Transcribed from the 1889 Macmillan and Co. edition by David Price, email
ccx074@pglaf.org
[Picture: She visited the village school.—p. 38]
SCENES AND CHARACTERS,
OR,
Eighteen Months at Beechcroft
BY
CHARLOTTE M. YOUNGE
AUTHOR OF ‘THE HEIR OF REDCLYFFE,’ ‘THE TWO GUARDIANS,’ ETC.
[Picture: ‘Yes, Miss, Dick Rood is a sad fellow.’—p. 41]
_FIFTH EDITION_
ILLUSTRATED BY W. J. HENNESSY
London
MACMILLAN AND CO.
AND NEW YORK
1889
_All rights reserved_
PREFACE
OF those who are invited to pay a visit to Beechcroft, there are some
who, honestly acknowledging that amusement is their object, will be
content to feel with Lilias, conjecture with Jane, and get into scrapes
with Phyllis, without troubling themselves to extract any moral from
their proceedings; and to these the Mohun family would only apologise for
having led a very humdrum life during the eighteen months spent in their
company.
There may, however, be more unreasonable visitors, who, professing only
to come as parents and guardians, expect entertainment for themselves, as
well as instruction for those who had rather it was out of sight,—look
for antiques in carved cherry-stones,—and require plot, incident, and
catastrophe in a chronicle of small beer.
To these the Mohuns beg respectfully to observe, that they hope their
examples may not be altogether devoid of indirect instruction; and lest
it should be supposed that they lived without object, aim, or principle,
they would observe that the maxim which has influenced the delineation of
the different _Scenes and Characters_ is, that feeling, unguided and
unrestrained, soon becomes mere selfishness; while the simple endeavour
to fulfil each immediate claim of duty may lead to the highest acts of
self-devotion.
NEW COURT, BEECHCROFT,
18th _January_.
PREFACE (1886)
PERHAPS this book is an instance to be adduced in support of the advice I
have often given to young authors—not to print before they themselves are
old enough to do justice to their freshest ideas.
Not that I can lay claim to its being a production of tender and
interesting youth. It was my second actual publication, and I believe I
was of age before it appeared—but I see now the failures that more
experience might have enabled me to avoid; and I would not again have
given it to the world if the same characters recurring in another story
had not excited a certain desire to see their first start.
In fact they have been more or less my life-long companions. An almost
solitary child, with periodical visits to the Elysium of a large family,
it was natural to dream of other children and their ways and sports till
they became almost realities. They took shape when my French master set
me to write letters for him. The letters gradually became conversation
and narrative, and the adventures of the family sweetened the toils of
French composition. In the exigencies of village school building in
those days gone by, before in every place
“It there behoved him to set up the standard of her Grace,”
the tale was actually printed for private sale, as a link between
translations of short stories.
This process only stifled the family in my imagination for a time. They
awoke once more with new names, but substantially the same, and were my
companions in many a solitary walk, the results of which were scribbled
down in leisure moments to be poured into my mother’s ever patient and
sympathetic ears.
And then came the impulse to literature for young people given by the
example of that memorable book the _Fairy Bower_, and followed up by _Amy
Herbert_. It was felt that elder children needed something of a deeper
tone than the Edgeworthian style, yet less directly religious than the
Sherwood class of books; and on that wave of opinion, my little craft
floated out into the great sea of the public.
Friends, whose kindness astonished me, and fills me with gratitude when I
look back on it, gave me seasonable criticism and pruning, and finally
launched me. My heroes and heroines had arranged themselves so as to
work out a definite principle, and this was enough for us all.
Children’s books had not been supposed to require a plot. Miss
Edgeworth’s, which I still continue to think gems in their own line, are
made chronicles, or, more truly, illustrations of various truths worked
out upon the same personages. Moreover, the skill of a Jane Austen or a
Mrs. Gaskell is required to produce a perfect plot without doing violence
to the ordinary events of an every-day life. It is all a matter of
arrangement. Mrs. Gaskell can make a perfect little plot out of a sick
lad and a canary bird; and another can do nothing with half a dozen
murders and an explosion; and of arranging my materials so as to build up
a story, I was quite incapable. It is still my great deficiency; but in
those days I did not even understand that the attempt was desirable.
