The Way of All Flesh Part 12

I, as she very well knew, had always been devoted to her, and she might have had a score of other admirers if she had liked, but she had discouraged them all, and railed at matrimony as women seldom do unless they have a comfortable income of their own. She by no means, however, railed at man as she railed at matrimony, and though living after a fashion in which even the most censorious could find nothing to complain of, as far as she properly could she defended those of her own s.e.x whom the world condemned most severely.

In religion she was, I should think, as nearly a freethinker as anyone could be whose mind seldom turned upon the subject. She went to church, but disliked equally those who aired either religion or irreligion. I remember once hearing her press a late well-known philosopher to write a novel instead of pursuing his attacks upon religion. The philosopher did not much like this, and dilated upon the importance of showing people the folly of much that they pretended to believe. She smiled and said demurely, "Have they not Moses and the prophets? Let them hear them."

But she would say a wicked thing quietly on her own account sometimes, and called my attention once to a note in her prayer-book which gave account of the walk to Emmaus with the two disciples, and how Christ had said to them "O fools and slow of heart to believe ALL that the prophets have spoken"--the "all" being printed in small capitals.

Though scarcely on terms with her brother John, she had kept up closer relations with Theobald and his family, and had paid a few days' visit to Battersby once in every two years or so. Alethea had always tried to like Theobald and join forces with him as much as she could (for they two were the hares of the family, the rest being all hounds), but it was no use. I believe her chief reason for maintaining relations with her brother was that she might keep an eye on his children and give them a lift if they proved nice.

When Miss Pontifex had come down to Battersby in old times the children had not been beaten, and their lessons had been made lighter. She easily saw that they were overworked and unhappy, but she could hardly guess how all-reaching was the regime under which they lived. She knew she could not interfere effectually then, and wisely forbore to make too many enquiries. Her time, if ever it was to come, would be when the children were no longer living under the same roof as their parents. It ended in her making up her mind to have nothing to do with either Joey or Charlotte, but to see so much of Ernest as should enable her to form an opinion about his disposition and abilities.

He had now been a year and a half at Roughborough and was nearly fourteen years old, so that his character had begun to shape. His aunt had not seen him for some little time and, thinking that if she was to exploit him she could do so now perhaps better than at any other time, she resolved to go down to Roughborough on some pretext which should be good enough for Theobald, and to take stock of her nephew under circ.u.mstances in which she could get him for some few hours to herself. Accordingly in August 1849, when Ernest was just entering on his fourth half year a cab drove up to Dr Skinner's door with Miss Pontifex, who asked and obtained leave for Ernest to come and dine with her at the Swan Hotel. She had written to Ernest to say she was coming and he was of course on the look- out for her. He had not seen her for so long that he was rather shy at first, but her good nature soon set him at his ease. She was so strongly bia.s.sed in favour of anything young that her heart warmed towards him at once, though his appearance was less prepossessing than she had hoped.

She took him to a cake shop and gave him whatever he liked as soon as she had got him off the school premises; and Ernest felt at once that she contrasted favourably even with his aunts the Misses Allaby, who were so very sweet and good. The Misses Allaby were very poor; sixpence was to them what five shillings was to Alethea. What chance had they against one who, if she had a mind, could put by out of her income twice as much as they, poor women, could spend?

The boy had plenty of prattle in him when he was not snubbed, and Alethea encouraged him to chatter about whatever came uppermost. He was always ready to trust anyone who was kind to him; it took many years to make him reasonably wary in this respect--if indeed, as I sometimes doubt, he ever will be as wary as he ought to be--and in a short time he had quite dissociated his aunt from his papa and mamma and the rest, with whom his instinct told him he should be on his guard. Little did he know how great, as far as he was concerned, were the issues that depended upon his behaviour. If he had known, he would perhaps have played his part less successfully.

