Kitabı oku: «Robin Redbreast: A Story for Girls», sayfa 3

CHAPTER III.
TWO JACINTHS

The porch was almost like a room. It had cushioned seats all round, a rustic table at one side, and stained glass, tiny-paned windows. The old lady hurried through it, looking back over her shoulder to say, 'Sit down for a minute or two. I will order some milk for the little boy,' and nothing loth, the children did so, though in silence.

Then Eugene glanced round in triumph.

'There now,' he said, 'you see I was right. She doesn't mind a bit. I shouldn't wonder if she brought us out cakes too.'

'Hush,' said Frances, 'you needn't talk like that, Eugene. You were as frightened as anything when she first came out. And how can you be so greedy?'

'Hush,' said Jacinth in her turn, and still more authoritatively. 'Don't you hear? she's coming back.'

The door standing slightly ajar was pushed open more widely, disclosing a trim-looking maid, carrying a tray with a large glass jug full of milk, and – joyful sight! – a plate of small brown crisp-looking cakes. Eugene's eyes glistened, though, poor little chap, it was more at the sight of the milk than the cakes, for he was very thirsty indeed. But he sat still, to outward appearance patiently enough, for just behind the maid came the old lady again, looking quite eager and excited, a bright spot of colour on each cheek.

'Put the tray on the little table,' she said. 'Yes, that will do. You need not stay;' and the trim maid disappeared again.

Lady Myrtle poured out a glass of milk and gave it to Eugene.

'Your sisters will excuse my attending to you first, I am sure,' she said. 'You are very thirsty, I know. – Now, will you two have some milk and some cake?' she went on, turning to Jacinth and Frances.

Jacinth felt half inclined to refuse, but something in the old lady's manner made it difficult to do so. She did not seem accustomed to have even her suggestions disregarded, and her invitation was more like a command.

'After your brother has finished his milk,' their hostess went on, 'perhaps he would like to walk about the garden a little with your maid, or if he is tired, there is a nice arbour over there in the corner. I want to speak to you two a little. I have some questions to ask you, but I want you to understand that I will not invite you to come in till you have got leave from – from your parents or your guardians. When I was a child I would not have entered any stranger's house without leave, and I approve of strict ways of bringing up children.'

The girls listened respectfully, making a little sign of assent. But Eugene's whole attention had been given to the milk and cakes. Now that his thirst was satisfied, he began to think about others, and for the first time found his voice.

'Mayn't Phebe have some milk and cake, too, please?' he said. 'We've been a drefful long walk. I'm sure Phebe's firsty too.'

Phebe blushed scarlet, but in spite of her terror, her good manners – and she was a specially good-mannered girl – did not forsake her.

'Master Eugene, my dear,' she said quietly. 'You forget I am not a little young gentleman like you. – If I might take his glass and plate to the arbour, my lady, he would be very happy, and out of the way.'

Lady Myrtle smiled benignly. She liked 'tact.'

'Certainly, my good girl,' she said, 'and take a glass and some cakes for yourself too. – That is a nice-mannered girl,' she added to Jacinth and Frances. 'She is both modest and sensible.'

'Yes,' said Jacinth, 'we like her very much. Aunt Alison got her for us before we came here.'

Lady Myrtle's face grew grave.

'Is Aunt Alison the relation you live with?' she asked. 'Is her name Mrs Alison? And where and with whom did you live before? Have you no parents? I am not asking out of curiosity, but because I think you must be related to a very dear friend of mine – now dead.' Here her breath seemed to catch her voice. 'I may be mistaken, but I do not think so.'

'Our parents are in India,' said Jacinth. 'Our father is Colonel Mildmay, and Aunt Alison is his sister. Alison is her first name. We have only lived with her since our – grandmother, Mrs Denison, died.'

'Denison!' repeated Lady Myrtle, 'I was sure of it. But Mrs Denison? I cannot understand it. Are you not making a mistake, my dear? Are you sure that your grandmother was Mrs Denison? Was she not' —

'Mrs Denison was only our step-grandmother,' interrupted Jacinth, eagerly. Frances could not blame her now for explaining this! 'She was very good to us, but – she wasn't our own grandmother. She died before we were born. She was mamma's mother, and I am called after her. She was Lady Jacinth Denison, and' —

'I knew it,' exclaimed the old lady. 'And her name before she was married was' —

Jacinth hesitated a little. It is sometimes rather confusing to remember relations so far back.

