Phoebe, Junior
“Ursula!” the girl said at last, with a more potent nudge, “what's the matter? won't you speak to me?” And Janey, who had her own disappointment too, and had expected to be received with enthusiasm, burst out crying, regardless of appearances, in the middle of the street.
“Janey, for Heaven's sake – people will see you! I am sure it is I who should cry, not you,” said Ursula, in sudden distress.
“I don't care who sees me,” sobbed Janey. “You have been enjoying yourself while we have stayed at home, and instead of being pleased to come back, or glad to see us – Oh, how can you be so cold-hearted?” she said with a fresh burst of tears.
Here the other side of the question suddenly dawned upon Ursula. She had been enjoying herself while the others stayed at home. It was quite true. Instead of feeling the shock of difference she should have thought of those who had never been so lucky as she was, who had never seen anything out of Carlingford. “Don't be so foolish, Janey,” she said, “I am glad; – and I have brought you such beautiful presents. But when you do nothing but laugh – ”
“I am sure I didn't laugh to hurt. I only laughed for fun!” cried Janey, drying her eyes not without a little indignation; and thus peace was made, for indeed one was dying to tell all that happened, and the other dying to hear. They walked the rest of the way with their heads very close together, so absorbed that the eldest brother, coming out of the gate as they approached, stood looking at them with a smile on his face for some time before they saw him. A slight young man, not very tall, with dark hair, like Ursula's, and a somewhat anxious expression, in correct English clerical dress.
“Has it all begun already?” he said, when they came close up to him, but without perceiving him, Ursula's face inspired with the pleasure of talking, as Janey's was with the eager delight of listening. The house was built in the ecclesiastical style, with gables and mullioned windows, which excluded the light, at least, whether or not they inspired passers-by with a sense of correct art, as they were intended to do. It was next door to the church, and had a narrow strip of shrubbery in front, planted with somewhat gloomy evergreens. The gate and door stood always open, except when Mr. May himself, coming or going, closed them momentarily, and it cannot be denied that there were outward and visible signs of a large, somewhat unruly family inside.
“Oh, Reginald!” cried Ursula. “You have come home!”
“Yes – for good,” he said with a half-laugh, half-sigh. “Or for bad – who can tell? At all events, here I am.”
“Why should it be for bad?” cried Janey, whose voice was always audible half-way up the street. “Oh, Ursula, something very nice has happened. He is to be warden of the old college, fancy! That is being provided for, papa says; and a beautiful old house.”
“Warden of the old college! I thought it was always some old person who was chosen.”
“But papa says he can live at home and let the house,” cried Janey. “There is no reason why it should be an old gentleman, papa thinks; it is nice, because there is no work – but look at Reginald, he does not like it a bit; he is never satisfied, I am sure, I wish it was me – ”
“Come in,” said Reginald hastily, “I don't want all my affairs, and my character besides, to be proclaimed from the house-tops.” Janey stopped indignant, to make some reply, and Ursula, grasping her arm, as she feared, with an energetic pinch, went in quickly. Little Amy had been playing in the little square hall, which was strewed with doll's clothes, and with two or three dolls in various stages of dilapidation. Some old, ragged school-books lay in a corner, the leaves out of one of which were blowing about in the wind. Even ten days of Anne Dorset's orderly reign had opened Ursula's eyes to these imperfections.
“Oh, what a muddle!” she cried; “I don't wonder that Reginald does not care for living at home.”
“Oh, I wish papa heard you!” cried Janey loudly, as Ursula led the way into the drawing-room, which was not much tidier than the hall. There was a basket-full of stockings to be mended, standing on the old work-table. Ursula felt, with a sinking of the heart, that they were waiting for her arrival, and that Janey had done nothing to them. More toys and more old school-books were tossed about upon the faded old carpet. The table-cover hung uneven, one end of it dragging upon the floor. The fire was burning very low, stifled in dust and white ashes. How dismal it looked! not like a place to come home to. “Oh, I don't wonder Reginald is vexed to be made to live at home,” she said once again to herself, with tears in her eyes.
