Six to Sixteen Part 8

I think this little incident just sealed our friendship. I always remained in high favour with my great-grandfather.

He spent a great deal of his time in painting. He never had, I believe, had any profession. The very small income on which he and his wife had lived was their own private fortune. I often think it must have been a great trial to a woman of my great-grandmother's energy, that her husband should have made no effort to add to their resources by work of some kind. But then I cannot think of any profession that would have suited him. He was sadly wanting in general capacity, though accomplished much above the average, and with a fine knack in the budding of roses.

I thought him the grandest gentleman that ever lived, and the pleasantest of companions. His weak but lovable nature had strong sympathy with children, I think. I ought to say, with a child; for he would share the fancies and humours of one child companion for hours, but was quite incapable of managing a larger number--as, indeed, he was of any kind of domestic administration or control. Mrs. Vandaleur was emphatically Elspeth's mistress, if she was also her friend; but in the absence of "the mistress" Elspeth ruled "the master" with a rod of iron.

I quickly gained a degree of power over him myself. I discovered that if I maintained certain outward forms of respect and courtesy, so as not to shock my grandpapa's standard of good manners, I might make almost any demands on his patience and good-nature. Children and pet animals make such discoveries very quickly, and are apt to use their power somewhat tyrannically. I fear I was no exception to the rule.

CHAPTER X.

THOMAS THE CAT--MY GREAT-GRANDFATHER'S SKETCHES--ADOLPHE IS MY FRIEND--MY GREAT-GREAT-GREAT-GRANDFATHER DISTURBS MY REST--I LEAVE THE VINE.

My great-grandfather had, as I said, some skill in painting. He was gifted with an intense sense of, and love for, colour. I am sure he saw colours where other people did not. What to common eyes was a ma.s.s of grey, or green, was to him a pleasant combination of many gay and delicate hues. He distinguished severally the innumerable bright threads in Nature's coat of many colours, and in simple truth I think that each was a separate joy to him.

He had a white Persian cat of an artistic temperament, which followed him in his walks, dozed on the back of his arm-chair, and condescended to share his tea when it reached a certain moderate temperature. It never was betrayed into excitement, except when there was fish for dinner. My great-grandfather's fasts were feasts for Thomas the cat.

I can very clearly remember the sight of my great-grandfather pacing slowly up and down the tiny garden at The Vine, his hands behind him, and followed sedately by Thomas. Now and then he would stop to gaze, with infinite contentment in his eyes, at the delicate blue-grey mist behind the leafless trees (which in that spring sunshine were, no doubt, of much more complex and beautiful colour to him than mere brown), or drinking in the blue of the scillas in the border with a sigh of satisfaction. When he paused, Thomas would pause; as he feasted his eyes, Thomas would rub his head against his master's legs, and stretch his own. When Elspeth had cooked the fish, and my great-grandmother had made the tea and arranged the flowers on the table, they would come in together and condescend to their breakfasts, with the same air about them both of having no responsibility in life but to find out sunny spots and to enjoy themselves.

My great-grandfather's most charming paintings were sketches of flowers.

Ordinary stiff flower-paintings are of all paintings the most uninteresting, I think; but his were of a very different kind. Each sketch was a sort of idyll. Indeed, he would tell me stories of each as he showed them.

Long as my great-grandfather had lived, he was never a robust man, and Elspeth's chief ideas on the subject of his sketches bore reference to the colds he had caught, and the illnesses he had induced, by sitting in the east winds or lying on damp gra.s.s to do this or that sketch.

"That'll be the one the master did before he was laid by with the rheumatics," Elspeth said, when I described one of my favourites to her.

It was a spring sketch. My great-grandfather had lain face downwards on the lawn to do it. This was to bring his eyes on a level with the subject of his painting, which was this: a crocus of the exquisite shades of lilac to be seen in some varieties, just full-blown, standing up in its first beauty and freshness from its fringe of narrow silver-striped leaves. The portrait was not an opaque and polished-looking painting on smooth cardboard, but a sketch--indefinite at the outer edges of the whole subject--on water-colour paper of moderate roughness. The throat and part of the cup of the flower stood out from some shadow at the roots of a plant beyond; a shadow of infinite gradation, and quite without the blackness common to patches of shade as seen by untrained eyes. From the level of my great-grandfather's view, as he lay in the gra.s.s, the border looked a mere strip; close behind it was a hedge dividing the garden from a field. Just by the crocus there was a gap in the hedge, which in the sketch was indicated rather than drawn. And round the corner of the bare thorn branches from the hedge-bank in the field there peeped a celandine and a daisy. They were not nearly such finished portraits as that of the crocus. A few telling strokes of colour made them, and gave them a life and pertness that were clever enough. Beneath the sketch was written, "La Demoiselle. Des enfants du village la regardent."

