PAPA AND MAMMA.
The father of this family, as we have already said, was a clerk in a
merchant’s office, with a salary of two hundred pounds a-year. He was a
man of fifty, with very moderate abilities, but character
unimpeachable--a perfect type of his class--steadily marching on in his
common routine--doing all his duties without pretension--somewhat given
to laying down the law in respect to business--and holding a very grand
opinion of the importance of commerce in general, and of the marvellous
undertakings of London in particular. Yet this good man was not entirely
circumscribed by his “office.” He had that native spring of life and
healthfulness in him which belongs to those who have been born in, and
never have forgotten, the country. The country, most expressive of
titles!--he had always kept in his recollection the fragrance of the
ploughed soil, the rustle of the growing grass; so, though he lived in
Islington, and had his office in the City, he was not a Cockney--a
happy and most enviable distinction. His wife, too, was country born and
country bred; and two ancestral houses, humble enough, yet standing
always among the trees and fields, belonged to the imagination of their
children. This was a great matter--for the roses on her grandmother’s
cottage-wall bloomed perpetually in the fancy of Agnes; and Marian and
Charlie knew the wood where Papa once went a-nutting, as well as--though
with a more ideal perception than, Papa himself had known it. Even
little Bell and Beau knew of a store of secret primroses blooming for
ever on a fairy bank, where their mother long ago, in the days of her
distant far-off childhood, had seen them blow, and taken them into her
heart. Happy primroses, that never faded! for all the children of this
house had dreamed and gathered them in handfuls, yet there they were for
ever. It was strange how this link of connection with the far-off rural
life refined the fancy of these children; it gave them a region of
romance, into which they could escape at all times. They did not know
its coarser features, and they found refuge in it from the native
vulgarity of their own surroundings. Happy effect to all imaginative
people, of some ideal and unknown land.
The history of the family was a very common one. Two-and-twenty years
ago, William Atheling and Mary Ellis had ventured to marry, having only
a very small income, limited prospects, and all the indescribable hopes
and chances of youth. Then had come the children, joy, toil, and
lamentation--then the way of life had opened up upon them, step by step;
and they had fainted, and found it weary, yet, helpless and patient, had
toiled on. They never had a chance, these good people, of running away
from their fate. If such a desperate thought ever came to them, it must
have been dismissed at once, being hopeless; and they stood at their
post under the heavy but needful compulsion of ordinary duties, living
through many a heartbreak, bearing many a bereavement--voiceless souls,
uttering no outcry except to the ear of God. Now they had lived through
their day of visitation. God had removed the cloud from their heads and
the terror from their heart: their own youth was over, but the youth of
their children, full of hopes and possibilities still brighter than
their own had been, rejoiced these patient hearts; and the warm little
hands of the twin babies, children of their old age, led them along with
delight and hopefulness upon their own unwearying way. Such was the
family story; it was a story of life, very full, almost overflowing with
the greatest and first emotions of humanity, but it was not what people
call eventful. The private record, like the family register, brimmed
over with those first makings and foundations of history, births and
deaths; but few vicissitudes of fortune, little success and little
calamity, fell upon the head of the good man whose highest prosperity
was this two hundred pounds a-year. And so now they reckoned themselves
in very comfortable circumstances, and were disturbed by nothing but
hopes and doubts about the prospects of the children--hopes full of
brightness present and visible, doubts that were almost as good as hope.
There was but one circumstance of romance in the simple chronicle. Long
ago--the children did not exactly know when, or how, or in what
manner--Mr Atheling did somebody an extraordinary and mysterious
benefit. Papa was sometimes moved to tell them of it in a general way,
sheltering himself under vague and wide descriptions. The story was of a
young man, handsome, gay, and extravagant, of rank far superior to Mr
Atheling’s--of how he fell into dissipation, and was tempted to
crime--and how at the very crisis “I happened to be in the way, and got
hold of him, and showed him the real state of the case; how I heard what
he was going to do, and of course would betray him; and how, even if he
could do it, it would be certain ruin, disgrace, and misery. That was
the whole matter,” said Mr Atheling--and his affectionate audience
listened with awe and a mysterious interest, very eager to know
something more definite of the whole matter than this concise account of
it, yet knowing that all interrogation was vain. It was popularly
suspected that Mamma knew the full particulars of this bit of romance,
but Mamma was as impervious to questions as the other head of the house.
There was also a second fytte to this story, telling how Mr Atheling
himself undertook the venture of revealing his hapless hero’s
misfortunes to the said hero’s elder brother, a very grand and exalted
personage; how the great man, shocked, and in terror for the family
honour, immediately delivered the culprit, and sent him abroad. “Then he
offered me money,” said Mr Atheling quietly. This was the climax of the
tale, at which everybody was expected to be indignant; and very
indignant, accordingly, everybody was.