His aunt drew from him more details of his home and school life than his papa and mamma would have approved of, but he had no idea that he was being pumped. She got out of him all about the happy Sunday evenings, and how he and Joey and Charlotte quarrelled sometimes, but she took no side and treated everything as though it were a matter of course. Like all the boys, he could mimic Dr Skinner, and when warmed with dinner, and two gla.s.ses of sherry which made him nearly tipsy, he favoured his aunt with samples of the Doctor's manner and spoke of him familiarly as "Sam."

"Sam," he said, "is an awful old humbug." It was the sherry that brought out this piece of swagger, for whatever else he was Dr Skinner was a reality to Master Ernest, before which, indeed, he sank into his boots in no time. Alethea smiled and said, "I must not say anything to that, must I?" Ernest said, "I suppose not," and was checked. By-and-by he vented a number of small second-hand priggishnesses which he had caught up believing them to be the correct thing, and made it plain that even at that early age Ernest believed in Ernest with a belief which was amusing from its absurdity. His aunt judged him charitably as she was sure to do; she knew very well where the priggishness came from, and seeing that the string of his tongue had been loosened sufficiently gave him no more sherry.

It was after dinner, however, that he completed the conquest of his aunt.

She then discovered that, like herself, he was pa.s.sionately fond of music, and that, too, of the highest cla.s.s. He knew, and hummed or whistled to her all sorts of pieces out of the works of the great masters, which a boy of his age could hardly be expected to know, and it was evident that this was purely instinctive, inasmuch as music received no kind of encouragement at Roughborough. There was no boy in the school as fond of music as he was. He picked up his knowledge, he said, from the organist of St Michael's Church who used to practise sometimes on a week-day afternoon. Ernest had heard the organ booming away as he was pa.s.sing outside the church and had sneaked inside and up into the organ loft. In the course of time the organist became accustomed to him as a familiar visitant, and the pair became friends.

It was this which decided Alethea that the boy was worth taking pains with. "He likes the best music," she thought, "and he hates Dr Skinner.

This is a very fair beginning." When she sent him away at night with a sovereign in his pocket (and he had only hoped to get five shillings) she felt as though she had had a good deal more than her money's worth for her money.

CHAPTER x.x.xIII

Next day Miss Pontifex returned to town, with her thoughts full of her nephew and how she could best be of use to him.

It appeared to her that to do him any real service she must devote herself almost entirely to him; she must in fact give up living in London, at any rate for a long time, and live at Roughborough where she could see him continually. This was a serious undertaking; she had lived in London for the last twelve years, and naturally disliked the prospect of a small country town such as Roughborough. Was it a prudent thing to attempt so much? Must not people take their chances in this world? Can anyone do much for anyone else unless by making a will in his favour and dying then and there? Should not each look after his own happiness, and will not the world be best carried on if everyone minds his own business and leaves other people to mind theirs? Life is not a donkey race in which everyone is to ride his neighbour's donkey and the last is to win, and the psalmist long since formulated a common experience when he declared that no man may deliver his brother nor make agreement unto G.o.d for him, for it cost more to redeem their souls, so that he must let that alone for ever.

All these excellent reasons for letting her nephew alone occurred to her, and many more, but against them there pleaded a woman's love for children, and her desire to find someone among the younger branches of her own family to whom she could become warmly attached, and whom she could attach warmly to herself.

Over and above this she wanted someone to leave her money to; she was not going to leave it to people about whom she knew very little, merely because they happened to be sons and daughters of brothers and sisters whom she had never liked. She knew the power and value of money exceedingly well, and how many lovable people suffer and die yearly for the want of it; she was little likely to leave it without being satisfied that her legatees were square, lovable, and more or less hard up. She wanted those to have it who would be most likely to use it genially and sensibly, and whom it would thus be likely to make most happy; if she could find one such among her nephews and nieces, so much the better; it was worth taking a great deal of pains to see whether she could or could not; but if she failed, she must find an heir who was not related to her by blood.

"Of course," she had said to me, more than once, "I shall make a mess of it. I shall choose some nice-looking, well-dressed screw, with gentlemanly manners which will take me in, and he will go and paint Academy pictures, or write for the _Times_, or do something just as horrid the moment the breath is out of my body."

