MONKS HORTON.
'And we will all the pleasures prove,
By shallow rivers, by whose falls
Melodious birds sing madrigals.'--Old Ballad.
It was holiday-time, and liberties were taken such as were not
permissible, when they might have afforded a bad precedent to the
boarders. Therefore, when two afternoons later Mary Nugent, returning
from district visiting, came out into her garden behind the house, she
was not scandalised to see a pair of little black feet under a holland
skirt resting on a laurel branch, and going a few steps more she beheld
a big shady hat, and a pair of little hands busy with a pencil and a
blank book; as Ursula sat on the low wall between the gardens, shaded
by the laburnum which facilitated the ascent on her own side.
'Oh Miss Mary! Delicious! Come up here! You don't know how charming
this is.'
She moved aside so as to leave the ascent--by an inverted flower-pot
and a laurel branch--open to her friend, thus knocking down one of the
pile of books which she had taken to the top of the wall. Miss Nugent
picked it up, 'Marie Stuart! Is this your way of studying her?'
'Now, you know 'tis holiday time, and volunteer work; besides, she was
waiting for you, and I could not help doing this.' She held out a
hand, which was scarcely needed, and Mary sprang lightly to share her
perch upon the wall. 'Look here!'
'Am I to guess the subject as in the game of historic outlines,' said
Miss Nugent, as the book was laid on her lap. 'It looks like a
modern--no, a mediaeval--edition of Marcus Curtius about to leap into
the capital opening for a young man, only with his dogs instead of his
horse. That hound seems very rationally to object.'
'Now don't! Guess in earnest.'
'A compliment to your name. The Boy of Egremont, poor fellow, just
about to bound across the strid.'
'Exactly! I always feel sure that my father must have done something
like this.'
'Was it so heroic?' said Miss Mary. 'You know it was for the hundredth
time, and he had no reason to expect any special danger.'
'Oh, but his mother was waiting, and he had to go. Now, I'll tell you
how it must have been with my father. You know he sailed away in a
yacht before I was born, and poor mother never saw him again; but I
know what happened. There was a ship on fire like the Birkenhead, and
the little yacht went near to pick up the people, and my father called
out, like Sir Humphrey Gilbert--
"Do not fear, Heaven is as near
By water as by land."
And the little yacht was so close when the great ship blew up that it
got sucked down in the whirlpool, and rescuers and all died a noble
death together!'
'Has your mother been telling you?' asked Miss Mary.
'Oh no! she never mentions him. She does not know. No one does; but I
am quite sure he died nobly, with no one to tell the tale, only the
angels to look on, and that makes it all the finer. Or just suppose he
was on a desert island all the time, and came back again to find us! I
sometimes think he is.'
'What? When you are _quite sure_ of the other theory?'
'I mean I am quite sure while I am thinking about it, or reading
Robinson Crusoe, or the Swiss Family.'
'Oh!'
'Miss Mary, has no one ever told you anything about my father?'
'No one.'
'They never tell me. Mother cries, and aunt Ursula puts on her
"there's-an-end-of-it look." Do you think there is anything they are
waiting to tell me till I am older?'
'If there were, I am sure you had better not try to find it out
beforehand.'
'You don't think I would do anything of _that sort?_ But I thought you
might know. Do you remember their first settling here?'
'Scarcely. I was a very small child then.'
Miss Nugent had a few vague recollections which she did not think it
expedient to mention. A dim remembrance rose before her of mysterious
whisperings about that beautiful young widow, and that it had been said
that the rector of the Old Church had declared himself to know the
ladies well, and had heartily recommended them. She thought it wiser
only to speak of having been one of their first scholars, telling of
the awe Miss Headworth inspired; but the pleasure it was to bring a
lesson to pretty Mrs. Egremont, who always rewarded a good one with a
kiss, 'and she was so nice to kiss--yes, and is.'
'Aunt Ursel and mother both were governesses,' continued the girl, 'and
yet they don't want me to go out. They had rather I was a teacher at
the High School.'
'They don't want to trust their Little Bear out in the world.'
'I think it is more than that,' said the girl. 'I can't help thinking
that he--my father--must have been some one rather grand, with such a
beautiful name as Alwyn Piercefield Egremont. Yes; I know it was that,
for I saw my baptismal certificate when I stood for the scholarship; it
was Dieppe,--Ursula Alice, daughter of Alwyn Piercefield and Alice
Elizabeth Egremont, May 15, 1860. James Everett--I think he was the
chaplain at Dieppe.'