“I hope you have enjoyed yourself,” her brother said, as she dropped wearily into the old easy-chair. “We have missed you very much; but I don't suppose you missed us. London was very pleasant, I suppose, even at this time of the year?”
“Oh, pleasant!” said Ursula. “If you had been with me, how you would have liked it! Suffolk Street is only an inn, but it is a very nice inn, what they call a private hotel. Far better than the great big places on the American principle, Sir Robert says. But we dined at one of those big places one day, and it was very amusing. Scores of people, and great mirrors that made them look hundreds. And such quantities of lights and servants; but Sir Robert thought Suffolk Street very much the best. And I went to two theatres and to a ball. They were so kind. Sophy Dorset laughs at me sometimes, but Anne is an angel,” said Ursula fervently. “I never knew any one so good in my life.”
“That is not saying much,” said Janey, “for none of us are very good, and you know nobody else. Anne Dorset is an old maid.”
“Oh, Janey! how dare you?”
“And, for that matter, so is Sophy. Papa says so. He says she was jilted, and that she will never get a husband.”
“Hold your tongue,” said Reginald fiercely, “if we are to hear what my father says at second hand through an imp like you – ”
“Oh, yes,” said Janey, mocking, “that is because you are not friends with papa.”
“Janey, come and help me to take off my things,” said Ursula, seeing that Reginald would probably proceed to strong measures and box his sister's ears. “If you were older, you would not talk like that,” she said, with dignity, as they went upstairs. “Oh, dear Janey, you can't think how different Cousin Anne and Sophy are, who are not girls, like us. They never talk unkindly of other people. You would get to think it childish, as I do, if you had been living with Cousin Anne.”
“Stuff!” said Janey. “Papa is not childish, I hope. And it was he who said all that. I don't care what your fine Cousin Anne does.”
Notwithstanding, the reproof thus administered went to Janey's heart; for to a girl of fifteen, whose next sister is almost twenty, the reproach of being childish is worse than any other. She blushed fiery-red, and though she scoffed, was moved. Besides, though it suited her to quote him for the moment, she was very far from putting any unbounded faith in papa.
“Just wait a moment! See what Cousin Anne, whom you think so little of, has sent you,” said Ursula, sitting down on the floor with the great parcel in her lap, carefully undoing the knots; for she had read Miss Edgeworth's stories in her youth, and would not have cut the strings for the world; and when the new dresses, in all their gloss and softness, were spread out upon the old carpet, which scarcely retained one trace of colour, Janey was struck dumb.
“Is that,” she said, faltering and conscience-stricken, “for me?”
“This is for you; though you think them old maids – and that they will never get husbands,” said Ursula, indignantly. “What a thing for a girl to say! And, indeed, I don't think Cousin Anne will ever get a husband. There is not one in the world half good enough for her – not one! Yes, this is for you. They went themselves, and looked over half the things in the shop before they could get one to please them. They did not say, 'Janey is an unkind little thing, that will repeat all she hears about us, and does not care for us a bit.' They said, 'Ursula, we must choose frocks for Janey and Amy. Come and help us to get what they will like best.'”
Janey's lips quivered, and two very big tears came into her eyes. She was stricken with the deepest compunction, but her pride did not permit her to give in all at once.
“I dare say you told her how badly off we were,” she said.
“I told her nothing about it, and she did not say a word – not a word, as if it were a charity – only to please you – to let you see that you were remembered; but I dare say it is quite true after all,” said Ursula, with lofty irony, “that Cousin Anne will never get a husband, and that they are old maids.”
“Oh, you know I didn't mean it!” said Janey, giving way to her tears.
Then Ursula got up and took off her hat and smoothed her hair, feeling satisfied with her success, and went downstairs again to Reginald, who was seated on the dingy sofa waiting for her, to answer her questions about the great event which had happened since she had been away. Ursula's mind was full of the shock of the sharp impression made by her return, though the impression itself began to wear away.
“I can understand why you don't care about living at home,” she said. “Oh I wonder if I could do anything to mend it! I am so glad you have got something, Reginald. If you have a good servant, you might be quite comfortable by yourself, and we could come and see you. I should not feel it a bit – not a single bit; and it would be so much nicer for you.”
