CHAPTER VI.
‘In her is highe beauty without pride,And youth withoute greenhood or folly.To all her workes virtue is her guide.Humbless hath slain in her all tyranny:She is the mirror of all courtesy,Her heart a very chamber of holiness,Her hand minister of freedom for almess.’Chaucer.
‘In her is highe beauty without pride,And youth withoute greenhood or folly.To all her workes virtue is her guide.Humbless hath slain in her all tyranny:She is the mirror of all courtesy,Her heart a very chamber of holiness,Her hand minister of freedom for almess.’Chaucer.
‘In her is highe beauty without pride,And youth withoute greenhood or folly.To all her workes virtue is her guide.Humbless hath slain in her all tyranny:She is the mirror of all courtesy,Her heart a very chamber of holiness,Her hand minister of freedom for almess.’Chaucer.
‘In her is highe beauty without pride,
And youth withoute greenhood or folly.
To all her workes virtue is her guide.
Humbless hath slain in her all tyranny:
She is the mirror of all courtesy,
Her heart a very chamber of holiness,
Her hand minister of freedom for almess.’
Chaucer.
‘No!’ says Susan. The word is not a denial; it is merely an ejaculative expression of the most extreme astonishment, largely mingled with disbelief.
The sun is glinting through the trees in the old orchard right down on her head, striking a light from the glancing knitting-needles she has now let fall into her lap. This old orchard is the happy hunting-ground of the Barry children old and young—the place which they rush to in their joyousmoments, the place which they crawl to with their griefs and woes. To-day neither joys nor griefs are near them, and it is out of sheer love alone for its mossy old apple-trees and its sunlit corners that Susan had tripped in here a while ago with a dilapidated old novel tucked into her apron pocket, and the eternal sock with the heel half turned between her pretty fingers. After her had straggled Betty, a slender creature of sixteen, and Tom, the baby. Tom was five, but he was always the baby, there having been no more babies after him, principally because his mother died when he was born. And last of all came Bonnie, the little cripple, hopping sadly on his crutches, until Susan saw him, and ran back to him and caught him in her arms, and placed him beside her on the warm soft grass, putting out her much-washed cotton skirt that he might sit upon it, and so be protected from even an imaginary damp, and had cuddled him up to her, to the many droppings of the stitches of the long-suffering heel.
Carew, who came between Betty and Susan, was away, fishing somewhere in the Crosby river, and Jacky had not put in an appearance since breakfast. How on earth his lessons are going to be prepared between this—two o’clock—and five, makes Susan wonder anxiously. Why doesn’t he come home? What can he be doing?
She has hardly got further than this in her thoughts of the truant, when suddenly he appears upon the scene, a very rosy, bright-eyed rascal, big with news. Indeed, it was the coming of Jacky, and the astounding revelation in his opening sentence—that he had sprung upon them in a most unprincipled way, without a word of warning—that had drawn from Susan that heavily emphasized ‘No!’
She speaks again now.
‘I don’t believe it,’ she says.
‘Oh, Susan, why not?’ asks Betty, who is sitting with her hands folded behind her head, perhaps because if she brought them forward she might find some knitting to do,too. Idle hands they are, only made for mischief; so is the face to which they belong.
‘Because it’s nonsense,’ says Susan, shrugging her shoulders, and drawing Bonnie closer to her. ‘And, besides, I don’t want to believe it.’
‘Oh, I do!’ says Betty, with a little grin from under her big sun-hat. ‘Go on, Jacky.’
‘I saw her, I saw her plain,’ says Jacky, his rosy round face fired with joy at the thought of being for once the bearer of important news. ‘She was walking about in the garden.’
‘In,’ from Susan, in a severe tone, ‘Mr. Wyndham’s garden?’
‘Yes, in there.’ Jacky now looks as though he is going to burst. ‘Why don’t you believe me? I saw her, I tell you. I saw her quite plain. An’ her hair is dark, a lot darker than yours, an she’s got a blue frock like your Sunday one, only better.’
Susan interrupts him with dignity.
‘I don’t see how Mrs. Denis’s——’ Denis’s wife was always called Mrs. Denis; if she had any other name, it was sunk beneath insuperable barriers. Mr. and Mrs. Denis she and her husband had been since the priest poured his blessing down upon them and made them one in the old chapel built on the rock at the end of the village. This rock gave the parish priest a distinct crow over the Protestant clergyman.
‘Ye would quote me the Scriptures, would ye?’ Father McFane would call to Mr. Barry as the latter drove by the chapel in his Norwegian on his way to the church beyond. ‘An’ what did St. Paul say? “Like a house founded upon a rock.” Why, here’s the rock, man. Come in! come in! where are ye going?’
It occurred every Sunday, and Mr. Barry would smile back at Father McFane, and nod his head, for the two, indeed, were great friends, as the Protestants and Roman Catholics often are in small places, until someone comes in to them with wild newsand absurd tidings from incendiaries outside to upset the loving work of years.
