“Oh, my dear, dear John, I am so sorry for you,” she exclaimed gaspingly.
“What do you mean, Clara? What has happened? Has Sibyl come to you?”
“Come to me, poor blind, deluded girl! Come to me? Oh, John, haven’t you heard? Didn’t you receive poor Miss Gambert’s second telegram?”
“No!” cried Sir John, fiercely. “What does it all mean? Has there been an accident on the line? Is the girl hurt — killed?” he asked, hoarse with sudden terror.
His sister’s tears, her agitation, her embraces were enough to suggest direst calamity.
“Killed!” cried Mrs. Hawberk. “No, she is safe enough. There are some parents, perhaps, who would rather hear that she had been killed in a railway accident than that she had so lowered herself, thrown herself away so blindly as she has done!”
“Clara, if you would be good enough to tell me in plain words what has happened to my daughter, instead of trying to act like Madame Ristori in Medea, you would do me a favour,” said Sir John, in his most unpleasant voice.
Mrs. Hawberk sat down and collected herself, thinking, as she did so, that it was in the fraternal nature to be disagreeable at every stage of life. She remembered dimly how shamefully her brother had ill-treated her favourite doll five and forty years before. He was the same man now — now, after she had toiled and slaved for him, saying him all thought and care about his motherless girls. The same man, utterly heartless and unfeeling.
“Your daughter Sibyl was married to Mr. Morland, the curate, at St. Sophia’s Church, Plymouth, this morning,” she said with haughty indifference. “If you haven’t received your own telegram, you may like to see mine.” She waved her hand towards an occasional table, on which lay an open telegram. Sir John snatched it up and read it eagerly, stooping to get the light of the shaded lamp, which was intended to make darkness visible rather than to illuminate the room.
“The inquiries about Bristol were only a blind. She went to Plymouth with Mr. Mori and, and they were married at St. Sophia’s, and have gone to Torquay for their honeymoon. A telegram from him to me — letter to follow. Also letter to Sir John. I think you must feel for me, dear friend, for you alone can understand my feelings under this cruel blow.”
It was a long telegram. A woman must be deeply moved before she can be so reckless in the expenditure of words, every one of which has to be paid for.
“Her feelings!” growled Sir John; “what have her feelings to do with my daughter’s misconduct, except so far as she has proved herself unworthy of being trusted with the care of a pupil?”
“Oh, John! don’t you know the poor thing was engaged to Morland? He pretended to be only waiting for his first living in order to marry her.”
“Oh, that was the state of the case, was it?” said Sir John, with cutting coolness. “And he thought it a better speculation to marry my daughter. I am very sorry for him. He will find he has made a bad bargain. He would have done better to marry the governess, for she is a bread-winner, and my daughter will never bring him a sixpence.”
“Oh, John! She has been very foolish, poor child, but I know you will forgive her — after a time.”
“Not after an eternity — if eternity could have an afterwards. She has set me at nought, and from this hour to my last hour on earth I shall set her at nought. It shall be to me as if she had never existed.”
CHAPTER III.
THE time, afternoon — the afternoon of Christmas Eve; the place the library at Penlyon Castle; and the only personage Sir John Penlyon, sitting by the fire in the gathering dusk, somewhat out of temper with the world at large, and with himself as the most important member in it. The morning had been troublesome, spent for the most part with his bailiff, who was full of the wants and the shortcomings of tenants. Sir John had missed his useful friend Danby, and that philosophical spirit which always made light of such thorns in the flower-bed of a rich man’s lot, and always succeeded in laughing him out of his bad temper.
Mr. Danby had been absent for the last four days.
He had gone, with Sir John’s cheque in his pocket, to fetch the Christmas hirelings; the little people who were to come to the dull old castle and make merriment for its solitary lord.
The more Sir John Penlyon meditated upon the business, especially this afternoon, the more preposterous and vexatious it seemed to him.
“I must have been an arrant fool to consent to such a piece of folly,” he said to himself.
