser, Wire, Hook, and Elser, Wood Street, City.
Time and tide would about as probably wait the convenience of mankind, or humour the whims of womankind, as those gentlemen accept as apology for Alick’s non-appearance the fact of his niece being ill, and his sister-in-law in trouble.
According to the mood in which the firm chanced to be, the members composing it would have intimated to Alick, either that it was a matter of the supremest indifference to them if the whole of his relations were dead and buried, or suggested that he had made a mistake in applying to them for a situation, since it was evidently a nurse’s berth he wanted at one of the hospitals.
But, in whatever form of words they had couched their rejection, that rejection would have certainly been inevitable. No blame to the Messrs. Elser and Co. Of course the world cannot stand still because children fall ill, and women like to have their male relations near them in times of trouble.
Heather, indeed, would have been the first to recognise this truth, had there arisen any question concerning it; but in that quiet Hertfordshire home it never occurred to a single soul within its walls that there could be a moment’s hesitation in the matter.
Alick had to go; and, accordingly, he packed up his clothes, bade good-bye to “the mother,” not without tears, kissed all his sisters, received quite a volume of maternal advice from Mrs. Piggott, together with a box of sandwiches, prepared, apparently, under an impression that he was going to the Canary Isles, and had not the remotest chance of getting anything to eat till he arrived there; and, in the grey dawn, drove over in the pony cart to Palinsbridge, where he caught the eight o’clock up express, and entered the office of Messrs. Elser, Wire, Hook, and Elser, at ten—the hour at which he had been bidden to put in his first appearance.
On the same day two letters were posted at Fifield: one to Arthur from Agnes—written in defiance of Heather’s wishes—telling the Squire of Lally’s accident, not lightly, as Heather had done, but fully and circumstantially, and informing him how ill, how very ill the child had remained ever since; and another, which having been penned with a great expenditure both of thought and ink, it may be as well to print it in extenso, for the information of my readers:
it purported to be written, and the date was Monday, —— 18—:—
“dere mis”—it began—“this coms with my dewtey hopeing yu ayre in good helth az it leves mee at preasant.
“dere mis, i hope yu will pardon the libberty i tayke in riting, but az wee are all in grate distres i thought praphs az yu mite like toe no.
“it’s along of mis laly, who was nere drownded last Weak and who as layd almost for Ded yver since. dere mis it was al along of mastar marresden Which is az yu no a very bade Buoy, tha was al down at the mil, and miss laly She were a-standin cloze up to the brinck, wich were rong in she, but the Pore darelying new no Beter, when mastar marresden he sais to mastar lenarde—goe and giv her A Pusche and soe he Pusched hur inn, and she Was for Yver and Yver soe long in the Watter for the tew others was soe frytenned thay colde doe nothyng but schream, and at Laste the myler’s yf—She herde the crise and mr. scrotor he Mayde noe more addoo than intoe the Watter after hur, and Shee has bene verry bade yver sinc and Pore mrs. duddeley is like wun broaken Harted. She Wente of wen shee yerd the Knus, and it was a Long time befor shee comed too agen. mis laly is rowled up in franell and cryse a gode diel and dere mis i doant no wot is the mater with shee, but I Am Afraide it is hur death. mrs. duddeley she sais her Pore chylde is beter too-nite but i think it is Only a temporeairy feling. mrs. pigot sais shee thinks mrs. duddeley would be beter if her concert wuz at whome, but mrs. duddeley woan’t hav him rote for, were i think she is rong. but dere mis i rite to yu without askhing noboddy’s lefe, and i hop as you will Xuse the libberty. i have knot seen yu no whu sinc yu Went—and ples mis knot to sai az i have rote, becaus mrs. duddeley mite think az i had took to Mutch on mee, but i beleav yu augt to noe, and so hopeaing i have don rite i remain dere miss, with dewty,
Without photographing the original document, which cost Miss Dobbin quite as much mental anxiety as an official dispatch, it would be vain to hope to give an idea of the sort of manuscript through which Bessie Ormson at length arrived at the fact of Lally’s serious illness.
It was blotted all over by accident and design. If by chance Priscilla spelt a word rightly, so surely she rubbed her finger through it, and wrote in another as unlike what it ought to have been as can well be imagined.
She had not a capital letter in its proper place from first to last, and it was many a day, in fact, before Bessie fully mastered the contents of that epistle.
But she gathered enough, almost in a first perusal, to convince her something was very wrong at the Hollow; and, although she had no invitation from Heather to do so, still she instantly resolved to start for Berrie Down.