‘I don’t see how Mrs. Denis’s niece or cousin, or whatever she is, should have a better gown than mine,’ says she.
‘But she isn’t Mrs. Denis’s cousin, she’s too young,’ says Jacky. ‘She’s a girl, and she was pulling the flowers like anything, and if she belonged to Mrs. Denis she wouldn’t be let do that.’
Jacky’s English is always horrible.
‘Oh, you’ve dreamt the whole thing!’ says Susan contemptuously. ‘Run away and play.’ She has forgotten about the lessons.
‘Oh, you are a marplot! I am going to believe in Jacky for once in my life. Don’t go, Jacky! Jacky, come back! If you don’t, Aunt Jemima will make you do your lessons.’
This has a magical effect. Jacky swerves round.
‘She is there,’ says he indignantly. ‘I did see her.’ He seems to dwell on this factwith gusto. ‘An’ she’s not Mrs. Denis’s niece. An’ old Meany down by the mill says she’s been there for four weeks.’
‘The plot is thickening,’ says Betty lazily. ‘’Tis a clever villain, whoever she is; fancy her being here for four weeks without the very size of her shoes being known throughout the length and breadth of Curraghcloyne! Four days ought to have done it. Go on, Jacky! Had she a cloven foot by any chance?’
‘No; but’—and Jacky’s eyes widen, and he seems to swell—‘Meany says she’s a prisoner.’
‘A what?’
‘Yes, a real prisoner. She’s not let go out of the place. Mrs. Denis never opens the front-gate now, but comes out by the little green one we can see from the hall-door, an’ even that’s locked when she comes out an’ goes back again, Meany says.’
‘Mrs. Denis very seldom comes out by any other,’ says Susan.
‘But she doesn’t always lock it behindher,’ puts in Betty, who is evidently beginning to enjoy herself.
‘Now she locks the front-gate too,’ says Jacky triumphantly.
‘It’s perfectly thrilling,’ declares Betty, sitting up and growing openly interested. Betty is frivolous. ‘A prisoner, and a young girl. Can she be the long-lost princess of our infancy? And imprisoned by Mr. Wyndham! Oh, the terrible man!’
‘She is of course a friend of Mrs. Denis’s,’ says Susan, with the grand air of one who will have the truth at any price, and who is bent on dismissing all theories save the practical one. ‘It’s the most natural thing in the world. We all know Mr. Wyndham told her he wouldn’t come down for a month or two, and so she is entertaining a niece or a cousin, or something.’
‘She isn’t a niece of Mrs. Denis’s, any way,’ persists Jacky obstinately; ‘she’—with a hopeful, yet doubtful glance at Betty, whose latest idea has struck him—‘she is much more like a—a princess.’ Again he looks at Betty,as if expecting her to bring him through this difficulty of her own making; but Betty fails him, as she fails most people.
‘After all, I dismiss the romantic element,’ says she, nursing her knees and swaying herself indolently to and fro in the warm sunshine. ‘I incline now towards the supernatural. Susan,’ addressing her elder sister with due solemnity, ‘perhaps she is a ghost.’ Her face thus uplifted is sufficiently like Susan’s to let all the world know they are of kin; but Betty’s face, piquante, provocative, as it is, lacks the charm of Susan’s. Betty is pretty, nay, perhaps something more, for the Barrys are a handsome race; but Susan—Susan is lovely. It is useless saying her nose is not pure Greek, that her mouth wants this or that, that her forehead is a trifle too low. Susan, when all is said, when long argument has been used, remains what she was before—lovely. The smiling, earnest lips, the liquid eyes, the rippling, sunny hair—all these might be another girl’s, but yet that other girl would not be Susan. Oh, beauteousSusan! with your youthful, starry eyes and tender, mirthful, timid air, I would that a brush, and not a pen, might paint you!
‘A ghost! Nonsense,’ says she, now contemptuously. ‘But’—thoughtfully—‘what a queer story!’ And again, with a wrathful glance at Jacky: ‘After all, I don’t believe a word of it.’
‘Oh, I do! I want to,’ says Betty, who revels in sensations. ‘And the ghost development is beautiful. I’d rather see a ghost than anything. As you looked, Jacky, did she vanish into thin air?’
‘No; only round the corner,’ says Jacky reluctantly. He would evidently have liked the vanishing trick.
‘Very disappointing! But perhaps that’s her way of doing it. Corners are always so convenient.’
‘If the gates are all locked,’ says Susan, turning suddenly a magisterial eye upon her brother, ‘may I ask how you saw her?’
‘Ah, that’s part of it! That,’ says Betty,‘is where the fire and brimstone come in. That’s what makes her a ghost. It isn’t everybody can see through stone walls,’ says she, lowering her voice mysteriously, and glancing at the staring Jacky. ‘She had evidently the power to turn Mrs. Denis’s walls into glass! It’s very unlucky, Jacky, for ghosts to fall in love with people, and I’m sorry to say I think this one has developed a mad fancy for you.’
‘She hasn’t!’ says Jacky, who is now extremely pale.
