CLINTONS YOUNG AND OLD
The family tradition of the Clintons, whereby the interests and
occupations of the women were strictly subordinated to those of the men,
had not yet availed to damp the spirits or curb the activities of Joan
and Nancy, of whom Mrs. Clinton had made a simultaneous and somewhat
belated present to the Squire thirteen years before. Frank, the sailor,
the youngest son, had been seven at the time the twins were born, and
Dick a young man at Cambridge. Joan and Nancy were still the pets of the
household, strong and healthy pets, and unruly within the limits
permitted them. Released from their schoolroom, they now came rushing
into the hall, and threw themselves on to their parents and their sister
with loud cries of welcome.
The Squire kissed them in turn--they approached him first as in duty
bound. It had taken him three or four years to get used to their
presence, and during that time he had treated them as the sort of
unaccountable plaything a woman brings into a house and a male
indulgently winks his eye at, a thing beneath his own notice, like a new
gown or a new poodle, or a new curate, but one in which she must be
permitted, in the foolish weakness of her sex, to interest herself. Then
he had gradually begun to "take notice" of them, to laugh at their
childish antics and speeches, to quote them--he had actually done this
in the hunting-field--and finally to like to have them pottering about
with him when duties of investigation took him no further than the
stables or the buildings of the home farm. He had always kept them in
order while they were with him; he had never lost sight of the fact that
they were, after all, feminine; and he had never allowed them to
interfere with his more serious pursuits. But he had fully accepted them
as agreeable playthings for his own lighter hours of leisure, just as he
might have taken to the poodle or the curate, and so treated them still,
although their healthy figures were beginning to fill out, and if they
had been born Clintons of a generation or two before they would have
been considered to be approaching womanhood.
He now greeted them with hearty affection, and told them that if they
were good girls they might come and look at the pheasants with him when
he had read his letters and they had had their tea, and then took
himself off to his library.
Mrs. Clinton's greeting was less hearty, but not less affectionate. She
lingered just that second longer over each of them which gives an
embrace a meaning beyond mere convention, but she only said, "I must go
and see Miss Bird. I suppose she is in the schoolroom." She gathered up
her skirts and went upstairs, but when the twins had given Cicely a
boisterous hug, they went back to their mother, and walked on either
side of her. She was still the chief personage in their little world,
although their father and even their brothers were of so much more
importance in the general scheme of things. And not even in the presence
of their father and brothers did they "behave themselves" as they did
with their mother.
The schoolroom was at the end of a long corridor, down two steps and
round a corner. It was a large room, looking on to the park from two
windows and on to the stableyard from a third. There were shelves
containing the twins' schoolbooks and storybooks, a terrestrial and a
celestial globe, purchased many years ago for the instruction of their
great-aunts, and besides other paraphernalia of learning, signs of more
congenial occupations, such as bird-cages and a small aquarium, boxes of
games, a big doll's house still in tenantable repair though seldom
occupied, implements and materials for wood-carving, and in a corner of
the room a toy fort and a surprising variety of lead soldiers on foot or
on horseback. Such things as these might undergo variation from time to
time. The doll's house might disappear any day, as the rocking-horse had
disappeared, for instance, a year before. But the furniture and other
contents of the room were more stable. It was impossible to think of
their being changed; they were so much a part of it. The Squire never
visited the room, but if he had done so he would have recognised it as
the same room in which he had been taught his own letters, with
difficulty, fifty years before, and if any unauthorised changes had been
made, he would certainly have expressed surprise and displeasure, as he
had done when Walter had carried off to Oxford the old print of Colonel
Thomas on his black horse, Satan, with a view of Kencote House, on a
slight eminence imagined by the artist, in the background. Walter had
had to send the picture back, and it was hanging in its proper place
now, and not likely to be removed again.
Miss Bird, commonly known as "the old starling," to whom Mrs. Clinton
had come to pay an immediate visit upon entering the house, as in duty
bound, was putting things away. She was accustomed to say that she spent
her life in putting things away after the twins had done with them, and
that they were more trouble to her than all the rest of the family had
been. For Miss Bird had lived in the house for nearly thirty years, and
had acted as educational starter to the whole race of young Clintons, to
Dick, Humphrey, Walter, Cicely, and Frank, and had taken a new lease of
life when the twins had appeared on the scene with the expectation of a
prolonged period of service. She was a thin, voluble lady, as old as the
Squire, to whom she looked up as a god amongst mankind; her educational
methods were of an older generation and included the use of the globes
and the blackboard, but she was most conscientious in her duties, her
religious principles were unexceptionable, and she filled a niche at
Kencote which would have seemed empty without her.