With Bessie, as a rule, to resolve was to perform; and, accordingly, that very same evening, she astonished the Dudley household by walking coolly in amongst her cousins as they were sitting down to tea.
“Well, and what is this about Lally?” she asked, after she had kissed the girls, and inquired for Heather; “what is the matter with her?”
“Did Alick not tell you?” answered the assembled Dudleys in chorus.
“Alick,” repeated Miss Ormson. “I have not seen Alick. I only heard a vague rumour this morning about something wonderful having occurred, and so I thought that I would come down and learn the certainties of the matter for myself. One of you girls, I think, might have written to tell me; but I suppose it is with you as with the rest of the world—out of sight, out of mind.”
“Heather would not let us write to any one,” said Agnes.
“Then Heather ought not to have had her own way,” retorted Bessie; “and then, I suppose, she has been up with that child night after night, taking no rest, eating nothing, fretting herself to death.”
“We all wanted to sit up,” exclaimed Lucy Dudley, “but she would trust no person.”
“Precisely what I expected,” said Bessie, who had by this time divested herself of cloak and bonnet, and now stood beside the fire looking as trim and pretty as though she had just stepped out of her dressing-room. “And so Lally is very bad?”
“That is precisely what she says herself,” answered Laura. “Whenever the pain leaves her for a minute or two, she settles down a little in the bed and whispers, ‘Poor Lally’s very bad.’”
“Is she in danger?” asked Bessie.
“I do not know; the doctor will not tell us.”
“Is Arthur at home?”
“No; Heather would not let him know how ill Lally was,” answered Agnes; “but I wrote yesterday—not that I suppose he could do any good, if he were here.”
“She fell into the mill-pond?”—this was interrogative.
“She was pushed in,” answered Cuthbert, with a vicious look towards Harry, who sat at the farthest corner of the table with his legs tucked up under his chair, a great slice of bread and butter and honey in one hand, and a huge cup of tea in the other.
“I didn’t push her in,” remarked that young gentleman.
“No, but you told Leonard to shove her,” said Cuthbert, shaking his hand at his brother menacingly.
“Well, how was I to know she would topple over like that?” persisted Harry. “If she was loose on her perch, that wasn’t my fault, was it? and it’s not right of you to go on like that at me. Mrs. Dudley said you wasn’t to do it; she came and she talked to me, she did, and said she believed me, if nobody else didn’t.”
“She must have great faith,” remarked Bessie, meditatively. “If I had been here, Harry, I should have taken you down to the pond and given you a ducking on my own responsibility.”
“I shouldn’t have cared if you had drowned me, then,” retorted Harry. “There was not one of them would speak to me, and Alick would not let even Leonard come and say a word to me; and I was so miserable, I often thought of going out at night and throwing myself into the water, and that I knew would vex them all—only I was afraid of crossing the fields by myself in the dark;” and at the bare recollection of his fear and trouble, Harry began to whimper.
“If you had done that, you know,” said Bessie, coolly, “you would have been buried at the four cross-roads on the way to South Kemms, with a stake through your body.”
“I should not have minded what was done to me when once I was dead,” said Harry, philosophically.
“If you do not mind what you are about while you are living,” answered Bessie, “you will come to the gallows.”
“No more likely to come to the gallows than you, Miss Impudence, for all your red-and-white face and shiny hair, that you think so much of;” and Harry put out his tongue as far as he could thrust it at Bessie, who, without “more ado,” to appropriate an expression from Priscilla’s letter, walked round the table, and would have boxed the offender’s ears but that he disappeared from his chair and dived among the feet of the four Dudleys, one of whom, Cuthbert, was not slow about availing himself of the tempting opportunity thus offered.
“You’re a coward,” said the boy, reappearing on the other side with a very red face, and his hair all in a tangle, looking, as Laura said, like one of those things chimneys are swept with. “You’re a coward, to kick a man when he’s down. Come on, and fight it out.”
“You had better behave yourself, Harry,” answered Cuthbert, “or I will give you toko for yam,” which mysterious threat evidently conveyed some definite idea to Master Marsden’s mind, for he answered:—
“You could not, nor two like you.”
“Shall I try?” asked Cuthbert, rising; but Harry fled towards the door, and Agnes ended the quarrel by bringing the boy back to the table and seating him in his place, and warning both him and Cuthbert that they must not make a noise—that the doctor had said the house was to be kept as still and quiet as possible. “So, Harry,” continued his sister, “do be good for once in your life; finish your tea and go to bed.”
