Old Kensington Part 7

A door opened into an inner room, through which George, by leaning forward from his arm-chair behind the door, can see Mrs. Morgan's cap-ribbons all on end against the cross-light in the sitting-room windows. Ca.s.sie is kneeling on the floor, surrounded by piles of garments; while her brother, standing in the middle of the room, is rapidly checking off a list of various ailments and misfortunes that are to be balanced in the scales of fate by proportionate rolls of flannel and calico. Good little Ca.s.sie Morgan feels never a moment's doubt as she piles her heaps--so much sorrow, so many petticoats: so much hopeless improvidence, so many pounds of tea and a coal-ticket. In cases of confirmed wickedness, she adds an illuminated text sometimes, and a hymn-book. Do they ever come up, these hymn-books and bread-tickets cast upon the waters? Is it so much waste of time and seed? After all, people can but work in their own way, and feel kindly towards their fellow-creatures. One seed is wasted, another grows up; as the buried flora of a country starts into life when the fields are ploughed in after years.

'Go on, Ca.s.sie,' says Mrs. Morgan: 'Bonker--Wickens--Costello.'

'Costello is again in trouble,' says John. 'It is too bad of him, with that poor wife of his and all those children. I have to go round to the Court about him now. Tell George I shall be back in ten minutes.'

'I have kept some clothes for them,' said Ca.s.sie. 'They are such nice little children,' and she looks up flushed and all over ravellings at the relenting curate, who puts Mrs. Costello down in his relief-book.

All over John Morgan's study, chairs and tables, such books are lying, with pamphlets, blue books, black books, rolls and registers, in confusion, and smelling of tobacco.

In this age of good reports and evil reports people seem like the two boys in d.i.c.kens's story, who felt when they had docketed their bills that they were as good as paid. So we cla.s.sify our wrongs and tie up our miseries with red tape; we pity people by decimals, and put our statistics away with satisfied consciences. John Morgan wrote articles from a cold and lofty point of view, but he left his reports about all over the room, and would rush off to the help of any human being, deserving or undeserving. He had a theory that heaven had created individuals as well as cla.s.ses; and at this very moment, with another bang of the door, he was on his way to the police-court, to say a good word for the intemperate Costello, who was ruefully awaiting his trial in the dark cell below.

George, although comfortably established in the Morgan study, was also tired of waiting, and found the house unusually dull. For some time past he had been listening to a measured creaking noise in the garden; then came a peal of bells from the steeple; and he went to the window and looked out. The garden was full of weeds and flowers, with daisies on the lawn, and dandelions and milkwort among the beds. It was not trimly kept, like the garden at home; but George, who was the chief gardener, thought it a far pleasanter place, with its breath of fresh breeze, and its bit of blue over-roof. For flowers, there were blush-roses, nailed against the wall, that Rhoda used to wear in her dark hair sometimes, when there were no earwigs in them; and blue flags, growing in the beds among spiked leaves, and London pride, and Cape jessamine, very sweet upon the air, and also ivy, creeping in a tangle of leaves and tendrils.

The garden had been planted by the different inhabitants of the old brown house--each left a token. There was a medlar-tree, with one rotten medlar upon a branch, beneath which John Morgan would sit and smoke his pipe in the sun, while his pupils construed Greek upon the little lawn.

Only Carlo was there now, stretching himself comfortably in the dry gra.s.s (Carlo was one of Bunch's puppies, grown up to be of a gigantic size and an unknown species). Tom Morgan's tortoise was also basking upon the wall. The creaking noise went on after the chimes had ceased, and George jumped out of window on to the water-b.u.t.t to see what was the matter. He had forgotten the swing. It hung from a branch of the medlar-tree to the trellis, and a slim figure, in a limp cotton dress, stood clinging to the rope--a girl with a black cloud of hair falling about her shoulders. George stared in amazement. Rhoda had stuck some vine-leaves in her hair, and had made a long wreath, that was hanging from the swing, and that floated as she floated. She was looking up with great wistful eyes, and for a minute she did not see him. As the swing rose and fell, her childish wild head went up above the wall and the branches against the blue, and down 'upon a background of pure gold,'

where the Virginian creeper had turned in the sun. George thought it was a sort of tune she was swinging, with all those colours round about her in the sultry summer day. As he leaped down, a feeling came over him as if it had all happened before, as if he had seen it and heard the creaking of the ropes in a dream. Rhoda blushed and slackened her flight. He seemed still to remember it all while the swing stopped by degrees; and a voice within the house began calling, 'Rhoda! Rhoda!'