As yet, however, she had made no will at all, and this was one of the few things that troubled her. I believe she would have left most of her money to me if I had not stopped her. My father left me abundantly well off, and my mode of life has been always simple, so that I have never known uneasiness about money; moreover I was especially anxious that there should be no occasion given for ill-natured talk; she knew well, therefore, that her leaving her money to me would be of all things the most likely to weaken the ties that existed between us, provided that I was aware of it, but I did not mind her talking about whom she should make her heir, so long as it was well understood that I was not to be the person.

Ernest had satisfied her as having enough in him to tempt her strongly to take him up, but it was not till after many days' reflection that she gravitated towards actually doing so, with all the break in her daily ways that this would entail. At least, she said it took her some days, and certainly it appeared to do so, but from the moment she had begun to broach the subject, I had guessed how things were going to end.

It was now arranged she should take a house at Roughborough, and go and live there for a couple of years. As a compromise, however, to meet some of my objections, it was also arranged that she should keep her rooms in Gower Street, and come to town for a week once in each month; of course, also, she would leave Roughborough for the greater part of the holidays.

After two years, the thing was to come to an end, unless it proved a great success. She should by that time, at any rate, have made up her mind what the boy's character was, and would then act as circ.u.mstances might determine.

The pretext she put forward ostensibly was that her doctor said she ought to be a year or two in the country after so many years of London life, and had recommended Roughborough on account of the purity of its air, and its easy access to and from London--for by this time the railway had reached it. She was anxious not to give her brother and sister any right to complain, if on seeing more of her nephew she found she could not get on with him, and she was also anxious not to raise false hopes of any kind in the boy's own mind.

Having settled how everything was to be, she wrote to Theobald and said she meant to take a house in Roughborough from the Michaelmas then approaching, and mentioned, as though casually, that one of the attractions of the place would be that her nephew was at school there and she should hope to see more of him than she had done hitherto.

Theobald and Christina knew how dearly Alethea loved London, and thought it very odd that she should want to go and live at Roughborough, but they did not suspect that she was going there solely on her nephew's account, much less that she had thought of making Ernest her heir. If they had guessed this, they would have been so jealous that I half believe they would have asked her to go and live somewhere else. Alethea however, was two or three years younger than Theobald; she was still some years short of fifty, and might very well live to eighty-five or ninety; her money, therefore, was not worth taking much trouble about, and her brother and sister-in-law had dismissed it, so to speak, from their minds with costs, a.s.suming, however, that if anything did happen to her while they were still alive, the money would, as a matter of course, come to them.

The prospect of Alethea seeing much of Ernest was a serious matter.

Christina smelt mischief from afar, as indeed she often did. Alethea was worldly--as worldly, that is to say, as a sister of Theobald's could be.

In her letter to Theobald she had said she knew how much of his and Christina's thoughts were taken up with anxiety for the boy's welfare.

Alethea had thought this handsome enough, but Christina had wanted something better and stronger. "How can she know how much we think of our darling?" she had exclaimed, when Theobald showed her his sister's letter. "I think, my dear, Alethea would understand these things better if she had children of her own." The least that would have satisfied Christina was to have been told that there never yet had been any parents comparable to Theobald and herself. She did not feel easy that an alliance of some kind would not grow up between aunt and nephew, and neither she nor Theobald wanted Ernest to have any allies. Joey and Charlotte were quite as many allies as were good for him. After all, however, if Alethea chose to go and live at Roughborough, they could not well stop her, and must make the best of it.

In a few weeks' time Alethea did choose to go and live at Roughborough. A house was found with a field and a nice little garden which suited her very well. "At any rate," she said to herself, "I will have fresh eggs and flowers." She even considered the question of keeping a cow, but in the end decided not to do so. She furnished her house throughout anew, taking nothing whatever from her establishment in Gower Street, and by Michaelmas--for the house was empty when she took it--she was settled comfortably, and had begun to make herself at home.