'I know,' said Frances; 'it was More' – but here she too stopped.

'Moreland?' said Lady Myrtle.

The girls' faces cleared. Yes, that was it.

'But the Christian name – "Jacinth" – satisfied me,' said the old lady. 'The name, and your face, my dear,' to Jacinth herself. 'Thank you, for answering my questions. Perhaps I must not keep you any longer to-day, but I will write to your aunt – Miss Mildmay – Miss Alison Mildmay – I think I have heard of her at Thetford – and ask her to allow you to come to see me again very soon. If I keep you longer just now, she may be uneasy.'

'Oh no,' said Frances, 'she won't be at home when we get back. It's one of the days she's out all day – till after we're in bed, generally.'

'Dear me!' said Lady Myrtle, 'she must be a very busy person.'

'Yes,' said Jacinth, 'she is. She is very, very useful, I know. And one couldn't have expected her to give up all the things she'd been at so many years, all of a sudden, when we came. We don't mind, except that it seems a little lonely sometimes; but – I don't think Aunt Alison cares much for children or girls like us. She says she's got out of the way of it. But she's quite kind.'

'You have a governess, I suppose?' asked Lady Myrtle.

'No,' said Jacinth, 'we go every day but Saturday to Miss Scarlett's school.'

She coloured a little as she said it, for she had an instinct that 'school' for girls was hardly one of the things that her hostess had been accustomed to in her youth, and notwithstanding Jacinth's decision of character, she was apt to be much influenced by the opinions and even prejudices of those about her. But still she knew that Miss Scarlett's was really a somewhat exceptional school.

'To Miss Scarlett's,' repeated Lady Myrtle. 'I have heard of it. I believe it is very nice, but still – I prefer home education. But perhaps I should not say so. No doubt your parents and guardians have acted for the best. I should like you to tell Miss Alison Mildmay all I have asked you, and I will write to her. And in the meantime, that she may not think me too eccentric an old woman, pray tell her that I was – that your own grandmother – I like you to call her that – Lady Jacinth Moreland, afterwards Lady Jacinth Denison, and I, were the – yes, the very dearest of friends when we were young. It is possible that Miss Alison Mildmay may have heard my name from your mother. I think your mother – what is her name – "Eugenia," oh yes, I remember – I think your mother must have heard of me even in her childhood. My unmarried name was Harper, "Myrtle Harper;" your grandmother and I first took to each other, I think, because we had such uncommon names.'

'Harper!' exclaimed Frances eagerly, 'there are some – what is it, Jacinth? – I mean Bessie and Margar' —

'We must go,' said Jacinth, getting up, as she spoke. 'Frances, will you call Eugene? and' – turning to her hostess, 'thank you very much for being so kind. And oh, if you will ask Aunt Alison to let us come again, it would be such a pleasure.'

She raised her beautiful eyes to Lady Myrtle's face. A mist came over the keen bright old pair gazing at her in return. Partly perhaps to conceal this sudden emotion, Lady Myrtle stooped – for, tall though Jacinth was for her age, she was shorter than her grandmother's old friend – and kissed the soft up-turned cheek. 'My dear, you are so like her – my Jacinth, sometimes,' she murmured, 'that it is almost too much for me.'

Then a practical thought struck her.

'You have not told me your address at Thetford,' she said. 'I had better have it, though no doubt Miss Alison Mildmay is well known in the place.'

Jacinth gave it.

'Number 9, Market Square Place,' she said.

'Oh, I know where it is – a row of rather nice quaint old houses. Still, you must feel rather cooped up there sometimes, after Stannesley; was not that the Denisons' place? I was there once.'

'We miss the grounds, and – yes, we miss a good many things,' said Jacinth simply.

