As I came slowly and softly up the aisle, I fancied Eleanor was kneeling, but a strange British shame of prayer made her start to her feet and kept me from kneeling also; though the peculiar peace and devout solemnity which seemed to be the very breath of that ancient House of God made me long to do something more expressive of my feelings than stand and stare.

There was no handsome church at Riflebury; the one the Bullers “attended” when we were at the seaside was new, and not beautiful. The one Miss Mulberry took us to was older, but uglier. I had never seen one of these old parish churches. This cathedral among the moors, with its massive masonry, its dark oak carving, its fragments of gorgeous glass, its ghostly hatchments and banners, and its aisles paved with the tombstones of the dead, was a new revelation.

I was silent awhile in very awe. I think it was a bird beginning to chirp in the roof which made me dare to speak, and then I whispered, “How quiet it is in here, and how cool!”

I had hardly uttered the words when a flash of lightning made me start and cry out. A heavy peal of thunder followed very quickly.

“Don’t be frightened, Margery dear,” said Eleanor; “we have very heavy storms here, and we had better go home. But I am so glad you admire our dear old church. There was one very hot Sunday last summer, when a thunderstorm came on during Evening Prayer. I was sitting in the choir, where I could see the storm through the south transept door, and the great stones in the transept arches. It was so cool in here, and all along I kept thinking of ‘a refuge from the storm, a shadow in the heat,’ and ‘a great rock in a weary land.’”

As we sat together at tea that evening, Eleanor went back to the subject of the church. I made some remark about the gravestones in the aisles, and she said, “Next time we go in, I want to show you one of them in the chancel.”

“Who is buried there?” I asked.

“My grandfather, he was vicar, you know, and my aunt, who was sixteen. (My father has got the white gloves and wreath that were hung in the church for her. They always used to do that for unmarried girls.) And my sister; my only sister—little Margaret.”

I could not say anything to poor Eleanor. I stroked her head softly and kissed it.

“One thing that made me take to you,” she went on, “was your name being Margaret. I used to think she might have been like you. I have so wished I had a sister. The boys are very dear, you know; but still boys think about themselves, of course, and their own affairs. One has more to run after them, you know. Not that any boys could be better than ours, but—anyway, Margery darling, I wish you weren’t here just on a visit, but were going to stop here always, and be my sister!”

“So do I!” I cried. “Oh! so very much, Eleanor!”

CHAPTER XXII.

When the day came we spent most of it in small preparations and useless restlessness. We filled all the flower vases in the drawing-room, put some of the choicest roses in Mrs. Arkwright’s bedroom, and made ourselves very hot in hanging a small union-jack which belonged to the boys out of our own window, which looked towards the high-road. Eleanor even went so far as to provoke a severe snub from the cook, by offering suggestions as to the food to be prepared for the travellers.

The dogs fully understood that something was impending, and wandered from room to room at our heels, sitting down to pant whenever we gave them a chance, and emptying the water jug in Mr. Arkwright’s dressing-room so often that we were obliged to shut the door when Keziah had once more filled the ewer.

About half-an-hour after the curfew bell had rung the cab came. The dogs were not shut up this time, and they, and we, and the Arkwrights met in a very confused and noisy greeting.

“God bless you, my dear!” I heard Mr. Arkwright say very affectionately, and he added almost in the same breath, “Do call off the dogs, my dear, or else take your mother’s beasts.”

I suppose Eleanor chose the latter alternative, for she did not call off the dogs, but she took away two or three tin cans with which Mr. Arkwright was laden, and which had made him look like a particularly respectable milkman.

“What are they?” she asked.

“Crassys,” said Mrs. Arkwright, with apparent triumph in her tone, “and Serpulæ, and two Chitons, and several other things.”

I thought of Uncle Buller’s “collection,” and was about to ask if the new “beasts” were insects, when Eleanor, after a doubtful glance into the cans, said, “Have you brought any fresh water?”

Mrs. Arkwright pointed triumphantly to a big stone-bottle cased in wickerwork, under which the cabman was staggering towards the door. It looked like spirits or vinegar, but was, as I discovered, seawater for the aquarium. With this I had already made acquaintance, having helped Eleanor to wipe the mouths of certain spotted sea anemones with a camel’s-hair brush every day since my arrival.

“The Crassys are much more beautiful,” she assured me, as we helped Mrs. Arkwright to find places for the new-comers. “We call them Crassys because their name is Crassicornis. I don’t believe they’ll live, though, they are so delicate.”

“I rather think it may be because being so big they get hurt in being taken off the rocks,” said Mrs. Arkwright, “and we were very careful with these.”

“I’m afraid the Serpulæ won’t live!” said Eleanor, gazing anxiously with puckered brows into the glass tank.

Mrs. Arkwright was about to reply, when the dogs burst into the room, and, after nearly upsetting both us and the aquarium, bounded out again.

“Dear boys!” cried Eleanor. And “Dear boys!” murmured Mrs. Arkwright from behind the magnifying glass, through which she was examining the “beasts.”

“I wonder what they’re running in and out for?” said I.

The reason proved to be that supper was ready, and the dogs wanted us to come into the dining-room. Mr. Arkwright announced it in more sedate fashion, and took me with him, leaving Eleanor and her mother to follow us.

“In three days more,” said Eleanor, as we sat down, “the boys will be here, and then we shall be quite happy.”

Eleanor and I were as much absorbed by the prospect of the boys’ arrival as we had been by the coming of her parents.

We made a “ruin” at the top of the little gardens, which did not quite fulfil our ideal when all was done, but we hoped that it would look better when the ivy was more luxuriant. We made all the beds look very tidy. The fourth bed was given to me.

“Now you are our sister!” Eleanor cried. “It seems to make it so real now you have got her bed.”

We thoroughly put in order the old nursery, which was now “the boys’ room,” a proceeding in which Growler and Pincher took great interest, jumping on and off the beds, and smelling everything as we set it out. Growler was Clement’s dog, I found, and Pincher belonged to Jack.

“They’ll come in a cab, because of the luggage,” said Eleanor, “and because we are never quite sure when they will come; so it’s no use sending to meet them. They often miss trains on purpose to stay somewhere on the road for fun. But I think they’ll come all right this time—I begged them to—and we’ll go and meet them in the donkey-carriage.”

