The Hand of Ethelberta Part 16

'We be thinking of coming to London ourselves soon,' said Sol, a carpenter and joiner by trade, as he walked along at Christopher's left hand. 'There's so much more chance for a man up the country. Now, if you was me, how should you set about getting a job, sir?'

'What can you do?' said Christopher.

'Well, I am a very good staircase hand; and I have been called neat at sash-frames; and I can knock together doors and shutters very well; and I can do a little at the cabinet-making. I don't mind framing a roof, neither, if the rest be busy; and I am always ready to fill up my time at planing floor-boards by the foot.'

'And I can mix and lay flat tints,' said Dan, who was a house painter, 'and pick out mouldings, and grain in every kind of wood you can mention--oak, maple, walnut, satinwood, cherry-tree--'

'You can both do too much to stand the least chance of being allowed to do anything in a city, where limitation is all the rule in labour. To have any success, Sol, you must be a man who can thoroughly look at a door to see what ought to be done to it, but as to looking at a window, that's not your line; or a person who, to the remotest particular, understands turning a screw, but who does not profess any knowledge of how to drive a nail. Dan must know how to paint blue to a marvel, but must be quite in the dark about painting green. If you stick to some such principle of specialty as this, you may get employment in London.'

'Ha-ha-ha!' said Dan, striking at a stone in the road with the stout green hazel he carried. 'A wink is as good as a nod: thank'ee--we'll mind all that now.'

'If we do come,' said Sol, 'we shall not mix up with Mrs. Petherwin at all.'

'O indeed!'

'O no. (Perhaps you think it odd that we call her "Mrs. Petherwin," but that's by agreement as safer and better than Berta, because we be such rough chaps you see, and she's so lofty.) 'Twould demean her to claim kin wi' her in London--two journeymen like we, that know nothing besides our trades.'

'Not at all,' said Christopher, by way of chiming in in the friendliest manner. 'She would be pleased to see any straightforward honest man and brother, I should think, notwithstanding that she has moved in other society for a time.'

'Ah, you don't know Berta!' said Dan, looking as if he did.

'How--in what way do you mean?' said Christopher uneasily.

'So lofty--so very lofty! Isn't she, Sol? Why she'll never stir out from mother's till after dark, and then her day begins; and she'll traipse about under the trees, and never go into the high-road, so that n.o.body in the way of gentle-people shall run up against her and know her living in such a little small hut after biding in a big mansion-place.

There, we don't find fault wi' her about it: we like her just the same, though she don't speak to us in the street; for a feller must be a fool to make a piece of work about a woman's pride, when 'tis his own sister, and hang upon her and bother her when he knows 'tis for her good that he should not. Yes, her life has been quare enough. I hope she enjoys it, but for my part I like plain sailing. None of your ups and downs for me.

There, I suppose 'twas her nater to want to look into the world a bit.'

'Father and mother kept Berta to school, you understand, sir,' explained the more thoughtful Sol, 'because she was such a quick child, and they always had a notion of making a governess of her. Sums? If you said to that child, "Berta, 'levenpence-three-farthings a day, how much a year?"

she would tell 'ee in three seconds out of her own little head. And that hard sum about the herrings she had done afore she was nine.'

'True, she had,' said Dan. 'And we all know that to do that is to do something that's no nonsense.'

'What is the sum?' Christopher inquired.

'What--not know the sum about the herrings?' said Dan, spreading his gaze all over Christopher in amazement.

'Never heard of it,' said Christopher.

'Why down in these parts just as you try a man's soul by the Ten Commandments, you try his head by that there sum--hey, Sol?'

'Ay, that we do.'

'A herring and a half for three-halfpence, how many can ye get for 'levenpence: that's the feller; and a mortal teaser he is, I a.s.sure 'ee.

Our parson, who's not altogether without sense o' week days, said one afternoon, "If cunning can be found in the multiplication table at all, Chickerel, 'tis in connection with that sum." Well, Berta was so clever in arithmetic that she was asked to teach summing at Miss Courtley's, and there she got to like foreign tongues more than ciphering, and at last she hated ciphering, and took to books entirely. Mother and we were very proud of her at that time: not that we be stuck-up people at all--be we, Sol?'

'Not at all; n.o.body can say that we be that, though there's more of it in the country than there should be by all account.'

'You'd be surprised to see how vain the girls about here be getting.

Little rascals, why they won't curtsey to the loftiest lady in the land; no, not if you were to pay 'em to do it. Now, the men be different. Any man will touch his hat for a pint of beer. But then, of course, there's some difference between the two. Touching your hat is a good deal less to do than bending your knees, as Berta used to say, when she was blowed up for not doing it. She was always one of the independent sort--you never seed such a maid as she was! Now, Picotee was quite the other way.'

'Has Picotee left Sandbourne entirely?'

'O no; she is home for the holidays. Well, Mr. Julian, our road parts from yours just here, unless you walk into the next town along with us.

