But father interrupted. 'I've simply got to give you a thrashing as
well, little 'un, because once or twice before you've said you were
sorry, but it will have to be a moral one. I can't thrash a thing your
size; why _don't_ you grow? I'm sure you could if you really tried,
it's just cussedness. Now you go down to Sam and Ross, they're in the
harness room, and tell them you're sorry and that you're going to do
what they tell you in future.'
And I said, 'Daddy, I simply couldn't; why, I'd never hear the last of
it, I couldn't get it out.'
So father said, 'Well, you can take your choice between your pride and
the Hickley Woods, darling.'
So I went down to the harness room and got it out somehow. Ross said,
'Oh, I say, Meg, _don't_ say any more, it won't make a scrap of
difference, but if you wouldn't mind about wasps' nests and that kind of
thing, we would be so obliged, wouldn't we, Sam?'
And Sam said 'Rather' and gave me a red apple. I always got one from
Sam if I were in a row.... Of course, I've had a dog's life with the
pair of them ever since.
*CHAPTER V*
When Ross and I were fifteen we got to know a topping boy named Charlie
Foxhill. He is amphidextrous. His father is most frightfully rich. He
made his money in cement, but this is never mentioned because Mrs
Foxhill is the daughter of an impecunious peer, and she is as proud as
the cement is hard. The Foxhills came to live in the next village to
ours. My great friend, Monica Cunningham, lives there too, at least she
is there sometimes. Her father is a baron, but you would never know it
to look at him. He takes a great interest in patent manures and the ten
lost tribes.
Charlie is two years older than Ross, but so much shorter that they seem
the same age. He is an agnostic. His mother has driven him to it, she
is so 'steeped in saints.'
'It's bad enough to be steeped in poets like my sister,' said Ross, 'but
saints! I never can imagine how people can stomach all that crowd.
They bore me stiff. The only one I like is the chap that finds lost
things.
'St Elian?'
'Fat lot you know about saints, Foxhill,' remarked my brother politely.
'I know an awful lot; I've not lived with my mother for nothing,' said
Charlie lugubriously.
'Well, I never could see that a saint was anything more than a dead
sinner,' remarked my brother, 'and some of them make a perfect nuisance
of themselves--look at St Vitus.'
'Oh,' I giggled, but my brother was wound up and ignored my
interruption.
'And St Swithin--isn't he the absolute limit? Look how he mucks the
summer up if he gets the chance! All because he thought he was going to
be buried where he didn't want to be--keeping the feud up all these
years, too.'
Charlie admires my friend Monica awfully and calls her a Greek poem
because she is so graceful, but Ross says that it is a pity she suffers
from pride of race and spends her time in looking up people's pedigrees.
Her brother is the Master of Rullerton. Daddy asked her once if she had
ever looked up the pedigree of the Master of the Universe, as He was a
gentleman on his mother's side, and daddy showed her a funny old book
where it said, 'He might, if He had esteemed of the vayne glorye of this
world, have borne coat armour.'
That took Monica's fancy frightfully. She said it made Him seem quite
interesting. Aunt Amelia thought it 'shocking,' of course, but daddy
said,--
'We don't all travel by the same road, Amelia.'
'There is only one way, and it is narrow,' groaned my aunt.
'Yes, but not narrow-minded,' daddy retorted. He is funny.
Though Charlie Foxhill is such a friend of Ross they are not a bit
alike; Charlie is so diffident, Ross so sure of everything. But then
Charlie has had one of those unfortunate 'Christian upbringings' that
daddy calls only another name for spiritual slavery, when square parents
try to shove their round children into square holes, and of course the
children hate it and some of them go to the devil in the process. Mrs
Foxhill actually insists on reading all her children's letters, and
expects them to think and feel just as she does about everything.
But Charlie won't be put into his parents' mould, he refuses to be
shoved into their square hole, he utterly declines to be steeped in
saints. If he differs from his mother on any subject he is answered
with a mass of words and arguments, reproaches, or worse still, tears;
consequently Charlie says nothing now and veils all he really feels in a
cloak of absurdities or feigned indifference.
