Dirt, clamour, oyster-shells, ginger-beer bottles, stolid curiosity, beery satisfaction, careworn stall-keepers with babies-in-arms and strange trust about their wares and honesty over change; giddy-go-rounds, photograph booths, marionettes, the fat woman, the double-headed monstrosity, and the teeming beer-houses——

Poor Madame! The contrast was terrible. She would not enter a booth. She turned homewards in a rage of vexation, and shut herself up in her bedroom (I suspect with tears of annoyance and disappointment), whilst Eleanor and I went back into the feast, and were photographed with dear boys and Clement.

Clement was getting towards an age when clever youngsters are not unapt to exercise their talents in depreciating home surroundings. He said that it was no wonder that Madame was disgusted, and scolded us for taking her into the feast. Jack took quite a different view of the matter.

"The feast's very good fun in its way," said he; "and Madame only wants tackling. I'll tackle her."

"Nonsense!" said Clement.

"I bet you a shilling I take her through every mortal thing this afternoon," said Jack.

"You've cheek enough," retorted his elder brother.

But after luncheon, when Madame was again in her room, Jack came to me with a nosegay he had gathered, to beg me to arrange it properly, and put a paper frill round it. With some grass and fern-leaves, I made a tasteful bouquet, and added a frill, to Jack's entire satisfaction. He took it up-stairs, and we heard him knock at Madame's door. After a pause ("I'm sure she's crying again!" said Eleanor) Madame came out, and a warm discussion began between them, of which we only heard fragments. Madame's voice, as the shrillest, was most audible, and it rose into distinctness as she exclaimed, "Anything soh dirrty, soh meean, soh folgaire, I nevaire saw."

Again the discussion proceeded, and we only caught a few of Jack's arguments about "customs of the country," "for the fun of it," etc.

"Fun?" said Madame.

"For a joke," said Jack.

"Ah, c'est vrai, for the choke," she said.

"And avec moi," Jack continued. "There's French for you, Madame! Come along!"

Madame laughed.

"She'll go," said Eleanor.

"Eh bien!" Madame cried gaily. "For the choke. Avec vous, Monsieur Jack. Ha! ha! Allons! Come along!"

"Link, Madame," said Jack, as they came down-stairs, Madame smarter than ever, and bouquet in hand.

"Mais link? What is this?" said she.

"Take my arm," said Jack. "I'll treat you to everything."

"Mais treat? What is that?" said Madame, whose beaming good-humour only expanded the more when Jack explained that it was a pecuniary attention shown by rustic swains to their "young women."

As Clement came into the hall he met Madame hanging on Jack's arm, and absolutely radiant.

"You're not going into that beastly place again?" said he.

"For the choke, Monsieur Clement. Ah, oui! And with Monsieur Jack."

"You may as well come, Clem," said Eleanor, and we followed, laughing.

Madame had now no time for discontent. Jack held her fast. He gave her gingerbread at one stall, and gingerbeer at another, and cracked nuts for her all along. He vowed that the oyster-shells were flowers, and the empty bottles bouquet-holders, and offered to buy her a pair of spectacles to see matters more clearly with.

"Couleur de rose?" laughed Madame.

We went in a body to the marionettes, and Madame screamed as we climbed the inclined plane to enter, and scrambled down the frail scaffolding to the "reserved seats." These cost twopence a head, and were "reserved" for us alone. The dolls were really cleverly managed. They performed the closing scenes of a pantomime. The policeman came to pieces when clown and harlequin pulled at him. People threw their heads at each other, and shook their arms off. The transformation scene was really pretty, and it only added to the joke that the dirty old proprietor burned the red light under our very noses, amid a storm of chaff from Jack.

From the marionettes we went to the fat woman. A loathsome sight, which turned me sick; but, for some inexplicable reason, seemed highly to gratify Madame. She and Jack came out in fits of laughter, and he said, "Now for the two-headed monstrosity. It'll just suit you, Madame!"

At the door, Madame paused. "Mais, ce n'est pas pour des petites filles," she said, glancing at Eleanor and me.

"Feel?" said Jack, who was struggling through the crowd, which was dense here. "It feels nothing. It's in a bottle. Come along!"

"All right, Madame," said Eleanor, smiling. "We'll wait for you outside."

We next proceeded to the photographer's, where Jack and Madame were photographed together with Pincher.

By Madame's desire she was now led to the "bazaar," where she bought a collar for Pincher, two charming china boxes, in the shape of dogs' heads, for Eleanor and her mother, a fan for me, a walking-stick for Monsieur le Pasteur, and some fishing-floats for Clement. By this time some children had gathered round us. The children of the district were especially handsome, and Madame was much smitten by their rosy cheeks and many-shaded flaxen hair.

"Ah!" she sighed, "I must make some little presents to the children;" and she looked anxiously over the stalls.

"Violin, one and six," said the saleswoman. "Nice work-box for a little girl, half-a-crown."

"Half a fiddlestick," said Jack promptly. "What have you got for a halfpenny?"

"Them's halfpenny balls, whips, and dolls. Them churns and mugs is a halfpenny; and so's the little tin plates. Them's the halfpenny monkeys on sticks."

"Now, Madame," said Jack, "put that half-crown back, and give me a shilling. Twenty-two, twenty-three, twenty-four. There are your presents; and now for the children!"

Madame showed a decided disposition to reward personal beauty, which Jack overruled at once.

"The prettiest? I see myself letting you! Church Sunday scholars is my tip; and I shall put them through the Catechism test. Look here, young un, what's your name? Who gave you this name?"

"Ma godfeythers and godmoothers," the young urchin began.

"That'll do," said Jack. "Take your whip, and be thankful. Now, my little lass, who gave you this name?"

"Me godfeythers——"

"All right. Take your doll, and drop a curtsy; and mind you don't take the curtsy, and drop your doll. Now, my boy, tell me how many there be?"

"Ten."

"Which be they? I mean, take your monkey, and make your bow. Next child, come up."

Clem, Eleanor, and I kept back the crowd as well as we could; but children pressed in on all sides. Clem brought a shilling out of his pocket, and handed it over to Jack.

"You've won your bet, old man," he said.

"You're a good fellow, Clem. I say, lay it out among the halfpenny lot—will you?—and then give them to Madame. Keep your eye open for Dissenters, and send the Church children first."

The forty-eight halfpennyworths proved to be sufficient for all, however, though the orthodoxy of one or two seemed doubtful.

Madame was tired; but the position had pleased her, and she gave away the toys with a charming grace. We were leaving the fair when some small urchins, who had either got or hoped to get presents, and were (I suspected) partly impelled also by a sense of the striking nature of Madame's appearance, set up a lusty cheer.

Madame paused. Her eyes brightened; her thin lips parted with a smile. In a voice of intense satisfaction, she murmured:

"It is the Briteesh hooray!"



CHAPTER XXIV.

WE AND THE BOYS—WE AND THE BOYS AND OUR FADS—THE LAMP OF ZEAL—CLEMENT ON UNREALITY—JACK'S OINTMENT.

Our life on the moors was, I suppose, monotonous. I do not think we ever found it dull; but it was not broken, as a rule, by striking incidents.

The coming and going of the boys were our chief events. We packed for them when they went away. We wrote long letters to them, and received brief but pithy replies. We spoke on their behalf when they wanted clothes or pocket-money. We knew exactly how to bring the news of good marks in school and increased subscriptions to cricket to bear in effective combination upon the parental mind, and were amply rewarded by half a sheet, acknowledging the receipt of a ten-shilling piece in a match-box (the Arkwrights had a strange habit of sending coin of the realm by post, done up like botanical specimens), with brief directions as to the care of garden or collection, and perhaps a rude outline of the head-master's nose—"In a great hurry, from your loving and grateful Bro."

We kept their gardens tidy, preserved their collections from dust, damp, and Keziah, and knitted socks for them. I learned to knit, of course. Every woman knits in that village of stone. And "between lights" Eleanor and I plied our needles on the boys' behalf, and counted the days to the holidays.

We had fresh "fads" every holidays. Many of our plans were ambitious enough, and the results would, no doubt, have been great had they been fully carried out. But Midsummer holidays, though long, are limited in length.

Once we made ourselves into a Field Naturalists' Club. We girls gave up our "spare dress wardrobe" for a museum. We subdivided the shelves, and proposed to make a perfect collection of the flora and entomology of the neighbourhood. Eleanor and I really did continue to add specimens whilst the boys were at school; but they came home at Christmas devoted, body and soul, to the drama. We were soon converted to the new fad. The wardrobe became a side-scene in our theatre, and Eleanor and Clement laboured day and night with papers of powdered paint, and kettles of hot size, in converting canvas into scenery. "Theatricals" promised to be a lasting fancy; but the next holidays were in fine weather, and we made the drop-curtain into a tent.

When the boys were at school, Eleanor and I were fully occupied. We took a good deal of pains with our room: half of it was mine now. I had my knick-knack table as well as Eleanor, my own books and pictures, my own photographs of the boys and of the dear boys, my own pot plants, and my own dog—a pug, given to me by Jack, and named "Saucebox." In Jack's absence, Pincher also looked on me as his mistress.