'Then I hope that Robin Redbreast will make up to you for some of them,' said Lady Myrtle. 'You know the name of my funny old house, I daresay?'

'Oh yes,' said Francis, who had just rejoined them with Eugene and Phebe, 'we heard it the very first day. And we've always thought it lovely – both the house and the name. And we always pass by this way when we can, because of the gates. We call them 'Uncle Marmy's gates,' for it was here we said good-bye to him – good-bye properly, I mean.'

'Kissing, and trying not to cry,' added Eugene, by way of explanation.

Lady Myrtle seemed a little startled.

'Uncle Marmy!' she repeated, 'that was your grandfather's name. I thought your mother was an only child.'

'Yes,' said Jacinth, 'Uncle Marmaduke is not our real – not our full uncle. He is mamma's half-brother only.'

'Oh,' exclaimed the old lady, 'now I understand.'

'But we love him just as much —quite as much as if he was our whole uncle,' said Frances, eagerly. 'He's perfectly – oh, he's as nice as he can possibly be.'

Lady Myrtle smiled, and gave a little pat to Frances's shining tangle of curly hair.

'Good-bye then, my dears, for to-day,' she said.

But she stood at the gate looking after them till they reached the corner of the lane, when some happy impulse made Jacinth – undemonstrative Jacinth – turn round and kiss her hand to the solitary old figure.

'She's like a sort of a grandmother to us,' said Eugene. 'What a good thing,' with extreme self-complacency, 'I made you go in! – what a good thing I was' – after a great effort – 'wursty!'

But Jacinth's face was slightly clouded. She drew Frances a little apart from the others.

'Frances,' she said severely, 'you must have more sense. How could you begin about those girls at school?' Lady Myrtle, if she does notice us, won't want to hear all the chatter and gossip of Miss Scarlett's. And it's such a common sort of thing, the moment you hear a name, to start up and say "Oh, I know somebody called that," and then go on about your somebodies that no one wants to hear anything of.'

Frances looked rather ashamed. She was barely two years younger than her sister, but on almost every subject – on questions of good manners and propriety above all – Jacinth's verdict was always accepted by her as infallible, though whence Jacinth had derived her knowledge on such points it would have been difficult to say. No one could have been less a woman of the world than the late Mrs Denison; indeed, the much misused but really sweet old word 'homely' might have been applied to her in its conventional sense without unkindly severity. And no life could have been simpler, though from that very fact not without a certain dignity of its own, than the family life at Stannesley, which was in reality the only training these girls had ever known.

'I'm very sorry, Jass,' said the younger sister, penitently. 'It was only – it did seem funny that her name was Harper, when I am so fond of Bessie and Marg' —

'I'm getting tired of your always talking of them,' said Jacinth. 'I daresay they're nice enough' —

'And they're quite ladies,' interposed Frances, 'though they are so very poor.'

'I wouldn't look down on them for that; I should think you might know me better,' said Jacinth. 'We're not at all rich ourselves, though I suppose papa and mamma seem so in India with all the parties and things they're obliged to have. And I never said the girls weren't "quite ladies," as you say. But I know how it will end: in a little while you won't like Bessie and Margaret any better than Prissy Beckingham. You fly at people so at first.'

'I don't think it will be that way this time,' said Frances in a tone of quiet conviction. 'There's something different about the Harpers.'

'It isn't a very uncommon name,' said Jacinth. 'There are all sorts of Harpers. Why, at Stannesley, the village schoolmaster's wife was called Harper before she married, I remember. And then Lord Elvedon's family name is Harper.'

They had drawn nearer to the other two by this time, and Phebe overheard the last words.

'If you please, Miss Jacinth, that is Lady Myrtle's family. Her father was Lord Elvedon, two or three back, and the Lord Elvedon now is a nephew or a cousin's son to her, though they never come near the place; it's been let ever since I can remember.'

'I wonder if she was brought up at Elvedon,' said Frances. 'It must seem rather sad to her, if she was there when she was a little girl, to have no one belonging to her there now.'