‘Circumstances point to it,’ says Betty, who is nothing if not a tease. ‘And when ghosts fall in love, they do dreadful things to people. Things like this!’ She has risen, and is now advancing on the stricken Jacky with her slender arms uplifted, and long fingers pointed downwards and arranged like claws. She has taken to a sort of prance, a high-stepping walk that brings her knees upwards and her toes outward, and she has worked her face out of all recognition in an abominable grin. All this taken together proves toomuch for Jacky, who, his face now visibly paler, descends precipitately upon Susan.
Susan has been seeing to the comfort of her little Bonnie, and has therefore been ignorant of Betty’s flight of fancy until the moment when Jacky stumbles somewhat heavily against her, and looking up, she sees Betty’s diabolical pose.
‘Betty, don’t!’ says she, glancing back to Jacky’s face, which is, indeed, a mixture of pluck and abject terror.
‘Would you not warn him, then?’ says Betty reproachfully, returning, however, to her ordinary appearance, and making an aside at Bonnie, a pretence at shooting him with her first finger and thumb, that sends the delicate little creature into fits of laughter. ‘Poor old Jacky!’ returning to the charge. ‘It isn’t for nothing that ghosts reveal themselves. It is easy to see that this one has her eye on you!’
‘She hasn’t,’ says Jacky again, who is on the point of tears. He is evidently not partial to ghosts. ‘And it wasn’t through aglass wall I saw her—it was——’ He stops dead short.
‘Yes?’ says Susan, still severely. ‘Do be quiet, Betty, and let him speak. It was——’
‘Through the hole in the wall near the garden,’ confesses Jacky doggedly, but somewhat shamefacedly.
‘You see, it was through the wall, after all!’ says Betty, breaking into a delighted laugh. ‘She’ll get you, Jacky—she’ll get you yet.’
‘I don’t think it is a very nice thing to peep through other people’s walls into their grounds,’ says Susan, more from the point of view that she is the eldest sister, and bound to say a word in season now and then, than from any feeling of horror at the act. All boys peep through holes in walls, when lucky enough to find them. ‘How would you like it,’ says she, ‘if you were found doing it?’
‘But I wasn’t found,’ retorts Jacky sulkily.
‘Susan,’ Betty breaks into the argument with a vivacity all her own, ‘you have no more morality than a cat. You are teachinghim all wrong. It isn’t the not being found out, Jacky, that is of importance, as Susan is most erroneously bent on impressing upon you; it is the fact of peeping in itself that makes you the’—shaking her finger at him—‘miserable sinner that you are!’
‘Sinner yourself!’ says Jacky, now driven to desperation and the most unreserved impertinence. ‘I often saw you look through the hole in the wall yourself.’
At this, instead of being annoyed, both Susan and Betty give way to inextinguishable mirth; whereupon Jacky, who had, perhaps, hoped that his shot would take effect, prepares once more to march away. But Betty, making a sudden grab at him, catches him by his trousers.
‘Wait awhile,’ cries she, still shaking with laughter. ‘Susan, seize his arm. Tell us the rest of it. Was she——’
‘I won’t tell you anything; and I’m sorry I told you a word at all. Let me go, Betty. D’ye hear? You are tearing my breeches.’
‘And you are tearing our hearts,’ saysBetty, ‘Jacky darling. Go on; don’t be a cross cat, now. Was she——’
‘Twice as pretty as you, any way,’ says Jacky, with virulence.
‘Is that all? Poor girl! says Betty, who is very hard to beat. ‘Prettier than Susan?’
‘Yes, lots.’
‘She must be a real princess, then, and no ghost. I’d like to leave a card upon her. Perhaps you would kindly push it through the hole in the wall, Jacky.’
This is adding to the insult, and Jacky, with the loss of a button or two, and serious injury to his suspenders, breaks away.
‘There now!’ says he, beginning to cry. ‘Look what you’ve done; and no one to mend it; and Aunt Maria will be angry, and father will give me twenty lines——’ Sobs check his utterance.
Susan rises hurriedly, and, with a whispered word to Bonnie, she passes him on to Betty, who, in spite of her carelessness, receives the little fragile creature with loving arms, hugging him to her, and beginning to ransackher memory for a story to tell him, such as his soul loveth; then Susan, slipping her arm round Jacky’s shoulder, whispers soft comforts to him. He shall come in now and do his lessons with her, so that father shall not be vexed this evening, and after dinner (the Rector’s family dined at two, and had high tea at seven) she would take him with her up to Crosby Park.
Jacky’s recovery is swift; his sobs cease, and he graciously allows himself to be kissed. To go to Crosby Park is always a joy—the big, huge, handsome place, with its long gardens and glass houses, and, best of all, its absentee landlord.
It is, indeed, quite ten years since George Crosby has been at the Park, and in all probability ten more years are likely to elapse before he comes again. The last accounts of him were from Africa, where he had had a most unpleasantly near interview with a lion, but had got off with a whole skin and another not quite so whole: the lion had come to grief.