Like most other conscientious girls, we had rules and regulations of our own devising: private codes, generally kept in cipher, for our own personal self-discipline, and laws common to us both for the employment of our time in joint duties—lessons, parish work, and so forth. I think we made rather too many rules, and that we re-made them too often. I make fewer now, and easier ones, and let them much more alone. I wonder if I really keep them better? But if not, may GOD, I pray Him, send me back the restless zeal, the hunger and thirst after righteousness, which He gives in early youth! It is so easy to become more thick-skinned in conscience, more tolerant of evil, more hopeless of good, more careful of one's own comfort and one's own property, more self-satisfied in leaving high aims and great deeds to enthusiasts, and then to believe that one is growing older and wiser. And yet those high examples, those good works, those great triumphs over evil, which single hands effect sometimes, we are all grateful for, when they are done, whatever we may have said of the doing. But we speak of saints and enthusiasts for good, as if some special gifts were made to them in middle age which are withheld from other men. Is it not rather that some few souls keep alive the lamp of zeal and high desire which GOD lights for most of us while life is young?

Eleanor and I worked at our lessons by ourselves. We always had her mother to "fall back upon," as we said. When we took up the study of Italian in order to be able to read Dante—moved thereto by the attractions of the long volume of Flaxman's illustrations of the 'Divina Commedia'—we had to "fall back" a good deal on Mrs. Arkwright's scholarship. And this in spite of all the helps the library afforded us, the best of dictionaries, English "cribs," and about six of those elaborate commentaries upon the poem, of which Italians have been so prolific.

During the winter the study of languages was commonly uppermost; in summer sketching was more favoured.

I do think sketching brings one a larger amount of pleasure than almost any other occupation. And like "collecting," it is a very sociable pursuit when one has fellow-sketchers as well as fellow-naturalists. And this, I must confess, is a merit in my eyes, I being of a sociable disposition! Eleanor could live alone, I think, and be happy; but I depend largely on my fellow-creatures.

Jack and I were talking rather sentimentally the other day about "old times," and I said:

"How jolly it was, that summer we used to sketch so much—all four of us together!"

And Jack, who was rubbing some new stuff of his own compounding into his fishing-boots, replied:

"Awfully. I vote we take to it again when the weather's warmer."

But Jack is so sympathetic, he will agree with anything one says. Indeed, I am sure that he feels what one feels—for the time, at any rate.

Clement is very different. He always disputes and often snubs what one says; partly, I am sure, from a love of truth—a genuine desire to keep himself and everybody else from talking in an unreal way, and from repeating common ideas without thinking them out at first hand; and partly, too, from what Keziah calls the "contradictiousness" of his temper. He was in the room when Jack and I were talking, but he was not talking with us. He was reading for his examination.

All the Arkwrights can work through noise and in company, having considerable powers of mental abstraction. I think they even sometimes combine attention to their own work with an occasional skimming of the topics current in the room as well.

Some outlying feeler of Clement's brain caught my remark and Jack's reply.

"My dear Margery," said he, "you are at heart one of the most unaffected people I know. Pray be equally genuine with your head, and do not encourage Jack in his slipshod habits of thought and conversation by——"

"Slipshod!" interrupted Jack, holding his left arm out at full length before him, the hand of which was shod with a fishing-boot. "Slipshod! They fit as close as your convictions, and would be as stiff and inexorable as logic if I didn't soften them with this newly-invented and about-to-be-patented ointment by the warmth of a cheerful fire and Margery's beaming countenance."

Clement had been reading during this sentence. Then he lifted his head, and said pointedly:

"What I was going to advise you, Margery, is never to get into the habit of adopting sentiments till you are quite sure you really mean them. It is by the painful experience of my own folly that I know what trouble it gives one afterwards. If ever the time comes when you want to know your real opinion on any subject, the process of getting rid of ideas you have adopted without meaning them will not be an easy one."

I am not as intellectual as the Arkwrights. I can always see through Jack's jokes, but I am sometimes left far behind when Eleanor or Clement "take flight," as Jack calls it, on serious subjects. I really did not follow Clement on this occasion.

With some hesitation I said:

"I don't know that I quite understand."

"I'm sure you don't," said Jack. "I have feared for some time that your hair was getting too thick for the finer ideas of this household to penetrate to your brain. Allow me to apply a little of this ointment to the parting, which in your case is more definite than with Eleanor; and as our lightest actions should proceed from principles, I may mention that the principle on which I propose to apply the Leather-softener to your scalp is that on which the blacksmith's wife gave your cholera medicine to the second girl, when she began with rheumatic fever—'it did such a deal of good to our William.' Now, this unguent has done 'a deal of good' to the leather of my boots. Why should it not successfully lubricate the skin of your skull?"

Only the dread of "a row" between Jack and Clem enabled me to keep anything like gravity.

"Don't talk nonsense, Jack!" said I, as severely as I could. (I fear that, like the rest of the world, I snubbed Jack rather than Clement, because his temper was sweeter, and less likely to resent it.) "Clement, I'm very stupid, but I don't quite see how what you said applies to what I said."

"You said, 'How happy we were, that summer we went sketching!' or words to that effect. It's just like a man's writing about the careless happiness of childhood, when he either forgets, or refuses to advert to, the toothache, the measles, learning his letters, the heat of the night-nursery, not being allowed to sit down in the yard whilst his knickerbockers were new, going to bed at eight o'clock, and having a lie on his conscience. I have striven for more accurate habits of thought, and I remember distinctly that you cried over more than one of your sketches."

"I got into the 'Household Album' with mine, however," said Jack; "and I defy an A.R.A. to have had more difficulty in securing his position."

"I'm afraid your appearance in the Phycological Quarterly was better deserved," said Mrs. Arkwright, without removing her eye from the microscope she was using at a table just opposite to Clem's.

But this demands explanation, and I must go back to the time of which Jack and I spoke—when we used to go sketching together.



CHAPTER XXV.

THE "HOUSEHOLD ALBUM"—SKETCHING UNDER DIFFICULTIES—A NEW SPECIES?—JACK'S BARGAIN—THEORIES.

Out of motherly affection, and also because their early attempts at drawing were very clever, Mrs. Arkwright had, years before, begun a scrapbook, or "Household Album," as it was called, into which she pasted such of her children's original drawings as were held good enough for the honour; the age of the artist being taken into account.

Jack's gift in this line was not as great as that of Clement or Eleanor, but this was not the only reason why no drawing of his appeared in the scrapbook. Mrs. Arkwright demanded more evidence of pains and industry than Jack was wont to bestow on his sketches or designs. He resented his exclusion, and made many efforts to induce his mother to accept his hasty productions; but it was not till the summer to which I alluded that Jack took his place in the "Household Album."

It was during a long drive, in which we were exhibiting the country to some friends, that Eleanor and I chose the place of that particular sketching expedition. The views it furnished had the first, and almost the only, quality demanded by young and tyro sketchers—they were very pretty.

There was some variety, too, to justify our choice. From the sandy road, where a heathery bank afforded the convenience of seats, we could look down into a valley with a winding stream, whose banks rose into hillsides which lost themselves in finely-coloured mountains of moorland.

Farther on, a scramble on foot over walls and gates had led us into a wooded gorge fringed with ferns, where a group of trees of particularly graceful form roused Eleanor's admiration.

"What a lovely view!" had burst from the lips of our friends at every quarter of a mile; for they were of that (to me) trying order of carriage companions who talk about the scenery as you go, as a point of politeness.

But the views were beautiful—"Sketches everywhere!" we cried.

"There's nothing to make a sketch of round the Vicarage," we added. "We've done the church, with the Deadmanstone Hills behind it, and without the Deadmanstone Hills behind it, till we are sick of the subject."

So, the weather being fine, and even hot, we provided ourselves with luncheon and sketching materials, and made an expedition to the point we had selected.

We were tired by the time we reached it. This does not necessarily damp one's sketching ardour, but it is unfavourable to accuracy of outline, and especially so to purity of colouring. However, we did not hesitate. Eleanor went down to her study of birch-trees in the gorge, Clement climbed up the bank to get the most extended view of the Ewden Valley; I contented myself with sitting by the roadside in front of the same view, and Jack stayed with me.

He had come with us. Not that he often went out sketching, but our descriptions of the beauty of the scenery had roused him to make another attempt for the "Household Album." Seldom lastingly provided, for his own part, with apparatus of any kind, Jack had a genius for purveying all that he required in an emergency. On this occasion he had borrowed Mrs. Arkwright's paint-box (without leave), and was by no means ill supplied with pencils and brushes which certainly were not his own. He had hastily stripped a couple of sheets from my block whilst I was dressing, and with these materials he seated himself on that side of me which enabled him to dip into my water-pot, and began to paint.

Not half-way through my outline, I was just beginning to realize the complexities of a bird's-eye view with your middle distance in a valley, and your foreground sloping steeply upwards to your feet, when Jack, washing out a large, dyed sable sky-brush in my pot, with an amount of splashing that savoured of triumph, said:

"That's done!"