My great-grandfather translated this for me, and used to show me how the "little peasants," Marguerite and Celandine, were peeping in at the pretty young lady in her mauve dress striped with violet.

But every sketch had its story, and often its moral; not, as a rule, a very original one. In one, a lovely study of ivy crept over a rotten branch upon the ground. A crimson toadstool relieved the heavy green, and suggested that the year was drawing to a close. Beneath it was written, "Charity." "Thus," said my great-grandfather, "one covers up and hides the defects of one he loves."

A study of gaudy summer tulips stood--as may be guessed--for Pride.

"Pride," said my great-grandfather, "is a sin; a mortal sin, dear child.

Moreover, it is foolish, and also vulgar--the pride of fine clothes, money, equipages, and the like. What is called pride of birth--the dignity of an ancient name--this, indeed, is another thing. It is not petty, not personal; it seems to me more like patriotism--the pride of country."

I did my best to describe to Elspeth both the sketch and my great-grandfather's commentary.

"A' pride's sinful," said Elspeth decidedly. "Pride o' wealth, and pride o' birth. Not that I'm for objecting to a decent satisfaction in a body's ain gude conduct and respectability. Pride o' character, that's anither thing a'thegither, and to be respect.i.t."

My great-grandfather gave me a few paints, and under his directions I daubed away, much to my own content. When I was struggling hopelessly with the perspective of some pansies of various colours (for in imitation of him I painted flowers), he would say, "Never mind the shape, dear Marguerite, get the colour--the colour, my child!" And he trained me to a quickness in the perception of colour certainly not common at my age.

I spent many pleasant hours, too, in the less intellectual society of Adolphe. He dug a bed for me in a bit of spare ground, and shaped it like a heart. He laboured constantly at this heart, making it plump by piling up the earth, and cramming it with plants of various kinds--perennials much in want of subdivision, and often in full bloom--which he brought from cottage gardens of "folk he knew," and watered copiously to "sattle 'em."

His real name was not Adolphe, but Thomas. As this, however, had created some confusion between him and the cat, my great-grandmother had named him afresh, after a retainer of the de Vandaleurs in days gone by, whose faithful service was a tradition in the family.

I was very happy at The Vine--by day. I feel ashamed now to recall how miserable I was at night, and yet I know I could not help it. In old times I had always been accustomed to be watched to sleep by Ayah. After I came to Aunt Theresa, I slept in the same room with one or more of the other children. At The Vine, for the first time, I slept alone.

This was not all. It was not merely the being alone in the dark which frightened me. Indeed, a curious little wick floating on a cup of oil was lighted at night for my benefit, but it only illumined the great source of the terror which made night hideous to me.

Some French refugee artist, who had been indebted to my great-grandparents for kindness, had shown his grat.i.tude by painting a picture of the execution of that Duc de Vandaleur who perished in the Revolution, my great-grandfather having been the model. It was a wretched daub, but the subject was none the less horrible for that, and the caricatured likeness to my great-grandfather did not make it seem less real or more pleasant.

That execution which was never over, this ghastly head which never found rest in the grave, that awful-looking man who was, and yet was not, Grandpapa--haunted me. They were the cause of certain horrible dreams, which I can remember quite as clearly at this day as if I dreamed them last night, and which I know I shall never forget. The dreams again a.s.sociated themselves with the picture, and my fears grew instead of lessening as the time went by.

Very late one night Elspeth came in and found me awake, and probably looking far from happy. I had nothing to say for myself, but I burst into tears. Elspeth was tenderness itself, but she got hold of a wrong idea. I was "just homesick," she thought, and needed to be "away home again," with "bairns like myself."