Criticism was a more thorough thing in those times than it has since
become through the multiplicity of books to be hurried over, and it was
often very useful, as when it taught that such arrangement of incident
was the means of developing the leading idea.
Yet, with all its faults, the children, who had been real to me, caught,
chiefly by the youthful sense of fun and enjoyment, the attention of
other children; and the curious semi-belief one has in the phantoms of
one’s brain made me dwell on their after life and share my discoveries
with my friends, not, however, writing them down till after the lapse of
all these years the tenderness inspired by associations of early days led
to taking up once more the old characters in _The Two Sides of the
Shield_; and the kind welcome this has met with has led to the
resuscitation of the crude and inexperienced tale which never pretended
to be more than a mere family chronicle.
C. M. YONGE.
6_th_ _October_ 1886.
CONTENTS
PAGE
CHAPTER I
THE ELDER SISTER 1
CHAPTER II
THE NEW COURT 6
CHAPTER III
THE NEW PRINCIPLE 15
CHAPTER IV
HONEST PHYL 26
CHAPTER V
VILLAGE GOSSIP 35
CHAPTER VI
THE NEW FRIEND 52
CHAPTER VII
SIR MAURICE 61
CHAPTER VIII
THE BROTHERS 78
CHAPTER IX
THE WASP 101
CHAPTER X
COUSIN ROTHERWOOD 109
CHAPTER XI
DANCING 123
CHAPTER XII
THE FEVER 131
CHAPTER XIII
A CURIOSITY MAP 143
CHAPTER XIV
CHRISTMAS 155
CHAPTER XV
MINOR MISFORTUNES 167
CHAPTER XVI
VANITY AND VEXATION 186
CHAPTER XVII
LITTLE AGNES 198
CHAPTER XVIII
DOUBLE, DOUBLE TOIL AND TROUBLE 208
CHAPTER XIX
THE RECTOR’S ILLNESS 222
CHAPTER XX
THE LITTLE NEPHEW 227
CHAPTER XXI
CHARITY BEGINS AT HOME 235
CHAPTER XXII
THE BARONIAL COURT 249
CHAPTER XXIII
JOYS AND SORROWS 256
CHAPTER XXIV
LOVE’S LABOUR LOST 264
CHAPTER XXV
THE THIRTIETH OF JULY 277
CHAPTER XXVI
THE CRISIS 297
CHAPTER XXVII
CONCLUSION 313
CHAPTER I
THE ELDER SISTER
‘Return, and in the daily round
Of duty and of love,
Thou best wilt find that patient faith
That lifts the soul above.’
ELEANOR MOHUN was the eldest child of a gentleman of old family, and good
property, who had married the sister of his friend and neighbour, the
Marquis of Rotherwood. The first years of her life were marked by few
events. She was a quiet, steady, useful girl, finding her chief pleasure
in nursing and teaching her brothers and sisters, and her chief annoyance
in her mamma’s attempts to make her a fine lady; but before she had
reached her nineteenth year she had learnt to know real anxiety and
sorrow. Her mother, after suffering much from grief at the loss of her
two brothers, fell into so alarming a state of health, that her husband
was obliged immediately to hurry her away to Italy, leaving the younger
children under the care of a governess, and the elder boys at school,
while Eleanor alone accompanied them.
Their absence lasted nearly three years, and during the last winter, an
engagement commenced between Eleanor and Mr. Francis Hawkesworth, rather
to the surprise of Lady Emily, who wondered that he had been able to
discover the real worth veiled beneath a formal and retiring manner, and
to admire features which, though regular, had a want of light and
animation, which diminished their beauty even more than the thinness and
compression of the lips, and the very pale gray of the eyes.
The family were about to return to England, where the marriage was to
take place, when Lady Emily was attacked with a sudden illness, which her
weakened frame was unable to resist, and in a very few days she died,
leaving the little Adeline, about eight months old, to accompany her
father and sister on their melancholy journey homewards. This loss made
a great change in the views of Eleanor, who, as she considered the cares
and annoyances which would fall on her father, when left to bear the
whole burthen of the management of the children and household, felt it
was her duty to give up her own prospects of happiness, and to remain at
home. How could she leave the tender little ones to the care of
servants—trust her sisters to a governess, and make her brothers’ home
yet more dreary? She knew her father to be strong in sense and firm in
judgment, but indolent, indulgent, and inattentive to details, and she
could not bear to leave him to be harassed by the petty cares of a
numerous family, especially when broken in spirits and weighed down with
sorrow. She thought her duty was plain, and, accordingly, she wrote to
Mr. Hawkesworth, to beg him to allow her to withdraw her promise.