Mary Nugent thought it the wisest way to laugh and say: 'You, of all
people in the world, to want to make out a connection with the
aristocracy!'
'True love is different,' said Ursula. 'He must have been cast off by
his family for her sake, and have chosen poverty--
"To make the croon a pund, my Alwyn gaed to sea,
And the croon and the pund, they were baith for me."'
Miss Mary did not think a yacht a likely place for the conversion of a
croon into a pound, and the utter silence of mother and aunt did not
seem to her satisfactory; but she feared either to damp the youthful
enthusiasm for the lost father, or to foster curiosity that might lead
to some painful discovery, so she took refuge in an inarticulate sound.
'I think Mr. Dutton knows,' proceeded Nuttie.
'You don't mean to ask him?'
'Catch me! I know how he would look at me.'
'Slang! A forfeit!'
'Oh, it's holiday time, and the boarders can't hear. There's Mr.
Dutton's door!'
This might in one way be a relief to Miss Nugent, but she did not like
being caught upon the wall, and therefore made a rapid descent, though
not without a moment's entanglement of skirt, which delayed her long
enough to show where she had been, as Mr. Dutton was at the same moment
advancing to his own wall on the opposite side of the Nugent garden.
Perhaps he would have pretended to see nothing but for Nuttie's cry of
glee.
'You wicked elf,' said Miss Mary, 'to inveigle people into
predicaments, and then go shouting ho! ho! ho! like Robin Goodfellow
himself.'
'You should have kept your elevation and dignity like me,' retorted
Ursula; 'and then you would have had the pleasure of seeing Mr. Dutton
climbing his wall and coming to our feet.'
'Mischievous elves deserve no good news,' said Mr. Dutton, who was by
no means so venerable that the crossing the wall was any effort or
compromise of dignity, and who had by this time joined Mary on her
grass plat.
'Oh, what is it! Are we to go to Monks Horton?' cried Nuttie.
'Here is a gracious permission from Lord Kirkaldy, the only
stipulations being that no vestiges of the meal, such as sandwich
papers or gooseberry skins, be left on the grass; and that nobody does
any mischief,' he added in an awful tone of personality. 'So if I see
anybody rooting up holly trees I shall be bound to interfere.'
'Now, Mr. Dutton, it was only a baby holly in a chink.'
'Only a holly tree! Just like the giant's daughter when she only
carried off waggon, peasant, oxen, and all in her pinafore.'
'It is not longer than my finger now!'
'Well, remember, mischief either wanton or scientific is forbidden. You
are to set an example to the choir-boys.'
'Scientific mischief is a fatal thing to rare plants,' said Mary.
'If I'm not to touch anything, I may as well stay at home,' pouted
Nuttie.
'You may gather as many buttercups and daisies as the sweet child
pleases,' said Mr. Dutton; whereupon she threatened to throw her books
at his head.
Miss Nugent asked how they were to go, and Mr. Dutton explained that
there was only a quarter of a mile's walk from the station; that return
tickets would be furnished at a tariff of fourpence a head; and that
there would be trains at 1.15 and 7.30.
'How hungry the children will be.'
'They will eat all the way. That's the worst of this sort of outing.
They eat to live and live to eat.'
'At least they don't eat at church,' said Nuttie.
'Not since the peppermint day, when Mr. Spyers suspended Dickie Drake,'
put in Mary.
And the Spa Terrace Church people said it was incense.'
'No. Nuttie!'
'Indeed they did. Louisa Barnet attacked us about it at school, and I
said I wished it had been. Only they mustn't eat peppermint in the
train, for it makes mother quite ill.'
'Do you mean that Mrs. Egremont will come?' exclaimed Mr. Dutton.
'Oh yes, she shall. It is not too far, and it will be very good for
her. I shall make her.'
'There's young England's filial duty!' said Mary.
'Why, I know what is good for her, and she always does as "I wish."'
'Beneficent despotism!' said Mr. Dutton. 'May I ask if Miss Headworth
is an equally obedient subject.'
'Oh! Aunt Ursel is very seldom tiresome.'
'Nuttie! Nuttie! my dear,' and a head with the snows of more than half
a century appeared on the other side of the wall, under a cap and
parasol. 'I am sorry to interrupt you, but it is cool enough for your
mother to go into the town, and I wish you to go with her.'