"O Mrs. Clinton I am so glad to see you back," she said, almost
ecstatically, "and you too Cicely dear--oh my a new hat and such a
pretty one! You look quite the town lady, upon my word and how did you
enjoy the ball? you must tell me all about it every word now Joan and
Nancy I will not put away your things for you once more and that I
declare and you hear me say it you are the most shockingly untidy
children and if I have told you that once I have told you a hundred
times O Mrs. Clinton a new bonnet too and I declare it makes you look
five years younger _at_ least."
Mrs. Clinton took this compliment equably, and asked if the twins had
been good girls.
"Well, good!" echoed the old starling, "they know best whether they have
been good, of their lessons I say nothing and marks will show, but to
get up as you might say in the dead of the night and let themselves down
from a window with sheets twisted into a rope and not fit to be seen
since, all creased, _most_ dangerous, besides the impropriety for great
girls of thirteen if any one had been passing as I have told them and
should be _obliged_ to report this behaviour to you Mrs. Clinton on the
first opportunity."
Joan and Nancy both glanced at their mother tentatively. "We were only
playing Jacobites and Roundheads," said Joan. "It makes it more real."
"And it wasn't in the middle of the night," added Nancy. "It was four
o'clock, and quite light."
"Why, you might have killed yourselves!" exclaimed Cicely.
"_Exactly_ what I said the very words," corroborated the old starling.
"We tied the sheets very tight," said Joan.
"And tested them thoroughly," added Nancy.
"And we won't do it again, mother," said Joan coaxingly.
"Really, we won't," said Nancy impressively.
"But what else will you do?" asked Mrs. Clinton. "You are getting too
big for these pranks. If your father were to hear of it, I am sure I
don't know what he would say."
She knew pretty well that he would have laughed boisterously, and told
her that he didn't want the children molly-coddled. Time enough for that
by and by when they grew up. And the twins probably knew this too, and
were not unduly alarmed at the implied threat. But there was a quality
in their mother's displeasure, rare as it was, which made them
apprehensive when one of their periodical outbursts had come to light.
They were not old enough to perceive that it was not aroused by such
feats as the one under discussion, which showed no moral delinquency,
but only a certain danger to life and limb, now past. But their
experience did tell them that misbehaviour which caused her displeasure
was not thus referred to their father, and with many embraces and
promises of amendment they procured future oblivion of their escapade.
"Well, I have done my duty," said the old starling, "and very unpleasant
it was to have to welcome you home with such a story, Mrs. Clinton, and
now it is all over and done with I will say and am glad to say that it
is the only _blot_. And that is what I said to both Joan and Nancy that
it was _such_ a pity to have spoilt everything at the last moment, for
otherwise two better behaved children it would have been impossible to
find anywhere."
At which Joan and Nancy both kissed the old starling warmly, and she
strained them to her flat but tender bosom and called them her precious
pets.
They went with Cicely into her bedroom while she "took off her things."
They betrayed an immense curiosity for every detail of her recent
experiences, particularly that crowning one of the Court Ball. She was
exalted in their eyes; she had long been grown up, but now she seemed
more grown up than ever, a whole cycle in advance of their active,
sexless juvenility.
"I don't know," said Joan doubtfully, fingering the new hat which Cicely
had taken off, "but I almost think it must be rather fun to wear pretty
things sometimes."
But Nancy, the younger by some minutes, rebuked that unwholesome
weakness. "What rot, Joan," she said indignantly. "Sis, we have made up
our minds to ask mother if we may wear serge knickerbockers. Then we
shall be able to do what we like."
When this sartorial revolution had been discussed, Cicely asked, "Has
Muriel been over while I have been away?"
"Yes," replied Joan. "Walter was at Mountfield on Sunday, and they came
over in the afternoon. They prowled about together. Of course they
didn't want us."
"But they had us all the same," said Nancy, with a grin. "We stalked
them. They kissed in the Temple, and again in the peach-house."
"But there were lucid intervals," said Joan. "They have made up their
minds about something or other; we couldn't quite hear what it was. They
were in the kitchen garden, and we were on the other side of the wall."
"You weren't listening, darling?" hazarded Cicely.
"Oh, rather not! We wouldn't do such a thing. But Nancy and I like to
pace up and down the yew walk in contemplation, and of course if they
liked to pace up and down by the asparagus beds at the same time, we
couldn't help hearing the murmur of their voices."
"It is something very serious," said Nancy. "Walter is going to tackle
Edward about it at once. And Muriel is quite at one with him in the
matter. She said so."
