DRIFTING INTO HAVEN.
It is a soft, calm evening, early in April, and Dr. Faunthorpe’s
shabby old house is as much brightened by the westering sunlight as
it can be brightened by anything less than the three coats of paint
for which its worm-eaten woodwork has been languishing for the last
twenty years. There has not been a five-pound note expended upon the
repair or the beautification of Robert Faunthorpe’s house within the
memory of the oldest inhabitant of Redcastle. It is scrupulously
clean, and that is the best that can be said of it. There is a small
garden in front, where flourish those homely perennials which demand
little care and no artificial nutriment,--lupins, Canterbury bells,
flags, London pride, polyanthuses, primroses, and wall-flowers.
Behind the house there is a long strip of ground where the surgeon
cultivates cabbages and potatoes, leeks and potherbs, leaving only
two narrow borders for floriculture. Happily there are ancient rose
bushes in these neglected borders,--rose bushes from which Beauty’s
father might have gathered those large red cup-shaped cabbage roses
that grow in a child’s picture book. The borders are edged with box,
tall and thick,--box that has been growing for a century. The low
red walls, crumbling into hollows where the birds have pecked at the
brickwork, crowned with dragon’s-mouth, stonecrop, and houseleek,
would be delicious in a picture, and are not unlovely in reality.
At the bottom of this long narrow garden there is a patch of ground
set apart for the benefit of Scrub, the pony, upon which grow
purple-flowered tares, three crops in a twelvemonth sometimes.
Within, the house has a certain air of homely comfort. The shabby old
furniture has that well-worn look which in some wise endears goods
and chattels to their owners. Beeswax and labour have done their best
to brighten and beautify the ancient mahogany bureaus, the clumsy
walnutwood bedsteads and tables,--made at a time when walnutwood was
almost as cheap as deal. Cracked old jars and bottles of common blue
delf adorn the tall narrow wooden mantelpieces; curtains of watered
moreen, once crimson, but faded to a tawny brown, drape the deeply
recessed windows of parlour and surgery. The rooms are spacious, but
low; the ceilings sustained by massive beams painted black. The walls
are for the most part paneled, and the paneling has been painted a
dingy pink or a dirty drab. To keep this paneling spotless is the
old servant’s anxious care, and much house-flannel and soft soap are
expended thereupon to Dr. Faunthorpe’s aggravation,--that good easy
man having no passion for cleanliness in the abstract.
A wide stone passage leads from the front door to the half-glass door
opening into the back garden, thus letting light and air through the
old house. A clumsy mahogany-framed barometer, a row of hat-pegs,
and a faded map of England are the only furniture of this passage,
or hall, as a modern house-agent would call it. A roomy, solid old
staircase, with shallow treads, and ponderous balusters, leads to the
upper chambers, which are numerous and of fair size. To the right
of the front door is the parlour, on the left the surgery. Behind
the surgery is the best parlour; behind the every-day parlour is the
large stone-paved kitchen.
For this house, with its acre of garden, Dr. Faunthorpe pays twenty
pounds a year; so there is some saving of house-rent in residence
at Redcastle, if your soul aspires not after any higher state than
comfortable vegetation, and you are content to inhabit the inferior
end of the town.
Dr. Faunthorpe paces his front garden on this calm April evening,
smoking his pipe. He is a smoker as well as a snuffer, and finds
solace in tobacco after his daily round. This is his hour of rest
and leisure. True that it may be broken in upon at any moment by
some sudden call for his services, but his regular daily labour, his
measured grind at life’s mill, is over.
He prefers the small front garden for his evening pipe to the larger
ground at the back,--first, because he is to the fore if wanted;
and secondly, because, his house being on the high road, it is just
possible that something may go by, vehicle or passenger, to the
enlivenment of his leisure.
He is meditative and silent, but not alone. His niece Marion, a tall
girl with wavy light hair, and a pre-Raphaelite figure, stands in a
listless attitude by the gate. His niece Jenny, an overgrown girl of
twelve, with a very short frock and stalwart legs, encased in brown
worsted stockings, is watering the flowers, and making as much mess
as it is possible to make in the operation.