I paused in a vigorous mental effort to put aside my knowledge of the relative sizes of objects, and to see that a top stone of my foreground wall covered three fields, the river, and half the river's bank beyond.

"Done?" I exclaimed. Jack put his brush into his mouth, in defiance of all rules, and deliberately sucked it dry. Then he waved his sketch before my eyes.

"The effect's rather good," I confessed, "but oh, Jack, it's out of all proportion! That gate really looks as big as the whole valley and the hills beyond. The top of the gate-post ought to be up in the sky."

"It would look beastly ugly if it was," replied he complacently.

"You've got a very good tint for those hills; but the foreground is mere scrambling. Oh, Jack, do finish it a little more! You would draw so nicely if you had any patience."

"How imperfectly you understand my character," said Jack, packing up his traps. "I would sit on a monument and smile at grief with any one, this very day, if the monument were in a grove, or even if I had an umbrella to smile under. To sit unsheltered under this roasting sun, and make myself giddy by gauging proportions with a pencil at the end of my nose, or smudging my mistakes with melting india-rubber, is quite another matter. I'm off to Eleanor. I've got another sheet of paper, and I think trees are rather in my line."

"I thought my block looked smaller," said I, rapidly comparing Jack's paper and my own, with a feeling for size developed by my labours.

"Has she got a water-pot?" asked Jack.

"She is sure to have," said I pointedly. "She always takes her own materials with her."

"How fortunate for those who do not!" said Jack. "Now, Margery dear, don't look sulky. I knew you wouldn't grudge me a bit of paper to get into the 'Household Album' with. Come down into the ravine. You're as white as a blank sheet of Whatman's hot-pressed water-colour paper!"

The increasing heat was really beginning to overpower me, but I refused to leave my sketch. Jack pinned a large white pocket-handkerchief to my shoulders—"to keep the sun from the spine"—and departed to the ravine.

By midday my outline was in. One is no good judge of one's own work, but I think, on the whole, that it was a success.

It is always refreshing to complete a stage of anything. I began to feel less hot and tired, as I passed a wash of clean water over my outline, and laying it in the sun to dry, got out my colours and brushes.

As I did so, one of the little gusts of wind which had been an unpleasant feature of this very fine day, and which, threatening a change of weather, made us anxious to finish our sketches at a sitting, came down the sandy road. In an instant the damp surface of my block looked rough enough to strike matches on. But impatience is not my besetting sin, and I had endured these little catastrophes before. I waited for the block to dry before I brushed off the sand. I also waited till the little beetle, who had crept into my sky, and was impeded in his pace by my first wash, walked slowly down through all my distances, and quitted the block by the gate in the foreground. This was partly because I did not want to hurt him, and partly because a white cumulus cloud is a bad part of your sketch to kill a black beetle on.

I washed over my paper once more, and holding it on my knee to dry just as much and no more than was desirable, I looked my subject in the face with a view to colour.

A long time passed. I had looked and looked again; I had washed in and washed out; I had realized the difficulty of the subject without flinching, and had tried hard to see and represent the colouring before me, when Clement (having exhausted his water in a similar process) came down the hill behind me, with a surly and sunburnt face, to replenish his bottle at a wayside water-trough.

It was then that, as he said, he found me crying.

"It's not because it's difficult and I'm very stupid," I whimpered. "I don't mind working on and trying to make the best of a thing. And it's not the wind or the sand, though it has got dreadfully into the paints, particularly the Italian Pink; but what makes me hopeless, Clement, is that I don't believe it would look well if I could paint it perfectly. It looked lovely as we were driving home the other evening, but now—— Just look at those fields, Clem; I know they're green, but really and truly I see them just the same colour as this road, and I don't think there is the difference of a shade between them and that gate-post. What shall I do?"

A tear fell out of my eyelashes and dropped on to my river. Clement took the sketch from me, and dried up the tear with a bit of blotting-paper.

Then to my amazement he gave rather a favourable verdict. It comforted me, for Clement never says anything that he does not mean.

"It's not half bad, Margery! Wait till you see mine! How did you get the tints of that hillside? You've a very truthful mind, that's one thing, and a very true eye as well. I do admire the way you abstain from filling up with touches that mean nothing."

"Oh, Clement!" cried I, so gratified that I began to feel ready to go on again. "Do you really think I can make anything of it?"

"Nothing more," said Clement. "Don't put another touch. It's unfinished, but no finishing would do any good. We've got an outlandish subject and a bad time of day. But keep it just as it is, and three months hence, on a cool day, you'll be pleased when you look at it."

"Perhaps if I went on a little with the foreground," I suggested; but even as I spoke, I put my hand to my head.

"Go to Eleanor in the ravine, at once," said Clement imperatively. "I'll bring your things. What did make us such fools as to come out without umbrellas?"

"We came out in the cool of the morning," said I, as I staggered off; "besides, it's almost impossible to hold one and paint too."

Once in the ravine, I dropped among the long grass and ferns, and the damp, refreshing coolness of my resting-place was delicious.

Eleanor was not faint, neither had she been crying; but she was not much happier with her sketch than I had been with mine. The jutting group of birch-trees was well chosen, and she had drawn them admirably. But when she came to add the confused background of trees and undergrowth, her very outline had begun to look less satisfactory. When it came to colour—and the midday sun was darting and glittering through the interstices of the trees, without supplying any effects of chiaroscuro to a subject already defective in point and contrast—Eleanor was almost in despair.

"Where's Jack?" said I, after condoling with her.

"He tried the birches for ten minutes, and then he went up the stream to look for algae."

At this moment Jack appeared. He came slowly towards us, looking at something in his hand.

"Lend me your magnifying-glass, Eleanor," said he, when he had reached us.

Eleanor unfastened it from her chatelaine, and Jack became absorbed in examining some water-weed in a dock-leaf.

"What is it?" said we.

"It's a new species, I believe. Look, Eleanor!" and he gave her the leaf and the glass with an almost pathetic anxiety of countenance.

My opinion carried no weight in the matter, but Eleanor was nearly as good a naturalist as her mother. And she was inclined to agree with Jack.

"It's too good to be true! But I certainly don't know it. Where did you find it?"

"No, thank you," said Jack derisively. "I mean to keep the habitat to myself for the present. For a very good reason. Margery, my child, put that sketch of mine into the pocket of your block. (The paper is much about the size of your own!) It is going into the 'Household Album.'"

We went home earlier than we had intended. Even the perseverance of Eleanor and Clement broke down under their ill-success. Jack was the only well-satisfied one of the party, and, with his usual good-nature, he tried hard to infect me with his cheerfulness.

"I think," said I, looking dolefully at my sketch, "that a good deal of the fault must have been in my eyes. I suspect one can't see colours properly when one is feeling sick and giddy. But the glare of the sun was the worst. I couldn't tell red from green on my palette, so no wonder the fields and everything else looked all the same colour. And yet what provokes one is the feeling that an artist would have made a sketch of it somehow. The view is really beautiful."

"And that is really beautiful," said Eleanor, pointing to the birch group and its background. "And what a mess I have made of it! I wish I'd stuck to pencil. And yet, as you say, an artist would have got a picture out of it."

"I'll tell you what," said Jack, who was lying face downwards with my picture spread before him, "I believe that any one who knew the dodges, when he saw that everything looked one pale, yellowish, brownish tint with the glare of the sun, would have boldly taken a weak wash of all the drab-looking colours in his box right over everything, picked out a few stones in his foreground wall, dodged in a few shadows and so on, and made a clever sketch of it. And the same with Eleanor's. If he had got his birch-trees half as good as hers, and had then seen what a muddle the trees behind were in, I believe he would only have washed in a little blue and grey behind the birches, 'indicated' (as our old drawing-master at school calls it) a distant stem or two—and there would have been another clever sketch for you!"

"Another clever falsehood, you mean," said Clement hotly, "to ruin people's taste, and encourage idle painters in showy trickery, and make them believe they can improve upon Nature's colouring."

"Nature's colouring varies," said Jack. "Distant trees often are blue and grey, though these, just now, are of the rankest green."

Clement replied, Jack responded, Clement retorted, and a fierce art-discussion raged the whole way home.

We were well used to it. Indeed all conversations with us had a tendency to become controversial. Over and above which there was truth in Keziah's saying, "The young gentlemen argle-bargles fit to deave a body's head; and dear knows what it's all about."

Clement finished a vehement and rather didactic confession of his art-faith as we climbed the steep hill to the Vicarage. The keynote of it was that one ought to draw what he sees, exactly as he sees it; and that every subject has a beauty of its own which he ought to perceive if his perception is not "emasculated by an acquired taste for prettinesses."

"I shall be in the 'Household Album' this evening," said Jack, in deliberate tones. "My next ambition is the Society of Painters in Water Colours. The subject of my first painting is settled. Three grass fields (haymaking over the day before yesterday). A wall in front of the first field, a hedge in front of the second, a wall in front of the third. A gate in the middle of the wall. A spotted pig in the middle of the field. The sun at its meridian; the pig asleep. Motto, 'Whatever is, is beautiful.'"