The donkey-carriage was a pretty little thing on four wheels, with a seat in front and a seat behind, each capable of holding one small person. Eleanor had almost outgrown the front seat, but she managed to squeeze into it, and I climbed in behind. We had dressed Neddy’s head and our own hats liberally with roses, so that our festive appearance drew the notice of the villagers, more than one of whom, from their cottage-doors, asked if we were going to meet “the young gentlemen,” and added, “They’ll be rare and glad to get home, I reckon!”

Impatience had made us early, and we drove some little distance before espying the cab, which toiled uphill at much the same pace as the black snails crawled by the roadside. Eleanor drew up by the ditch, and we stood up and waved our handkerchiefs. In a moment two handkerchiefs were waving from the cab-windows. We shouted, and faint hoorays came back upon the breeze. Neddy pricked his ears, the dogs barked, and only the cabman remained unmoved, though we could see sticks and umbrellas poked at him from within, in the vain effort to induce him to hasten on.

At last we met. The boys tumbled out, one on each side, and a good deal of fragmentary luggage tumbled out after them. Clement seemed to be rather older than Eleanor, and Jack, I thought, a little younger than me.

“How d’ye do, Margery?” said Jack, shaking me warmly by the hand. “I’m awfully glad to hear the news about you; we shall be all square now, two and two, like a quadrille.”

“How do you do, Miss Vandaleur?” said Clement.

“Look here, Eleanor,” Jack broke in again; “I’ll drive Margery home in the donkey-carriage, and you can go with Clem in the cab. I wish you’d give me the wreath off your hat, too.”

Eleanor willingly agreed, the wreath was adjusted on Jack’s hat, and we were just taking our places, when he caught sight of the luggage that had fallen out on Clement’s side of the cab—some fishing-rods, a squirrel in a fish-basket, and a hat-box.

“Oh!” he screamed, “there’s my hat-box! Take the reins, Margery!” and he flew over the wheel, and returned, hat-box in hand.

“Is it a new hat?” I asked sympathizingly.

“A hat!” he scornfully exclaimed. “My hat’s loose in the cab somewhere, if it came at all; but all my beetles are in here, pinned to the sides. Would you mind taking it on your knee, to be safe?”

And having placed it there, he scrambled once more into the front seat, and we were about to start (the cab was waiting for us, the cabman looking on with a grim smile at Jack, whilst energetic Eleanor rearranged the luggage inside), when there came a second check.

“Have you got a pin?” Jack asked me.

“I’ll see,” said I; “what for?”

“To touch up Neddy with. We’re going home a rattler.”

But on my earnestly remonstrating against the pin, Jack contented himself with pointing a stick, which he assured me would “hurt much more.”

“Now, cabby!” he cried, “keep your crawler back till we’re well away. You’d better let us go first, or we might pass you on the road, and hurt the feelings of that spirited beast of yours. Do you like going fast, Margery?”

“As fast as you like,” said I.

I knew nothing whatever of horses and donkeys, or of what their poor legs could bear; but I very much liked passing swiftly through the air. I do not think Neddy suffered, however, though we went back at a pace marvellously different from that at which we came. We were very light weights, and Master Neddy was an overfed, underworked gentleman, with the acutest discrimination as to his drivers. Jack’s voice was quite enough; the stick was superfluous. When we came to the top of the steep hill leading down to the village, Jack asked me, “Shall we go down a rattler?”

“Oh, do!” said I.

“Hold on to the hat-box, then, and don’t tumble out.”

Down we went. The carriage swayed from side to side; I sat with my arms tightly clasped round the hat-box, and felt as if I were flying straight down on to the church-tower. It was delightful, but I noticed that Jack did not speak till we reached the foot of the hill. Then he said, “Well, that’s a blessing! I never thought we should get safe to the bottom.”

“Then why did you drive so fast?” I inquired.

“My dear Margery, there’s no drag on this carriage; and when I’d once given Neddy his head he couldn’t stop himself, no more could I. But he’s a plucky, sure-footed little beast; and I shall walk up this hill out of respect for him.”

I resolved to do the same, and clambered out, leaving the hat-box on the seat. I went up to Jack, who was patting Neddy’s neck, on which he stuck out his right arm, and said, “Link!”

“What?” said I.

“Link,” said Jack; and as he stuck out his elbow again in an unmistakable fashion, I took his arm.

“We call that linking, in these parts,” said Jack. “Good-evening, Mrs. Loxley. Good-evening, Peter. Thank you, thank you. I’m very glad to get home too—I should think not!” These sentences were replies to the warm greetings Jack received from the cottage-doors; the last to the remark, “You don’t find a many places to beat t’ould one, sir, I expect!”

“I’m very popular in the village,” said my eccentric companion, with a sigh, as we turned into the drive. “Though I say it that shouldn’t, you think? Well! Ita vita. Such is life’s half circle. Do you know Leadbetter? That’s the way he construed it.”

“I know you all talk in riddles,” said I.

“Well, never mind; you’ll know Leadbetter, and all the old books in the house by and by. Plenty of ’em, aren’t there? The governor had a curate once, when his throat was bad. He said it was an Entertaining Library of Useless Knowledge. I’ve brought home one more volume to add to it. Second prize for chemistry. Only three fellows went in for it; which you needn’t allude to at head-quarters;” and he sighed again.

As we passed slowly under the shadow of the heavy foliage, Jack, like Eleanor, put up his left arm to drag down a bunch of roses. They were further advanced now, and the shower of rose-leaves fell thickly like snowflakes over us—over Jack and me, and Neddy and the carriage, with the hat-box on the driving seat. We must have looked very queer, I think, as we came up out of the overshadowed road, like dwarfs out of a fairy tale, covered with flowers, and leading our carriage with its odd occupant inside.

Keziah, who had been counting the days to the holidays, ran down first to meet us, beaming with pleasure; though when Jack, in the futile attempt to play leap-frog with her against her will, damaged her cap, and clung to her neck till I thought she would have been throttled, she indignantly declared that, “Now the young gentlemen was home there was an end of peace for everybody, choose who they might be.”

CHAPTER XXIII.