Yet there was a wonderful excitement in the thought that this hero of
Papa’s adventure was now, as Papa intimated, a man of note in the
world--that they themselves unwittingly read his name in the papers
sometimes, and that other people spoke of him to Mr Atheling as a public
character, little dreaming of the early connection between them. How
strange it was!--but no entreaty and no persecution could prevail upon
Papa to disclose his name. “Suppose we should meet him some time!”
exclaimed Agnes, whose imagination sometimes fired with the thought of
reaching that delightful world of society where people always spoke of
books, and genius was the highest nobility--a world often met with in
novels. “If you did,” said Mr Atheling, “it will be all the better for
you to know nothing about this,” and so the controversy always ended;
for in this matter at least, firm as the most scrupulous old knight of
romance, Papa stood on his honour.
As for the good and tender mother of this house, she had no story to
tell. The girls, it is true, knew about _her_ girlish companions very
nearly as well as if these, now most sober and middle-aged personages,
had been playmates of their own; they knew the names of the pigeons in
the old dovecote, the history of the old dog, the number of the apples
on the great apple-tree; also they had a kindly recollection of one old
lover of Mamma’s, concerning whom they were shy to ask further than she
was pleased to reveal. But all Mrs Atheling’s history was since her
marriage: she had been but a young girl with an untouched heart before
that grand event, which introduced her, in her own person, to the
unquiet ways of life; and her recollections chiefly turned upon the
times “when we lived in---- Street,”--“when we took that new house in
the terrace,”--“when we came to Bellevue.” This Bellevue residence was a
great point in the eyes of Mrs Atheling. She herself had always kept her
original weakness for gentility, and to live in a street where there was
no straight line of commonplace houses, but only villas, detached and
semi-detached, and where every house had a name to itself, was no small
step in advance--particularly as the house was really cheap, really
large, as such houses go, and had only the slight disadvantage of being
out of repair. Mrs Atheling lamed her most serviceable finger with
attempts at carpentry, and knocked her own knuckles with misdirected
hammering, yet succeeded in various shifts that answered very well, and
produced that grand _chef-d’œuvre_ of paperhanging which made more
amusement than any professional decoration ever made, and was just as
comfortable. So the good mother was extremely well pleased with her
house. She was not above the ambition of calling it either Atheling
Lodge, or Hawthorn Cottage, but it was very hard to make a family
decision upon the prettiest name; so the house of the Athelings, with
its eccentric garden, its active occupants, and its cheery
parlour-window, was still only Number Ten, Bellevue.
And there in the summer sunshine, and in the wintry dawning, at eight
o’clock, Mr Atheling took his seat at the table, said grace, and
breakfasted; from thence at nine to a moment, well brushed and buttoned,
the good man went upon his daily warfare to the City. There all the day
long the pretty twins played, the mother exercised her careful
housewifery, the sweet face of Marian shone like a sunbeam, and the
fancies of Agnes wove themselves into separate and real life. All the
day long the sun shone in at the parlour window upon a thrifty and
well-worn carpet, which all his efforts could not spoil, and dazzled the
eyes of Bell and Beau, and troubled the heart of Mamma finding out spots
of dust, and suspicions of cobwebs which had escaped her own detection.
And when the day was done, and richer people were thinking of dinner,
once more, punctual to a moment, came the well-known step on the gravel,
and the well-known summons at the door; for at six o’clock Mr Atheling
came home to his cheerful tea-table, as contented and respectable a
householder, as happy a father, as was in England. And after tea came
the newspaper and Mr Foggo; and after Mr Foggo came the readings of
Agnes; and so the family said good-night, and slept and rested, to rise
again on the next morning to just such another day. Nothing interrupted
this happy uniformity; nothing broke in upon the calm and kindly usage
of these familiar hours. Mrs Atheling had a mighty deal of thinking to
do, by reason of her small income; now and then the girls were obliged
to consent to be disappointed of some favourite project of their
own--and sometimes even Papa, in a wilful fit of self-denial, refused
himself for a few nights his favourite newspaper; but these were but
passing shadows upon the general content. Through all these long winter
evenings, the one lighted window of this family room brightened the
gloomy gentility of Bellevue, and imparted something of heart and
kindness to the dull and mossy suburban street. They “kept no company,”
as the neighbours said. That was not so much the fault of the Athelings,
as the simple fact that there was little company to keep; but they
warmed the old heart of old Mr Foggo, and kept that singular personage
on speaking terms with humanity; and day by day, and night by night,
lived their frank life before their little world, a family life of love,
activity, and cheerfulness, as bright to look at as their happy open
parlour-window among the closed-up retirements of this genteel little
street.