Works of Ellen Wood

by Ellen Wood

  Bent upon a congenial expedition, they were not long preparing themselves for it. They were going out to observe the custom of the place on the twenty-ninth of May — that of starting abroad with the sun, to gather and gild oak-balls.

  The clock struck six as they went out — William, Alice, and Rose Allair. Quiet enough looked the village in the early morning, but few shutters being open or blinds undrawn. The publicans had been abroad earlier, however; for great branches of oak, nearly as large as trees, were already raised in triumph over their several signs.

  “I wonder whether the Vanes are ready, or whether we shall have to wait?” said Alice, as they were approaching a handsome white house, its portico supported by Corinthian pillars. “I hope they will not have turned lie-a-beds!”

  “Trust to Harry Vane for that,” was William’s answer. “He is never behindhand.”

  Scarcely were the words spoken, when the door of the house opened, and out leaped an agile, active boy, somewhat younger than William. It was Harry Vane. A dark-eyed, noble, fine boy, careless and random in manner, somewhat too sanguine; but good at heart, truthful, generous. Caroline Vane followed; a handsome girl. But she descended the steps decorously; not, as her brother did, in a flying leap.

  “Halloa! how are you?” shouted out Harry Vane, catching sight of them in the distance.

  “Halloa!” came the response from William. “I say! is it not prime to see this splendid morning?” he added, as they came nearer.

  “First-rate!” was Harry Vane’s answer. “Oh, I said we should have it,” he carelessly added. “Some of you croakers prophesied it would be wet. I knew better. As if we should get anything but sunshine on the twenty-ninth of May!”

  “You always do look on the bright side of things,” said William, as they all went on in a heap. The manner of their walking could be called nothing else.

  “And you on the dark.”

  “At any rate, we were justified in croaking, in this instance,” returned William. “The rain threatened us yesterday; and had been threatening us for days past.”

  “The more reason for its changing to fine,” argued Harry Vane. “The longest and darkest night gets morning at the end of it. Summer will come in brightly now. You’ll see.”

  “It is to be hoped it will; we have had a pretty good share of all that’s dull,” remarked William. “The grass wants fine weather. The farmers are complaining.”

  “Did you ever know the farmers do anything but complain?” returned Harry Vane. “Some of them will be found to find fault with to-day. In fine weather they want it wet; and in wet weather, they grumble that it is not dry. I say, have you met any of the fellows on your road?”

  “Not one. Perhaps Robertson’s man has turned crusty, and won’t let the boarders out!”

  “He had better try that on! They’d climb the chimneys, but what they’d come. Or make ropes of the sheets, and get out that way. I would. Robertson would look over it, too; he’d never attempt to stop the oak-balling on this day. Where’s Jenniker, I wonder?”

  “Talking about Jenniker,” said William, “I met him last night. I left my Euripides at school by mistake, and in coming back from getting it, came across Jenniker. He said —— But there’s no depending on a word he says,” broke off William. “He is always romancing.”

  “Romancing, you call it! He is the greatest — cram teller — in all the school. I use a genteel appellation, young ladies, in deference to your presence,” said Harry with a laugh, raising his hat to his sister and to Alice and Rose Allair. “Jenniker will get sent to Coventry one of these days, as sure as he is alive. He will go too far.”

  “The wonder is, that he has not been sent already. Look at that tale of the traps, the other day! How we were all taken in!”

  “What was his romance last night?”

  “He said he had just seen Vane — you; and that you were boasting of some jolly news. Then it was decided you were to go to sea.”

  “That’s tolerably correct, for Jenniker. I told him it was nearly decided. It would only have been in keeping had he said I was gone.”

  “That will never be decided, Harry,” interposed Caroline Vane. “Never, in the manner you hope for.”

  “Won’t it, Carry! Do you know what mamma said last night?”

  “What did she say?” eagerly asked William.

  “I had got into hot water with her; chopped a piece off the dining-room table, in chopping some wood for my new boat. So she told papa I was fit for nothing but the sea, and the sooner I was off the more tranquil the house would be. She was angry at the moment, you know.”