My sympathy was real, as well as ready, when the Major discovered a new insect, almost invisible by the naked eye, which thenceforward bore the terrible specific name of Bulleriana, suggesting a creature certainly not less than a rhinoceros, and surrounding the Major’s name with something of the halo of immortality. He was equally glad to hear of Jack’s beetles and of my fresh-water shells. I had taken to the latter as being “the only things not yet collected by somebody or other in the house;” and I became so infatuated in the pursuit that I used to get up at four o’clock in the morning to search the damp places and water-herbage by the river, it being emphatically “the early bird who catches” snails. After his great discovery, the Major constantly asked if I had found a specimen of Helix Vandaleuriana yet. It was a joke between us—that new shell that I was to discover!

I have an old letter open by me now, in which, writing of the Arkwrights, he says, “Your dear father’s daughter could have no better home.” And, as I read, my father’s last hours come back before me, and I hear the poor faint voice whispering, “You’ve got the papers, Buller? Arkwright will be kind about it, I’m sure.” And, “It’s all dark now.” And with tears I wonder if he—with whom it is all light now—knows how well his true friends have dealt by me, and how happy I am.

To be busy is certainly half-way to being happy. And yet it is not so with every kind of labour. Some occupations, however, do seem of themselves to be peace-bringing; I mean, to be so independent of the great good of being occupied at all. Gardening, sketching, and natural history pursuits, for instance. Is it partly because one follows them in the open air, in great measure?—fresh air, that mysteriously mighty power for good! Anodyne, as well as tonic; dispeller of fever when other remedies are powerless; and the best accredited recipe for long life. Only partly, I think.

One secret of the happiness of some occupations is, perhaps, that they lift one away from petty cares and petty spites, without trying the brain or strength unduly, as some other kinds of mental labour must do. And how delightful is fellowship in such interests! What rivalries without bitterness; what gossip without scandal; what gifts and exchanges; what common interests and mutual sympathy!

In such happy business the holidays went by. Then the question arose, Were we to go back to school? Very earnestly we hoped not; and I think the Arkwrights soon resolved not to send Eleanor away again. As to me, the case was different. Mr. Arkwright felt that he must do what was best for my education: and he wrote to consult with Major Buller.

Fortunately for Eleanor and me, the Major was now as much prejudiced against girls’ schools as he had been against governesses; and as masters were to be had at the nearest town, a home education was decided upon. It met with the approval of such of my relatives as were consulted—my great-grandmother especially—and it certainly met with mine.

Eleanor and I were very anxious to show that idleness was not our object in avoiding Bush House. The one of my diaries that escaped burning has, on the fly-leaf, one of the many “lesson plans” we made for ourselves.

We used to get up at six o’clock, and work before breakfast. Certain morning headaches, to which at this time I became subject, led to a serious difference of opinion between me and Mrs. Arkwright; she forbidding me to get up, and I holding myself to be much aggrieved, and imputing the headaches to anything rather than what Keziah briefly termed “book-larning upon an empty stomach.” The matter was compromised, thanks to Keziah, by that good creature’s offering to bring me new milk and bread-and-butter every morning before I began to work. She really brought it before I dressed, and my headaches vanished.

Though we did not wish to go back to Bush House, we were not quite unmindful of our friends there. Eleanor wrote to thank Madame for the flowers, and received a long and enthusiastic letter in reply—in French, of course, and pointing out one or two blunders in Eleanor’s letter, which was in French also. She begged Eleanor to continue to correspond with her, for the improvement of her “composition.”

Poor Madame! She was indeed an indefatigable teacher, and had a real ambition for the success of her pupils, which, in the drudgery of her life, was almost grand.

Strange to say, she once came to the Vicarage. It was during the summer succeeding that in which I came to live with the Arkwrights. She had been in the habit of spending the holidays with a family in the country, where, I believe, she gave some instruction in French and music in return for her expenses. That summer she was out of health, and thinking herself unable to fulfil her part of the bargain, she would not go. After severe struggles with her sensitive scruples, she was persuaded to come to us instead, on the distinct condition that she was to do nothing in the way of “lessons,” but talk French with us.

To persuade her to accept any payment for her services was the subject of another long struggle. The thriftiest of women in her personal expenditure, and needing money sorely, Madame was not grasping. Indeed, her scruples on this subject were troublesome. She was for ever pursuing us, book in hand, and with a sun-veil and umbrella to shield her complexion, into the garden or the hayfield, imploring us to come in out of the wind and sun, and do “a little of dictation—of composition,” or even to permit her to hear us play that duet from the ‘Semiramide,’ of which the time had seemed to her on the last occasion far from perfect.

Her despair when Mrs. Arkwright supported our refusals was comical, and she was only pacified at last by having the “scrap-bag” of odds and ends of net, muslin, lace, and embroidery handed over to her, from which she made us set after set of dainty collars and sleeves in various “modes,” sitting well under the shade of the trees, on a camp-stool, with a camphor-bag to keep away insects, and in bodily fear of the dogs.

Poor Madame! I thought she would have had a fit on the first night of her arrival, when the customary civility was paid of offering her a dog to sleep on her bed. She never got really accustomed to them, and they never seemed quite to understand her. To the end of her stay they snuffed at her black skirts suspiciously, as if she were still more or less of an enigma to them. Madame was markedly civil to them, and even addressed them from time to time as “bons enfants,” in imitation of our phrase “dear boys”; but more frequently, in watching the terms on which they lived with the family, she would throw up her little brown hands and exclaim, “Ménage extraordinaire!”

I am sure she thought us a strange household in more ways than one, but I think she grew fond of us. For Eleanor she had always had a liking; about Eleanor’s mother she became rhapsodical.

“How good!” so she cried to me, “and how truthful—how altogether truthful! What talents also, my faith! Miss Arkwright has had great advantages. A mother extraordinary!”

Mrs. Arkwright had many discussions with Madame on political subjects, and also on the education of girls. On the latter their views were so essentially different, that the discussion was apt to wax hot. Madame came at last to allow that for English girls Madame Arkwright’s views might be just, but pour les filles françaises—she held to her own opinions.