Eleanor and I (in the interests of peace) hastened to change the subject by ridiculing Jack's complacent conviction that his sketch would be accepted for the "Household Album."

And yet it was.

The fresh-water alga Jack had been lucky enough to find was a new species, and threw Mrs. Arkwright and Eleanor into a state of the highest excitement. But all their entreaties failed to persuade Jack to disclose the secret of the habitat.

"Put my sketch into the 'Household Album,' and I'll tell you all about it," said he.

Mrs. Arkwright held out against this for half-an-hour. Then she gave way. Jack's sketch was gummed in (it took up a whole page, being the full size of my block), and he told us all about the water-weed.

It was described and figured in the Phycological Quarterly, and received the specific name of Arkwrightii, and Jack's double triumph was complete.

We were very glad for his success, but it almost increased the sense of disappointment that our share of the expedition had been so unlucky.

"It seems such a waste," said I, "to have got to such a lovely place with one's drawing things and plenty of time, and to come away without a sketch worth keeping at the end, just because one doesn't know the right way of working."

"I think there's a good deal in what Jack said about your sketch," said Eleanor; "and I think if one looked at the way real artists have treated similar subjects, and then went at it again and tried to do it on a similar principle——"

"If ever we do go there again," Clement interrupted, "but I don't suppose we shall—these holidays. And the way summer after summer slips away is awful. I'm more and more convinced that it's a great mistake to have so many hobbies. No life is long enough for more than one pursuit, and it's ten to one you die in the middle of mastering that. One is sure to die in the early stages of half-a-dozen."

Clement is very apt to develop some odd theory of this kind, and to preach it with a severity that borders on gloom. I never know what to say, even if I disagree with him; but Eleanor takes up the cudgels at once.

"I don't think I agree with you," she said, giving a shove to her soft elastic hair which did not improve the indefiniteness of the parting. "Of course it's unsatisfactory in one way to feel one will never live to finish things, but in another way I think it's a great comfort to feel one can never use them up or outlive them if one lasts on to be a hundred. And though one gets very cross and miserable with failing so over things one works at, I don't know whether one would be so much happier when one was at the top of the tree. I'm not sure that the chief pleasure isn't actually in the working at things—I mean in the drudgery of learning, rather than in the triumph of having learnt."

"There's something in that," said Clement. And it was a great deal for Clement to say.

It does not take much to convert me to Eleanor's views of anything. But I do think experience bears out what she said about this matter.

Perhaps that accounts for my having a happy remembrance of old times when we worked at things together, even if we failed and cried over them.

I know that practically, now, I would willingly join the others in going at anything, though I could not promise not to be peevish over my own stupidity sometimes, and if I was very much tired.

I don't think there was anything untrue in my calling the times we went sketching together happy times—in spite of what Clement says.

But he does rule such very straight lines all over life, and I sometimes think one may rule them too straight—even for full truth.



CHAPTER XXVI.

MANNERS AND CUSTOMS—CLIQUE—THE LESSONS OF EXPERIENCE—OUT VISITING—HOUSE-PRIDE—DRESSMAKING.

Eleanor and I were not always at home. We generally went visiting somewhere, at least once a year.

I think it was good for us. Great as were the advantages of the life I now shared over an existence wasted in a petty round of ignoble gossip and social struggle, it had the drawback of being almost too self-sufficing, perhaps—I am not certain—a little too laborious. I do think, but for me, it must, at any rate, have become the latter. I am so much less industrious, energetic, clever and good in every way than Eleanor, for one thing, that my very idleness holds us back; and I think a taste for gaiety (I simply mean being gay, not balls and parties), and for social pleasure, and for pretty things, and graceful "situations" runs in my veins with my French blood, and helps to break the current of our labours.

We led lives of considerable intellectual activity, constant occupation, and engrossing interest. We were apt to "foy" at our work to the extent of grudging meal-times and sleep. Indeed, at one time a habit obtained with us of leaving the table in turn as we finished our respective meals. One member of the family after another would rise, bend his or her head for a silent "grace," and depart to the work in hand. I have known the table gradually deserted in this fashion till Mr. Arkwright was left alone. I remember going back one day into the room, and seeing him so. My entrance partially aroused him from a brown study. (He was at all times very "absent") He rose, said grace aloud for the benefit of the company—which had dispersed—and withdrew to his library. But we abolished this uncivilized custom in conclave, and thenceforth sat our meals out to the end.

So free were we in our isolation upon those Yorkshire moors from the trammels of conventionality (one might almost say, civilization!), that I think we should have come to begrudge the ordinary interchange of the neighbourly courtesies of life, but for occasional lectures from Mrs. Arkwright, and for going out visiting from time to time.

It was not merely that a life of running in and out of other people's houses, and chatting the same bits of news threadbare with one acquaintance after another, as at Riflebury, would have been unendurable by us. The rare arrival of a visitor from some distant country-house to call at the Vicarage was the signal for every one, who could do so with decency, to escape from the unwelcome interruption. But as we grew older, Mrs. Arkwright would not allow this. The boys, indeed, were hard to coerce; they "bolted" still when the door-bell rang; but domestic authority, which is apt to be magnified on "the girls," overruled Eleanor and me for our good, and her mother—who reasoned with us far more than she commanded—convinced us of how much selfishness there was in this, as in all acts of discourtesy.

But what do we not owe to her good counsels? In how many evening talks has she not warned us of the follies, affectations, or troubles to which our lives might specially be liable! Against despising interests that are not our own, or graces which we have chosen to neglect, against the danger of satire, against the love or the fear of being thought singular, and, above all, against the petty pride of clique.

"I do not know which is the worst," I remember her saying, "a religious clique, an intellectual clique, a fashionable clique, a moneyed clique, or a family clique. And I have seen them all."

"Come, Mother," said Eleanor, "you cannot persuade us you would not have more sympathy with the intellectual than the moneyed clique, for instance?"

"I should have warmly declared so myself, at one time," said Mrs. Arkwright, "but I have a vivid remembrance of a man belonging to an artistic clique, to whose house I once went with some friends. My friends were artists also, but their minds were enlarged, instead of being narrowed, by one chief pursuit. Their special art gave them sympathy with all others, as the high cultivation of one virtue is said to bring all the rest in its train. But this man talked the shibboleth of his craft over one's head to other members of his clique with a defiance of good manners arising more from conceit than from ignorance of the ways of society; and with a transparent intention of being overheard and admired which reminded me of the little self-conscious conceits of children before visitors. He was one of a large family with the same peculiarities, joined to a devout admiration of each other. Indeed, they combined the artistic clique and the family clique in equal proportions. From the conversation at their table you would have imagined that there was but one standard of good for poor humanity, that of one 'school' of one art, and absolutely no one who quite came up to it but the brothers, sisters, parents, cousins, or connections by marriage of your host. Now, I honestly assure you that the only other man really like this one that I ever met, was what is called a 'self-made' man in a commercial clique. Money was his standard, and he seemed to be as completely unembarrassed as my artist friend by the weight of any other ideas than his own, or by any feeling short of utter satisfaction with himself. Their contempt for the conventionalities of society was about equal. My artist friend had passed a sweeping criticism for my benefit now and then (there could be no conversation where no second opinion was allowed), and it was with perhaps a shade less of condescension—a shade more of friendliness—that my commercial friend once stopped some remarks of mine with the knowing observation, 'Look here, ma'am. Whenever I hear this, that, and the other bragged about a party, what I always say is this, I don't want you to tell me what he his, but what he 'as.'"

Eleanor and I laughed merrily at the anecdote, even if we were not quite converted to Mrs. Arkwright's views. And I must in justice add that every visit which has taken us from home—every fresh experience which has enlarged our knowledge of the world—has confirmed the truth of her sage and practical advice.

If at home we have still inclined to feel it almost a duty to be proud of intellectual tastes, quite a duty to be proud of orthodox opinions, and, at the worst, a very amiable weakness indeed to think that there are no boys like our boys, a wholesome experience of having other people's tastes and views crammed down our throats has modified our ideas in this respect. A strong dose of eulogistic biography of the brothers of a gushing acquaintance made the names of Clem and Jack sacred to our domestic circle for ever; and what I have endured from a mangy, over-fed, ill-tempered Skye-terrier, who is the idol of a lady of our acquaintance, has led me sometimes to wonder if visitors at the Vicarage are ever oppressed by the dear boys.

I'm afraid it is possible—poor dear things!

I have positively heard people say that Saucebox is ugly, though he has eyes like a bull-frog, and his tongue hangs quite six inches out of his mouth, and—in warm weather or before meals—further still! However, I keep him in very good order, and never allow him to be troublesome to people who do not appreciate him. For I have observed that there are people who (having no children of their own) hold very just and severe views about spoiled boys and girls, but who (having dogs of their own) are much less clear-sighted on the subject of spoiled terriers and Pomeranians. And I do not want to be like that—dear as the dear boys are!

Certainly, seeing all sorts of people with all sorts of peculiarities is often a great help towards trying to get rid of one's own objectionable ones. But like the sketching, one sometimes gets into despair about it, and though the process of learning an art may be even pleasanter than to feel one's self a master in it, one cannot say as much for the process of discovering one's follies. I should like to get rid of them in a lump.