At first we couldn't get him to give an opinion about anything,
especially in front of father, but gradually as he got to know us better
and found that Ross expressed his views quite freely and that daddy
treated them with respect and consideration, even if they were
diametrically opposed to his own, Charlie began gradually to develop and
say what he really thought, but always with a certain diffidence as if
he half expected a storm of opposition. But he is always courteous
about his mother--'steeped in saints' is the only criticism he ever
makes. For the rest he is silent and suppressed, but the cold politeness
with which he treats his people is quite different from the deference
Ross pays to daddy.
Monica, too, is not a bit like me. I always know exactly what I want;
she never does--till afterwards. Father says, however, that Monica will
be a fine character when she learns that a man can be all the things
that really matter, even if he never had a grandfather, and that she
will rise to the occasion some day and do the splendid thing even if she
doesn't always know whether she wants to play tennis with Ross or
Charlie.
*CHAPTER VI*
When I was sixteen my governess got married and daddy said it was a good
opportunity for me to go to school for a bit. I was therefore sent to
the one in London where Monica was. The head mistress was a friend of
Aunt Amelia. I suppose that's why my prickles were always out and my
old Adam gave me such a lot of trouble.
There was that last unfortunate Sunday, for instance. It was the 27th
April, and Monica and I awoke at four o'clock. We peeped out of the
bedroom window just as the dawn was coming. The London garden had all
the glamour of the woods at home, and there in the half light we could
see the six or seven trees with bluebells growing round--a mist of blue,
enchanting, adorable, divine. The scent blew across the grass and the
birds called us. We slipped downstairs and ran over the delicious cool
lawn into that lovely blue light at the foot of the trees. We gathered
handfuls of blossoms and ferns all drowned with dew. We went quite mad
with the call of the spring, and danced, for I thought I heard distant
music. It may have been only a blackbird; could it have been the pipes
of Pan? Anything was possible that morning. We got back, as we thought
unseen, stole some scones and milk, and as we tumbled into bed again
Monica swore she heard the cuckoo, but I'm certain it was only the clock
on the stairs, because this 'Bird' ooed before it cucked!
Then the same day I behaved badly in church. Of course, the general
behaviour of the sons and daughters of the clergy is always more
unseemly than that of other people's children. Daddy says it's because
they're so frightfully handicapped in having the clergy for their
fathers.
But that day two such absurd things happened. I believe even St Paul
with his love of decency and order would have been obliged to smile,
while Peter, of course, would have giggled. Monica passed me a bit of
paper shortly after we arrived, on which was written the mystic message:
'Eyes right. Psalm 57, verse 5. She will remember.' I looked to the
right, and seated in the pew immediately in front of us was a spinster
of uncertain age in a smart blue toque, in the hollow crown of which lay
a complete set of false teeth with an unholy smile still lingering about
them. I suppose the poor dear had put them on her hat to remind her to
put them in her mouth. I collapsed into weak giggles, which increased
when I looked up the Psalm we were about to sing, which contained the
verse: 'Whose teeth are spears and arrows.' I am afraid I must confess
I didn't attempt to follow the service, I simply lived for verse 5.
Sure enough, as Monica had predicted, 'she remembered.' She was singing
away lustily, 'And I lie even among the children of men that are set on
fire whose----' then a violent start, a wild clutch at the toque, and a
dash down the aisle. The churchwarden, who thought she was ill,
followed her into the porch with a glass of water.
I could see Monica's shoulders shaking though her face was
preternaturally solemn. I felt quite ill with suppressed laughter. I
tried to remember all the things I had been taught to think about in
church, but I was in that weak state I couldn't stop giggling. The next
Psalm began with the question: 'Are your minds set upon righteousness, O
ye congregation.' I felt neither Monica nor I could answer in the
affirmative.
After a while my eyes stopped running and I was able to attend a little
better. Then we had the second lesson. It was Acts xxvii, all about
the shipwreck of St Paul. I noticed poor old Admiral Stopford, who is a
bit weak in the head, was getting very fidgety. His nurse whispered to
him once or twice, but in vain, for when the vicar read how they cast
the cargo over to lighten the ship he suddenly got up and said loudly,--
'Never ought to have been necessary, bad navigation, bad navigation.'