“You are mistaken,” said her brother. “It is not staying at home I object to. We are not very tidy or very comfortable, perhaps, but we all belong to each other, at least. It is not that, Ursula.”
“What is it, then? Janey says,” said Ursula, drawing a long breath of awe and admiration, “that you are to have two hundred and fifty pounds a year.”
“For doing nothing,” he said.
“For doing nothing?” She looked up at him a little bewildered, for his tone struck Ursula as not at all corresponding with the delightful character of the words he said. “But, Reginald, how nice, how very nice it sounds! How lucky you must have been! How could it happen that such a delightful thing should come to one of us? We are always so unlucky, papa says.”
“If you think this luck – ” said Reginald. “He does, and he is quite pleased; but how do you suppose I can be pleased? Thrust into a place where I am not wanted – where I can be of no use. A dummy, a practical falsehood. How can I accept it, Ursula? I tell you it is a sinecure!”
Ursula looked at him with eyes round with wonder. He seemed to be speaking in some different language of which she understood nothing. “What is a sinecure?” she said.
CHAPTER X
PAPA
“Ursula has come back!” cried the little ones, who had returned from their tea-party, running to meet their father at the door.
Mr. May was very good, except by moments, to his younger children. He was not, indeed, an unkind father to any of them; but he had never forgiven Providence for leaving him with his motherless family upon his hands, a man so utterly unfit for the task. Perhaps he did not put this exactly into words, but he felt it deeply, and had never got over it. There were so many things that he could have done better, and there were so many people who could have done this better; and yet it was precisely to him, not a person adapted to the charge of children, that it had been given to do it! This seemed to argue a want of judgment in the regulation of mortal affairs, which irritated him all the more because he was a clergyman, and had to persuade other people that everything that happened to them was for the best. He was a man of some culture, and literary power, and wrote very pleasant “thoughtful” papers for some of the Church magazines; but these compositions, though very easy to read, were only brought into the world by elaborate precautions on the part of the family, which scarcely dared to speak above its breath when papa was “writing;” for on such occasions he could be very savage, as the occasional offender knew. He was a man with an imposing person, good-looking, and of very bland and delightful manners, when he chose. But yet he had never made friends, and was now at fifty-five the incumbent of St. Roque, with a small income and a humble position in the church hierarchy of Carlingford. He preached better than any other of the Carlingford clergymen, looked better, had more reputation out of the place; and was of sufficiently good family, and tolerably well connected. Yet he never got on, never made any real advance in life. Nobody could tell what was the cause of this, for his opinions were moderate and did not stand in his way – indeed within the limits of moderation he had been known to modify his principles, now inclining towards the high, then towards the low, according as circumstances required, though never going too far in either direction. Such a man ought to have been successful, according to all rules, but he was not. He was generally in debt and always needy. His eldest son, James, was in India, doing well, and had often sent a contribution towards the comfort of the family, and especially to help Reginald at College. But James had married a year before, and accordingly was in a less favourable position for sending help. And indeed these windfalls had never produced much effect upon the family, who heard of James' gifts vaguely without profiting by them. All this donna à penser to the elder children. Having no softening medium of a mother's eyes to look at their father through, they were more bold in judging him than, perhaps, they ought to have been; and he did not take pains to fascinate his children, or throw the glamour of love into their eyes. He took it for granted, frankly and as a part of nature, that he himself was the first person to be considered in all matters. So he was, of course – so the father, the bread-winner, the head of the family, ought to be; and when he has a wife to keep him upon that pedestal, and to secure that his worship shall be respected, it becomes natural, and the first article of the family creed; but somehow when a man has to set forth and uphold this principle himself, it is less successful; and in Mr. May's case it was not successful at all. He was not severe or tyrannical, so that they might have rebelled. He only held the conviction quite honestly and ingeniously, that his affairs came first, and were always to be attended to. Nothing could be said against this principle – but it tells badly in the management of a family unless, indeed, as we have said, it is managed through the medium of the mother, who takes away all imputation of selfishness by throwing an awful importance and tender sanctity over all that happens to be desirable or necessary for “papa.”