Eleanor said so one day to her mother, but Mrs. Arkwright said: "We may hate ourselves, as you call it, when we come to realize failings we have not recognized before, and feel that there are probably others which we do not yet see as clearly as other people see them, but this kind of impatience for our perfection is not felt by those who love us, I am sure. It is one's greatest comfort to believe that it is not even felt by GOD. Just as a mother would not love her child the better for its being turned into a model of perfection by one stroke of magic, but does love it the more dearly every time it tries to be good, so I do hope and believe our Great Father does not wait for us to be good and wise to love us, but loves us, and loves to help us in the very thick of our struggles with folly and sin."

But I am becoming as discursive as ever! What I want to put down is about our going out visiting. There is really nothing much to say about our life at home. It was very happy, but there were no great events in it, and Eleanor says it will not do for us to "go off at a tangent," and describe what happened to the boys at school and college; first, because these biographies are merely to be lives of our own selves, for nobody but us two to read when we are both old maids; and secondly, because if we put down everything we had anything to do with in these ten years, it will be so very long before our biographies are finished. We are very anxious to see them done, partly because we are getting rather tired of them, and Jack is becoming suspicious, and partly because we have got an amateur bookbinding press, and we want to bind them.

Well, as I said, we paid visits to relatives of mine, and to old friends of the Arkwrights. My friends invited Eleanor, and Eleanor's friends invited me. People are very kind; and it was understood that we were happier together.

I was fortunate enough to find myself possessed of some charming cousins living in a cathedral town; and at their house it was a great pleasure to us to visit. The cathedral services gave us great delight; when I think of the expression of Eleanor's face, I may almost say rapture. Then there was a certain church-bookseller's shop in the town, which had manifold attractions for us. Every parochial want that print and paper could supply was there met, with a convenience that bordered on luxury. There was a good store, too, of sacred prints, illuminated texts, and oak frames, from which we carried back sundry additions to the garnishing of our room, besides presents for Jack, who was as fond of such things as we were. Parish matters were, naturally, of perennial interest for us in our Vicarage home; but if ever they became a fad, it was about this period.

But it was to a completely new art that this visit finally led us, which I hardly know how to describe, unless as the art of dressmaking and general ornamentation.

The neighbourhood abounded with pretty clerical and country homes, where my cousins were intimate; each one, so it seemed to Eleanor and me, prettier than the last: sunshiny and homelike, with irregular comfortable furniture, dainty with chintz, or dark with aged oak, each room more tastefully besprinkled than the rest with old china, new books, music, sketches, needlework, and flowers.

"Do you know, Eleanor," said I, when we were dressing for dinner one evening before a toilette-table that had been tastefully adorned for our use by the daughters of the house, "I wonder if Yorkshire women are as 'house-proud' as they call themselves? I think our villagers are, in the important points of cleanliness and solid comfort, and of course we are at the Vicarage as to that—Keziah keeps us all like copper kettles; but don't you think we might have a little more house-pride about tasteful pretty refinements? It perhaps is rather a waste of time arranging all these vases and baskets of flowers every day, but they are very nice to look at, and I think it civilizes one."

"You're not to blame," said Eleanor decisively. "You're south-country to the backbone, and French on the top. It is we hard north-country folk, we business people, who neglect to cultivate 'the beautiful.' We're quite wrong. But I think the beautiful is revenged on us," added she with one of her quick, bright looks, "by withdrawing itself. There's nothing comparable for ugliness to the people of a manufacturing town."

My mind was running on certain very ingenious and tasteful methods of hanging nosegays on the wall.

"Those baskets with ferns and flowers in, against the wall, were lovely, weren't they?" said I. "Do you think we shall ever be able to think of such pretty things?"

"We're not fools," said Eleanor briefly. "We shall do it when we set our minds to it. Meantime, we must make notes of whatever strikes us."

"There are plenty of jolly, old-fashioned flowers in the garden at home," said I. It was a polite way of expressing my inward regret that we had no tropical orchids or strange stove-plants. And Eleanor danced round me, and improvised a song beginning:

"There are ferns by Ewden's waters, And heather on the hill."

From the better adornment of the Vicarage to the better adornment of ourselves was a short stride. Most of the young ladies in these country homes were very prettily dressed. Not a la Mrs. Perowne. Not in that milliner's handbook style dear to "Promenades" and places of public resort; but more daintily, and with more attention to the prettiest and most convenient of the prevailing fashions than Eleanor's and my costumes displayed.

The toilettes of one young lady in particular won our admiration; and when we learned that her pretty things were made by herself, an overwhelming ambition seized upon us to learn to do the same.

"Women ought to know about all house matters," said Eleanor, puckering her brow to a gloomy extent. "Dressmaking, cookery, and all that sort of thing; and we know nothing about any of them. I was thinking only last night, in bed, that if I were cast away on a desert island, and had to make a dress out of an old sail, I shouldn't have the ghost of an idea where to begin."

"I should," said I. "I should sew it up like a sack, make three holes for my head and arms, and tie it round my waist with ship's rope. I could manage Robinson Crusoe dresses; it's the civilized ones that will be too much for me, I'm afraid."

"I believe the sail would go twice as far if we could gore it," said Eleanor, laughing. "But there's no waste like the wastefulness of ignorance; and oh, Margery, it's the gores I'm afraid of! If skirts were only made the old-fashioned way, like a flannel petticoat! So many pieces all alike—run them together—hem the bottom—gather the top—and there you are, with everything straightforward but the pocket."

To our surprise we found that our new fad was a sore subject with Mrs. Arkwright. She reproached herself bitterly with having given Eleanor so little training in domestic arts. But she had been brought up by a learned uncle, who considered needlework a waste of time, and she knew as little about gores as we did. She had also, unfortunately, known or heard of some excellent mother who had trained nine daughters to such perfection of domestic capabilities that it was boasted that they could never in after-life employ a workwoman or domestic who would know more of her business than her employer. And this good lady was a standing trouble to poor Mrs. Arkwright's conscience.

Her self-reproaches were needless. General training is perhaps quite as good as (if not better than) special, even for special ends. In giving us a higher education, in teaching us to use our eyes, our wits, and our common-sense, she had put all meaner arts within our grasp when need should urge, and opportunity serve.

"Aunt Theresa was always dressmaking," I said to Eleanor; "but I don't remember anything that would help us. I was so young, you know. And when one is young one is so stupid, one really resists information."

I was to have another chance, however, of gleaning hints from Aunt Theresa.



CHAPTER XXVII.

MATILDA—BALL DRESSES AND THE BALL—GORES—MISS LINING—THE 'PARISHIONER'S PENNYWORTH.'

The Bullers came home again. Colonel St. Quentin had retired, and when Major Buller got the regiment, he also left the army and settled in a pleasant neighbourhood in the south of England. As soon as Aunt Theresa was fairly established in her new house she sent for Eleanor and me. There was no idea of my remaining permanently. It was only a visit.

The Major (but he was a colonel now) and his wife were very little changed. The girls, of course, had altered greatly, and so had I. Matilda was a fashionably-dressed young lady, with a slightly frail appearance at times, as if Nature were still revenging the old mismanagement and neglect.

It did not need Aunt Theresa to tell us that she was her father's favourite daughter. But it was no capricious favouritism, I am sure. I believe Colonel Buller to have been one of those people whose hearts have depths of tenderness that are never sounded. The Bush House catastrophe had long ago been swept into the lumber-room of Aunt Theresa's memory, but the tender self-reproach of Matilda's father was still to be seen in all his care and indulgence of her.

"He'll take me anywhere," said Matilda, with affectionate pride. "He even goes shopping with me."

We liked Matilda by far the best of the girls. Partly, no doubt, because she was our old friend, but partly, I think, because intimacy with her father had developed the qualities she inherited from him, and softened others.

To our great satisfaction we discovered that gores were no enigma to Matilda, and she and Aunt Theresa good-naturedly undertook to initiate us into the mysteries of dressmaking.

There was an excellent opportunity. Eleanor was now eighteen, and Matilda seventeen years old. Matilda was to "come out" at a county ball that was to take place whilst we were with the Bullers, and Mrs. Arkwright consented to let Eleanor go also. Hence ball dresses, and hence also our opportunity for learning how to make them. For they were to be made by a dressmaker in the house, and she did not reject our assistance.

The Bullers' drawing-room was divided by folding-doors, and both divisions now overflowed with tarlatan and trimmings; but at every fresh inroad of callers (and they were hardly less frequent than of old) we young ones, and yards of flounces and finery with us, were swept by Aunt Theresa into the back drawing-room, like autumn leaves before a breeze.

The dresses were very successful, and so was the ball. I was so anxious to hear how Eleanor had sped, that I felt quite sure that I could not go to sleep, and that it was a farce to go to bed just when she was beginning to dance. I went, however, at last, and had had half a night's sound sleep before rustling, and chattering, and the light from bed-candles woke me to hear the news.