  “Oh, yes, we all say things at times the very opposite to what we mean,” remarked William, rather testily. “Of course she objects in reality just as much as ever?”

  “Of course: mothers always do. Mine thinks I shall come to grief among the fishes. Papa laughs at her.”

  “He sees no objection,” observed William, eagerly, who appeared to hold a remarkably strong interest in the point.

  “Not he; though he won’t say as much to me. The mother thinks — the fishes sparing me — I should return from my first voyage utterly unpresentable; a sort of animal between a Robinson Crusoe and a tattooed wild Indian; and never come into a civilised being again. But, mark you, Allair, she has never said I shall not go.”

  “What if she did?”

  “Don’t talk about that,” said Harry, hastily. “The having to give up my golden visions would be a climax I’d rather not contemplate. Oh, it won’t come to that! Papa sympathizes with me. I know he does. He cared as much for the sea as I do, and they forbid his going. His father was a brave old commander, and fought many a battle under Nelson.”

  “Who forbid his going?”

  “His mother. She said it was bad enough to have her husband at sea, without having her son there. Papa says he never regretted the not going but once, and that has been ever since. I suppose I inherit my taste from him. The mother often says she is thankful Frederick has no liking for it.”

  “And I’m sure I am thankful,” interposed Caroline Vane. “A grievous calamity, it would be, to have two brothers, one’s only brothers, obstinately bent upon turning themselves into rough, roving, disagreeable sailors.”

  “There are worse misfortunes at sea than that would be,” said Harry, nodding his head. “However, Carry, you have your wish as to Fred. He hates the sea and all things connected with it. He would rather do anything on earth than go to sea; turn day-labourer, or lion-feeder at a wild beast show.”

  Alice Allair laughed. “I don’t think your brother Frederick betrays great inclination for labour of any sort.”

  “Not he,” said Harry. “He is the laziest fellow alive. It is a good thing for him that he was the eldest son, born with a silver spoon in his mouth. Otherwise, I fear Mr Fred would have stood a chance of starving.”

  “I can tell you what,” said William, “it is the being born to the silver spoon that does the mischief. When a fellow knows he has got to work, he does work; but if there’s not a necessity, he won’t make it.”

  A little bit of wisdom wonderfully true to come from the lips of a boy of fifteen; and I daresay you, my boys, are thinking so. But you must not give William Allair credit for it; it was borrowed from his father. Mr Allair had echoed it in his presence many and many a time. You will find it to be the case as you go through life: possibly you have noticed it already. Fortunes have done more harm than good in this world. I’d rather see a boy born to honourable work, with a ready heart to do it, than see him born to a fortune.

  “I suppose that’s it,” returned Harry Vane, in reply to William’s remark. “If Fred had not been born to money, I don’t know how he would have lived. Idleness is his besetting sin! My father says he shall learn some profession, just to keep his days from being spent in mischief: Fred says he will not.”

  “One would suppose the sea, as a profession, would suit him well, then,” remarked William. “A nice idle life it is, that of
a sailor’s.” —

  “An idle life!” repeated Harry Vane. “What on earth are you talking of, Allair? A sailor’s work is never done.”

  “Rubbish!” cried William. “What can there be to do on board a ship? Get her once under weigh, the sails set, and all that, and you have only to walk about the deck and watch the waves. Except, of course, in a storm. In calm weather, you may shoot at the sea-birds all day.”

  The remark amused Harry Vane excessively. He stared at William. “Well, you have got a rum notion of a sailor’s life!” he said. “Where did you pick it up? Just you go out before the mast for a few months. That would help you to a little general knowledge in the nautical line.”

  “I shouldn’t mind,” was the answer. “Before the mast, or behind the mast, it would be all one to me, so that I got there. Anything’s better than being chained to a desk all day; to have to scratch, scratch, scratch, at a pen until your teeth are set on edge, and your eyes are dazzled.”

  “A desk!” scorned Harry Vane. “I would not stop at a desk, I would not lead such a humdrum life, to be made Lord Chancellor of England. Better cut a fellow’s legs off at once!”