Mr. May had no wife to watch over the approaches of his study, and talk of him with reverential importance to her children. This was not his fault, but his misfortune. Bitterly had he mourned and resented the blow which took her from him, and deeply felt the loss she was to him. This was how he spoke of it always, the loss to him; and probably poor Mrs. May, who had adored and admired her husband to the last day of her life, would have been more satisfied with this way of mourning for her than any other; but naturally Ursula, who thought of the loss to herself and the other children, found fault with this limitation of the misfortune. A man who has thus to fight for himself does not appear in an amiable aspect to his family, to whom, as to all young creatures, it seemed natural that they should be the first objects; and as they were a great trouble and burden to him, perhaps the children did not always bear their most amiable aspect to their father. Both looked selfish to the other, and Mr. May, no doubt, could have made out quite as good a case as the children did. He thought all young people were selfish, taking everything they could, trying to extract even the impossible from the empty purse and strained patience of their elders; and they thought that he was indifferent to them, thinking about himself, as it is a capital sin in a parent to do; and both of them were right and both wrong, as indeed may be said in every case to which there are two sides.
“Ursula has come!” cried the two little ones. Amy and Robin could read their father's face better than they could read those instruments of torture called printed books, and they saw that he was in a good humour, and that they were safe to venture upon the playful liberty of seizing him, one by each hand, and dragging him in. He was a tall man, and the sight of him triumphantly dragged in by these imps, the youngest of whom was about up to his knees, was pretty, and would have gone to the heart of any spectator. He was not himself unconscious of this, and when he was in a good humour, and the children were neat and tolerably dressed, he did not object to being seen by the passers-by dragged up his own steps by those two little ones. The only passers-by, however, on this occasion were a retired shopkeeper and his wife, who had lately bought one of the oldest houses in Grange Lane, and who had come out for a walk as the day was fine. “Mark my words, Tozer,” the lady was saying, “that's a good man though he's a church parson. Them as children hangs onto like that, ain't got no harm in them.”
“He's a rum un, he is,” said Mr. Tozer in reply. It was a pity that the pretty spectacle of the clergyman with his little boy and girl should have been thus thrown away upon a couple of Dissenters, yet it was not without its effect. Amy pulled one arm and Robin pulled the other. They were dark-haired children like all the Mays, and as this peculiarity is rare among children, it gave these two a certain piquancy.
“Well, well,” he said, “take me to Ursula,” and after he had kissed his newly-arrived daughter, he sat down in the faded drawing-room with much geniality, and took one child on each knee.
“I hope you have enjoyed yourself, Ursula,” he said; “of course, we have missed you. Janey has done her best, but she is not very clever at housekeeping, nor does she understand many things that people require, as you have learned to do.”
“Oh, I am so glad you have missed me!” said Ursula, “I mean sorry; I have enjoyed myself very, very much. The Dorsets were so kind, kinder than anybody ever was before.”
“And, papa, they have sent me a new dress.”
“And me too, papa,” chirruped little Amy on his knee.
“You too, Mouse! it was very kind of them; and you went to the Tower and did all the lions, Ursula? that is the lot of country cousins, and the Dorsets would spare you nothing, I suppose.”
“We went to much better things,” said Ursula, producing her theatres and her ball as she had done before. “And, oh, papa, I like them so much. I wish we lived a little nearer. Those poor little Indian children, I fear they will be too much for Cousin Anne; they look so pale and so peevish, not like our children here.”
“Well, they are not pale at all events,” said Mr. May, putting them down; “run and play like good children. You will have heard that we have had something happening to us, even in this quiet place, while you were away.”
“Oh, I was so astonished,” said Ursula, “but Reginald doesn't seem to like it. That is so odd; I should have thought he would have been overjoyed to get something. He used to talk so about having no interest.”
“Reginald is like a great many other people. He does not know his own mind,” said Mr. May, his countenance overcasting. Ursula knew that sign of coming storms well enough, but she was too much interested to forbear.
“What is a sinecure, papa?” she asked, her brother's last word still dwelling in her mind.