Matilda was looking pale, and somewhat dishevelled, and a great deal of the costume at which we had laboured was reduced to rags. Eleanor's dress was intact, and she herself looked perfectly fresh, partly because she had resisted, with great difficulty, the extreme length of train then fashionable, and partly from a sort of general compactness which seems a natural gift with some people. Poor Matilda had nearly fainted after one of the dances, and had brought away a violent headache; but she declared that she had enjoyed herself, and would have stayed to relate her adventures, but Colonel Buller would not allow it, and sent her to bed. Eleanor slept with me, so our gossip was unopposed, except by warnings.

I set fire to my hair in the effort to decipher the well-filled ball card, but we put it out, and the candle also, and chatted in bed.

"You must have danced every dance," I said, admiringly.

"We sat out one or two that are down," said Eleanor; "and No. 21 was supper, but I danced all the rest."

"There was one man you danced several times with," I said, "but I couldn't make out his name. It looks as if it began with a G."

"Oh, it's not his real name," said Eleanor. "It's the one he says you used to call him by. One reason why I liked him, Margery dear, was because he said he had been so fond of you. You were such a dear little thing, he said. I told him the locket and chain were in good preservation."

"Was it Mr. George?" I cried, with so much energy that Aunt Theresa (who slept next door) heard us, and knocked on the wall to bid us go to sleep.

"We're just going to," Eleanor shouted, and added in lower tones, to me, "Yes, it was Captain Abercrombie. Colonel Buller introduced him to me. He is so nice, and so delightfully fond of dogs and of you, Margery."

"Shall I see him?" I asked. "I should like to see him again. He was very good to me when I was little."

"Oh yes," said Eleanor. "It was curious his being in the neighbourhood; for the 202nd is in Dublin, you know. And, Margery, he says he has an uncle in Yorkshire. He——"

"Girls! girls!" cried Aunt Theresa; and we went to sleep.

Soon after we returned from our visit to the Bullers, Eleanor and I resolved to prove the benefit we had reaped from Aunt Theresa's instructions by making ourselves some dresses of an inexpensive stuff that we bought for the purpose.

How well I remember the pattern! A flowering creeper, which followed a light stem upwards through yard after yard of the material. We had picked to pieces certain old bodies which fitted us fairly, and our first work was to lay these patterns upon the new stuff, with weights on them, and so to cut out our new bodies as easily as Matilda (whose directions we were following) had prophesied that we should. When these and the sleeves were accomplished (and they looked most business-like), we began upon the skirts. We cut the back and the front breadths, and duly "sloped" the latter. Then came the gores. We folded the breadths into three parts; we took a third at one end, and two-thirds at the other, and folded the slope accordingly. It became quite exciting.

"Who would have thought it was so easy?" said I.

Eleanor was almost prone upon the table, cutting the gores with large scissors which made a thoroughly sempstress-like squeak.

"The higher education fades from my view with every snip," she said, laughing. "Upon my word, Margery, I begin to believe this sort of thing is our vocation. It is great fun, and there is absolutely no brain wear and tear."

The gores were parted as she spoke, and (to do us justice) were exactly the shape of the tarlatan ones Aunt Theresa had cut. But when we came to put them together, they wouldn't fit without turning one of them the wrong side out. Eleanor had boasted too soon. We got headaches and backaches with stooping and puzzling. We cut up all our stuff, but the gores remained obstinate. By no ingenuity could we combine them so as to be at once in proper order, the right side out, and the right side (of the pattern) up. I really think we cried over them with weariness and disappointment.

"Algebra's a trifle to it," was poor Eleanor's conclusion.

I went out to clear my brain by a walk, and happening, as I returned, to meet Jack, I confided our woes to him. One could tell Jack anything.

"You've got it wrong somehow," said Jack, "linking" me. "Come to Miss Lining's."

Miss Lining was our village dressmaker. A very bad one certainly, but still she could gore a skirt. She was not a native of the village, and signified her superior gentility by a mincing pronunciation. She had also a hiss with the sibilants peculiar to herself. Before I could remonstrate, Jack was knocking at the door.

"Good-afternoon, Miss Lining. Miss Margery has been making a dress, and she's got into a muddle with the gores. Now, how do you manage with gores, Miss Lining?" Jack confidentially inquired, taking his hat off, and accepting a well-dusted chair.

There was now nothing for it but to explain my difficulties, which I did, Miss Lining saying, "Yisss, misss," at every two or three words. When I had said my say, she sucked the top of her brass thimble thoughtfully for some moments, and then spoke as an oracle.

"There's a hinside and a hout to the stuff? Yisss, misss. And a hup and a down? Yisss, misss."

"And quite half the gores won't fit in anywhere," I desperately interposed.

Miss Lining took another taste of the brass thimble, and then said:

"In course, misss, with a patterned thing there's as many gores to throw hout as to huse. Yisss, misss."

"Are there?" said I. "But what a waste!"

"Ho no, misss! you cuts the body out of the gores you throws hout, misss——"

"Well, if you get the body out of them, there must be a waist!" Jack broke in, as he sat fondling Miss Lining's tom-cat.

"Ho no, sir!" said Miss Lining, who couldn't have seen a joke to save her dignity. "They cuts to good add-vantage, sir."

The mystery was now clear to me, and Jack saw this by my face.

"You understand?" said he briefly, setting down the cat.

"Quite," said I. "Our mistake was beginning with the bodies. But we can get some more stuff."

"An odd bit always comes in," said Miss Lining, speaking, I fear, from an experience of bits saved from the dresses of village patrons. "Yisss, misss."

"Well, good-afternoon, Miss Lining," said Jack, who never suffered, as Eleanor and I sometimes did, from a difficulty in getting away from a cottage. "Thank you very much. Have you heard from your sister at Buxton lately?"

"Last week, sir," said Miss Lining.

"And how is she?" said Jack urbanely.

He never forgot any one, and he never grudged sympathy—two qualities which made him beloved of the village.

"Quite well, thank you, sir, and the same to you," said Miss Lining, beaming; "except that she do suffer a deal in her inside, sir."

"Chamomile tea is very good for the inside, I believe," said Jack, putting on his hat with perfect gravity.

"So I've 'eerd—yisss, sir," said Miss Lining; "and there's something of the same in them pills that's spoke so well of in your magazine, sir, I think. I sent by the carrier for a box, sir, on Saturday last, and would have done sooner, but for waiting for Mrs. Barker to pay for the pelerine I made out of her uncle's funeral scarf. Yisss, misss."

Jack was very seldom at a loss, but on this occasion he seemed puzzled.

"Pills recommended in our magazine?" he said, as we strolled up towards the Vicarage. "It's those medical tracts you and Eleanor have been taking round lately."

"There's nothing about pills in them," said I. "They're about drains, and fresh air, and cleanliness. Besides, she said our magazine."

"We don't give them any magazine but the Parishioner's Pennyworth and the missionary one," said Jack. "I'm stumped, Margery."

But in a few minutes I was startled by his seizing me by the shoulders and leaning against me in a paroxysm of laughter.

"Oh, Margery, I've got it! It is the Parishioner's Pennyworth. There's been an advertisement at the end of it for months, like a fly-leaf, of Norton's chamomile pills."

And as I unravelled to Eleanor the mystery of our dressmaking difficulties, we could hear Jack convulsing Mrs. Arkwright with a perfect reproduction of Miss Lining's accent—"Them pills that's spoke so well of in your magazine. Yisss, m'm."

We got some more material, and finished the dresses triumphantly. By the next summer we were skilful enough to use our taste with some freedom and good success.

I was then fifteen, and in long dresses. I remember some most tasteful costumes which we produced; and as we contemplated them as they hung, flounced, furbelowed, and finished, upon pegs, Eleanor said:

"I wonder where we shall display these this year?"

How little we knew! We had made the dresses alike, to the nicety of a bow, because we thought it ladylike that the costumes of sisters should be so. How far we were from guessing that they would not be worn together after all!



CHAPTER XXVIII.

I GO BACK TO THE VINE—AFTER SUNSET—A TWILIGHT EXISTENCE—SALAD OF MONK'S-HOOD—A ROYAL SUMMONS.

The few marked events of my life have generally happened on my birthdays. It was on my fifteenth birthday that Mr. Arkwright got a letter from one of my relations on the subject of my going to live with my great-grandfather and grandmother.

They were now very old. My great-grandfather was becoming "childish," and the little dear duchess was old and frail for such a charge alone. They had no daughter. The religious question was laid aside. My most Protestant relatives thought my duty in the matter overwhelming, and with all my clinging of heart to the moor home I felt myself that it was so.

I don't know how I got over the parting. I wandered hopelessly about familiar spots, and wished I had made sketches of them; but how could I know I had not all life before me? The time was short, and preparations had to be made. This kept us quiet. At the last, Jack put in all my luggage, and did everything for me. Then he kissed me, and said, "GOD bless you, Margery," and "linking" Eleanor by force, led her away and comforted her like the good, dear boy he is. Clement drove me so recklessly down the steep hill, and over the stones, that the momentary expectation of an upset dried my tears, and I did not see much of the villagers' kind and too touching farewells.

