Comin' Thro' the Rye (Mathers)/Seed Time/Chapter 8
CHAPTER VIII.
Her faults will ne'er be known,
For blushing cheeks by faults are bred,
And fears by pale white shown."
The clock is striking eight, and we are all hunting ventre-à-terre for the family book of prayers. Not once since we came to Periwinkle have we looked upon its godly face, and now it is revenging itself by refusing to come forth and save us from utter disgrace. If papa discovers that we have eaten our morning meal without the seasoning salt of chapter, prayer, and benediction, then woe, woe, woe betide us! We distractedly turn the books over and over, but nowhere does that much-coveted old brown cover meet our eager gaze. Overhead we hear his warlike tread as he walks to the toilet table; he is putting on his coat, now he has opened the door, and is telling mamma she is the laziest woman in Christendom, and a disgrace to her sex; his foot is on the stair, oh!—o—o—oh! We tumble madly over each other in a dancing agony, and a pale tear trickles down Amberley's nose, when, hallelujah! I have found it, wedged in with its back to the wall, between the "Arabian Nights" and the "Pilgrim's Progress." We are saved by the skin of our teeth, and fly to our seats with thankful hearts while Alice finds the place, and sets the old marker, "Jesus wept," with its back broken in three places, on the open page. He is in the room before she has done, and having received our morning salutes, and glanced sharply at Alice's collapsed charms (she looks like Samson shorn of his strength), rings the bell for prayers. He is half through the chapter before the servants can get in at the door; but that is of little consequence, they would not hear a word if they were present. Breakfast passes over better than might be expected. There are so many safe remarks we can make about Periwinkle; every man and woman we see is not an enemy, the mention of whose name must be shunned as the plague; and I am even able to provoke a smile by remarking that it is difficult to hear the sermon on Sunday evenings, because the sailors snore so loudly.
I think that if we were to travel much we should find plenty to talk to him about, become quite colloquial in fact. Ah! travel's a wonderful thing for enlarging the mind. No wonder splendid Will said, "Home-keeping youths have ever homely wits" (of course he meant that for girls as well).
After breakfast our troubles begin. We go for a walk, and make the depressing discovery that in every deep there is a lower depth, and that, bad as the Silverbridge walks were, the Periwinkle ones are infinitely, immeasurably worse.
The governor is apparently as impervious to shingle as to ploughed fields, for he leads the van without a falter, while we flounder, slip, and stumble after him like a badly drilled squad of infantry. The sun is fiercely smiting our backs, blistering our cheeks and noses, making us feel that our bodies have suddenly grown gross and heavy and suffocating; our clothes might be of woollen, so irritatingly do they chafe us. It is one of those broiling mornings when existence under a green tree is bad enough, but existence taking a race over a glaring shingle is diabolical.
We are bound for the rocks now uncovered by the receding tide, and over them we are going to Cod's Bay, a fishing village of evil reputation and bad smells, that hides its dirty head round the corner of the cliff. It seems near enough, but, judged by the endless succession of slippery boulders that intervene, we find it a very long way indeed, and groan in our spirits as we slide and scramble after our leader, who bounds on in front, agile as a chamois, and twice as sure-footed as his progeny. Not one cropper does he come; but Amberley makes up for him—she slides majestically down the rocks as though born to the accomplishment, and even sits in the pools among the scurrying little crabs, from whence she has to be fished out by our united efforts. She makes no complaint though, far from it; her bruised shins, damaged elbows, and wet petticoats all come in the day's work.
We reach Cod's Bay at last, looking as though we had fallen among thieves, and take our way through its one unsavoury street, and climb a hill that would be trying in mid-winter, but in these dog-days is simply brutal. In two hours' time we get home, blowsy, footsore, and worn out, knowing that our evil days have indeed begun. Somehow the hours go by and blessed night-fall comes.