"How they do go on together, those two!" said Joan. "You would think
they had never met in their lives until they got engaged six months ago.
When they came out of the peach-house Nancy said, 'And this is love!'
Then she ran away."
"Only because Walter ran after me," said Nancy.
"And Muriel put her arm round my neck," continued Joan, "and said, 'O
Joan, _darling_! I am so happy that I don't care _who_ sees me.'
Positively nauseating, I call it. You and Jim don't behave like that,
Sis."
"I should think not," said Cicely primly.
"Well, you're engaged--or as good as," said Nancy. "But I do rather
wonder what Walter is going to tackle Edward about. It can't be to hurry
on the wedding, for it's only a month off now."
"We shall know pretty soon," said Joan. "Father doesn't keep things to
himself."
"No, I expect Edward will make a deuce of a row," said Nancy.
"Nancy!" said Cicely sharply, "you are not to talk like that."
"Darling!" said Nancy in a voice of grieved expostulation. "It is what
Walter said to Muriel. I thought there _couldn't_ be any harm in it."
The twins--they were called "the twankies" by their brothers--went off
after tea in the schoolroom to see the young pheasants with their
father. They were lively and talkative, and the Squire laughed at them
several times, as good-humoured men do laugh at the prattle of innocent
childhood. Arrived at the pens he entered into a long and earnest
conversation with his head keeper, and the twins knew better than to
interrupt him with artless prattle at such a time as that. But going
home again through the dewy park, he unbent once more and egged Nancy on
to imitate the old starling, at which he roared melodiously. He was a
happy man that evening. He had come back to his kingdom, to the serious
business of life, which had a good deal to do with keepers and broods of
pheasants, and to his simple, domestic recreations, much enhanced by the
playful ways of his "pair of kittens."
The mellow light of the summer evening lay over the park, upon the thick
grass of which the shadows of the trees were lengthening. Sheep were
feeding on it, and it was flat round the house and rather uninteresting.
But it was the Squire's own; he had known every large tree since the
earliest days of his childhood, and the others he had planted, seeing
some of them grow to a respectable height and girth. He would have been
quite incapable of criticising it from the point of view of beauty. The
irregular roofs of the stables and other buildings, the innumerable
chimneys of the big house beyond them, seen through a gap in the trees
which hemmed it in for the most part on three sides, were also his own,
and objects so familiar that he saw them with eyes different from any
others that could have been turned upon them. The sight of them gave
him a sensation of pleasure quite unrelated to their aesthetic or even
their actual value. They meant home to him, and everything that he
loved in the world, or out of it. The pleasure was always there
subconsciously--not so much a pleasure as an attitude of mind--but this
evening it warmed into something concrete. "There's plenty of little
dicky-birds haven't got such a nest as my two," he said to the twins,
who failed to see that this speech, which they wriggled over, but
privately thought fatuous, had the elements of both poetry and religion.
In the meantime Cicely had made her way over the park in another
direction to visit her aunts in the dower-house, for she knew they would
be itching for an account of her adventures, and she had not had time to
write to them from London.
Aunt Ellen and Aunt Laura were the only surviving representatives of the
six spinster daughters of Colonel Thomas Clinton, the Squire's
grandfather. One after the other Aunt Mary, Aunt Elizabeth, Aunt Anna
and Aunt Caroline had been carried out of the dark house in which they
had ended their blameless days to a still darker and very narrow house
within the precincts of Kencote church, and the eldest sister, now an
amazingly aged woman, but still in the possession of all her faculties,
and the youngest, who although many years her junior, was well over
seventy, were all that were left of the bevy of spinster ladies.
On their father's death, now nearly forty years ago, they had removed in
a body from the big house in which they had lived in a state of subdued
self-repression to the small one in which, for the first time, they were
to taste independence. For their father had been a terrible martinet
where women were concerned, and would as readily have ordered Aunt Ellen
to bed, at the age of fifty, if he had been displeased with her, as if
she had been a child of ten. And if he had ordered her she would have
gone.
Some of the rooms in the dower-house had been occupied by the agent to
the Kencote estate who at that time was a bachelor, and the rest had
been shut up. The six sisters spent the happiest hours they had hitherto
known in the arrangement of their future lives and of the beautiful old
furniture with which the house was stocked. The lives were to be active,
regular, and charitable. Colonel Thomas, who had allowed them each
twenty pounds a year for dress allowance and pocket-money during his
lifetime, had astonished everybody by leaving them six thousand pounds
apiece in his will, which had been made afresh a year before his death.
