Daisy Burns Volume I Part 14

"Yes," she said, smiling, "he will soon be here." But there was a delay of ten or fifteen minutes: she saw me restless with expectation, and good-naturedly told me I might go and look out for him at the back-door.

I jumped up with an eagerness that again made her smile, and having promised not to pa.s.s the threshold of the garden, I ran out to watch for Cornelius, as I had formerly so often watched for my father. The lane was green, silent, and lonely, with high hawthorn hedges, a few overshadowing trees, and a narrow path ever encroached on by gra.s.s, weeds, and low trailing plants. Ere long I saw Cornelius appear in the distance; he walked with his eyes on the ground, and never saw me until he had reached the door. He entered, and in pa.s.sing by me carelessly stroked my hair by way of greeting. To his sister, who stood waiting for him on the last step of the house, he gave the embrace without which they never met or parted.

The tea was made and waiting. Miss O'Reilly poured it out, and called me from where I sat apart, feeling shy and unnoticed, to hand his cup to her brother, who was again lying on the sofa. He asked how I had behaved.

"Too well; she is too quiet."

"Shall we send her to school!" said Cornelius.

I turned round from the table, to give him an entreating look, which he did not heed.

"She is too weak; we must teach her ourselves," replied his sister.

I heard the decision with great relief. A school was my horror. When the meal was over, I made my way to Cornelius, and half whispered--

"Will _you_ teach me?"

"Perhaps so; well, don't look disappointed--I will."

"What do you know?"

"Grammar, history, geography--"

"I can vouch for the geography," interrupted Miss O'Reilly.

"We shall see."

He examined me; I did my best to answer well, and waited for his verdict with a beating heart.

"What do you think of her?" asked his sister, who now re-entered the room, which she had left for awhile.

"She won't fit in it!" replied Cornelius, giving me a perplexed look.

"What?"

"Ah! I forgot to tell you. I bought her a cot, or crib--what do you call it?--I fear she won't fit in it! Can't we shorten her?"

"You have bought her a bed!" exclaimed Miss O'Reilly, looking confounded, and laying down her work.

"Yes; come here, Daisy."

He measured me with his eye, then added triumphantly, "She will fit in it; it is just her size, Kate! see if it is not, when it arrives! just her size."

"Just her size! bless the boy! does he not mean the poor child to grow?"

"Faith!" exclaimed Cornelius, looking astonished, "I never thought of that, never!--and yet," he added thoughtfully, "I think I can remember her shorter than she is now."

"You are the most foolish lad in all Ireland!" hotly observed Miss O'Reilly, with whom, though she had left it many years, her native country was ever present.

She gave him a scolding, which he bore with perfect good-humour. A little mollified by this, she changed the subject by asking--

"Well, how did the child answer?"

"Oh,--hem! Oh, very well, of course."

He had already forgotten all about it, as I felt, with some mortification. Quite unconscious of this, he rose, opened the piano, and turning to his sister, said--

"What shall I sing you, Kate?"

"Anything you like,--one of the Melodies."

She sat back to listen, with her hand across her eyes, whilst, in a rich harmonious voice, her brother sang one of those wild and beautiful Irish melodies,--plaintive as the songs of their own land which the captives of Sion sang by the rivers of Babylon. I listened, entranced, until he closed the piano, and read aloud to his sister from a book of travels, which sent me fast asleep.

Happy are the bereaved children whom Providence leads to the harbour of such a home as I had found! Cornelius and his sister lived in a retired way; their tastes were simple; their means moderate; but their home, though quiet, was pleasant like a shady bower, where the waving trees let in ever-new glimpses of the blue sky, with gliding sun beams and many a wandering breeze. There was a genial light and vivacity about them; an endless variety of moods, never degenerating into ill-temper; a pleasant union of shrewdness, simplicity, and originality, which lent a great charm to their daily intercourse. To be with them was to breathe an atmosphere of cheerful, living peace, far removed from the fatal and enervating calmness which makes a pain of repose.