I do not know why I never explained the real reason of my distress--children are apt to be reticent on such occasions. I think a panic seized upon the members of the household, that they were too old to make a child happy. I was constantly a.s.sured that "it was very natural," and I "had been very good." But I was sent back to Riflebury.

No one knew how loth I was to leave, still less that it was to a much older relative than those at The Vine that I owed my expulsion--to my great-great-great-grandfather--Monsieur le Duc de Vandaleur.

Thomas, the cat, purred so loudly as I withdrew, that I think he was glad to be rid of me.

Adolphe alone was against the verdict of the household, and I think believed that I would have preferred to remain.

"I'm sure I thought you was quite sattled, miss," he said, as he saw me off; and he blubbered like a baby. His transplanted perennials were "sattled" by copious floods of water. Perhaps he hoped that tears would settle me!

CHAPTER XI.

MATILDA'S NEWS--OUR GOVERNESS--MAJOR BULLER TURNED TUTOR--ELEANOR ARKWRIGHT.

The grief I felt at leaving The Vine was greatly forgotten in the warm welcome which awaited me on my return to Riflebury.

In a household where gossip is a princ.i.p.al amus.e.m.e.nt, the return of any member from a visit is a matter for general congratulation till the new budget is exhausted. Indeed, I plead guilty to a liking to be the first to skim the news when Eleanor or one of the boys comes back from a visit, at the present time.

Matilda withdrew me from Aunt Theresa as soon as she could.

"I am so glad to get you back, Margery dear," said she. "And now you must tell me all your news, and I'll tell you all mine. And to begin with--what do you think?--we've got a governess, and you and I are to have the little room at the head of the stairs all to ourselves."

Matilda's news was lengthy enough and interesting enough to make us late for tea, and mine kept us awake for a couple of hours after we were fairly in our two little iron bedsteads in the room that was now our very own. That is to say, I told what I had to tell after we came to bed, but my news was so tame compared with Matilda's that we soon returned to the discussion of hers. I tried to describe my great-grandfather's sketches, but neither Aunt Theresa in the drawing-room, nor Matilda when we retired for the night, seemed to feel any interest in the subject; and when Mrs. Buller asked what sort of people called at The Vine, I felt that my reply was, like the rest of my news, but dull.

Matilda's, on the contrary, was very entertaining. She spoke enthusiastically of Miss Perry, the governess.

"She is so good-natured, Margery, you can't think. When lessons are over she takes me walks on the Esplanade, and she calls me her dear Matilda, and I take her arm, and she tells me all about herself. She says she knows she's very romantic. And she's got lots of secrets, and she's told me several already; for she says she has a feeling that I can keep a secret, and so I can. But telling you's not telling, you know, because she's sure to tell you herself; only you'd better wait till she does before you say anything, for fear she should be vexed."

Of course I promised to do so, and craned my neck out of bed to catch Matilda's interesting but whispered revelations.

Matilda herself was only partially in Miss Perry's confidence, and I looked anxiously forward to the time when she would admit me also to her secrets, though I feared she might consider me too young. My fears were groundless, as I found Miss Perry was fond of talking about herself, and a suitable audience was quite a secondary consideration with her.

She was a _protegee_ of Mrs. Minchin's, who had persuaded Aunt Theresa to take her for our governess. She was quite unfit for the position, and did no little harm to us in her brief reign. But I do not think that our interests had entered in the least into Mrs. Minchin's calculations in the matter. She had "taken Miss Perry up," and to get Miss Perry a comfortable home was her sole object.

To do our new governess justice, she did her best to impart her own superficial acquirements to us. We plodded regularly through French exercises, which she corrected by a key, and she kept us at work for a given number of hours during the day; tatting by our sides as we practised our scales, or roasting her petticoats over the fire, whilst Matilda and I read Mrs. Markham's _England_ or Mrs. Trimmer's _Bible Lessons_ aloud by turns to full-stops. But when lessons were over Miss Perry was quite as glad as we were, and the subjects of our studies had as little to do with our holiday hours as a Sunday sermon with the rest of the week.

She was a great novel-reader, and I think a good many of the things she told us of, as having happened to herself, had their real origin in the Riflebury circulating library. For she was one of those strange characters who indulge in egotism and exaggeration, till they seem positively to lose the sense of what is fact and what is fiction.