“A piece of outrageous folly,” he cried, getting up and striding about the room, “all springing from the foolish books boys read now-a-days, and the nonsense that is put into their minds. Mean! it means that your brother is an ass, that is what it means. After all the money that has been spent upon him – ”
“But, papa, we have not spent much, have we? I thought it was his scholarship?” said Ursula with injudicious honesty. Her father turned upon her indignantly.
“I am not aware that I said we. We have nothing to spend upon any one, so far as I know. I said I – the only person in the house who earns any money or is likely to do so, if Reginald goes on in this idiotical way.”
Ursula grew red. She was Mr. May's own daughter, and had a temper too. “If I could earn any money I am sure I would,” she cried, “and only too glad. I am sure it is wanted badly enough. But how is a girl to earn any money? I wish I knew how.”
“You little fool, no one was thinking of you. Do a little more in the house, and nobody will ask you to earn money. Yes, this is the shape things are taking now-a-days,” said Mr. May, “the girls are mad to earn anyhow, and the boys, forsooth, have a hundred scruples. If women would hold their tongues and attend to their own business, I have no doubt we should have less of the other nonsense. The fact is everything is getting into an unnatural state. But if Reginald thinks I am going to maintain him in idleness at his age – ”
“Papa, for Heaven's sake don't speak so loud, he will hear you!” said Ursula, letting her fears of a domestic disturbance overweigh her prudence.
“He will hear me? I wish him to hear me,” said Mr. May, raising his voice. “Am I to be kept from saying what I like, how I like, in my own house, for fear that Reginald should hear me, forsooth! Ursula, I am glad to have you at home; but if you take Reginald's part in his folly, and set yourself against the head of the family, you had better go back again and at once. He may defy me, but I shall not be contradicted by a chit of a girl, I give you my word for that.”
Ursula was silent; she grew pale now after her redness of hasty and unconsidered self-defence. Oh, for Cousin Anne to shield and calm her; what a difference it made to plunge back again thus into trouble and strife.
“He thinks it better to be idle at his father's expense than to do a little work for a handsome salary,” said Mr. May; “everything is right that is extracted from his father's pocket, though it is contrary to a high code of honour to accept a sinecure. Fine reasoning that, is it not? The one wrongs nobody, while the other wrongs you and me and all the children, who want every penny I have to spend; but Reginald is much too fine to think of that. He thinks it quite natural that I should go on toiling and stinting myself.”
“Papa, it may be very wrong what he is doing; but if you think he wants to take anything from you – ”
“Hold your tongue,” said her father; “I believe in deeds, not in words. He has it in his power to help me, and he chooses instead, for a miserable fantastic notion of his own, to balk all my care for him. Of course the hospital was offered to him out of respect for me. No one cares for him. He is about as much known in Carlingford as – little Amy is. Of course it is to show their respect to me. And here he comes with his fantastic nonsense about a sinecure! Who is he that he should make such a fuss? Better men than he is have held them, and will to the end of the chapter. A sinecure! what does he call a sinecure?”
“That is just what I want to know,” said Ursula under her breath, but her father did not, fortunately, hear this ejaculation. Reginald had gone out, and happily was not within hearing, and Mr. May calmed down by degrees, and told Ursula various circumstances about the parish and the people which brought him down out of his anger and comforted her after that passage of arms. But the commotion left him in an excitable state, a state in which he was very apt to say things that were disagreeable, and to provoke his children to wrath in a way which Ursula thought was very much against the scriptural rule.
“Things in the parish are going on much as usual,” he said, “Mrs. Sam Hurst is as kind as ever.”
“Indeed!” said Ursula with a suppressed snort of anger. Mr. May gave the kind of offensive laugh, doubly offensive to every woman, which men give when their vanity is excited, and when there is, according to the common expression, a lady in the case.
“Yes, she is very kind,” he said with a twinkle in his eye. “She has had the children to tea a great many times since you have been away. To show my sense of her kindness, you must ask her one of these days. A woman who understands children is always a valuable friend for a man in my position – and also, Ursula, for a girl in yours.”