I knew them at the least troubled period of their lives. They were the children, by different mothers, of an ambitious and disappointed artist, who had left Ireland ardent with hope, and after vainly struggling against obscurity for a few years, had died in London, poor, miserable, and broken-hearted.

For some years his daughter supported herself and her young brother by teaching; then my father, who had long known them, came to her aid, and insisted on defraying the expenses of the education of Cornelius. She struggled on alone, until, about a year before I saw her, an old relative, who had never a.s.sisted her in her poverty, died, leaving her a moderate income, and the house in which we now resided. Towards the same time Cornelius, who had completed his studies, instead of entering one of the learned professions, as his sister urged him to do, accepted of a situation in the City. This was one of the few subjects on which they differed; but it was seldom alluded to, and never allowed to disturb the harmony of their home. On most points they agreed; on none more entirely than in taking every care of their adopted child.

Cornelius had a memory tenacious of benefits and injuries. He thought himself bound to watch over the orphan daughter of his benefactor and friend. He took me, indeed, to my grandfather--my natural protector; but, on learning from Miss Murray the footing on which I was said to be treated in Mr. Thornton's house, he at once set off to obtain possession of me, "if possible," not being quite prepared for the ease with which his object was accomplished.

I rejoiced in the change, as might a plant removed from deadly shade to living sunshine. My health improved; I became more cheerful. Every day I walked out with Kate in the neighbourhood. It was then one of the prettiest suburbs about London. We lived in a street called the "Grove,"

and which deserved its name, for it was planted with old trees, and pa.s.sed like a broad walk through the gardens on either side, where, like brown nests in a green hedge, appeared a few ancient houses irregularly built, and still more irregularly scattered. But its lanes were the great attraction of this vicinity.

If we opened the garden door we entered a verdant wilderness of paths crossing one another; and each was (and there lay the charm) in itself a solitude. Country lanes may break the grand lines of a landscape; but, in the neighbourhood of a great and crowded city, every glimpse of nature is pleasant and lovely. I remember the sense of serene happiness I felt in walking out with Kate in the early morning, along a quiet path; now, alas! crowded with villas, but then called "Nightingale lane," and sheltered on one side by a cheerful orchard, with its white and fragrant blossoms in Spring, or its bending fruit in Autumn, glittering in the rising sun; and, on the other, screened by a row of elms, whose ancient roots grasped earth in the tenacious hold of ages, and whose broad base young green shoots veiled with a tender grace. The horizon on our left was bounded by an old park, a stately, motionless grove of beech-trees, above which, bending to every breeze, rose a few tall and graceful poplars; to our right, hidden in its garden, lay our humble home. Kate, reading her favourite Thomas ? Kempis, walked on, her eyes bent on the page; I followed more slowly, reading, child though I was, from the Divine book man cannot improve, and vainly tries to mar.

Between the path and the hedge which enclosed the orchard, lay a broad ditch. There grew green gra.s.ses, that bent to the breeze like forests, and beneath which flowed a faint thread of water, the river of that small world, peopled with nations of insects, and which to me possessed both attraction and beauty. For there the ground-ivy trailed along the earth, its delicate blue flowers hidden by fresh leaves; there rose the purple bugle, the stately dead-nettle, with its broad leaves and white whorls, and grew the cheerful celandine, bright b.u.t.tercups, the sunny dandelion, the diminutive shepherd's purse, the starry blossoms of the chickweed, the dark bitter-sweet with its poisonous red berries, the frail and transparent flowers of the bindweed, sheltered in the p.r.i.c.kly hedge like shy or captive beauties, with every other common weed and plant which man despises, and G.o.d disdained not to fashion.

My communion with nature, though restricted, was very sweet. I was debarred from her wildness and grandeur, but I became all the more familiar with those aspects which she takes around human homes. And is there not a great charm in the very way in which man and nature meet? The narrow garden, its flowers and shrubs so tenderly protected and cared for, the ivy that clings around the porch, the gra.s.s that half disputes the little beaten path, have a half wild, half domestic grace, I have often felt as deeply, as the romantic beauty of ancient glens, where mountain torrents make a way through pathless solitudes. My world might seem narrow, but I never found it so whilst the deep skies, with all their changes, spread above to tell of infinity, and the sweet and mysterious song of free birds, under distant cover, allured thought away to many a green and shady bower.