“Yes, that’s the way,” grumbled Harry, his mouth full of bread, and his lips smeary and sticky with honey—“that’s the way; finish, and go to bed; finish, and go into the garden; finish, and see what the men are doing; it is always go, go, go, from morning till night.”
“Will you be quiet, and let other people hear themselves talking?” said Bessie, sharply.
“There are not many that would care to hear you talk, at any rate,” retorted Master Marsden; “it is gab—gab—gab; bub—a bub—a bub—wherever you are, just like a meat-fly, or a wasp, or a mosquito.”
“I declare, Harry, I will write to your papa,” averred Bessie, solemnly.
“Write—who cares—and send somebody to read it, will you? We always call yours fat writing at home, and pa says if there was many hands like it, ink could not be made fast enough to supply people. Writing, do you call it? I could write as well with a paste-brush.”
“Are you going to be quiet, Harry, or are you not?” asked Bessie, taking a step towards him; “for, if you make another saucy speech, I will box your ears, as sure as my name is Bessie Ormson.”
“Who gave you that name?” mocked the boy; whereupon Bessie proved as good as her word, and, seizing him, was about to administer condign punishment, when Harry cried out—
“If you do—if you do—I’ll make a noise, and then Mrs. Dudley will come down to know what is the matter, and then I’ll tell her, and then she’ll be angry with you, for she said nobody was to speak crossly to me while I stayed in the house.”
“It is quite true,” Agnes said, in answer to Bessie’s look of inquiry. “She thought we were not kind to him, and scolded him about Lally; and in the middle of all her own trouble, of course, she had time to consider Harry. You see the result.”
“And pray, Harry, how long are you going to stay in the house?” inquired Bessie.
“As long as I like—as long as I find it convenient,” replied the boy; “but now, I tell you what; I am quiet mostly, not because I care a button for all their threats, but because I promised Mrs. Dudley I would—there now!”
“You are a curiosity,” remarked Bessie.
“Not so much of one as you are. I don’t wear frizzle-gigs of things in my hair; I don’t live in a steel cage; I don’t screw myself in round the waist and walk this way,” added Master Marsden, marching up and down the room in a style which he firmly believed to be an exact imitation of Bessie. “I don’t look from under my parasol—so! and make up my face when anybody is in the room I want to think well of me; I don’t wear kicking straps and dress improvers to make my petticoats stick out—like that;” and Master Marsden pulled out his knickerbockers to their fullest width, and treated society to another representation of Bessie “sailing across a room.”
If every one belonging to her had been dying at that moment, Bessie could not have refrained from laughing; and in this mirth her cousins joined.
“I suppose Harry thinks that is holding the mirror up to nature,” said Lucy Dudley, at length.
“No, Harry does not,” retorted the young gentleman; “he thinks it is holding the mirror up to art.”
“I am art, then, am I?” inquired Bessie; and Harry nodded assent.
“Well,” she said, “since it seems you have engaged this room for your performances, I will go upstairs and see Heather.”
“Had not I better go up first, and tell her?” suggested Agnes.
“Oh no,” answered Bessie; “good wine, you know, needs no bush;” and with that she left the apartment, and ascended to the sick chamber, at the threshold of which she paused for a moment irresolute.
The door stood wide open, and across the entrance was hung a curtain, so that the watchers could pass in and out noiselessly.
Lightly Bessie lifted this curtain, and looked in. On the bed lay Lally, quiet enough to have satisfied all Mrs. Ormson’s requirements—quiet enough and changed enough—a mere shadow of the Lally Bessie had scolded and teazed, and loved and petted in the glorious summer weather—a poor wasted little Lally—a Lally who was, as she herself said, “very bad indeed.”
And beside the bed sat Heather, looking so pale and worn that it might well have been supposed she also had passed through very grievous sickness. The blue-veined lids were closed over the weary, aching eyes, when Bessie first lifted the curtain; but she had scarcely time to glance at the child and her mother, before Heather, feeling there was some one standing in the doorway, awoke and recognised her visitor with a start of glad surprise.
Making a sign for Bessie not to make a noise, she rose and came across the room.
“I only heard this morning,” the girl whispered, “and I could not rest. How is she?”
“Better, I trust,” Heather answered. They were by this time in Bessie’s old apartment, which looked as though she had only left it about an hour previously. That was the beauty of the Hollow—any one could drop into his accustomed place there, even after long absence, in five minutes.
“Heather dear, you have suffered dreadfully.”