Enter Adela Hawberk, flushed and excited.
Adela. We have finished, uncle (clapping her hands). It is quite the prettiest tree you ever saw. How delighted the dear little things will be!
Sir John (testily). Dear little things, indeed! How do you know they mayn’t be odious little things, spoilt and cantankerous, or underbred and hypocritical, if they have been what a middle-class mother calls “well brought up” — brought up to sit upon the edge of their chair, and to be afraid of everybody?
Adela (with conviction). They are sure to be nice children. Mr. Danby wouldn’t bring nasty ones.
Sir John. What does he know about children — an old bachelor?
Adela. Why, uncle, you can’t have seen him in a children’s party, or you’d never say that. He is a prodigious favourite with the children in all the houses he goes to. Perhaps that is one reason why the mothers are so fond of him. Hark! They ought to be here by this time. The carriage went to Victoria an hour ago to meet the coach from Launceston. They were to stay at Plymouth last night. Mr. Danby thought it would be too long a journey for the little things to do in one day. Ho is so considerate.
SIR John. He is a fool; and I am a greater fool to encourage his nonsense. The utter absurdity of bringing children from the other end of the world! Do you know where the creatures come from, Adela?
Adela. I haven’t the faintest notion. All Mr. Danby said was that they lived on the other side of London, and that he wanted a clear week to fetch them. You must remember, uncle, you told him you wanted to know nothing about them. They were to come and go, and you were to hear no more of them. They were to have no claim upon you in the future.
Sir John. I should think not, indeed. Claim upon me, forsooth! But it would have been only civil to tell me where the brats come from, and who their people are.
Adela. No doubt he will tell you, if you ask him.
Sir John. He ought to have told me of his own accord. I am not going to ask him.
Adela was discreetly silent, seeing that her uncle was in what she called one of his tempers. She always respected her uncle’s tempers.
She went to the big bay window from which she could see a long way down the drive. It was not four o’clock, but the dimness of a wintry twilight was creeping over the landscape. The afternoon was mild and calm, by no means an old-fashioned Christmas, an afternoon that might have been October. She could hear a faint sighing of the wind in the trees near at hand, and the roaring of the waves far off, not a stormy roar, only the rhythmical rise and swell of the great Atlantic rolling over the stony beach.
Everything had been made ready for the little strangers.
There were fires blazing in two large bedrooms overhead; rooms with a door of communication. In one there were still the two little white beds in which Lilian and Sibyl had slept when they were children; poor Lilian, whose bed was in the English cemetery at Florence, under a white marble monument erected by her sorrowing husband, and whose sorrowing husband had taken to himself a second wife five years ago. Every one knew where Lilian was lying; but no one at Penlyon Castle knew where Sibyl’s head had found rest, All that people knew about the disobedient daughter was that her husband had died within three or four years of her marriage, worn to death in some foreign mission, after toiling for a year or so at the east end of London. Of his luckless widow no one at Penlyon had heard anything, but it was surmised that her father made her an allowance. He could hardly let his only daughter starve, people said, however badly she might have treated him. Lady Lurgrave’s ear
ly death had been a crushing blow to his love and to his pride. She had died childless.
The rooms were ready. Adela ran upstairs to take a final survey. One of the housemaids had been told off to wait upon the little strangers; and Adela’s maid was to give a hand. Neither of these young women had any objection to the extra duty. Each professed herself fond of children.
“They’ll enliven the place a little, poor mites,” said Harrop, who considered Penlyon the abode of dullness; and Sarah the housemaid agreed with her.
Harrop was to sleep in the larger room, and in the bed which Miss Peterson had occupied during five peaceful years. Sarah had put up her truckle bed in the inner and smaller room, where she was to keep guard over the little boy.
“It would be downright cruelty to let any child sleep alone in one of these ghastly rooms,” said Sarah, the “ghastliness” being doubtless a question of spaciousness and oak panelling, and ponderous old-fashioned furniture which cast monstrous shadows in the pale glimmer of the night-light.