At the present moment I am standing with my hands behind my back, affectionately regarding a crab, garnished with frequent prawns and abundant bread and butter, which Jack and I have provided for supper, as a set-off against the disagreeables of the day. He has gone to fetch a jug of cider, when he comes back we shall fall to. I walk to the open window and look out. The dim grey of night is creeping over the land; the cold, salt smell of the sea blows faintly but most freshly up across the town; the lights yonder look like coarse reflections of the bright restless lamps that quiver and burn in the pale vault overhead. I lean my elbows on the window-sill, and look across at the rose garden, that, like many another in Devonshire, is on the other side of the road, and from whence a fragrant whiff comes now and again, and make a disastrous discovery. Those moving shadows yonder, what are they? Followers? Not one or two or three but dozens! Oh, Alice, Alice! do I not know well enough what will happen? In five minutes the governor will come in from the garden at the back of the house, and sit down to supper (his seat faces the road and the hedge to the left of the rose garden), he will see them—he will rush out—and here conjecture fails me.
Jack enters, bearing the cider. "Jack!" I cry, rushing at him, "they have come, they are here, dozens of them!"
"Beetles?" asks Jack abstractedly, his thoughts plainly running on the crab who is waiting to have his body dissected.
"Lovers!" I say, shaking him by he arm, "oh! what shall we do?"
Jack goes to the window. Below we hear the scraping of chairs, the rattle of plates; the lamplight streams across the road; evidently Alice is in full view of the enamoured host, for there is a sudden movement in their ranks, and they increase their capers tenfold, much as you may see Chucky, the pig, curl his tail and grunt excitedly when he sees a delectable wash approaching.
"If they would only keep quiet," I say in despair, "perhaps he would not see them. Do you thing they know what a dreadful man he is?" Jack vanishes. A thought strikes me; seizing my nightcap, I lean out of the window and wave it energetically, pointing first to the room below, then at the town yonder. Surely, surely, my nightcap says, as plain as it can speak, "Go away?" Alas! to them such is evidently not its meaning, for at sight of my modest signal, at the dim vision of my white-robed form, the besieging army seems inspired with fresh vigour, and even begins to clamber over the hedge. My flag of danger is construed as an amatory signal pointing to indefinite favours, perhaps a love-letter. In another moment I hear a chair pushed sharply back below; the next I see the governor tearing across the road. He is up the hedge and over it before you could say Jack Robinson; but, quick as he is, Miss Alice's admirers are quicker, and he shortly returns furious and empty handed. I am so petrified at the catastrophe my well-meaning efforts have brought about that I am utterly incapable of moving away, so when the governor returns, and casts his eye over the house in search of the waiting-maid to whom he attributes the ovation, he beholds me—nightgown, nightcap, open mouth, and all. He shakes his fist wildly at me, and the gesture breaks the spell. I turn to hide myself in bed, but before I can reach it the governor is before me. I receive a box on the ear that makes me see two enraged parents, two crabs, two jugs of cider, two nightcaps; then, with a thunderstorm of abuse and wrath bellowing about me, I am hustled out of the room and down into Jack's—a narrow slip of a place overlooking the back garden, and which is only—oh, horror!—partitioned off the governor's chamber. There I am left crabless, supperless, tearless, to reflect on the extreme folly of ever meddling in other people's affairs; no matter what one's intentions may be, since the better they are the worse the results seem to be. Alice comes by-and-by and condoles with me—as well she may, since her sins have brought down upon me the sentence of three days' imprisonment to the house.
Finally, for I shall have plenty of time for reflecting on my woes, I fall asleep. I scarcely seem to have reached the land of Nod, when I wake suddenly and open my eyes widely on—what! At first I am divided between a doubt whether it is papa come to finish me off, or that I at last face to face with a ghost; it is so difficult to make out anything in this half-light (for the green window blinds are very thick and dark), and it cannot yet be more than very early morning. Do ghosts seize you by the arm and shake you till your teeth rattle in your head, and the breath is nearly out of your body? Do ghosts———
"It's four o'clock," says a voice in a harsh whisper; "wake up, Master Jack, wake up."