And so to the bleak station again, and the familiar old porter, whom fate seems to leave long enough at his post, and on through the whirling railway panorama, by which one passes to so much joy and so much sorrow—and then I was at The Vine once more.

I wonder if I am like my great-grandmother in her youth? Some people (Elspeth among them) declare that it is so; and others that I am like my poor mother. I suppose I have some Vandaleur features, from an eerie little incident which befell me on the threshold of The Vine—an appropriate beginning to a life that always felt like a weird, shadowy dream.

I did not ring the bell of the outer gate on my arrival, because Adolphe (grown up, but with the old, ruddy boy's face on the top of his man's shoulders) was anxiously waiting for me, and devoted himself to my luggage, telling me that Master was in the garden. Thither I ran so hastily, that a straggling sweetbriar caught my hat and my net, and dragged them off, sending my hair over my shoulders. My hair is not long, however, like Eleanor's, and it curls, and I sometimes wear it loose; so I did not stop to rearrange it, but hurried on towards my great-grandfather, who was coming slowly to meet me from the other end of the terrace, his hands behind his back, as of old. At least, I thought it was to meet me; but as he came near I saw that he was unconscious of my presence. He looked very old, his face was pale and shrivelled, like a crumpled white kid glove; his wild blue eyes, insensible of what was before them, seemed intently fixed on something that no one else could see, and he was talking to himself, as we call it when folk talk with the invisible.

It was very silly, but I really felt the colour fading from my face with fright. My great-grandfather's back was to the west, where a few bars of red across the sky, as it was to be seen through the Scotch firs, were all that remained of the sunset. That strange light was on everything, of which modern pre-Raphaelite painters are so fond. I was tired with my long journey and previous excitement; and when I suddenly remembered that Mr. Vandaleur was said to have in some measure lost his reason, a shudder came over me. In a moment more he saw me. I think my crimson cloak caught his eye, but his welcome was hardly less alarming than his abstraction. He started, and held up his hands, and a pained, puzzled expression troubled his face. Then a flush, which seemed to make him look older than the whiteness; and then, with a shrill, feeble cry of "Victoire, ma belle!" he tottered towards me so hastily that I thought he must have fallen; but, like a vision, a little figure flitted from the French window of the drawing-room, and in a moment my great-grandmother was supporting him, and soothing him with gentle words in French. I could see now how helpless he was. For a bit he seemed still puzzled and confused; but he clung to her and kissed her hand, and suffered himself to be led indoors. Then I followed them, through the window, into the room where the candles were not yet lighted for economy's sake—the glare of the red sunset bars making everything dark to me—with a strange sense of gloom.

It would be hard to imagine a stronger contrast than that between my life in my new home and my life in my home upon the moors. At the Arkwrights' we lived so essentially with the times. Our politics, on the whole, were liberal; our theology inclined to be broad; our ideas on social subjects were reformatory, progressive, experimental. Scientific subjects were a speciality of the household; and, living in a manufacturing district, mere neighbourhood kept us with the great current of mercantile interests. We argued each other into a general unfixity of opinions; and, full of youthful dreams of golden ages, were willing to believe this young world—where not yet we, but only our words could fly—to be but upon the threshold of true civilization. Above all, life seemed so short, our hands were so full, so over-full of work, the daylight was not long enough for us, and we grudged meals and sleep.

How different it was under the shadow of this old Vine! I am very thankful, now, that I had grace, under the sense of "wasted time," which was at first so irritating, to hold by my supreme child-duty towards my aged parents against the mere modern fuss of "work," against what John Wesley called the "lust of finishing" any labour, and to serve them in their way rather than in my own. But the change was very great. How we "pottered" through the days!—with what needless formalities, what slowness, what indecision! How fatiguing is enforced idleness! How lengthy were the evening meals, where we sat, trifling with the vine-leaves under a single dish of fruit, till the gloaming deepened into gloom!

At fifteen one is very susceptible of impressions; very impatient of what one is not used to. The very four-post bed in which I slept oppressed me, and the cracked basin held together for years by the circular hole in the old-fashioned washstand. The execution-picture only made me laugh now.

Then, as to the meals. No doubt a great many people eat and drink too much, as we are beginning to discover. Whether we at the Vicarage did, I cannot say; but the change to the unsubstantial fare on which very old people like the Vandaleurs keep the flickering light of life aglow was very great; and yet in this slow, vegetating existence my appetite soon died away. The country was flat and damp too; and by and by neuralgia kept me awake at night, as regularly as the ghost of my great-grandfather had done in years gone by. But it is strange how quickly unmarked time slips on. Day after day, week after week ran by, till a lassitude crept over me in which I felt amazed at former ambitions, and a certain facility of sympathy, which has been in many respects an evil, and in many a good to me, seemed to mould me to the interests of the fading household. And so I lived the life of my great-grandparents, which was as if science made no strides, and men no struggles; as if nothing were to be done with the days, but to wear through them in all patient goodness, loyal to a long-fallen dynasty, regretful of some ancient virtues and courtesies, tender towards past beauties and passions, and patient of succeeding sunsets, till this aged world should crumble to its close.

My great-grandfather came to know me again, though his mind was in a disordered, dreary condition; from old age, Elspeth said, but it often recalled what I had heard of the state of his mother's intellect before her death. The dear little old lady's intellects were quite bright, and, happily, not only entire, but cultivated. I do not know how people who think babies and servants are a woman's only legitimate interests would like to live with women who have either never met with, or long outlived them. I know how my dear granny's educated mind and sense of humour helped us over a dozen little domestic difficulties, and broke the neck of fidgets that seemed almost inevitable at her great age and in that confined sphere of interests.

I certainly faded in our twilight existence, as if there were some truth in the strange old theory that very aged people can withdraw vital force from young companions and live upon it. But every day and hour of my stay made me love and reverence my great-grandmother more and more, and be more and more glad that I had come to know her, and perhaps be of some little service to her.

Indeed, it was my great-grandfather's condition that kept us so much among the shadows. The old lady had a delightful youthfulness of spirit, and took an almost wistful pleasure in hearing about our life at the Arkwrights', as if some ambitious Scotch blood in her would fain have kept better pace with the currents of the busy world. But when my grandfather joined us, we had to change the subject. Modern ideas jarred upon him. And it was seldom that he was not with us. The tender love between the old couple was very touching.

"It must seem strange to you, my dear, to think of such long lives so little broken by events," said my great-grandmother. "But your dear grandfather and I have never been apart for a day since our happy marriage."

I do not think they were apart for an hour whilst I was with them. He followed her about the house, if she left him for many minutes, crying, "Victoire! Victoire!" chiefly from love, but I was sometimes spiteful enough to think also because he could not amuse himself.

"The master's calling for you again," said Elspeth, with some impatience, one day when grandmamma was teaching me a bit of dainty cookery in the kitchen.

"Oh, fly, petite!" she cried to me; "and say that his Majesty has summoned the Duchess."

Much bewildered, I ran out, and met my great-grandfather on the terrace, crying, "Victoire! Victoire!" in fretful tones.

"His Majesty has summoned the Duchess, sir," said I, dropping a slight curtsy, as I generally did on disturbing the old gentleman.

To my astonishment, this seemed quite to content him. He drew in his elbows, and spread the palms of his hands with a very polite bow, saying, "Bien, bien;" and after murmuring something else in French, which I did not catch, but which I fancy was an acknowledgment of the prior claims of royalty, he folded his hands behind his back and wandered away down the terrace, as I rushed off to my confectionery again.

I found that this use of the old fable, which had calmed my great-grandfather in past days, was no new idea. It was, in fact, a graceful fiction which deceived nobody, and had been devised by my great-grandmother out of deference to her husband's prejudices. In the long years when they were very poor, their poverty was made, not only tolerable but graceful, by Mrs. Vandaleur's untiring energy, but (though he wouldn't, or perhaps couldn't, find any occupation by which to add to their income) the sight of his Victoire, who should have been a duchess, doing any menial work so distracted him, that my grandmother had to devise some method to secure herself from his observation when she washed certain bits of priceless lace which redeemed her old dresses from commonness, or cooked some delicacy for Mons. le Duc's dinner, or mended his honourable clothes. Thus Jeanette's old fable came into use; first in jest, and then as an adopted form for getting rid of my great-grandfather when he was in the way. It must have astonished a practical woman like my great-grandmother to find how completely it satisfied him. But there must have been a time when his helplessness and impracticability tried her in many ways, before she fairly came to realize that he never could be changed, and her love fell in with his humours. On this point he was humoured completely, and never inquired on what business his deceased Majesty of France required the attendance of the Duchess that should have been!

To do him justice, if he was a helpless he was a very tender husband.

"He has never said a rude or unkind word to me since we were boy and girl together," said the little old lady, with tears in her eyes. And indeed, courtesy implies self-discipline; and even now the old man's politeness checked his petulance over and over again. He never gave up the habit of gathering flowers for my grandmother, and such exquisite contrasts of colour I never saw combined by any other hand. Another accomplishment of his was also connected with his love of plants.

"It's little enough a man can do about a house the best of times," said Elspeth, "and the master's just as feckless as a bairn. But he makes a fine sallet."