“Yes; but God has been very merciful,” Mrs. Dudley answered. “Oh! Bessie, if she had died without my seeing her, I could not have borne it; there is no use in saying I could, for my heart must have broken. She has been frightfully ill. She was so long in the water, and then lying in her wet clothes while they carried her here. It was this side of the pond, you know, Bessie; and though Mr. Scrotter’s house might have been nearer, still it could not have made much difference in her recovery, and it has made all the difference to me having her at home. Fortunately, there were good fires in the house, and plenty of hot water. If there had been any longer delay, we cannot tell how it might have turned out. The girls and Mrs. Piggott, Doctor Williams says, really saved her life; but I do not know—it seems to me everybody did what was possible. The worst of it was her being so long in the water, and so warm when she fell in—they had been racing, it appears; but if we can get her over this—and, please God, she will get over it—Doctor Williams assures me there is no reason why she should not be as strong as ever.”
“I have come down to help you nurse her,” said Bessie. “Now, don’t begin making objections, Heather, because I know every sentence you would speak, and all I intend to reply is, that I mean to do my share of the watching, or else let Agnes take it in turns with you, and I will try and see to things about the house—only I am resolved you shall not kill yourself. What will Arthur say when he comes home, and sees you looking like a ghost? I declare, if I met you in the dark you would frighten me. Now, you shall lie down on the sofa to-night, and I will sit beside Lally.”
“But you will be completely knocked up.”
“You do not know much about my constitution, evidently,” answered Bessie, smiling: and thus the difficult matter was arranged, and thus once again Bessie Ormson became an inmate of the Hollow, where Arthur arrived on the following day, greatly to Heather’s vexation; for she had tried to keep this trouble from him, not wishing, poor soul, to “spoil his holiday.”
But Agnes’ letter was so imperative, that the moment he read it he packed his portmanteau, asked his cousin to let him have the dog-cart as far as Foldam Station, and travelled by various circuitous routes from that out-of-the-world-place to Hertford, where he thanked Heaven when he exchanged the Eastern Counties line of rail for the Great Northern.
“That Copt Hall is the most cursed place in England to get either to or from,” he remarked to Bessie.
“I have heard some ignorant people remark that Berrie Down Hollow is not the most accessible spot on earth; and I know I thought it rather out of the way the other evening,” answered Miss Ormson.
“It is next door to everywhere in comparison to Copt Hall,” he replied.—“So you really think,” he went on to say, “there is no fear for Lally now—little monkey! Heather looks bad, though, does not she? I declare, Bessie, it was very kind indeed of you to come down, and I am greatly obliged to you for it.”
“Thank you, Arthur,” answered Bessie, demurely; “it is a happiness to know that my poor endeavours to give satisfaction have found favour in your eyes.” But although Miss Ormson replied to his gracious speech with so little appearance of astonishment, still she was secretly greatly surprised at the increased urbanity of his manners. “Arthur is growing like other people,” she said to Agnes Dudley. “Saul is coming among the Prophets. I wonder if the Protector Bread Company have had any share in effecting this great change; if so, success to it, say I; may its career be happy and glorious—may its dividends prove satisfactory, and my uncle grow more prosperous, and more like a Puffin than ever!” And then she returned to her watch beside Lally, who crept out of absolute danger, surely though slowly, and at length grew strong enough to sit up in bed, supported by pillows, and toss over scraps of coloured ribbons and bits of silk that Bessie would spread out over the coverlet for her.
After a minute or two, however, she would get weary of this game; the red and the blue would begin to dazzle her eyes; the little hands would grow too weak to toy among the bright trifles; the head would get tired with trying to raise itself over the edge of the sheet; and when all these things came to pass, Lally would drop the latest scrap of silk—heave a heavy sigh—look piteously at Bessie, and declare “Lally’s very bad aden.”
“No, you are not,” Bessie invariably answered; “you are scheming—you like being in bed this cold weather, and having nice things to eat, and being made much of; but wait a little. Some fine morning I will rout you up, and chase you about the lawn, and run you to earth in the Hollow. Won’t I; do you think I won’t?” and the lovely face was laid on the pillow beside the child, and Lally made nests for herself in Bessie’s hair, and was fain to fall asleep holding on by her pretty nurse’s gown, or sleeve, or collar.
“Oh Lor, Miss, ain’t she like wax-work!” remarked Priscilla Dobbin, the first time she beheld Lally sitting up on Miss Ormson’s lap—held in Miss Ormson’s arms.
“She is much more like bone-work to my mind,” answered Bessie, kissing the little white arms; “but we are going to feed her up, and send her to market next time her papa goes to London—are not we, Lally?”
And Lally, complaisant as ever, answered, while busily engaged in counting over the buttons on Bessie’s dress, “Iss.”