"Master Jack!" James! I disappear under the bed-clothes like a shot; but if I think I am going to be left there in peace, I am much mistaken. To leave Master Jack snoring in bed when (I now remember) James has received particular injunctions over night to eject the same, however unwilling, is no part of his duty, so he punches and prods my prostrate body with a most laudable vigour, making violent efforts to dispossess me of the clothes. To these, however, I cling like grim death, wrapping them about me as tightly as a hedgehog in his skin, and for a space there is a desperate tussle, intensely ludicrous by reason of its silence, for neither of us dare to make a sound for fear of the governor's hearing; finally, altogether worsted and confounded, he goes, and I am left to sit up in bed like Marius among the ruins of Carthage. Presently Jack's head is popped gingerly in at the door, and he stares a good deal at the sight of the tossed bed, my tangled locks, and flushed, indignant countenance.
"Has the governor been taking a turn at you?" he asks in a whisper.
"No," I answer solemnly, "Jeames. I am black and blue. He thought it was you, you know."
"Oh, he did, did he?" asks Jack, sitting down on a chair and going off into a noiseless explosion. "I quite forgot to tell him———" He rocks himself to and fro in an agony of mirth. "I know what his awakings are."
"And so do I," I put in with conviction. "I'm sure they are nothing to laugh at."
"I must go," says Jack indistinctly, "or I shall burst;" and he goes away on some unlawful excursion or another that I should have loved, leaving me to moisten my sheets with unavailing tears. How slowly the hours creep by; how shall I ever get through three whole days? For once in my life I enjoy the honour of lying in my bed while the others are all scurrying down to prayers. I eat my breakfast in a slatternly way with a book before me, I dawdle through the morning reading Shakespeare, for oh, blessed oversight! papa forgot to set me any tasks. I pass my afternoon in imaginary conversation with two blackbirds and a linnet, enjoying with a certain complacency the knowledge that all the others, Jack included, are expiating their sins in the burning sun at the governor's heels, over shingle, rock, and sand. But by the time night falls I am heartily sick of my own society. I am longing to be in the midst of the chaff and noise and bustle of my brothers and sisters. If papa wants a recipe for making me ripe for Bedlam, he has only to shut me up alone for a fortnight. Somehow the days drag away and I am released, free to go down the stairs or up as my spirit wills. Below I find things very crooked indeed; he is in a state of chronic ill-temper. Alice looks alarmed; she is red one moment, pale the next; and the very day of my re-admittance to the family bosom disaster marks us for its own. We are awaiting the announcement of dinner, and the governor is looking out of the window, prepared to quarrel with anything, from the thrush singing yonder, to the baker's boy with the bread, when a smart dog-cart drives slowly past, in which are seated two graceless, handsome, wide-awake Oxonians, who stare deliberately in at every window in search of Alice's blooming face. Papa turns round, and I think he is black, he can put two and two together as well as any other man, and he knows.
"Go to your room, miss," he says to Alice. "So this is the care you take of my daughters?" he asks Amberley.
Poor Alice, poorer Amberley, poorest mother: We have one of our extra, double-distilled, most virulent rows. It is not worth writing down: no one would believe it if I did. Let it suffice that out of all the windy talk and abuse, one abiding resolve remains, Miss Alice will go to school immediately, and a stronger, firmer hand than Amberley's shall be paid to crush the naughtiness out of her. The governor, as I have more than once remarked, is a man of action, and in an incredibly short space of time he has found a school and schoolmistress after his own heart and pattern. All preliminaries are arranged, the day for her departure is fixed, and to us all there is nothing left to do but to lament. All too soon the day and hour come round, and we crowd about her with our kisses and farewells; weeping in every degree, deeply and bitterly, loudly and effusively, silently and painfully, each according to our several natures; every one down to the babies furnishing his or her quota to the stream. "Good-bye, lovely sister, good-bye." For how many weary, long months shall we see your sweet face no more?