He had just then inherited the large fortune of his younger brother, who
had succeeded to the paternal business in Cheapside, lived and died a
bachelor, and saved a great deal of money every year. By his previous
will they would have had a hundred a year each from the estate, and the
use of the dower-house. But even that would have seemed wealth to these
simple ladies as long as they remained together, and all of them alive.
For Colonel Thomas had forgotten, in that first will, to make provision
for the probability of one of them outliving the rest and being reduced
to a solitary existence on a hundred pounds a year. However, with
fifteen hundred a year or so between them, and no rent to pay, they were
exceedingly well off, kept their modest carriage, employed two men in
their garden, and found such pleasures in dividing their surplus wealth
amongst innumerable and deserving charities that the arrival by post of
a nurseryman's catalogue excited them no more than that of an appeal to
subscribe to a new mission.
The beautiful old furniture, huddled in the disused rooms and in the
great range of attics that ran under the high-pitched roof, gave them
immense happiness in the arrangement. They were not in the least alive
to its value at that time, though they had become so in some degree
since, but kept rather quiet about it for fear that their nephew might
wish to carry some of it off to the great house. They thought it very
old-fashioned and rather absurd, and they also held this view of the
beautifully carved and panelled rooms of their old house, which were
certainly too dark for perfect comfort. But they disposed everything to
the best advantage, and produced without knowing it an effect which no
diligent collector could have equalled, and which became still more
delightful and satisfying as the years went on.
Cicely walked across the level park and went through a deep wood,
entering by an iron gate the garden of the dower-house, which seemed to
have been built in a clearing, although it was older than the oldest of
the trees that hemmed it round. On this hot summer afternoon it stood
shaded and cool, and the very fragrance of its old-fashioned garden
seeming to be confined and concentrated by the heavy foliage. There was
not a leaf too many. But in the autumn it was damp and close and in the
winter very dark. A narrow drive of about a hundred yards led straight
from the main road to the porch and showed a blue telescopic glimpse of
distant country. If all the trees had been cut down in front to the
width of the house it would have stood out as a thing of beauty against
its green background, air and light would have been let into the best
rooms and the pleasant view of hill and vale opened up to them. But the
Squire, tentatively approached years before by his affectionate and
submissive aunts, had decisively refused to cut down any trees at all,
and four out of the six of them had taken their last look of this world
out of one or other of those small-paned windows and seen only a great
bank of laurels--even those they were not allowed to cut down--across a
narrow space of gravel, and the branches of oaks not quite ripe for
felling, above them.
Cicely went through a garden door opening on to a stone-floored passage
which ran right through the house, and opened the door of her aunts'
parlour. They were sitting on either side of the fireless grate with
their tea-table not yet cleared between them. Aunt Ellen, ninety-three
years of age, with a lace cap on her head and a white silk shawl over
her shoulders, was sitting upright in her low chair, knitting. She wore
no glasses, and her old hands, meagre, almost transparent, with large
knuckles, and skin that looked as if it had been polished, fumbled a
little with her needles and the thick wool. Her eyesight was failing,
though in the pride of her great age she would not acknowledge it; but
her hearing was almost perfect. Aunt Laura, who was seventy-five,
looked, except for her hair, which was not quite white, the older of the
two. She was bent and frail, and she had taken to spectacles some years
before, to which Aunt Ellen alluded every day of her life with contempt.
They said the same things to each other, on that and on other subjects,
time after time. Every day for years Aunt Ellen had said that if dear
Edward had only been able to cut down the trees in front of the house it
would give them more light and open up the view, and she had said it as
if it had only just occurred to her. And Aunt Laura had replied that she
had thought the same thing herself, and did Ellen remember how dear
Anne, who was always one to say out what she wanted, had asked him if he
thought it might be done, but he had said--quite kindly--that the trees
had always been there, and there they would stay.
The two old ladies welcomed Cicely as if she had been a princess with
whom it was their privilege to be on terms of affectionate intimacy. She
was, in fact, a princess in their little world, the daughter of the
reigning monarch, to whom they owed, and gave, loyal allegiance. Aunt
Laura had been up to the house that morning and heard that they were to
return by the half-past four o'clock train. They had been quite sure
that Cicely would come to see them at once and tell them all her news,
and they had debated whether they would wait for their own tea or not.
They had, in fact, waited for a quarter of an hour. They told her all
this in minute detail, and only by painstaking insistence was Aunt Ellen
herself prevented from rising to ring the bell for a fresh supply to be
brought in. "Well, my dear, if you are quite sure you won't," she said
at last, "I will ring for Rose to take the things away."