I shudder almost as I write the words. How little we thought that my poor grandfather's one useful gift would have so fatal an ending!

But I must put it down in order. It was the end of many things. Of my life at The Vine among them, and very nearly of my life in this world altogether. My great-grandfather made delicious salads. I have heard him say that he preferred our English habit of mixing ingredients to the French one of dressing one vegetable by itself; but he said we did not carry it far enough, we neglected so many useful herbs. And so his salads were compounded not only of lettuce and cress, and so forth, but of dandelion, sorrel, and half-a-dozen other field or garden plants. Sometimes one flavour preponderated, sometimes another, and the sauce was always good.

Now it is all over it seems to me that I must have been very stupid not to have paid more attention to the strange flavour in the salad that day. But I was thinking chiefly of the old lady, who was not very well (Elspeth had an idea that she had had a very slight "stroke," but how this was we cannot know now), whilst my grandfather was almost flightily cheerful. I tasted the salad, and did not eat it, but I was the less inclined to complain of it as they seemed perfectly satisfied.

Then my grandmother was taken ill. At first we thought it a development of what we had noticed. Then Mr. Vandaleur became ill also, and we sent Adolphe in haste for the doctor. At last we found out the truth. The salad was full of young leaves of monk's-hood. Under what delusion my poor grandfather had gathered them we never knew. Elspeth and I were busy with the old lady, and he had made the salad without help from any one.

From the first the doctor gave us little hope, and they sank rapidly. Their priest, for whom Adolphe made a second expedition, did not arrive in time; they were in separate rooms, and Elspeth and I flitted from one to the other in sad attendance. The dear little old lady sank fast, and died in the evening.

Then the doctor impressed on us the necessity of keeping her death from my great-grandfather's knowledge.

"But supposing he asks?" said I.

"Say any soothing thing your ready wit may suggest, my dear young lady. But the truth, in his present condition, would be a fatal shock."

It haunted me. "Supposing he asks." And late in the evening he did ask! I was alone with him, and he called me.

"Marguerite, dear child, thou wilt tell me the truth. Why does my wife, my Victoire, thy grandmother, not come to me?"

Pondering what lie I could tell him, and how, an irresistible impulse seized me. I bent over him and said:

"Dear sir, the King has summoned the Duchess."

Does the mind regain power as the body fails? My great-grandfather turned his head, and, as his blue eyes met mine, I could not persuade myself that he was deceived.

"The will of his Majesty be done," he said faintly but firmly.

The next few moments seemed like years. Had I done wrong? Had it done him harm? Above all, what did he mean? Were his words part of one last graceful dream of the dynasty of the white lilies, or was his loyal submission made now to a Majesty not of France, not even of this world? It was an intense relief to me when he spoke again.

"Marguerite!"

I knelt by the bedside, and he laid his hand upon my head. An exquisite smile shone on his face.

"Good child; pauvre petite! His Majesty will call me also, before long. Is it not so? And then thou shalt rest."

His fine face clouded again with a wandering, troubled look, and his fingers fumbled the bed-clothes. I saw that he had lost his crucifix in moving his hand to my head. I gave it him, and he clasped his hands over it once more, and carrying it to his lips with a smile, closed his eyes like some good child going to sleep.

And Thou, O King of kings, didst summon him, as the dark faded into dawn!



CHAPTER XXIX.

HOME AGAIN—HOME NEWS—THE VERY END.

Now it is past it seems like a dream, my life at The Vine, with its sad end, if indeed that can be justly called a sad end which took away together, and with little pain, those dear souls whose married life had not known the parting of a day, and who in death were not (even by a day) divided.

And so I went back to the moors. I was weak and ill when I started, but every breath of air on my northward journey seemed to bring me strength.

There are no events in that porter's life, I am convinced. He looked just the same, and took me and my boxes quite coolly, though I felt inclined to shake hands with him in my delight. I did cry for very joy as we toiled up the old sandy hill, and the great moors welcomed me back. Then came the church, then the Vicarage, with the union-jack out of my window, and the villagers were at their doors—and I was at home. Oh, how the dear boys tore me to pieces!

There was no very special news, it seemed. Clement had been very good in taking my class at school, and had established a cricket club. Jack had positively found a new fungus, which would probably be named after him. "Boy's luck," as we all said! Captain Abercrombie had been staying with an old uncle at a place close by, only about twelve miles off. And he was constantly driving over. "So very good-natured to the boys," Mr. Arkwright said. And there was to be a school-children's tea on my birthday.

My birthday has come and gone, and I am sixteen now. Dear old Eleanor and I have gone back to our old ways. She had left my side of our room untouched. It was in talking of our recent parting, and all that has come and gone in our lives, that the fancy came upon us of writing our biographies this winter.

And here, in the dear old kitchen, round which the wild wind howls like music, with the dear boys dreaming at our feet, we bring them to an end.

* * * * *

This dusty relic of an old fad had been lying by for more than a year, when I found it to-day, in emptying a box to send some books in to Oxford, to Jack.

Eleanor should have had it, for we are parted, after all; but her husband has more interest in hers, so we each keep our own.

She is married, to George Abercrombie, and I mean to paste the bit out of the newspaper account of their wedding on to the end of this, as a sort of last chapter. It would be as long as all the rest put together if I were to write down all the ups and downs, and ins and outs, that went before the marriage, and I suppose these things are always very much alike.

I like him very much, and I am going to stay with them. The wedding was very pretty. Jack threw shoes to such an extent, that when I went to change my white ones I couldn't find a complete pair to put on. He says he meant to pick them up again, but Prince, our new puppy, thought they were thrown for him, and he never brought them back. Dear boy!

The old uncle helps George, who I believe is his heir, but at present he sticks to the regiment. It seems so funny that Eleanor should now be living there, and I here. In her letter to-day she says: "Fancy, Margery, my having quarrelled with Mrs. Minchin and not known it! She called on me to-day and solemnly forgave me, whereby I learned that she had been 'cutting' me for six weeks. When she said, 'No doubt you thought it very strange, Mrs. Abercrombie, that I never called on your mother whilst she was with you,' I was obliged to get over it the best way I could, for I dare not tell her I had never noticed it. I think my offence was something about calls, and I must be more particular. But George and I have been sketching at every spare moment this lovely weather. Oh, Margery dear, I do often feel so thankful to my mother for having given us plenty of rational interests. I could really imagine even our quarrelling or getting tired of each other, if we had nothing but ourselves in common. As it is, you can't tell, till you have a husband of your own, what a double delight there is in everything we do together. As to social ups and downs, and not having much money or many fine dresses, a 'collection' alone makes one almost too indifferent. Do you remember Mother's saying long ago, that intellectual pleasures have this in common with the consolations of religion, that they are such as the world can neither give nor take away?"

THE END.

Richard Clay & Sons, Limited, London & Bungay.



The present Series of Mrs. Ewing's Works is the only authorized, complete, and uniform Edition published.

It will consist of 18 volumes, Small Crown 8vo, at 2s. 6d. per vol., issued, as far as possible, in chronological order, and these will appear at the rate of two volumes every two months, so that the Series will be completed within 18 months. The device of the cover was specially designed by a Friend of Mrs. Ewing.

The following is a list of the books included in the Series—

1. MELCHIOR'S DREAM, AND OTHER TALES.

2. MRS. OVERTHEWAY'S REMEMBRANCES.

3. OLD-FASHIONED FAIRY-TALES.

4. A FLAT IRON FOR A FARTHING.

5. THE BROWNIES, AND OTHER TALES.

6. SIX TO SIXTEEN.

7. LOB-LIE-BY-THE-FIRE, AND OTHER TALES.

8. JAN OF THE WINDMILL.

9. VERSES FOR CHILDREN, AND SONGS.

10. THE PEACE EGG—A CHRISTMAS MUMMING PLAY—HINTS FOR PRIVATE THEATRICALS, &c.

11. A GREAT EMERGENCY, AND OTHER TALES.

12. BROTHERS OF PITY, AND OTHER TALES OF BEASTS AND MEN.

13. WE AND THE WORLD, Part I.

14. WE AND THE WORLD, Part II.

15. JACKANAPES—DADDY DARWIN'S DOVE-COTE—THE STORY OF A SHORT LIFE.

16. MARY'S MEADOW, AND OTHER TALES OF FIELDS AND FLOWERS.

17. MISCELLANEA, including The Mystery of the Bloody Hand—Wonder Stories—Tales of the Khoja, and other translations.

18. JULIANA HORATIA EWING AND HER BOOKS, with a selection from Mrs. Ewing's Letters.

S.P.C.K., NORTHUMBERLAND AVENUE, LONDON, W.C.



Transcriber's Note

The following typographical errors have been corrected.

Page Error 18 sate corrected to sat 42 sergeant). corrected to sergeant)." 135 Indeed, Edward corrected to "Indeed, Edward

The following words were inconsistently spelled:

&c. / etc. practice / practise

The following words had inconsistent hyphenation:

bedtime / bed-time gingerbeer / ginger-beer Mantuamaker / Mantua-maker overfed / over-fed remade / re-made scrapbook / scrap-book

THE END