With the boys she got on very well. At first they laughed at her; then Clement became polite, and even learned to speak French with her after a fashion. Jack was not only ignorant of French, but his English was so mixed with school-boy idioms, that Madame and he seldom got through a conversation without wonderful complications, from which, however, Jack’s expressive countenance and ready wit generally delivered them in the long run. I do not know whether, on the whole, Madame did not like Mr. Arkwright best of all. Le bon pasteur, as she styled him.

“The Furrin Lady,” as she was called in the village, was very fond of looking into the cottages, and studying the ways of the country generally.

I never shall forget the occurrence of the yearly village fair or feast during her visit: her anxiety to be present—her remarkable costume on the occasion—and the strong conviction borne in upon Eleanor and me that the Fat Lady in the centre booth was quite a secondary attraction to the Furrin Lady between us, with the raw lads and stolid farmers who had come down from the hills, with their wise sheep-dogs at their heels. If they stared at her, however, Madame was not unobservant of them, and the critical power was on her side.

“These men and their dogs seem to me alike,” said she. “Both of them—they stare so much and say so little. But the looks of the dogs are altogether the more spirituels,” she added.

I should not like to record all that she said on the subject of our village feast. It was not complimentary, and to some extent the bitter general observations on our national amusements into which her disappointment betrayed her were justified by facts. But it was not our fault that, in translating village feast into fête de village, she had allowed her imagination to mislead her with false hopes. She had expected a maypole, a dance of peasants, gay dresses, smiling faces, songs, fruit, coffee, flowers, and tasteful but cheap wares of small kinds in picturesque booths. She had adorned herself, and Eleanor and me, with collars and cuffs of elaborate make and exquisite “get-up” by her own hands. She wore a pale pink and a dead scarlet geranium, together with a spray of wistaria leaf, in admirable taste, on her dark dress. Her hat was marvellous; her gloves were perfect. She had a few shillings in her pocket to purchase souvenirs for the household; her face beamed in anticipation of a day of simple, sociable, uncostly pleasure, such as we English are so lamentably ignorant of. But I think the only English thing she had prepared herself to expect was what she called “The Briteesh hooray.”

Dirt, clamour, oyster-shells, ginger-beer bottles, stolid curiosity, beery satisfaction, careworn stall-keepers with babies-in-arms and strange trust about their wares and honesty over change; giddy-go-rounds, photograph booths, marionettes, the fat woman, the double-headed monstrosity, and the teeming beer-houses——

Poor Madame! The contrast was terrible. She would not enter a booth. She turned homewards in a rage of vexation, and shut herself up in her bedroom (I suspect with tears of annoyance and disappointment), whilst Eleanor and I went back into the feast, and were photographed with dear boys and Clement.

Clement was getting towards an age when clever youngsters are not unapt to exercise their talents in depreciating home surroundings. He said that it was no wonder that Madame was disgusted, and scolded us for taking her into the feast. Jack took quite a different view of the matter.

“The feast’s very good fun in its way,” said he; “and Madame only wants tackling. I’ll tackle her.”

“Nonsense!” said Clement.

“I bet you a shilling I take her through every mortal thing this afternoon,” said Jack.

“You’ve cheek enough,” retorted his elder brother.

But after luncheon, when Madame was again in her room, Jack came to me with a nosegay he had gathered, to beg me to arrange it properly, and put a paper frill round it. With some grass and fern-leaves, I made a tasteful bouquet, and added a frill, to Jack’s entire satisfaction. He took it up-stairs, and we heard him knock at Madame’s door. After a pause (“I’m sure she’s crying again!” said Eleanor) Madame came out, and a warm discussion began between them, of which we only heard fragments. Madame’s voice, as the shrillest, was most audible, and it rose into distinctness as she exclaimed, “Anything sŏh dirrty, sŏh meean, sŏh folgaire, I nevaire saw.”

Again the discussion proceeded, and we only caught a few of Jack’s arguments about “customs of the country,” “for the fun of it,” etc.

“Fun?” said Madame.

“For a joke,” said Jack.

“Ah, c’est vrai, for the choke,” she said.

“And avec moi,” Jack continued. “There’s French for you, Madame! Come along!”

Madame laughed.

“She’ll go,” said Eleanor.

“Eh bien!” Madame cried gaily. “For the choke. Avec vous, Monsieur Jack. Ha! ha! Allons! Come along!”

“Link, Madame,” said Jack, as they came down-stairs, Madame smarter than ever, and bouquet in hand.

“Mais link? What is this?” said she.

“Take my arm,” said Jack. “I’ll treat you to everything.”

“Mais treat? What is that?” said Madame, whose beaming good-humour only expanded the more when Jack explained that it was a pecuniary attention shown by rustic swains to their “young women.”

As Clement came into the hall he met Madame hanging on Jack’s arm, and absolutely radiant.

“You’re not going into that beastly place again?” said he.

“For the choke, Monsieur Clement. Ah, oui! And with Monsieur Jack.”

“You may as well come, Clem,” said Eleanor, and we followed, laughing.

Madame had now no time for discontent. Jack held her fast. He gave her gingerbread at one stall, and gingerbeer at another, and cracked nuts for her all along. He vowed that the oyster-shells were flowers, and the empty bottles bouquet-holders, and offered to buy her a pair of spectacles to see matters more clearly with.

“Couleur de rose?” laughed Madame.

We went in a body to the marionettes, and Madame screamed as we climbed the inclined plane to enter, and scrambled down the frail scaffolding to the “reserved seats.” These cost twopence a head, and were “reserved” for us alone. The dolls were really cleverly managed. They performed the closing scenes of a pantomime. The policeman came to pieces when clown and harlequin pulled at him. People threw their heads at each other, and shook their arms off. The transformation scene was really pretty, and it only added to the joke that the dirty old proprietor burned the red light under our very noses, amid a storm of chaff from Jack.

From the marionettes we went to the fat woman. A loathsome sight, which turned me sick; but, for some inexplicable reason, seemed highly to gratify Madame. She and Jack came out in fits of laughter, and he said, “Now for the two-headed monstrosity. It’ll just suit you, Madame!”

At the door, Madame paused. “Mais, ce n’est pas pour des petites filles,” she said, glancing at Eleanor and me.

“Feel?” said Jack, who was struggling through the crowd, which was dense here. “It feels nothing. It’s in a bottle. Come along!”