Altogether the adventure – and a real adventure it was – gave them plenty to think of and to talk about all the way home and after they got there. Eugene forgot his fatigue, and chattered briskly about the goodness of the little brown cakes, till he got a snub from Jacinth about being so greedy. His appetite, however, did not seem to have suffered, and he was quite ready to do justice to the tea waiting for them at home, though not without some allusions to Lady Myrtle's delicious cakes, and wishes that Aunt Alison would sometimes give them 'a change from bread and butter.'

For one of Miss Mildmay's fixed ideas about children was that they could not be brought up too plainly.

'We do have a change sometimes,' said Jacinth. 'We always have golden syrup on Saturdays and jam on Sundays, and you know we've had buns two or three times on birthdays.'

'Other children have buns and cakes far oftener than us,' said Eugene. 'Like we used to at Stannesley.'

'It was quite different there,' said Jacinth; 'a big country-house and baking at home.'

'Everything was nice at Stannesley,' said Frances with a sigh. 'Granny and Uncle Marmy really loved us; that makes the difference.'

'Aunt Alison loves us in her way,' said Jacinth. 'Everybody can't be the same. I think you're getting into a very bad habit of grumbling, Frances. And this afternoon you really should be pleased. For I shouldn't at all wonder if Lady Myrtle often asks us to go to see her, and that would be a treat and a change. But what you say about poor granny and Uncle Marmy reminds me to say something. You really needn't fly up so on the defensive every time I name them; you did it again to-day, and I'm sure Lady Myrtle must have thought it very queer, just as if I' —

But this second reproof for her behaviour at Robin Redbreast did not find Frances as meek as the former one, which, in deference to Jacinth's superior knowledge on such subjects, she had felt she perhaps deserved.

'I will "fly up" as you call it,' she interrupted angrily, 'when you talk in that cold measured way about dear granny and Uncle Marmy, as if you were almost ashamed of them. For one thing I can't bear you to say "poor" granny; it's not right. She was a sort of a saint, and I'm quite sure that now she's' – But here Frances burst into tears.

Jacinth felt sorry, but annoyed and irritated also. She blamed herself for having begun any private talk of the kind before Eugene and Phebe; for, as sometimes happened when they had come in late, Phebe was having tea with them this evening. And she felt conscious also of deserving, to a certain extent, her sister's blame. But Jacinth had a good deal of self-control.

'I cannot understand,' she said quietly, though the colour rose to her cheeks – 'I cannot understand how you can think such things of me – as if I – as if anybody could have loved them more than I did; as if' – But here the tears rose to her own eyes.

Frances was at once melted.

'I didn't mean that,' she said. 'I know you did. I wouldn't love you if I didn't know it. But it's your manner; you seem in such a hurry always to explain that granny wasn't our own grandmother.'

'I don't think that's fair,' said Jacinth. 'How could I possibly have helped explaining about it when it is only because of our own grandmother that Lady Myrtle cares anything at all about us. And I wasn't in a hurry to explain; don't you remember that Lady Myrtle kept asking if we were sure our grandmother was only Mrs?'

Yes, that had been so, but still the slightly hurt feeling which Jacinth's tone about the dear Stannesley people had more than once given Frances still remained, and she might have said more, had not her sister prevented her doing so.

'Anyway,' she said, 'we need not say any more about it just now.'

After tea they got out their lesson-books, anxious to do all they could, so as to wake on Saturday morning with the delightful sensation of a real whole holiday. But their long walk, perhaps the excitement of their adventure, had tired them. Lessons, with Frances especially, seemed more difficult than usual, and after a good many yawns and not a few groans, she decided that it was no use to attempt anything calling for a 'clear head' that evening.

'I'll just copy out my dictation and exercises,' she said, 'and do all the fresh learning to-morrow morning. Won't you do so too, Jass, for there are two or three things we can learn together?'

'Very well,' said Jacinth, though with a little sigh, 'perhaps it would be better.'

It was not only that she was tired – her head was full of Robin Redbreast and its owner, and all manner of fancies and castles in the air were crowding upon her. It was really so romantic, she thought; it was not silly to picture to herself the delightful possibilities of the future.