‘Just look what puddles you are making in the path, stupid,’ exclaims
the elder sister, peevishly regarding the efforts of her junior. ‘I
do wish you’d leave things alone. You’re always up to some mischief
or other.’
‘I suppose I shouldn’t be mischievous if I let the primroses die for
want of water,’ remonstrates the junior, in no wise abashed. ‘That’s
what you’d do, with your laziness and fine-lady ways. You were bad
enough before you went to stay with uncle Stephen, but you’re ever
so much worse now. I’m sure I wish he’d kept you there instead of
sending you back, like a bad penny. Uncle Robert and I were as jolly
as sandboys while you were away.’
The young person sets down her water-pot and delivers this diatribe
with arms akimbo, like Madame Angot’s daughter. Marion shudders.
‘Sandboys! What an expression for a young lady!’ she ejaculates.
‘Pray where’s the harm in sandboys?’ demands the incorrigible Jenny.
‘They’re more respectable than you, as far as I can see, for they get
their own living.’
‘My dear,’ remonstrates uncle Robert mildly, ‘that is not the way to
address your elder sister.’
‘Why does she come and loaf about here, then, with her
stuckupishness? Why doesn’t she go and be a governess like Sibyl? If
she heard what Hester says of her she’d be ashamed of herself.’
‘My love, you have no right to quote Hester.’
‘Hester is an impertinent, mischief-making creature,’ exclaims Marion.
‘And as to your sister going out as a governess, my dear,’ continues
uncle Robert mildly, ‘with her expectations it would be about the
most foolish thing she could do.’
‘Expectations,--dead men’s shoes!’ exclaims the terrible child,
twirling the watering-can so that its last drops sprinkle Marion’s
pretty blue dress. ‘I should hate myself if _I_ was mean enough to
calculate upon what any one would leave me.’
‘Quite right of you,’ says Marion, with a supercilious laugh--that
sneering schoolgirl laugh, which we all remember to have been crushed
by occasionally in our youth,--‘for certainly no one is likely to
leave _you_ money.’
‘I dare say not, with you in the way,’ answers the irrepressible
Jenny. ‘They’d feel they were doing an act of charity bestowing their
fortune on you, for it would be the same as leaving it to the Asylum
for Idiots. One simpleton provided for, at any rate.’
With this the imp swings round upon her heels as on a pivot,
brandishes the watering-pot as an Indian savage his club, and gallops
into the house. Jane Faunthorpe never walks. She has the action of
an unbroken colt, and seems, when in motion, to have as many legs
as that animal. When she comes downstairs there is a sound as of a
sack of coals flung from the upper story. How the old house sustains
itself under her youthful vigour is a mystery to the parish doctor.
‘I’d run after her and give her a good box on the ears,’ says Marion,
viciously, ‘if I didn’t want to see the omnibus go by.’
_The_ omnibus is a stunted covered vehicle, like a carrier’s cart
garnished with glazed windows, which plies between the station and
the outskirts of Redcastle, and it is nearly time for this conveyance
to pass with its evening freight. There are sometimes as many as five
people arrive by the six o’clock train from Krampston,--nay, the
Krampston train sometimes brings that rare bird, a passenger from
London.
‘It’s a pity you ever sent that child to a day school, uncle Robert,’
Marion remarks presently, wiping the waterspots daintily from her
dress. ‘She was bad enough before, but now she is simply intolerable.’
‘My love, I couldn’t afford a boarding school, and I was obliged
to send her somewhere,’ replies the surgeon, in his longsuffering
way. ‘At home she was learning only to dig potatoes and to whistle,
neither of which pursuits is an attractive accomplishment in a young
lady. The child is not bad at bottom.’
‘Perhaps not,’ answers Marion, snappishly, ‘but the bottom must be a
long way down. I’ve never come to it yet.’
‘She is very warm-hearted.’
‘Yes, if warmth of heart consists in rushing at one like an
avalanche, hugging one round the neck like a bear, and rumpling one’s
collar atrociously, without the faintest provocation.’
‘She is not of an idle disposition,’ remonstrates the uncle. ‘I found
her cleaning the back kitchen windows at half-past six this morning.
No one had asked her to do it.’