“All right, Madame,” said Eleanor, smiling. “We’ll wait for you outside.”

We next proceeded to the photographer’s, where Jack and Madame were photographed together with Pincher.

By Madame’s desire she was now led to the “bazaar,” where she bought a collar for Pincher, two charming china boxes, in the shape of dogs’ heads, for Eleanor and her mother, a fan for me, a walking-stick for Monsieur le Pasteur, and some fishing-floats for Clement. By this time some children had gathered round us. The children of the district were especially handsome, and Madame was much smitten by their rosy cheeks and many-shaded flaxen hair.

“Ah!” she sighed, “I must make some little presents to the children;” and she looked anxiously over the stalls.

“Violin, one and six,” said the saleswoman. “Nice work-box for a little girl, half-a-crown.”

“Half a fiddlestick,” said Jack promptly. “What have you got for a halfpenny?”

“Them’s halfpenny balls, whips, and dolls. Them churns and mugs is a halfpenny; and so’s the little tin plates. Them’s the halfpenny monkeys on sticks.”

“Now, Madame,” said Jack, “put that half-crown back, and give me a shilling. Twenty-two, twenty-three, twenty-four. There are your presents; and now for the children!”

Madame showed a decided disposition to reward personal beauty, which Jack overruled at once.

“The prettiest? I see myself letting you! Church Sunday scholars is my tip; and I shall put them through the Catechism test. Look here, young un, what’s your name? Who gave you this name?”

“Ma godfeythers and godmoothers,” the young urchin began.

“That’ll do,” said Jack. “Take your whip, and be thankful. Now, my little lass, who gave you this name?”

“Me godfeythers——”

“All right. Take your doll, and drop a curtsy; and mind you don’t take the curtsy, and drop your doll. Now, my boy, tell me how many there be?”

“Ten.”

“Which be they? I mean, take your monkey, and make your bow. Next child, come up.”

Clem, Eleanor, and I kept back the crowd as well as we could; but children pressed in on all sides. Clem brought a shilling out of his pocket, and handed it over to Jack.

“You’ve won your bet, old man,” he said.

“You’re a good fellow, Clem. I say, lay it out among the halfpenny lot—will you?—and then give them to Madame. Keep your eye open for Dissenters, and send the Church children first.”

The forty-eight halfpennyworths proved to be sufficient for all, however, though the orthodoxy of one or two seemed doubtful.

Madame was tired; but the position had pleased her, and she gave away the toys with a charming grace. We were leaving the fair when some small urchins, who had either got or hoped to get presents, and were (I suspected) partly impelled also by a sense of the striking nature of Madame’s appearance, set up a lusty cheer.

Madame paused. Her eyes brightened; her thin lips parted with a smile. In a voice of intense satisfaction, she murmured:

“It is the Briteesh hooray!”

CHAPTER XXIV.

We kept their gardens tidy, preserved their collections from dust, damp, and Keziah, and knitted socks for them. I learned to knit, of course. Every woman knits in that village of stone. And “between lights” Eleanor and I plied our needles on the boys’ behalf, and counted the days to the holidays.

We had fresh “fads” every holidays. Many of our plans were ambitious enough, and the results would, no doubt, have been great had they been fully carried out. But Midsummer holidays, though long, are limited in length.

Once we made ourselves into a Field Naturalists’ Club. We girls gave up our “spare dress wardrobe” for a museum. We subdivided the shelves, and proposed to make a perfect collection of the flora and entomology of the neighbourhood. Eleanor and I really did continue to add specimens whilst the boys were at school; but they came home at Christmas devoted, body and soul, to the drama. We were soon converted to the new fad. The wardrobe became a side-scene in our theatre, and Eleanor and Clement laboured day and night with papers of powdered paint, and kettles of hot size, in converting canvas into scenery. “Theatricals” promised to be a lasting fancy; but the next holidays were in fine weather, and we made the drop-curtain into a tent.

When the boys were at school, Eleanor and I were fully occupied. We took a good deal of pains with our room: half of it was mine now. I had my knick-knack table as well as Eleanor, my own books and pictures, my own photographs of the boys and of the dear boys, my own pot plants, and my own dog—a pug, given to me by Jack, and named “Saucebox.” In Jack’s absence, Pincher also looked on me as his mistress.

Like most other conscientious girls, we had rules and regulations of our own devising: private codes, generally kept in cipher, for our own personal self-discipline, and laws common to us both for the employment of our time in joint duties—lessons, parish work, and so forth. I think we made rather too many rules, and that we re-made them too often. I make fewer now, and easier ones, and let them much more alone. I wonder if I really keep them better? But if not, may God, I pray Him, send me back the restless zeal, the hunger and thirst after righteousness, which He gives in early youth! It is so easy to become more thick-skinned in conscience, more tolerant of evil, more hopeless of good, more careful of one’s own comfort and one’s own property, more self-satisfied in leaving high aims and great deeds to enthusiasts, and then to believe that one is growing older and wiser. And yet those high examples, those good works, those great triumphs over evil, which single hands effect sometimes, we are all grateful for, when they are done, whatever we may have said of the doing. But we speak of saints and enthusiasts for good, as if some special gifts were made to them in middle age which are withheld from other men. Is it not rather that some few souls keep alive the lamp of zeal and high desire which God lights for most of us while life is young?

Eleanor and I worked at our lessons by ourselves. We always had her mother to “fall back upon,” as we said. When we took up the study of Italian in order to be able to read Dante—moved thereto by the attractions of the long volume of Flaxman’s illustrations of the ‘Divina Commedia’—we had to “fall back” a good deal on Mrs. Arkwright’s scholarship. And this in spite of all the helps the library afforded us, the best of dictionaries, English “cribs,” and about six of those elaborate commentaries upon the poem, of which Italians have been so prolific.

During the winter the study of languages was commonly uppermost; in summer sketching was more favoured.

I do think sketching brings one a larger amount of pleasure than almost any other occupation. And like “collecting,” it is a very sociable pursuit when one has fellow-sketchers as well as fellow-naturalists. And this, I must confess, is a merit in my eyes, I being of a sociable disposition! Eleanor could live alone, I think, and be happy; but I depend largely on my fellow-creatures.