  “Yes,” grumbled William, his tone one of warm resentment. “And they wish to condemn me to the life. It’s a shame!”

  “You have often said you should like the life,” said Alice Allair. “You always said so, until you got this sea freak into your head.”

  “What do girls know about it?” retorted William, who had no better confuting argument at hand; but he laughed good-naturedly at his sister as he said it. “You hold your tongue, Alice.”

  Alice Allair did not choose to take the hint. “When boys talk of wanting to go to sea,” cried she, “it is generally an excuse for a fit of idleness.”

  “Call it idleness, if you like,” said William. “If you had the choice, you might think idleness — which of course means only that you have your time to yourself — preferable to being shut up in an office, glued down to a desk.”

  “But, for how short a time you would be glued down! At least, closely. Three or four years, and then—”

  “Oh, my service to you, Mademoiselle Alice! Years count for nothing, I suppose. What next, pray? I wish I was going for a sailor,” continued William, in a gleeful tone, his fair face flushing with pleasure at the thought. “Voyaging about from port to port, and seeing foreign countries! That would be something like a life.”

  “Oh, it is a jolly life!” burst out Harry Vane, in one of his fits of enthusiasm, to which, it must be owned, he was somewhat given. “The very sight of a ship sends my pulses into a thrill. It does, Caroline; and you need not look at me so mockingly. To see a vessel, with her white sails spread, scudding through the water; to be at the main-top-gallant mast-head and watch her speed, the glorious sea stretched out around; to feel the motion of the good ship as she rides along majestically, the breeze fanning your face, perhaps the sun, a blaze of splendour, rising in the east! — oh, you cannot, any of you, tell the enjoyment that it is. You have never experienced it.”

  “Ah! that was an unlucky voyage of yours, to Spain and back!” observed Caroline Vane, in a tone of vexation.

  Harry laughed out gleefully, and came down from his imaginary perch on the main-top-gallant.

  “Why do you call it an unlucky voyage?” asked little Rose Allair. “He did come back.”

  “I’ll explain it,” said Harry, before Caroline could speak. “When Captain Marsh was going to Spain with his ship — only a merchantman, you know, of two or three hundred tons — he invited me to make the voyage with him. ‘ Oh, dear yes, and thank you,’ cried mamma. ‘He will be dreadfully sea-sick, and that will cure him of his passion for the sea.’ Accordingly I started; and was sea-sick, not much, though; and I made the voyage, there and home; and when I got back, poor mamma found she was out in her reckoning. The taste had been confirmed in me. If I had only longed for the sea before, I loved it then. Ever since, mamma and Carry have called it my unlucky voyage.”

  “It was the most unlucky step you ever took,” persisted Caroline.

  Harry laughed. “It was a mistake, Carry, that’s all,” said he, quietly. “As if a trifle of sea-sickness could put me out of conceit of the sea! Why, I’d rather be sea-sick for ever, than not go!”

  “Don’t talk randomly,” rebuked Caroline, who was older than her brother. “Harry, I wonder whether Fred will come out this morning?”

  “No, I am sure he will not,” replied Harry. “He is above coming out on this morning expedition now. Don’t you remember last year? — he said it was his last time. Since Fred passed his eighteenth birthday, he has thought himself a man. Besides, Fred likes his bed too well to leave it, when there’s an excuse for stopping in it.”

  William had fallen into silence. He was thinking how lucky was Harry Vane in possessing a father who saw no ogres in the sea. And thus they reached the Grange meadow, a very favourite resort; and the two boys began to scramble over the stile, as boys will do when in much haste, with little regard to ceremony, or to the young ladies with them.

  “There stands Jenniker!” exclaimed William, pointing with his finger.

  “And there’s another with him! Who is it?”

  “Where? Oh, I see, behind the tree.”

  “Why, I declare it is that ignoramus, Tom Fisher! Of all dolts! Whatever brings Jenniker out with him?”

  CHAPTER II.

  THE SHOW.