Not less pleasant to me were the autumn evenings. They still stand forth on the background of memory, as vivid and minutely distinct as the home scenes, by light of lamp or fire-flame, which the old masters like to paint. Cornelius loved music and poetry, those two glorious gifts of G.o.d to man. He played and sang with taste, and read well. When the piano was closed, he took down some favourite volume from the bookcase, and gave us a few scenes from Shakspeare, a grand pa.s.sage from Milton, a calm meditative page from Wordsworth. Sometimes he opened AEschylus, Sophocles, or Euripides, and, translating freely, transported us into a world gone by, but beautiful and human in its pa.s.sions and sorrows. Miss O'Reilly listened attentively; then, after hearing some fine fragment from the Bound Prometheus, some stirring description from the Seven against Thebes, she would look up from her work and say, with mingled wonder and admiration--

"That is grand, Cornelius!"

"Is it not?" he would reply, with kindling glance, for they both had the same strong admiration for the heroic and great.

I should have been very happy, but for one drawback. It was natural, perhaps, that having been reared by my father, and never having known my mother, I should attach myself to Cornelius in preference to his sister.

But in vain I strove to win his attention and favour; in vain I ran, not merely on his bidding, but on a word and on a look; gave him his hat and gloves in the morning; watched for him every fine evening at the garden gate; followed him about the house like his shadow, sat when he sat, happy if I could but catch his eye; in vain I showed him how devotedly fond I was of him; he treated me with the most tantalizing mixture of kindness, carelessness, and indifference. Half the time, he did not seem to see me about the house; when he became conscious that I existed, he gave me a careless nod and smile. If I did anything for him he thanked me, and stroked my hair; yet if I looked unwell, he was quick to notice it. He occasionally made me small presents of books and toys, and every evening he devoted several hours to the task of teaching me. I worked hard to give him satisfaction, but he only took this as a matter of course; called me a good child, and, as I was quiet and silent, generally allowed me to sit somewhere near him for the rest of the evening, and this was all: he seldom caressed, he never kissed me.

With his sister Cornelius was very different, and I felt the contrast keenly. He loved her tenderly; he was proud of her beauty; he liked to call her his handsome Kate, to talk and jest with her, and often, too, to sit by her and caress her with a fondness more filial than brotherly; whilst I looked on, not merely unheeded, but wholly forgotten.

Of course I was still less thought of, when, as happened occasionally, evening visitors dropped in. I remember a dark-eyed Miss Hart, who kept up a gay quarrel with Cornelius, and of whom I was miserably jealous, until, to my great satisfaction, she got married and went into the country; also a bald and learned Mr. Mountford, whom I disliked heartily for keeping Cornelius to himself, but who, in a lucky hour, having made an offer to Kate and being rejected, came no more; likewise Mr. Leopold Trim, whom I detested on the score of his own merits.

As I entered the front parlour on a mild autumn afternoon which I had spent in the garden, I found Miss O'Reilly entertaining him and another gentleman. Mr. Trim sat by the fire in his usual att.i.tude: that is to say, with his hands benevolently resting on his knees, his little eyes peering about the room, and his capacious mouth good-naturedly open.

"Eh! little Daisy!" he said, in his warm husky voice, "and how are you, little Daisy, eh?"

He stretched out an arm--long, for so short a man--and attempted to seize on me for the kind purpose of bestowing a kiss; but I eluded his grasp, and took refuge behind Miss O'Reilly's chair, whence I looked at him rather ungraciously. Mr. Trim took this as an excellent joke, threw himself back in his chair, shut his little eyes, opened his mouth wider, and gave utterance to a boisterous "Ha! ha!" that ended all at once in a strange sort of squeak. Miss O'Reilly frowned; she never heard that laugh with patience.

"Daisy," she said, "go and shake hands with Mr. Smalley, an old friend of Cornelius."