Hark! Yes, that was the roll of wheels on the gravel drive, a nearer sound than the sullen swell of the sea out yonder grinding the pebbles in an unresting mill.
Adela Hawberk flew down to the hall, followed by Harrop, while Sarah the housemaid stopped upstairs and gave a final stir to the fires after the wont of her tribe, who are always ready to use the poker, wanted or not wanted, with a noble disregard to the coal-merchant’s bill.
Sir John had heard the carriage stop, and the opening of the hall door; and although he pretended to go on reading his paper by the lamp placed close at his elbow, the pretence was a poor one, and anybody might have seen that he was listening with all his might.
The footman had opened the hall door as the wheels drew near, and it was wide open when the carriage stopped. The red light from the hall fire streamed out upon the evening grey, and three little silvery voices were heard exclaiming —
“Oh, what a pretty house!”
“Oh, what a big house!”
And then the smallest voice of the three, with amazing distinctness —
“What an exceedingly red fire!”
The carriage door flew open, and two little girls, all in red from top to toe, and one little boy in grey, rolled out in a heap, or seemed to roll out, like puppies out of a basket, and scrambled on to their feet, and ran up the steps, Mr. Danby, slim and jaunty as usual, following them.
“Good gracious, how tiny they are!” cried Adela, stooping down to kiss the smaller girl, a round red bundle, with a round little face, and large dark grey eyes shining in the firelight.
The tiny thing accepted the kiss somewhat shrinkingly and looked about her, awed by the grandeur of the hall, the large fireplace and blazing logs, the men in armour, or the suits of armour standing up and pretending to be men.
“I don’t like them,” said the tiny girl, clinging to Danby, and pointing with a muffled red hand at one of these mailed warriors. “They’re not alive, are they, Uncle Tom?”
“No, no, no, Moppet; they’re as dead as door-nails.”
“Are they? I don’t like dead people.”
“Come, come, Moppet, suppose they’re not people at all — no more than a rocking-horse is a real live horse. We’ll pull one of them down to-morrow and look inside him; and then you’ll be satisfied.”
The larger scarlet mite, larger by about an inch, older by a year, was standing before the fire, gravely warming her hands, spreading them out before the blaze as much as hands so tiny could spread themselves. The boy was skipping about the hall, looking at everything, the armed warriors especially, and not at all afraid.
“They’re soldiers, aren’t they?” he asked.
“Yes, Laddie.”
“I should like to be dressed like that, and go into a battle and kill lots of people. I couldn’t be killed myself, could I, if I had that stuff all over me?”
“Perhaps not, Laddie; but I don’t think it would answer. You’d be an anachronism.”
“I wouldn’t mind being a nackerism if it saved me from being killed,” said Laddie.
“Come, little ones, come and be presented to your host,” said Mr. Danby, as the footman opened the library door; and they all poured in, Danby, Adela, and the children, the smallest running in first, her sister and the boy following, considerably in advance of the grown-ups.
Moppet ran right into the middle of the room, as fast as her little red legs could carry her, then seeing Sir John sitting where the bright lamplight shone full upon his pale elderly face, with its strongly marked features, black eyebrows, and silvery grey hair, she stopped suddenly as if she had beheld a Gorgon, and began to back slowly till she brought herself up against the silken skirt of Adela Hawberk’s gown, and in that soft drapery she in a manner absorbed herself, till there was nothing to be seen of the little neatly rounded figure except the tip of a bright red cap, and the toes of two bright red gaiters.
The elder mite had advanced less boldly, and had not to beat so ignominious a retreat. She was near enough to Mr. Danby to clutch his hand, and holding that, she was hardly at all frightened.
The boy, older, bolder, and less sensitive than either of the girls, went skipping round the library as he had skipped about the hall, looking at things and apparently unconscious of Sir John Penlyon’s existence.