But I suppose you get across to this station and go by rail?'

'I am obliged to go that way for my portmanteau,' said Christopher, 'or I should have been pleased to walk further. Shall I see you in Sandbourne to-morrow? I hope so.'

'Well, no. 'Tis hardly likely that you will see us--hardly. We know how unpleasant it is for a high sort of man to have rough chaps like us hailing him, so we think it best not to meet you--thank you all the same.

So if you should run up against us in the street, we should be just as well pleased by your taking no notice, if you wouldn't mind. 'Twill save so much awkwardness--being in our working clothes. 'Tis always the plan that Mrs. Petherwin and we agree to act upon, and we find it best for both. I hope you take our meaning right, and as no offence, Mr. Julian.'

'And do you do the same with Picotee?'

'O Lord, no--'tisn't a bit of use to try. That's the worst of Picotee--there's no getting rid of her. The more in the rough we be the more she'll stick to us; and if we say she shan't come, she'll bide and fret about it till we be forced to let her.'

Christopher laughed, and promised, on condition that they would retract the statement about their not being proud; and then he wished his friends good-night.

15. AN INNER ROOM AT THE LODGE

At the Lodge at this time a discussion of some importance was in progress. The scene was Mrs. Chickerel's bedroom, to which, unfortunately, she was confined by some spinal complaint; and here she now appeared as an interesting woman of five-and-forty, properly dressed as far as visible, and propped up in a bed covered with a quilt which presented a field of little squares in many tints, looking altogether like a bird's-eye view of a market garden.

Mrs. Chickerel had been nurse in a n.o.bleman's family until her marriage, and after that she played the part of wife and mother, upon the whole, affectionately and well. Among her minor differences with her husband had been one about the naming of the children; a matter that was at last compromised by an agreement under which the choice of the girls' names became her prerogative, and that of the boys' her husband's, who limited his field of selection to strict historical precedent as a set-off to Mrs. Chickerel's tendency to stray into the regions of romance.

The only grown-up daughters at home, Ethelberta and Picotee, with their brother Joey, were sitting near her; the two youngest children, Georgina and Myrtle, who had been strutting in and out of the room, and otherwise endeavouring to walk, talk, and speak like the gentleman just gone away, were packed off to bed. Emmeline, of that transitional age which causes its exponent to look wistfully at the sitters when romping and at the rompers when sitting, uncertain whether her position in the household is that of child or woman, was idling in a corner. The two absent brothers and two absent sisters--eldest members of the family--completed the round ten whom Mrs. Chickerel with thoughtless readiness had presented to a crowded world, to cost Ethelberta many wakeful hours at night while she revolved schemes how they might be decently maintained.

'I still think,' Ethelberta was saying, 'that the plan I first proposed is the best. I am convinced that it will not do to attempt to keep on the Lodge. If we are all together in town, I can look after you much better than when you are far away from me down here.'

'Shall we not interfere with you--your plans for keeping up your connections?' inquired her mother, glancing up towards Ethelberta by lifting the flesh of her forehead, instead of troubling to raise her face altogether.

'Not nearly so much as by staying here.'

'But,' said Picotee, 'if you let lodgings, won't the gentlemen and ladies know it?'

'I have thought of that,' said Ethelberta, 'and this is how I shall manage. In the first place, if mother is there, the lodgings can be let in her name, all bills will be receipted by her, and all tradesmen's orders will be given as from herself. Then, we will take no English lodgers at all; we will advertise the rooms only in Continental newspapers, as suitable for a French or German gentleman or two, and by this means there will be little danger of my acquaintance discovering that my house is not entirely a private one, or of any lodger being a friend of my acquaintance. I have thought over every possible way of combining the dignified social position I must maintain to make my story- telling attractive, with my absolute lack of money, and I can see no better one.'

'Then if Gwendoline is to be your cook, she must soon give notice at her present place?'

'Yes. Everything depends upon Gwendoline and Cornelia. But there is time enough for them to give notice--Christmas will be soon enough. If they cannot or will not come as cook and housemaid, I am afraid the plan will break down. A vital condition is that I do not have a soul in the house (beyond the lodgers) who is not one of my own relations. When we have put Joey into b.u.t.tons, he will do very well to attend to the door.'

'But s'pose,' said Joey, after a gla.s.sy look at his future appearance in the position alluded to, 'that any of your gentle-people come to see ye, and when I opens the door and lets 'em in a swinging big lodger stalks downstairs. What will 'em think? Up will go their eye-gla.s.ses at one another till they glares each other into holes. My gracious!'

'The one who calls will only think that another visitor is leaving, Joey.

But I shall have no visitors, or very few. I shall let it be well known among my late friends that my mother is an invalid, and that on this account we receive none but the most intimate friends. These intimate friends not existing, we receive n.o.body at all.'

'Except Sol and Dan, if they get a job in London? They'll have to call upon us at the back door, won't they, Berta?' said Joey.