She was as much at home in the dining-room at Penlyon Place as if she had been in her own nursery. She had dragged a chair close to Sir John’s elbow, and had placed herself at his side unbidden. Moppet had a preference for the ruder sex, perhaps resulting from her experience of her good friend Danby, who indulged her more than anybody else in her small world. She admired Adela, and she liked Adela’s frock, and the way her hair was done; but she wanted to sit next the nice old gentleman with the black eyebrows and silver-grey hair, who had taken her on his knee and talked to her in his big, deep voice.
The church was close to the gates of Penlyon Place, and they all walked there together on this fine Christmas morning. It was what people call a green Christmas, the air soft and warm, the sky blue, and the sun shining on the leafless branches of oak and beech and on the green underwood.
“There ought to be snow at Christmas,” said Lassie. “It isn’t like Christmas without snowballing.”
The children behaved so discreetly in church that it was clear that they were good little church people, and that the service was familiar to them, though only Laddie made any pretence at reading his Prayer-book, and he always read in the wrong place. Never a word spoke Moppet all through the long rustic service, though her eyes and her sensitive lips were eloquent of many emotions — wonder at the monuments on the wall in front of her, the knightly gentleman kneeling face to face with his stately lady, and a diminishing line of six kneeling boys behind him, and a diminishing line of six kneeling girls behind her.
“Had they really six apiece?” Moppet asked Sir John, as she trotted homeward by his side, her tiny hand held firmly in his strong fingers.
“Six what — who?”
“Had the gentleman with the frill round his neck six little boys? and had the lady with the frill round her neck six little girls?”
“Yes, Moppet, it’s quite true, only they shared them.”
“Then why are the boys all on one side?”
“I suppose it’s a more orderly arrangement.”
“Were they all dead — down to the very littlest boy when that thing was made?”
“I hope not, for it would give me a poor opinion of Cornwall as a health resort two hundred and fifty years ago.”
“Was it as long ago as that when there were those little boys?” asked Moppet.
“Longer. Nearly three hundred years!”
“Three hundred! What a pity! I should like to have six little boys like those to play with!”
“What would you do with them?”
“Lots of things. We could play at battles — one can’t make a battle with three. It isn’t like it.”
“And it isn’t a fair fight either, Moppet, two to one.”
“No, but Laddie thumps very hard. We have to push him down and sit upon him; and when he can’t get up we’ve won!” explained Moppet, with a triumphant air.
Lassie had been walking ahead with Adela, but she came running back and placed herself on Sir John’s other side, pushing a very small hand, but not so tiny as Moppet’s, into his.
“I hope you like me a little bit, too,” she said with dignity.
“Of course I do, Lassie. I think you are a very nice little girl.”
“But you don’t like me as well as you do her,” pointing to Moppet.
“Perhaps I know her best. She is such a forward young lady, and she and I are quite old friends.”
“Not really older than me and you,” said Lassie.
“Is it naughty to be forward?” Moppet asked gravely, having considered the phrase.
“Not at four years old. You won’t be able to jump upon an elderly gentleman’s knee and put your arms round his neck when you’re four and twenty.”
“I shall be too big; and I shouldn’t want to unless I liked him as much as I like you. Little girls sit on their father’s knees, don’t they?”
“Sometimes.”
“I mean good little girls. And that isn’t being forward, is it?”
“No, Moppet, no. Fathers are made to be sat upon!”
“I wish you would be my father.”
“Why, Moppet?”
“Because I never had one. Never, never. It’s curious, isn’t it? Other little girls say it’s curious when I tell them about it. Mother’s a” — stopping with a puzzled look—” the kind of person who has a dead husband.”
“A widow,” suggested Sir John, startled at the turn of speech.
“Yes, a widow. And I was born after he was dead. It’s so long ago that I don’t remember, and mother was very sorry then, awfully sorry, and she was so ill and so sorry that she didn’t care about me. She didn’t even know I was there. It was months and months before she knew anything about me; but, when she began to know, she liked me very much, and that’s why I’m her favourite child,” explained Moppet.