'Suppose Lady Myrtle really gets very fond of us' – she said 'us,' but 'me' would perhaps have been more correct, and after all this was scarcely unnatural, as it was she who had specially recalled the Jacinth Moreland of her enthusiastic youthful affection to the old lady – 'supposing she in a sort of way adopted us – or me' – for Jacinth was not selfish in the common acceptation of the word, though self-important and fond of ruling, 'what happiness it might bring us! She doesn't seem to have any relations, and she must be very well off. Supposing she took us to live with her, and treated us just like her own children, I wonder if mamma wouldn't come home then, and papa too perhaps. For of course, if they knew we were going to be well off, papa wouldn't worry so about staying out in India his full time and all that. How I should love to be the one to be able to do everything for them all.'

Still it would not do to begin speculating on what might happen in the far future when – Jacinth felt shocked when she realised that, in picturing herself as Lady Myrtle's possible heir, she was anticipating the old lady's death; yet she certainly could not 'fit in' the idea of their all living together at Robin Redbreast with its present châtelaine. And she laughed at her own absurdity.

'Papa is so independent,' she reflected. 'Even if mamma had a lot of money, I don't believe he'd be satisfied without working as hard as ever. And of course he loves his profession.'

Then she determined not to be silly, and to think no more about it. But her dreams that night were very fantastic and rosy-hued. She awoke in the morning from a vision of a wonderful room of which the walls were painted all over with robins, which suddenly burst out singing her name, 'Jacinth, Jacinth,' to find that Frances was awake and calling to her.

'Oh Francie, I was having such an interesting dream,' she said. 'I wish you hadn't awakened me: I can't remember what was dreams and what wasn't,' she went on sleepily. 'Did we really go inside Uncle Marmy's gates, and see?' —

'Of course we did,' said Frances, 'and I've got such a good thought. Don't you think we might go that way again to-day and take mamma's last photograph with us? Lady Myrtle would be sure to like to see it, and we needn't ask for her, you know. And it would keep her from forgetting us, and anyway we might walk round the garden, I should think.'

'No,' said Jacinth, 'we can't do anything like that without Aunt Alison's leave, and of course we can't ask for leave unless Lady Myrtle writes to Aunt Alison. And there's no telling if she will. She may be one of those whimsical old people that mean to do a thing, and then think better of it and do nothing.'

Frances's face fell.

'Oh, I do hope not,' she said. 'Somehow I don't think she's that sort of old lady.'

Nor in her heart did Jacinth. The expression of her misgivings had been as much or more to damp or check herself as Frances. For she was startled to find how wildly she had been indulging in building air-castles. Few, if any, even of those she had spent her life among, knew Jacinth Mildmay thoroughly, or had any suspicion of the impressionableness, the almost fantastic imagination, hidden under her quiet, almost cold exterior. But to some extent she knew herself better than is often the case at her age. She was well aware that she needed strict holding in hand; she sometimes even went too far in judging as contemptible weaknesses, feelings and impulses which were full of good.

But as regards the fancies which since yesterday had been so absorbing her, she was in the right. Even apparently harmless hopes and wishes dependent on the caprice, or, if carried where they may lead to, contingent on the life or death of others, are better checked at once. Indulgence in such can do no good, and may do harm.

They had not seen their aunt the night before. And her manner was somewhat 'carried' and preoccupied when she kissed the girls as they entered the dining-room, where she was already seated at the table waiting to read prayers.

A slight misgiving came over Jacinth. She glanced at the sideboard where the morning letters were always placed. Yes, one or two torn wrappers were lying there: evidently the letters had come and been opened. For Miss Alison Mildmay was, as Frances expressed it, 'a dreadfully early getter-up,' and had always an hour or more to herself before the younger members of the household appeared.

I am afraid Jacinth's attention that morning was rather distracted. She sat glancing at her aunt's profile, cold and almost hard, as she was accustomed to see it, but with just now the addition of some irritable lines about the forehead which were certainly not always there.

'Something has vexed her, I am certain,' said Jacinth to herself. 'I do wonder if it has anything to do with Lady Myrtle. Oh dear, if she has written so as to vex Aunt Alison, and we get blamed for it, and everything is spoilt!'