Jack and I were talking rather sentimentally the other day about “old times,” and I said:

“How jolly it was, that summer we used to sketch so much—all four of us together!”

And Jack, who was rubbing some new stuff of his own compounding into his fishing-boots, replied:

“Awfully. I vote we take to it again when the weather’s warmer.”

But Jack is so sympathetic, he will agree with anything one says. Indeed, I am sure that he feels what one feels—for the time, at any rate.

Clement is very different. He always disputes and often snubs what one says; partly, I am sure, from a love of truth—a genuine desire to keep himself and everybody else from talking in an unreal way, and from repeating common ideas without thinking them out at first hand; and partly, too, from what Keziah calls the “contradictiousness” of his temper. He was in the room when Jack and I were talking, but he was not talking with us. He was reading for his examination.

All the Arkwrights can work through noise and in company, having considerable powers of mental abstraction. I think they even sometimes combine attention to their own work with an occasional skimming of the topics current in the room as well.

Some outlying feeler of Clement’s brain caught my remark and Jack’s reply.

“My dear Margery,” said he, “you are at heart one of the most unaffected people I know. Pray be equally genuine with your head, and do not encourage Jack in his slipshod habits of thought and conversation by——”

“Slipshod!” interrupted Jack, holding his left arm out at full length before him, the hand of which was shod with a fishing-boot. “Slipshod! They fit as close as your convictions, and would be as stiff and inexorable as logic if I didn’t soften them with this newly-invented and about-to-be-patented ointment by the warmth of a cheerful fire and Margery’s beaming countenance.”

Clement had been reading during this sentence. Then he lifted his head, and said pointedly:

“What I was going to advise you, Margery, is never to get into the habit of adopting sentiments till you are quite sure you really mean them. It is by the painful experience of my own folly that I know what trouble it gives one afterwards. If ever the time comes when you want to know your real opinion on any subject, the process of getting rid of ideas you have adopted without meaning them will not be an easy one.”

I am not as intellectual as the Arkwrights. I can always see through Jack’s jokes, but I am sometimes left far behind when Eleanor or Clement “take flight,” as Jack calls it, on serious subjects. I really did not follow Clement on this occasion.

With some hesitation I said:

“I don’t know that I quite understand.”

“I’m sure you don’t,” said Jack. “I have feared for some time that your hair was getting too thick for the finer ideas of this household to penetrate to your brain. Allow me to apply a little of this ointment to the parting, which in your case is more definite than with Eleanor; and as our lightest actions should proceed from principles, I may mention that the principle on which I propose to apply the Leather-softener to your scalp is that on which the blacksmith’s wife gave your cholera medicine to the second girl, when she began with rheumatic fever—‘it did such a deal of good to our William.’ Now, this unguent has done ‘a deal of good’ to the leather of my boots. Why should it not successfully lubricate the skin of your skull?”

Only the dread of “a row” between Jack and Clem enabled me to keep anything like gravity.

“Don’t talk nonsense, Jack!” said I, as severely as I could. (I fear that, like the rest of the world, I snubbed Jack rather than Clement, because his temper was sweeter, and less likely to resent it.) “Clement, I’m very stupid, but I don’t quite see how what you said applies to what I said.”

“You said, ‘How happy we were, that summer we went sketching!’ or words to that effect. It’s just like a man’s writing about the careless happiness of childhood, when he either forgets, or refuses to advert to, the toothache, the measles, learning his letters, the heat of the night-nursery, not being allowed to sit down in the yard whilst his knickerbockers were new, going to bed at eight o’clock, and having a lie on his conscience. I have striven for more accurate habits of thought, and I remember distinctly that you cried over more than one of your sketches.”

“I got into the ‘Household Album’ with mine, however,” said Jack; “and I defy an A.R.A. to have had more difficulty in securing his position.”

“I’m afraid your appearance in the Phycological Quarterly was better deserved,” said Mrs. Arkwright, without removing her eye from the microscope she was using at a table just opposite to Clem’s.

But this demands explanation, and I must go back to the time of which Jack and I spoke—when we used to go sketching together.

CHAPTER XXV.

It was during a long drive, in which we were exhibiting the country to some friends, that Eleanor and I chose the place of that particular sketching expedition. The views it furnished had the first, and almost the only, quality demanded by young and tyro sketchers—they were very pretty.

There was some variety, too, to justify our choice. From the sandy road, where a heathery bank afforded the convenience of seats, we could look down into a valley with a winding stream, whose banks rose into hillsides which lost themselves in finely-coloured mountains of moorland.

Farther on, a scramble on foot over walls and gates had led us into a wooded gorge fringed with ferns, where a group of trees of particularly graceful form roused Eleanor’s admiration.

“What a lovely view!” had burst from the lips of our friends at every quarter of a mile; for they were of that (to me) trying order of carriage companions who talk about the scenery as you go, as a point of politeness.

But the views were beautiful—“Sketches everywhere!” we cried.

“There’s nothing to make a sketch of round the Vicarage,” we added. “We’ve done the church, with the Deadmanstone Hills behind it, and without the Deadmanstone Hills behind it, till we are sick of the subject.”

So, the weather being fine, and even hot, we provided ourselves with luncheon and sketching materials, and made an expedition to the point we had selected.

We were tired by the time we reached it. This does not necessarily damp one’s sketching ardour, but it is unfavourable to accuracy of outline, and especially so to purity of colouring. However, we did not hesitate. Eleanor went down to her study of birch-trees in the gorge, Clement climbed up the bank to get the most extended view of the Ewden Valley; I contented myself with sitting by the roadside in front of the same view, and Jack stayed with me.

He had come with us. Not that he often went out sketching, but our descriptions of the beauty of the scenery had roused him to make another attempt for the “Household Album.” Seldom lastingly provided, for his own part, with apparatus of any kind, Jack had a genius for purveying all that he required in an emergency. On this occasion he had borrowed Mrs. Arkwright’s paint-box (without leave), and was by no means ill supplied with pencils and brushes which certainly were not his own. He had hastily stripped a couple of sheets from my block whilst I was dressing, and with these materials he seated himself on that side of me which enabled him to dip into my water-pot, and began to paint.