“You mustn’t talk about favourites. A mother loves all her children alike.”
“That isn’t true,” said Moppet. “But you’re not a mother, and you don’t know, so you didn’t mean to tell a story.”
Sir John accepted this rebuke meekly, and as they had now arrived at the hall door he informed his young friend that he had some letters to write, and must part company with her for an hour or two.
The little woman in red looked up at him with a sorrowful face. She was an adhesive young person, and she had taken a fancy to her host.
“Mayn’t I come with you?” she asked plaintively. “I’ll be very quiet. I sit with mother when she writes her letters, and sometimes she lets me wipe the pen. She has such a dear little penholder, like a tortoise-shell cat, only it’s not alive.”
Sir John was polite but firm. He was charmed with Moppet, but he preferred to write his letters without her company.
“We shall meet at dinner,” he said, stooping very low to kiss the atom of a hand.
“And I shall sit next you?” asked Moppet.
“On my right hand, as the guest of the evening.”
CHAPTER V.
THE Christmas custom at Penlyon Place was one which in Sir John’s mind reduced Christmas Day to a penitential anniversary. On Christmas Day the family dinner was at five o’clock instead of at eight, in order that the servants might enjoy their evening.
“Their evening!” echoed Sir John, ruefully, when the matter was put before him as a sacrifice which the head of a respectable British household was called upon to make. “Their evening, forsooth! As if they had not three hundred and sixty-five evenings in the year in which to take their ease and be merry from nine to eleven, but must needs throw our lives out of gear, and make our evening wretched with the memory of a ridiculously early dinner, while they are uproarious over snapdragon or forfeits in the servants’ hall. The whole thing is an absurdity.” Absurd as it was, Sir John had been coaxed into submission; and now on this particular Christmas Day he was quite resigned to the five-o’clock dinner, and was amused at the delight of the little hirelings, who clapped their hands and jumped and chirped like three grasshoppers.
“We’re all going to have late dinner!” they cried, in a chorus of small silvery voices.
“You poor things!” exclaimed Miss Hawberk. “Do you never have late dinner at home, not even on Christmas Day?”
“Never,” answered the boy. “There isn’t any late dinner. Mother dines with us very early, and then in the evening, when the candles are lit, we all have tea, mother and all of us, and jam sandwiches, and then I sit by the fire and learn my spelling while mother puts Lassie and Moppet to bed.”
“He stops up last because he’s the oldest,” explained Moppet, who always addressed her small speeches to Sir John, “and we don’t learn no spelling because we’re too young. But I know most of Laddie’s words,” she added with sly triumph. “Laddie is very slow, and I’m rather quick.”
“Too quick, Moppet,” said Mr. Danby, lifting the tiny creature in his arms, and looking at her with a touch of melancholy. “If my watch were to go as fast as that small brain of yours I s
hould be afraid the works would wear out.”
The children went for a walk on the cliffs with Miss Hawberk and the gentleman whom they called Uncle Tom, and while they were strolling in the grey softness of a green Christmas, watching silvery sea-gulls wheeling and chattering in the soft grey sky, or congregating on a ledge of rocks, and the black shags diving for fish, Sir John came across the hillocky turf and joined them.
“Have you written all your letters?” asked Moppet, severely.
“As many as I cared to write, little one. The mild afternoon tempted me to a stroll.”
Moppet waited for no permission, but at once possessed herself of Sir John’s forefinger, and held on to his thick doeskin glove with a firm little grip. He could but wonder that such tiny fingers could hold him so tight.
“And what does Moppet think of the sea?” he asked.
“I like your sea better than our sea at home. There are such big, big, big rocks, and such a lot of black birds, and such a lot of white and grey birds. Uncle Tom showed us a rock just now that was all covered with birds. You couldn’t see the rocks for the birds. And then he threw a stone and they all flew off screaming, screaming like human persons. It was so funny!”
“Then it seems you live by the sea when you are at home, Moppet?”
“Always—’cept when it’s the season, and then mother lets her house to an English family, and we go to a farm where there are calves, and pigs, and ducks and chickens, and where we all wear wooden shoes and run about in the mud. It’s lovely.”