His nurse hurried him out, purple in the face, and Monica and I
followed. I felt if I couldn't laugh aloud I should spontaneously
combust. We found a flat tombstone in a secluded part of the churchyard
on which we sat and rocked.
On arriving back at the house there was a most frightful row because one
of the neighbours had telephoned to say that he had seen us in the
garden in the early morning. The head mistress said we had brought
disgrace on the school and that I was the chief offender. She
telegraphed to father,--
'Seriously worried about your daughter come the first thing on Monday.'
Daddy was frantic and thought that I was dying, and wired to Ross at
Harrow to go to Hampstead at once, and that he would come up by the
first train he could catch.
Ross was out, so he only got to the school half an hour before father.
Meantime Aunt Amelia had been sent for, and I was in the head mistress's
room being rowed when Ross was announced. He looked quite old as he
came in and said, 'Is my sister still alive?'
He was so relieved when he saw me that he was just going to kiss me, but
Aunt Amelia stopped him and said he'd better not.
'Have you got _another_ cold?' he asked, 'but I'm not afraid of germs.'
Ross wouldn't sit down because I wasn't allowed to. I felt like a
prisoner at the bar while he was told all my crimes from the beginning
of time to 'this last disgraceful episode which could not be passed
over.'
Ross could not see their point of view at all. When she told him about
the scones he exclaimed,
'But if my sister was hungry surely----?' and she said, 'But is that any
reason why your sister should leave the house in the middle of the
night?' and Aunt Amelia remarked she did not know what my dear dead
mother would say if she could know it.
My quick hurt then! I know it's awfully weak-minded to cry when you're
in a row, but I couldn't stand that bit about mother. Ross seemed to
get suddenly about seven feet high and his face went like a granite
sphinx, and he put his arm round me and said, 'There darling,' several
times.
'Oh, Ross,' I sobbed, 'I never left the house at all, I only ran out
into the garden.'
'Of course, darling.'
'And it wasn't the middle of the night either, Ross, it was four o'clock
in the morning.'
And he agreed that it was _quite_ different.
When daddy came the Mistress regretted that I would have to be expelled,
but she trusted that a father's care and watchful eye were all I needed.
She hoped and believed I had no vice.
I cried some more against father's sleeve then, because Ross had said
once that people were only expelled for really rotten things,--
'It was the bluebells, daddy.'
'Of course it was, darling,' he said, 'but they're heaps bigger in
Devonshire.'
'That child is on the road to ruin,' groaned my aunt.
Father said to Ross in the cab that crabbed age and youth never could
live together, and that woman was enough to make an Evangelical parson
turn Papist.
But something happened while I was at school that I can't forget. We
were allowed occasionally to go to Evensong, and once in the dimness of
the church I saw a man gazing at me. He looked like a soldier in the
Indian army--not a bit handsome, but he had a certain rugged strength
that made his face seem rather splendid. The keen, clear eyes were gray
and stern, but softened as they looked at me. I felt as if I knew him.
I have often thought since of that 'absent face that fixed me,' and I
find myself comparing other men with him, and somehow, I can't explain
it very well, I think I feel a little older since I saw him.
*CHAPTER VII*
Oh, it was topping to get home. Nannie said I was most frightfully
thin. She seemed quite worried about it, but the cook said
consolingly,--
'Oh, we all ebbs and flows, especially gals. She only wants the crip o'
the crame and an egg beat up in a drop of good milk.'
The next day I woke up with a spot on my chest, and Nannie said I was
feverish, and daddy got in a panic and sent for Doctor Merriwater. His
name is Tobias, but we always call him Toby. When he came he looked at
my spot most earnestly and said,--
'Why, good gracious, the child has got the measles, the one and only
measle, she's in a frightfully dangerous state. Don't let her get up
for at least two days and I'll send you round a collar and a chain at
once or I'm afraid her measle will be gone before the morning.'
When I was better I asked father if I could be presented, as I had left
school, and Monica was going to be.
'No,' he said, 'I've had quite enough of London for you for the moment.'
'Oh, daddy, why not?'
Father turned autocratic then and said, 'Because I don't choose,
darling.' So, of course, I couldn't say any more.