Not half-way through my outline, I was just beginning to realize the complexities of a bird’s-eye view with your middle distance in a valley, and your foreground sloping steeply upwards to your feet, when Jack, washing out a large, dyed sable sky-brush in my pot, with an amount of splashing that savoured of triumph, said:

“That’s done!”

I paused in a vigorous mental effort to put aside my knowledge of the relative sizes of objects, and to see that a top stone of my foreground wall covered three fields, the river, and half the river’s bank beyond.

“Done?” I exclaimed. Jack put his brush into his mouth, in defiance of all rules, and deliberately sucked it dry. Then he waved his sketch before my eyes.

“The effect’s rather good,” I confessed, “but oh, Jack, it’s out of all proportion! That gate really looks as big as the whole valley and the hills beyond. The top of the gate-post ought to be up in the sky.”

“It would look beastly ugly if it was,” replied he complacently.

“You’ve got a very good tint for those hills; but the foreground is mere scrambling. Oh, Jack, do finish it a little more! You would draw so nicely if you had any patience.”

“How imperfectly you understand my character,” said Jack, packing up his traps. “I would sit on a monument and smile at grief with any one, this very day, if the monument were in a grove, or even if I had an umbrella to smile under. To sit unsheltered under this roasting sun, and make myself giddy by gauging proportions with a pencil at the end of my nose, or smudging my mistakes with melting india-rubber, is quite another matter. I’m off to Eleanor. I’ve got another sheet of paper, and I think trees are rather in my line.”

“I thought my block looked smaller,” said I, rapidly comparing Jack’s paper and my own, with a feeling for size developed by my labours.

“Has she got a water-pot?” asked Jack.

“She is sure to have,” said I pointedly. “She always takes her own materials with her.”

“How fortunate for those who do not!” said Jack. “Now, Margery dear, don’t look sulky. I knew you wouldn’t grudge me a bit of paper to get into the ‘Household Album’ with. Come down into the ravine. You’re as white as a blank sheet of Whatman’s hot-pressed water-colour paper!”

The increasing heat was really beginning to overpower me, but I refused to leave my sketch. Jack pinned a large white pocket-handkerchief to my shoulders—“to keep the sun from the spine”—and departed to the ravine.

By midday my outline was in. One is no good judge of one’s own work, but I think, on the whole, that it was a success.

It is always refreshing to complete a stage of anything. I began to feel less hot and tired, as I passed a wash of clean water over my outline, and laying it in the sun to dry, got out my colours and brushes.

As I did so, one of the little gusts of wind which had been an unpleasant feature of this very fine day, and which, threatening a change of weather, made us anxious to finish our sketches at a sitting, came down the sandy road. In an instant the damp surface of my block looked rough enough to strike matches on. But impatience is not my besetting sin, and I had endured these little catastrophes before. I waited for the block to dry before I brushed off the sand. I also waited till the little beetle, who had crept into my sky, and was impeded in his pace by my first wash, walked slowly down through all my distances, and quitted the block by the gate in the foreground. This was partly because I did not want to hurt him, and partly because a white cumulus cloud is a bad part of your sketch to kill a black beetle on.

I washed over my paper once more, and holding it on my knee to dry just as much and no more than was desirable, I looked my subject in the face with a view to colour.

A long time passed. I had looked and looked again; I had washed in and washed out; I had realized the difficulty of the subject without flinching, and had tried hard to see and represent the colouring before me, when Clement (having exhausted his water in a similar process) came down the hill behind me, with a surly and sunburnt face, to replenish his bottle at a wayside water-trough.

It was then that, as he said, he found me crying.

“It’s not because it’s difficult and I’m very stupid,” I whimpered. “I don’t mind working on and trying to make the best of a thing. And it’s not the wind or the sand, though it has got dreadfully into the paints, particularly the Italian Pink; but what makes me hopeless, Clement, is that I don’t believe it would look well if I could paint it perfectly. It looked lovely as we were driving home the other evening, but now—— Just look at those fields, Clem; I know they’re green, but really and truly I see them just the same colour as this road, and I don’t think there is the difference of a shade between them and that gate-post. What shall I do?”

A tear fell out of my eyelashes and dropped on to my river. Clement took the sketch from me, and dried up the tear with a bit of blotting-paper.

Then to my amazement he gave rather a favourable verdict. It comforted me, for Clement never says anything that he does not mean.

“It’s not half bad, Margery! Wait till you see mine! How did you get the tints of that hillside? You’ve a very truthful mind, that’s one thing, and a very true eye as well. I do admire the way you abstain from filling up with touches that mean nothing.”

“Oh, Clement!” cried I, so gratified that I began to feel ready to go on again. “Do you really think I can make anything of it?”

“Nothing more,” said Clement. “Don’t put another touch. It’s unfinished, but no finishing would do any good. We’ve got an outlandish subject and a bad time of day. But keep it just as it is, and three months hence, on a cool day, you’ll be pleased when you look at it.”

“Perhaps if I went on a little with the foreground,” I suggested; but even as I spoke, I put my hand to my head.

“Go to Eleanor in the ravine, at once,” said Clement imperatively. “I’ll bring your things. What did make us such fools as to come out without umbrellas?”

“We came out in the cool of the morning,” said I, as I staggered off; “besides, it’s almost impossible to hold one and paint too.”

Once in the ravine, I dropped among the long grass and ferns, and the damp, refreshing coolness of my resting-place was delicious.

Eleanor was not faint, neither had she been crying; but she was not much happier with her sketch than I had been with mine. The jutting group of birch-trees was well chosen, and she had drawn them admirably. But when she came to add the confused background of trees and undergrowth, her very outline had begun to look less satisfactory. When it came to colour—and the midday sun was darting and glittering through the interstices of the trees, without supplying any effects of chiaroscuro to a subject already defective in point and contrast—Eleanor was almost in despair.

“Where’s Jack?” said I, after condoling with her.

“He tried the birches for ten minutes, and then he went up the stream to look for algæ.”

At this moment Jack appeared. He came slowly towards us, looking at something in his hand.

“Lend me your magnifying-glass, Eleanor,” said he, when he had reached us.

Eleanor unfastened it from her chatelaine, and Jack became absorbed in examining some water-weed in a dock-leaf.

“What is it?” said we.

“It’s a new species, I believe. Look, Eleanor!” and he gave her the leaf and the glass with an almost pathetic anxiety of countenance.