“So, Moppet, you are only half an English girl. You live on the other side of the Channel?” said Sir John.
“I don’t know what you mean by the Channel. We live in F’ance, but we’re not F’ench.” The letter represented difficulties not always surmounted even in Moppet’s exceptionally distinct speech. “Mother’s English, and father’s English, and we’re English.”
“Your father was English,” corrected Sir John. You told me your father was dead.”
“Ah, but we never say was about father. Mother likes us to think that he’s always with us, though we can’t see him. His spirit is there, you know, and he is glad when we are good, and he is very, very sorry when we are naughty — most of all when we are unkind to each other. Laddie didn’t think of that the day he gave me the bad slap,” continued Moppet, as if she were speaking of an event in history, like the Indian Mutiny, “or he wouldn’t have done it; but he thought of it afterwards, and he was awfully sorry for having grieved father.”
“How is it you don’t all talk French, Moppet, since you live in France?”
“Because we always live with mother, and she talks English with us. She doesn’t want us to learn French from servants and common people; so we only know the useful words — things you know — food and clothes and such things, and how to ask our way, or to tell people where we live, if ever we should he lost. And we pick up words sometimes. We can’t help learning words on the sands when we hear the little French children who are playing there, though mother won’t let us play with them. And mother is going to teach us French grammar by-and-by, when we are old enough to learn properly. But I,” concluded Moppet, putting on a consequential air, “am not to learn anything for ever so long.”
“What a privileged little person! But why not, pray?”
“Because I’m much too clever, Mr. Minchin said. I’m greatly in advance of my age. If I were forced or worried about lessons I might have water on the brain!”
Nothing could have surpassed Moppet’s grand air as she mentioned this possibility.
“Mr. Minchin is your doctor, I suppose?”
“Yes; he’s a hoppafist.”
“I thought so,” growled Sir John. “Nobody but a fool would have talked in that way before a dear little girl.”
“No, he isn’t a fool really,” replied Moppet, with her most grown-up air. He didn’t know I could hear him. I was playing in the garden, and the parlour window was open, and I took my little chair under the window and sat there quietly and listened.”
“That was not right, Moppet.”
“So mother said when I told her. But why shouldn’t I listen? It was all about me.”
“Perhaps; but you weren’t meant to hear it.”
“I hate secrets — about me. I don’t like doctors that whisper in corners about medicines, and next morning mother comes with a dose of something horrid, because of what the doctor said yesterday when I was playing with my doll. I call that mean of a doctor. But Mr. Minchin isn’t like the horrid doctors. He only gives us globules or tablaws. Can you swallow tablaws without tasting them?”
“I suppose you mean tabloids. No, Moppet, I have never tried them. The doctor hasn’t attacked the gout-fiend with anything so mild. Homoeopathy has never tempered the wind for this shorn lamb.”
Dinner at Penlyon Place on that particular Christmas Day was a grand function. The cook had surpassed herself in the preparation of plum pudding, mince pies, creams, jellies, and junket, stimulated to effort by the thought of the children. What was the use of making tarts or jellies for Sir John’s table, when the master of the house rarely touched anything of that kind, hardly looked at the best trifle or tipsy cake that could be offered to him; but there was some pleasure in cooking nice things for children, even if the children were to make themselves ill by eating too much or by mixing their puddings. Christmas came only once in the year; and no restraining consideration of health or the doctor should be allowed to spoil such a joyful season.
So the creams and jellies and junket were placed upon the dinner-table, as if it had been a ball supper, in order that the children should see them; and loud and joyous were the childish exclamations at the appearance of the feast, at the clusters of tall candles in the old silver candelabra, the old-fashioned epergne with its crystal dishes of bon-bons and sparkling fruits, crowned with a large basket-shaped dish of great purple grapes; the flowers, the dazzling white damask, and diamond cut glass. There was nothing new or modish from Venice or Bohemia, no Liberty silk or fantastic ornamentation. Sir John Penlyon’s dinner-table was not in the movement. Indeed, it was arranged very much as it had been for his grandfather when the century was young.