Her brother Henry was the only person who knew what she had done, and he
alone perceived something of tremulousness about her in the midst of the
even cheerfulness with which she had from the first supported her
father’s spirits. Mr. Mohun, however, did not long remain in ignorance,
for Frank Hawkesworth himself arrived at Beechcroft to plead his cause
with Eleanor. He knew her value too well to give her up, and Mr. Mohun
would not hear of her making such a sacrifice for his sake. But Eleanor
was also firm, and after weeks of unhappiness and uncertainty, it was at
length arranged that she should remain at home till Emily was old enough
to take her place, and that Frank should then return from India and claim
his bride.
Well did she discharge the duties which she had undertaken; she kept her
father’s mind at ease, followed out his views, managed the boys with
discretion and gentleness, and made her sisters well-informed and
accomplished girls; but, for want of fully understanding the characters
of her two next sisters, Emily and Lilias, she made some mistakes with
regard to them. The clouds of sorrow, to her so dark and heavy, had been
to them but morning mists, and the four years which had changed her from
a happy girl into a thoughtful, anxious woman, had brought them to an age
which, if it is full of the follies of childhood, also partakes of the
earnestness of youth; an age when deep foundations of enduring confidence
may be laid by one who can enter into and direct the deeper flow of mind
and feeling which lurks hid beneath the freaks and fancies of the early
years of girlhood. But Eleanor had little sympathy for freaks and
fancies. She knew the realities of life too well to build airy castles
with younger and gayer spirits; her sisters’ romance seemed to her
dangerous folly, and their lively nonsense levity and frivolity. They
were too childish to share in her confidence, and she was too busy and
too much preoccupied to have ear or mind for visionary trifles, though to
trifles of real life she paid no small degree of attention.
It might have been otherwise had Henry Mohun lived; but in the midst of
the affection of all who knew him, honour from those who could appreciate
his noble character, and triumphs gained by his uncommon talents, he was
cut off by a short illness, when not quite nineteen, a most grievous loss
to his family, and above all, to Eleanor. Unlike her, as he was joyous,
high-spirited, full of fun, and overflowing with imagination and poetry,
there was a very close bond of union between them, in the strong sense of
duty, the firmness of purpose, and energy of mind which both possessed,
and which made Eleanor feel perfect reliance on him, and look up to him
with earnest admiration. With him alone she was unreserved; he was the
only person who could ever make her show a spark of liveliness, and on
his death, it was only with the most painful efforts that she could
maintain her composed demeanour and fulfil her daily duties. Years
passed on, and still she felt the blank which Harry had left, almost as
much as the first day that she heard of his death, but she never spoke of
him, and to her sisters it seemed as if he was forgotten. The reserve
which had begun to thaw under his influence, again returning, placed her
a still greater distance from the younger girls, and unconsciously she
became still more of a governess and less of a sister. Little did she
know of the ‘blissful dreams in secret shared’ between Emily, Lilias, and
their brother Claude, and little did she perceive the danger that Lilias
would be run away with by a lively imagination, repressed and starved,
but entirely untrained.
Whatever influenced Lilias, had, through her, nearly the same effect upon
Emily, a gentle girl, easily led, especially by Lilias, whom she regarded
with the fondest affection and admiration. The perils of fancy and
romance were not, however, to be dreaded for Jane, the fourth sister, a
strong resemblance of Eleanor in her clear common sense, love of
neatness, and active usefulness; but there were other dangers for her, in
her tendency to faults, which, under wise training, had not yet developed
themselves.
Such were the three girls who were now left to assist each other in the
management of the household, and who looked forward to their new offices
with the various sensations of pleasure, anxiety, self-importance, and
self-mistrust, suited to their differing characters, and to the ages of
eighteen, sixteen, and fourteen.