Cicely rang the bell, and Rose, who five-and-thirty years before had
come to the dower-house as an apple-cheeked girl from the village
school, answered the summons. She wore a cap with coloured ribbons--the
two sisters still shook their heads together over her tendency to
dressiness--and dropped a child's curtsey to Cicely as she came in. She
had been far too well-trained to speak until she was spoken to, but Aunt
Ellen said, "Here is Miss Clinton returned from London, Rose, where she
has seen the King and Queen." And Rose said, "Well, there, miss!" with a
smile at Cicely, and before she removed the tea-tray settled the white
shawl more closely round Aunt Ellen's shoulders.
"Rose is a good girl," said Aunt Ellen, when she had left the room, "but
I am afraid more fond of admiration than she should be. Well, dear, now
tell us all about what you have seen and done. But, first of all, how is
your dear father?"
"Oh, quite well, thank you, Aunt Ellen," replied Cicely, "and very
pleased to get home, I think."
"Ah!" said Aunt Ellen. "We have all missed him sorely. I am sure it is
wonderful how he denies himself all kinds of pleasure to remain here and
do his duty. It is an example we should all do well to follow."
"When he was quite a young man," said Aunt Laura, "there was no one who
was gayer--of course in a _nice_ way--and took his part in everything
that was going on in the higher circles of the metropolis. Your dear
Aunt Elizabeth used to cut out the allusions to him in the _Morning
Post_, and there was scarcely a great occasion on which his name was not
mentioned."
"But after two years in his regiment he gave it all up to settle down
amongst his own people," said Aunt Ellen. "All his life has been summed
up in the word 'duty.' I wish there were more like him, but there are
not."
"It seems like yesterday," said Aunt Laura, "that he joined the Horse
Guards Blue. We all wished very much to see him in his beautiful
uniform, which so became him, and your dear Aunt Anne, who was always
the one to make requests if she saw fit, asked him to bring it down to
Kencote and put it on. Dear Edward laughed at her, and refused--quite
kindly, of course--so we all took a little trip to London--it was the
occasion of the opening of the International Reformatory Exhibition at
Islington by the Prince of Wales, as he was then--and your dear father
was in the escort. How noble he looked on his black horse! I assure you
we were all very proud of him."
Cicely sat patiently silent while these reminiscences, which she had
heard a hundred times before, were entered upon. She looked at Aunt
Ellen, fumbling with her knitting-needles, and wondered what it must be
like to be so very old, and at Aunt Laura, who was also knitting, with
quick and expert fingers, and wondered if she had ever been young.
"Did the King show your dear father any special mark of esteem?" asked
Aunt Ellen. "It did occur to your Aunt Laura and myself that, not
knowing how heavy are the duties which keep him at Kencote, His Majesty
might have been--I will not say annoyed, because he would not be
that--but perhaps disappointed at not seeing him more often about his
Court. For in the days gone by he was an ornament of it, and I have
always understood, though not from him, that he enjoyed special
consideration, which would only be his due."
"The King didn't take any notice of father," said Cicely, with the
brusque directness of youth, and Aunt Ellen seemed to be somewhat
bewildered at the statement, not liking to impute blame to her
sovereign, but unable for the moment to find any valid excuse for him.
"I thought," she said hesitatingly, "that sending specially--the
invitation for all of you--but I suppose there were a great many people
there."
Cicely took her opportunity, and described what she had seen and done,
brightly and in detail. She answered all her aunts' questions, and
interested them deeply. Her visits, and those of her mother, or the
twins with Miss Bird, were the daily enlivenment of the two old ladies,
and were never omitted. The Squire seldom went to the dower-house, but
when he did look in for a minute or two, happening to pass that way,
they were thrown into a flutter of pleasure and excitement which lasted
them for days.
When Cicely took her leave an hour later, Aunt Ellen said: "The
consideration with which dear Edward's family treats us, sister, is
something we may well be thankful for. I felt quite sure, and I told
you, that some one would come to see us immediately upon their return.
Cicely is always so bright and interesting--a dear girl, and quite takes
after her father."
"Dear Anne used to say that she took after her mother," said Aunt Laura;
to which Aunt Ellen replied: "I have not a word to say against Nina; she
has been a good wife to dear Edward, though we all thought at the time
of their marriage that he might have looked higher. But compared with
our nephew, quiet and unassuming as she is, she has very little
character, while Cicely _has_ character. No, sister, Cicely is a
Clinton--a Clinton through and through."