  OF the two boys standing there, one was of a tall, powerful frame, almost a man. That was Jenniker. The other was tall also, but slight and delicate. That was Fisher. In point of fact, Fisher was an overgrown dandy of sixteen, wearing a gold chain across his waistcoat, and two rings on his left little linger; a garnet set round with pearls, and an emerald studded with paste diamonds. His hands were white, his nails faultless, and his coat was cut in the height of fashion. His manner was slow; his brains were not particularly bright. He had been reared in the heart of London, had scarcely ever been beyond it, until this visit, which he was paying to some friends in Whittermead. In his utter ignorance of country sights and country habits, Dr Robertson’s pupils, with whom he was brought in contact, felt inclined to convert him into a sort of butt for their mocking sport. What with his dandy-cut coats, his white hands, his rings, his effeminacy altogether, and his real ignorance, the boys enjoyed a treat.

  “I say, Vane, what do you think?” called out Jenniker, at the top of his voice, as they approached. “Fisher, here, does not know one tree from another; can’t tell an oak from an ash, or a birch from a willow. He says he only knows a poplar; and, that, because it’s tall and thin, like the wooden trees they sell with children’s toys in Arcadia.”

  “I did not say in Arcadia,” hastily corrected Fisher, “I said in the Lowther Arcade.”

  “Oh, the Lowther Arcade! is it not the same?” cried Jenniker, putting on the full tide of ridicule. “My patience and conscience! Not to know a tree when you see it! I’ve heard of girls not knowing lots of things, but I never did hear of a fellow not knowing trees. You are a curiosity worth taking about the country in a travelling caravan, Master Fisher.”

  “Be quiet, Jenniker,” said William Allair. “Why do you begin upon him? He has always lived in London, where there are no trees to be seen.”

  “Right in the midst of it,” put in Harry Vane. “By Aldgate Pump.”

  “No, I don’t live by Aldgate Pump,” resentfully spoke Fisher. “I have not seen Aldgate Pump above half-a-dozen times in my life.”

  “It’s by Temple Bar, then.”

  “Well, Temple Bar is not Aldgate Pump,” retorted Fisher. “Aldgate Pump’s down Whitechapel way.”

  “Are there any trees round Temple Bar, Master Fisher?” cried Jenniker, returning to the charge.

  “You had better go up to London and see,” retorted Fisher, who by no means relished their aggravating salutation of “Master.”

  “If there are no trees in London, there are plenty outside it. At Clapham, where m
y aunt lives, they abound. I daresay I could tell the names of many, if I wanted to tell them.”

  “Let’s hear, Fisher,” said Harry Vane. “Do you know what these trees are?” pointing to those underneath which they were standing.

  Fisher looked up at the trees. He did not know them, but he did not like to confess to the ignorance. Another moment, and his face brightened.

  “Perhaps they are ivy?” suggested he.

  The boys leaned against the trees in their agony of laughter, and the young ladies — who were not upon their drawing-room manners — shrieked aloud with it, driving Fisher wild. Other young ladies, other schoolboys were running up from various points in the distance, and the audience promised to be a large one.

  “What is there to mock at?” asked Fisher. “Come! This is ivy that’s around them. I know ivy when I see it, as well as you. My aunt’s house at Clapham is covered with it.”

  “That’s ivy, but the trees are not,” jerked out Harry Vane, in the midst of his convulsion. “We’ll give you three guesses of what the trees are, Fisher; and if you can’t hit upon the right thing, you shall go up them and get down some boughs.”

  “Up a tree!” returned the dismayed Fisher, who had probably never in his experience climbed anything more formidable than to the top of an omnibus. “I wish you may get it! My hands and my clothes are not going to be torn, I can tell you.”

  At this moment a whole troop of new-comers came within hearing distance, many of Dr Robertson’s scholars being amongst them.

  “Fisher thought these trees were ivys,” said Jenniker, with a very broad grin; Mr Jenniker being rather addicted to grinning, when he found he could annoy any friend with it. “We are going to give him three guesses, and if he can’t hit upon the right name, he pays forfeit and goes up the tree.”

  “Why don’t you ask me to climb up to the moon at once?” cried Fisher. “You don’t get me up the stem of a tree.”