One of Miss Pontifex's first moves was to ask a dozen of the smartest and most gentlemanly boys to breakfast with her. From her seat in church she could see the faces of the upper-form boys, and soon made up her mind which of them it would be best to cultivate. Miss Pontifex, sitting opposite the boys in church, and reckoning them up with her keen eyes from under her veil by all a woman's criteria, came to a truer conclusion about the greater number of those she scrutinized than even Dr Skinner had done. She fell in love with one boy from seeing him put on his gloves.

Miss Pontifex, as I have said, got hold of some of these youngsters through Ernest, and fed them well. No boy can resist being fed well by a good-natured and still handsome woman. Boys are very like nice dogs in this respect--give them a bone and they will like you at once. Alethea employed every other little artifice which she thought likely to win their allegiance to herself, and through this their countenance for her nephew. She found the football club in a slight money difficulty and at once gave half a sovereign towards its removal. The boys had no chance against her, she shot them down one after another as easily as though they had been roosting pheasants. Nor did she escape scathless herself, for, as she wrote to me, she quite lost her heart to half a dozen of them. "How much nicer they are," she said, "and how much more they know than those who profess to teach them!"

I believe it has been lately maintained that it is the young and fair who are the truly old and truly experienced, inasmuch as it is they who alone have a living memory to guide them; "the whole charm," it has been said, "of youth lies in its advantage over age in respect of experience, and when this has for some reason failed or been misapplied, the charm is broken. When we say that we are getting old, we should say rather that we are getting new or young, and are suffering from inexperience; trying to do things which we have never done before, and failing worse and worse, till in the end we are landed in the utter impotence of death."

Miss Pontifex died many a long year before the above pa.s.sage was written, but she had arrived independently at much the same conclusion.

She first, therefore, squared the boys. Dr Skinner was even more easily dealt with. He and Mrs Skinner called, as a matter of course, as soon as Miss Pontifex was settled. She fooled him to the top of his bent, and obtained the promise of a MS. copy of one of his minor poems (for Dr Skinner had the reputation of being quite one of our most facile and elegant minor poets) on the occasion of his first visit. The other masters and masters' wives were not forgotten. Alethea laid herself out to please, as indeed she did wherever she went, and if any woman lays herself out to do this, she generally succeeds.

CHAPTER x.x.xIV

Miss Pontifex soon found out that Ernest did not like games, but she saw also that he could hardly be expected to like them. He was perfectly well shaped but unusually devoid of physical strength. He got a fair share of this in after life, but it came much later with him than with other boys, and at the time of which I am writing he was a mere little skeleton. He wanted something to develop his arms and chest without knocking him about as much as the school games did. To supply this want by some means which should add also to his pleasure was Alethea's first anxiety. Rowing would have answered every purpose, but unfortunately there was no river at Roughborough.

Whatever it was to be, it must be something which he should like as much as other boys liked cricket or football, and he must think the wish for it to have come originally from himself; it was not very easy to find anything that would do, but ere long it occurred to her that she might enlist his love of music on her side, and asked him one day when he was spending a half-holiday at her house whether he would like her to buy an organ for him to play on. Of course, the boy said yes; then she told him about her grandfather and the organs he had built. It had never entered into his head that he could make one, but when he gathered from what his aunt had said that this was not out of the question, he rose as eagerly to the bait as she could have desired, and wanted to begin learning to saw and plane so that he might make the wooden pipes at once.

Miss Pontifex did not see how she could have hit upon anything more suitable, and she liked the idea that he would incidentally get a knowledge of carpentering, for she was impressed, perhaps foolishly, with the wisdom of the German custom which gives every boy a handicraft of some sort.

Writing to me on this matter, she said "Professions are all very well for those who have connection and interest as well as capital, but otherwise they are white elephants. How many men do not you and I know who have talent, a.s.siduity, excellent good sense, straightforwardness, every quality in fact which should command success, and who yet go on from year to year waiting and hoping against hope for the work which never comes?