“How d’ye do, Danby?” said Sir John, holding out his hand as his old friend advanced to the fire, the little red girl hanging on to his left hand, while he gave his right to his host. “Upon my word, I began to think you were never coming back. You’ve been an unconscionable time. One would suppose you had to fetch the children from the world’s end,”
“I had to bring them to the world’s end, you might say. Boscastle is something more than a day’s journey from London in the depth of winter.”
“And are these the children? Good heavens, Danby! What could you be thinking about to bring us such morsels of humanity?”
“We wanted children,” said Danby, “not hobbledehoys.”
“Hobbledehoys! No, but there is reason in everything. You couldn’t suppose I wanted infants like these — look at that little scrap hidden in Adela’s frock. It’s positively dreadful to contemplate! They will be getting under my feet. I shall be treading upon them, and hurting them seriously.”
“No you won’t, Jack, I’ll answer for that.”
“Why not, pray?”
“Because of their individuality. They are small, but they are people. When Moppet comes into a room everybody knows she is there. She is a little scared now; but she will be as bold as brass in a quarter of an hour.”
Sir John Penlyon put on his spectacles and looked at the little hirelings more critically. Their youth and diminutive size had been a shock to him. He had expected bouncing children, with rosy faces, long auburn hair, and a good deal of well-developed leg showing below a short frock. These, measured against his expectations, were positively microscopic.
Their cheeks were pale rather than rosy. Their hair was neither auburn nor long. It was dark hair, and it was cropped close to the neat little heads, showing every bump in the broad, clever-looking foreheads. Sir John’s disapproving eyes showed him that the children were more intelligent than the common run of children; but for the moment he was not disposed to accept intelligence instead of size.
“They are preposterously small,” he said, “not at all the kind of thing I expected. They will get lost under chairs or buried alive in waste-paper baskets. I wash my hands of them. Take them away, Adela. Let them be fed and put to bed;” then turning to Mr. Danby as if to dismiss the subject, “Anything stirring in London when you were there, Tom?”
Before Danby could answer, Moppet emerged from her shelter, advanced deliberately, and planted herself in front of Sir John Penlyon, looking him straight in the face.
“I’m sorry you don’t like us. Mr. Old Gentleman,” she said.
Every syllable came with clear precision from those infantine lips. Moppet’s strong point was her power
of speech. Firm, decisive, correct as to intonation, came every sentence from the lips of this small personage. Ponderous polysyllables were no trouble to Moppet. There was only an occasional consonant that baffled her.
“Who says I don’t like you?” said Sir John, taken aback, and lifting the animated bundle of red cloth on to his knee.
He found there was something very substantial inside the woolly cloak and gaiters, a pair of round plump arms and sturdy little legs, a compact little figure, which perched firmly on his knee.
“You said so,” retorted Moppet, with her large grey eyes very wide open, and looking-full into his. “You don’t like us because we are so very small. Everybody says we are small, but everybody doesn’t mind. Why do you mind?”
“I didn’t say anything about not liking you, little one. I was only afraid you were too small to go out visiting.”
“I went out to tea when I was two, and nobody said I was too small. I have real tea at parties, not milk-and-water. And I have been out to tea often and often — haven’t I, Lassie?”
“Not so many times as I have,” replied the elder red thing, with dignity.
She was standing in front of the wide old fireplace, warming her hands, and she was to Sir John’s eye somewhat suggestive of a robin redbreast that had fluttered in and lighted there.
“Of course not, because you’re older,” said Moppet, disgusted at this superfluous self-assertion on her sister’s part, “I am always good at parties — ain’t I, Uncle Tom?” turning an appealing face to Mr. Danby.
“So these Lilliputians are your nieces, Danby?” exclaimed Sir John.
“Well, no, they are not exactly nieces, though they are very near and dear. I am only a jury uncle.”
“A jury uncle!” cried Moppet, throwing her head back and laughing at the unknown word.
“A jury uncle!” echoed the other two, and the three laughed prodigiously, not because they attached any meaning to the word, but only because they didn’t know what it meant. That was where the joke lay.
Delphi Works of M. E. Braddon Page 1038