My opinion carried no weight in the matter, but Eleanor was nearly as good a naturalist as her mother. And she was inclined to agree with Jack.

“It’s too good to be true! But I certainly don’t know it. Where did you find it?”

“No, thank you,” said Jack derisively. “I mean to keep the habitat to myself for the present. For a very good reason. Margery, my child, put that sketch of mine into the pocket of your block. (The paper is much about the size of your own!) It is going into the ‘Household Album.’”

We went home earlier than we had intended. Even the perseverance of Eleanor and Clement broke down under their ill-success. Jack was the only well-satisfied one of the party, and, with his usual good-nature, he tried hard to infect me with his cheerfulness.

“I think,” said I, looking dolefully at my sketch, “that a good deal of the fault must have been in my eyes. I suspect one can’t see colours properly when one is feeling sick and giddy. But the glare of the sun was the worst. I couldn’t tell red from green on my palette, so no wonder the fields and everything else looked all the same colour. And yet what provokes one is the feeling that an artist would have made a sketch of it somehow. The view is really beautiful.”

“And that is really beautiful,” said Eleanor, pointing to the birch group and its background. “And what a mess I have made of it! I wish I’d stuck to pencil. And yet, as you say, an artist would have got a picture out of it.”

“I’ll tell you what,” said Jack, who was lying face downwards with my picture spread before him, “I believe that any one who knew the dodges, when he saw that everything looked one pale, yellowish, brownish tint with the glare of the sun, would have boldly taken a weak wash of all the drab-looking colours in his box right over everything, picked out a few stones in his foreground wall, dodged in a few shadows and so on, and made a clever sketch of it. And the same with Eleanor’s. If he had got his birch-trees half as good as hers, and had then seen what a muddle the trees behind were in, I believe he would only have washed in a little blue and grey behind the birches, ‘indicated’ (as our old drawing-master at school calls it) a distant stem or two—and there would have been another clever sketch for you!”

“Another clever falsehood, you mean,” said Clement hotly, “to ruin people’s taste, and encourage idle painters in showy trickery, and make them believe they can improve upon Nature’s colouring.”

“Nature’s colouring varies,” said Jack. “Distant trees often are blue and grey, though these, just now, are of the rankest green.”

Clement replied, Jack responded, Clement retorted, and a fierce art-discussion raged the whole way home.

We were well used to it. Indeed all conversations with us had a tendency to become controversial. Over and above which there was truth in Keziah’s saying, “The young gentlemen argle-bargles fit to deave a body’s head; and dear knows what it’s all about.”

Clement finished a vehement and rather didactic confession of his art-faith as we climbed the steep hill to the Vicarage. The keynote of it was that one ought to draw what he sees, exactly as he sees it; and that every subject has a beauty of its own which he ought to perceive if his perception is not “emasculated by an acquired taste for prettinesses.”

“I shall be in the ‘Household Album’ this evening,” said Jack, in deliberate tones. “My next ambition is the Society of Painters in Water Colours. The subject of my first painting is settled. Three grass fields (haymaking over the day before yesterday). A wall in front of the first field, a hedge in front of the second, a wall in front of the third. A gate in the middle of the wall. A spotted pig in the middle of the field. The sun at its meridian; the pig asleep. Motto, ‘Whatever is, is beautiful.’”

Eleanor and I (in the interests of peace) hastened to change the subject by ridiculing Jack’s complacent conviction that his sketch would be accepted for the “Household Album.”

And yet it was.

The fresh-water alga Jack had been lucky enough to find was a new species, and threw Mrs. Arkwright and Eleanor into a state of the highest excitement. But all their entreaties failed to persuade Jack to disclose the secret of the habitat.

“Put my sketch into the ‘Household Album,’ and I’ll tell you all about it,” said he.

Mrs. Arkwright held out against this for half-an-hour. Then she gave way. Jack’s sketch was gummed in (it took up a whole page, being the full size of my block), and he told us all about the water-weed.

It was described and figured in the Phycological Quarterly, and received the specific name of Arkwrightii, and Jack’s double triumph was complete.

We were very glad for his success, but it almost increased the sense of disappointment that our share of the expedition had been so unlucky.

“It seems such a waste,” said I, “to have got to such a lovely place with one’s drawing things and plenty of time, and to come away without a sketch worth keeping at the end, just because one doesn’t know the right way of working.”

“I think there’s a good deal in what Jack said about your sketch,” said Eleanor; “and I think if one looked at the way real artists have treated similar subjects, and then went at it again and tried to do it on a similar principle——”

“If ever we do go there again,” Clement interrupted, “but I don’t suppose we shall—these holidays. And the way summer after summer slips away is awful. I’m more and more convinced that it’s a great mistake to have so many hobbies. No life is long enough for more than one pursuit, and it’s ten to one you die in the middle of mastering that. One is sure to die in the early stages of half-a-dozen.”

Clement is very apt to develop some odd theory of this kind, and to preach it with a severity that borders on gloom. I never know what to say, even if I disagree with him; but Eleanor takes up the cudgels at once.

“I don’t think I agree with you,” she said, giving a shove to her soft elastic hair which did not improve the indefiniteness of the parting. “Of course it’s unsatisfactory in one way to feel one will never live to finish things, but in another way I think it’s a great comfort to feel one can never use them up or outlive them if one lasts on to be a hundred. And though one gets very cross and miserable with failing so over things one works at, I don’t know whether one would be so much happier when one was at the top of the tree. I’m not sure that the chief pleasure isn’t actually in the working at things—I mean in the drudgery of learning, rather than in the triumph of having learnt.”

“There’s something in that,” said Clement. And it was a great deal for Clement to say.

It does not take much to convert me to Eleanor’s views of anything. But I do think experience bears out what she said about this matter.

Perhaps that accounts for my having a happy remembrance of old times when we worked at things together, even if we failed and cried over them.

I know that practically, now, I would willingly join the others in going at anything, though I could not promise not to be peevish over my own stupidity sometimes, and if I was very much tired.

I don’t think there was anything untrue in my calling the times we went sketching together happy times—in spite of what Clement says.

But he does rule such very straight lines all over life, and I sometimes think one may rule them too straight—even for full truth.