How, indeed, is it likely to come unless to those who either are born with interest, or who marry in order to get it? Ernest's father and mother have no interest, and if they had they would not use it. I suppose they will make him a clergyman, or try to do so--perhaps it is the best thing to do with him, for he could buy a living with the money his grandfather left him, but there is no knowing what the boy will think of it when the time comes, and for aught we know he may insist on going to the backwoods of America, as so many other young men are doing now." .

. . But, anyway, he would like making an organ, and this could do him no harm, so the sooner he began the better.

Alethea thought it would save trouble in the end if she told her brother and sister-in-law of this scheme. "I do not suppose," she wrote, "that Dr Skinner will approve very cordially of my attempt to introduce organ- building into the _curriculum_ of Roughborough, but I will see what I can do with him, for I have set my heart on owning an organ built by Ernest's own hands, which he may play on as much as he likes while it remains in my house and which I will lend him permanently as soon as he gets one of his own, but which is to be my property for the present, inasmuch as I mean to pay for it." This was put in to make it plain to Theobald and Christina that they should not be out of pocket in the matter.

If Alethea had been as poor as the Misses Allaby, the reader may guess what Ernest's papa and mamma would have said to this proposal; but then, if she had been as poor as they, she would never have made it. They did not like Ernest's getting more and more into his aunt's good books, still it was perhaps better that he should do so than that she should be driven back upon the John Pontifexes. The only thing, said Theobald, which made him hesitate, was that the boy might be thrown with low a.s.sociates later on if he were to be encouraged in his taste for music--a taste which Theobald had always disliked. He had observed with regret that Ernest had ere now shown rather a hankering after low company, and he might make acquaintance with those who would corrupt his innocence. Christina shuddered at this, but when they had aired their scruples sufficiently they felt (and when people begin to "feel," they are invariably going to take what they believe to be the more worldly course) that to oppose Alethea's proposal would be injuring their son's prospects more than was right, so they consented, but not too graciously.

After a time, however, Christina got used to the idea, and then considerations occurred to her which made her throw herself into it with characteristic ardour. If Miss Pontifex had been a railway stock she might have been said to have been buoyant in the Battersby market for some few days; buoyant for long together she could never be, still for a time there really was an upward movement. Christina's mind wandered to the organ itself; she seemed to have made it with her own hands; there would be no other in England to compare with it for combined sweetness and power. She already heard the famous Dr Walmisley of Cambridge mistaking it for a Father Smith. It would come, no doubt, in reality to Battersby Church, which wanted an organ, for it must be all nonsense about Alethea's wishing to keep it, and Ernest would not have a house of his own for ever so many years, and they could never have it at the Rectory. Oh, no! Battersby Church was the only proper place for it.

Of course, they would have a grand opening, and the Bishop would come down, and perhaps young Figgins might be on a visit to them--she must ask Ernest if young Figgins had yet left Roughborough--he might even persuade his grandfather Lord Lonsford to be present. Lord Lonsford and the Bishop and everyone else would then compliment her, and Dr Wesley or Dr Walmisley, who should preside (it did not much matter which), would say to her, "My dear Mrs Pontifex, I never yet played upon so remarkable an instrument." Then she would give him one of her very sweetest smiles and say she feared he was flattering her, on which he would rejoin with some pleasant little trifle about remarkable men (the remarkable man being for the moment Ernest) having invariably had remarkable women for their mothers--and so on and so on. The advantage of doing one's praising for oneself is that one can lay it on so thick and exactly in the right places.

Theobald wrote Ernest a short and surly letter _a propos_ of his aunt's intentions in this matter.

"I will not commit myself," he said, "to an opinion whether anything will come of it; this will depend entirely upon your own exertions; you have had singular advantages. .h.i.therto, and your kind aunt is showing every desire to befriend you, but you must give greater proof of stability and steadiness of character than you have given yet if this organ matter is not to prove in the end to be only one disappointment the more.

"I must insist on two things: firstly that this new iron in the fire does not distract your attention from your Latin and Greek"--("They aren't mine," thought Ernest, "and never have been")--"and secondly, that you bring no smell of glue or shavings into the house here, if you make any part of the organ during your holidays."