‘Of course not. That’s just the reason she did it.’
‘If you would take a little more pains with her, Marion,’ suggests
Dr. Faunthorpe, timidly----
‘Pains! I might take _agonies_, and without the least effect. Didn’t
I begin to teach her music----’
‘Yes, my dear, but you didn’t go on.’
‘Well, you just try to teach her anything, uncle Robert--just
try--that’s all,’ says Marion, with awful significance, and then
breaks out with a sigh, ‘Oh dear, is this precious old omnibus never
coming?’
‘It is rather late, my dear. But as it isn’t going to bring us any
one we care about, we needn’t worry ourselves about it.’
‘It would be something to look at just for a minute. If you only knew
what a difference there is between the look-out down here and above
Bar. There there’s almost always something going by--Mrs. Stormont’s
basket carriage, or Master Groshen’s pony, or the butcher’s cart.’
‘Ah, my dear, I’m afraid that long visit to your uncle Trenchard has
spoiled you for my quiet home.’
‘No, it hasn’t, uncle,’ answers the girl, with a little gush of
feeling in the midst of her petulance, just strong enough to show
the better side of her nature--‘no, it hasn’t, for this is home and
that isn’t. I should always feel that if I spent the rest of my life
with uncle Stephen. Of all the old fidgets----! Well, I suppose I
oughtn’t to say anything against him, for he has been very kind to
me in his way. He has given me a good deal of money from first to
last, though I must say he doled it out stingily, as if he liked the
money better than me; and it is nice staying at his house--one feels
one’s self somebody. Only think of the Stormonts, and the Groshens,
and the Marlin Spykes calling on him before he had been three weeks
in Redcastle, while you’ve lived here thirty years and they’ve never
called upon you.’
‘People at this end of the town are not visited, my dear,’ replies
the doctor, mildly, as one who bows to the mysterious ways of
Providence and questions not. ‘I dare say the _élite_ of Redcastle
called upon your uncle out of kindness, he being a stranger.’
‘He being a millionaire, uncle, that’s what you mean. Very much
they’d have called upon him if he’d been a stranger who wanted to get
his living. Think of the Stormonts giving a dinner party on purpose
for him, and inviting _me_--after ignoring me for the last four
years--staring me in the face, after church, for two hundred Sundays,
and taking no more interest in me than if I were a stone cherub on
a tablet in the minster, and now, all of a sudden, being so fond of
me. It’s too ridiculous. If I was as worldly as they are, I’d take a
little more pains not to show it.’
‘The world is worldly, my love,’ replies uncle Robert, with his
resigned air. ‘You can hardly expect it to be otherwise. For my part,
I am very glad to think that the Stormonts have taken notice of you,
and that you’ve been invited out with Mr. Trenchard. It may lead to
your making a good marriage, though you needn’t set your mind upon
that now, as it is tolerably certain your uncle will leave you an
independence. I only wish Sibyl were at home to have her share of
good fortune.’
‘It’s her own fault if she isn’t,’ says Marion.
‘Say rather her conscientiousness, my dear. She doesn’t like to leave
Mrs. Hazleton in a difficulty about her children; and very right too.
But I hope Mrs. Hazleton will suit herself with a new governess very
soon, and let Sibyl come home. Mr. Trenchard has asked for her so
often, and it really seems flying in the face of Providence for her
to be out of the way.’
‘If she wasn’t a stupid, she wouldn’t be at Mrs. Hazleton’s beck and
call,’ says Marion, and then exclaims, shrilly, ‘Here’s the omnibus,
and lots of people inside. Why, there’s some one nodding to us--a
lady in a gray hat--and--I declare, the ’bus is stopping. Why, it’s
Sibyl.’
The blundering vehicle stops before Dr. Faunthorpe’s gate; a shabby
carpet bag--only a carpet bag--is handed down from the roof, and
in the next instant Sibyl is in the homely little garden, sobbing
hysterically on her uncle’s shoulder.
He presses her to his breast tenderly, and looks in the pale, wan
face.
‘Why, my darling, how ill you look--how changed--how thin!’
‘I’ve had so much hard work, uncle,’ she answers, faintly, ‘but,
thank God, I am at home at last.’