'Oh! I must go,' said Rhoda, sighing. 'I am wasting my time. Please don't tell Aunt Morgan I was swinging.'

'Tell her!' said George. 'What a silly child you are. Why shouldn't you swing?'

'Oh! she would be angry,' said Rhoda, looking down. 'I _am_ very silly.

I can't bear being scolded.'

'Can't you?' says George, with his hands in his pockets. 'I'm used to it, and don't mind a bit.'

'I shouldn't mind it if ... if I were you, and any one cared for me,'

said Rhoda, with tearful eyes. She spoke in a low depressed voice.

'Nonsense,' said George; 'everybody cares for everybody. Dolly loves you, so--so do we all.'

'Do you?' said Rhoda, looking at him in a strange wistful way, and brightening suddenly, and putting back all her cloudy hair with her hands. Then she blushed up, and ran into the house.

When George told Dolly about it, Dolly was very sympathising, except that she said Rhoda ought to have answered when her aunt called her.

'She is too much afraid of being scolded,' said Dolly.

'Poor little thing!' said George. 'Listen to this,' and he sat down to the piano. He made a little tune he called 'The Swing,' with a minor accompaniment recurring again and again, and a pretty modulation.

'It is exactly like a swing,' said Dolly. 'George, you must have a cathedral some day, and make them sing all the services through.'

'I shall not be a clergyman,' said George, gravely. 'It is all very well for Morgan, who is desperately in love. He has often told me that it would be his ruin if he were separated from Mrs. Carbury.'

George, during his stay in Old Street (he had boarded there for some weeks during Lady Sarah's absence), had been installed general confidante and sympathiser, and was most deeply interested in the young couple's prospects.

'I believe Aunt Sarah has got a living when old Mr. Livermore dies,' he went on, shutting up the piano and coming to the table where Dolly was drawing. 'We must get her to present it to John Morgan.'

'But she always says it is for you, George, now that the money is lost,'

said Dolly. 'I am afraid it will not be any use asking her. George, how much is prudent?'

'How much is how much?' says George, looking with his odd blue eyes.

'I meant prudent to marry on?' says Dolly.

'Oh, I don't know,' says George, indifferently. 'I shall marry on anything I may happen to have.'

'What are you children talking about?' said Lady Sarah, looking up from her corner by the farthest chimney-piece. She liked one particular place by the fire, from which she could look down the room at the two heads that were bending together over the round table, and out into the garden, where a west wind was blowing, and tossing clouds and ivy sprays.

'We are talking about prudence in marriage,' says George.

'How can you be so silly!' says Lady Sarah, sharply, at which George starts up offended and marches through the window into the garden.

'What is it?' said the widow. 'Yes, Dolly, go to him,' she said, in answer to Dolly's pleading eyes. 'Foolish boy!'

The girl was already gone. Her aunt watched the white figure, flying with wind-blown locks and floating skirts along the ivy wall. Dolly caught her brother up by the speckled holly-tree, and the two went on together, proceeding in step to a triumphant music of sparrows overhead, a wavering of ivy along their path; soft winds blew everywhere, scattering light leaves; the summer's light was in the day, and shining from the depth of Dolly's grey eyes. The two went and sat down on the bench by the pond, the old stone-edged pond, that reflected sc.r.a.ps of the blue green overhead; a couple of gold-fishes alternately darted from side to side. George forgot that he was not understood as he sat there throwing pebbles into the water. Presently the wind brought some sudden voices close at hand, and, looking up, they saw two people advancing from the house, Robert Henley walking by Lady Sarah and carrying her old umbrella.