“I never saw late dinner before,” said Moppet; and then with a sigh of contentment, she exclaimed, “It’s very beautiful!”
The children were dressed for dinner, and there was nothing shabbily genteel or tawdrily fine in their raiment. Laddie wore a neat little black velvet suit, and the two little girls were in white cashmere frocks, which made them look more like dolls than ever.
The crowning glory of the feast was the pudding. The room was darkened in the old-fashioned way, and the great plum pudding was brought in surrounded with flames, and all the company looked like ghosts in the blue unearthly light, a ceremony repeated all over the land on that day in houses where there were children — rather boring for the grown-ups, but such a rapturous experience for the children, especially for the smallest child, who is just a little frightened perhaps at the entrance of the demon pudding, and hysterical with delight when the first shock is over.
This pudding was saluted with a tremendous clapping of tiny hands, which sounded like the applause of an audience of fairies. The whole business was rapture, most of all when it was discovered that there were some new sixpences in the pudding. The excitement increased to fever-heat when Mr. Danby found a sixpence in his portion, and exhibited an amount of pleasure which indicated an avaricious disposition, and quite shocked Moppet.
“I suppose you’ll give me your sixpence,” she said, stretching out a tiny palm in his direction; “you can’t want it yourself.”
“Can’t I?” ejaculated Mr. Danby. “ I do want it very much. Sixpence is sixpence all the world over.”
“But a man of your age can’t want sixpence,” with grave remonstrance.
“Can’t he? Why, there are lots of things that sixpence will buy for a man of my age. A cigar, for instance.”
“But y
ou can’t want that sixpence. You have always lots of money. I’ve seen you take out shillings — a handful of shillings — from your waistcoat pocket when you were paying for our brioches at the pastrycook’s, or buying us toys in the Grande Rue. You can’t want that sixpence.”
“Not to spend, Moppet. I shall keep it for luck. I shall bore a hole in it and wear it next my heart in memory of a Christmas dinner with you — your first late dinner.”
“I’m glad of that,” said Moppet, greatly relieved. “I was afraid you were a miser after all.”
Laddie and Lassie greeted this speech with uproarious laughter.
“A miser! Uncle Tom a miser! Why, you know he is always bringing us things. Mother has to be quite cross sometimes to prevent him spending too much money upon us,” said Laddie.
“Uncle Tom gave us our silk stockings,” explained Lassie. “They’re real silk; not spun silk, like most little girls have. They came in a letter from Wears and Swells. Wasn’t that a funny letter? Mother told Uncle Tom he was dreadfully extravagant; but he only laughed. He is not the least little bit of a miser; not nearly such a miser as Moppet, who puts all her half-francs into a money-box that won’t open, and then asks mother for sous to spend.”
There was more than one sixpence in the pudding. Each of the children discovered a glittering new coin, and in Moppet’s portion there were two sixpences. The stout and serious butler helping the pudding on the carving-table by the light of a single candle was suspected of treasonable practices.
If the pudding with its halo of blue flame were a glorious thing, how much more glorious was the Christmas-tree in the great Tudor hall, the Christmas-tree with innumerable tapers that were reflected in the bright armour of those dead and gone warriors whose prowess had helped to win victory at Agincourt or whose strength had prolonged the bitter struggle at home in the Wars of the Roses. Miss Hawberk had sent round some little notes of invitation, swift and sudden as the fiery cross, and had assembled all the little ladies and gentlemen of the neighbourhood, the pretty fair-haired girls from the Rectory, and the children of the only two gentlefolk’s families within an easy drive of Penlyon Place, and Mr. Nicholls, the old bachelor doctor, had also been invited; perhaps in order to throw in a warning-word occasionally when the revellers seemed inclined to over-eat themselves. All the little girls had long hair, combed and brushed and crinkled to perfection; and they looked rather suspiciously at Lassie and Moppet’s round-cropped heads, as little Africans with their hair caked in clay might look at the children of another tribe who wore no clay.
Delphi Works of M. E. Braddon Page 1040