'Oh, he is always coming,' said George, kicking his heels, and not seeming surprised. 'He is staying with his grandmother at the Palace, but they don't give him enough to eat, and so he drops into the Morgans', and now he comes here.'

'Hush!' said Dolly, looking round.

Robert Henley was a tall, handsome young fellow, about twenty, with a straight nose and a somewhat pompous manner. He was very easy and good-natured when it was not too much trouble; he would patronise people both younger and older than himself with equally good intentions.

George's early admiration for his cousin I fear is now tinged with a certain jealousy of which Robert is utterly unconscious; he takes the admiration for granted. He comes up and gives Dolly an affable kiss.

'Well, Dolly, have you learnt to talk French? I want to hear all about Paris.'

'What shall I tell you?' says simple Dolly, greatly excited. 'We had such a pretty drawing-room, Robert, with harps on all the doors, and yellow sofas, and such a lovely, lovely view.' And Lady Sarah smiled at Dolly's enthusiasm, and asked Robert if he could stay to dinner.

'I shall be delighted,' says Robert, just like a man of the world. 'My grandmother has turned me out for the day.'

CHAPTER X.

A SNOW GARDEN.

For every shrub, and every blade of gra.s.s, And every pointed thorn seemed wrought in gla.s.s; In pearls and rubies rich the hawthorns show, While through the ice the crimson berries glow ...

The spreading oak, the beech, and towering pine, Glazed over, in the freezing aether shine; The frighted birds the rattling branches shun, That wave and glitter in the distant sun.

--Phillips.

Is it that evening or another that they were all a.s.sembled in the little bow-windowed drawing-room in Old Street listening to one of Rhoda's interminable 'pieces' that she learnt at her French school? And then came a quartette, but she broke down in the accompaniment, and George turned her off the music-stool.

The doors were open into John's inner room, from which came a last western gleam of light through the narrow windows, and beyond the medlar-tree. It would have been dark in the front room but for those western windows. In one of them sat Lady Sarah leaning back in John's old leathern chair, sitting and listening with her hands lying loosely crossed in her lap; as she listened to the youthful din of music and voices and the strumming piano and the laughter. She had come by Dolly's special request. Her presence was considered an honour by Mrs. Morgan, but an effort at the same time. In her endeavours to entertain her guest, Mrs. Morgan, bolt upright in another corner, had fallen asleep, and was nodding her head in this silent inner room. There was noise and to spare in the front room, people in the street outside stopped to listen to the music.

When George began to play it seemed another music altogether coming out of the old cracked yellow piano, smash, bang, crack, he flew at it, thumping the keys, missing half the notes, sometimes jumbling the accompaniment, but seizing the tune and spirit of the music with a genuine feeling that was irresistible.

'Now all together,' cries George, getting excited.

It was an arrangement of one of Mendelssohn's four-part songs. 'As pants the hart,' sang Rhoda, shrill and sweet, leading the way. 'As pants the hart,' sang George, with a sort of swing. 'As pants the hart,' sang Dolly, carefully and restrainedly. She sang with great precision for a child of her age, quietly, steadily; but even her brother's enthusiasm did not inspire her. George flung his whole impulse into his music, and banged a chord at her in indignation at her tameness. John Morgan piped away with a face of the greatest seriousness, following his pupil's lead; he had much respect for George's musical capabilities. Ca.s.sie and Zoe sang one part together, and now and then Robert Henley came out with a deep trumpet-like note, placing it when he saw an opportunity. Dolly laughed the first time, but Rhoda's dark eyes were raised admiringly. So they all stood in the twilight, nodding their heads and clearing their voices, happy and harmlessly absorbed. They might have stood for a choir of angels; any one of the old Italian masters might have painted them as they sang, with the addition of lilies and wings, and gold glories, and the little cherubim who seemed to have flitted quite innocently out of ancient mythologies into the Legende Doree of our own days; indifferently holding the music for a St. Cecilia, or the looking-gla.s.s for the Mother of Love.