Two Maiden Aunts Part 15

'Oh no, no! Only Betty and I think he is getting old enough to be taught by a man.'

'Humph! That means school, I suppose,' said Mr. Crayshaw, 'or could we find him a tutor?'

'I think--at least, don't you think it ought to be school?' said Angel hesitatingly. 'I mean, if he is going to sea, oughtn't he to knock about with other boys a little first?'

Her cousin looked up thoughtfully at her.

'You'll miss him a good deal, won't you, my dear?' he said.

'Oh, it doesn't do to think about that,' said Angelica cheerfully.

'And you know, Cousin Crayshaw,' said Betty from her corner, 'you said when first we had him that we weren't to spoil him.'

'No, no, of course not, of course not,' said Cousin Crayshaw heartily; 'I'll inquire about a school.'

There was a little mischievous twinkle in Betty's eyes as she bent over her book, and when she and Angel were alone that night she threw her arms round her sister and burst out laughing. 'Oh, Angel, Angel, isn't it funny,' she cried, 'to think of you having to make Cousin Crayshaw send G.o.dfrey to school?'

'I believe he is almost as loth to lose him as we are,' said Angel; 'don't you love him for it?'

'Yes, that I do; and do you remember how you wouldn't let me make G.o.dfrey hate him? Angel dear, I'm just wondering how soon I and G.o.dfrey and Penny and this house altogether would go to rack and ruin without you.'

And so G.o.dfrey went to school.

It certainly was hard work letting him go, and Penny wore the same face all day as she had done when Angel had whipped him for disobedience, and evidently thought everybody very hard-hearted. And the house did seem fearfully empty and silent, especially in the first twilight hour, when Angel and Betty sat together in the big chair where there had always been room for a third.

Cousin Crayshaw arrived quite unexpectedly in the middle of the week, and gave no explanation whatever of his coming, except that he had brought Angelica a new book of poems; and how did he come to know Angel liked poetry, for he never read it himself? And better than the unexpected visit, almost better than the book, which Betty read till a dreadful hour that night, was Mr. Crayshaw's sudden exclamation,

'Dear me, how one does miss that boy!'

He was nearly strangled the next moment by Betty's arms thrown round his neck, and though he said,

'Elizabeth! Dear, dear, don't throttle me,' he did not seem angry.

G.o.dfrey was just the sort of boy to get on well at school, and he was soon popular both with boys and masters. In after years there was a packet, put away among Angelica's more cherished possessions, and ticketed, 'Letters written from school by my nephew G.o.dfrey,' and I think even the famous letter from the captain was not more read and re-read. There was one in particular which, I believe, had some tears dropped over it, though it was never shown to Martha and Penny as some of the others were.

'My dear Aunt Angel,' it ran, 'I have had a fight. The boy I fought was bigger than me. He gave me a black eye, but I gave him two. He said something about you and aunt Betty, but he never will again.

Jones, who is the head of the school, says I am a good plucked one. He put some raw meat on my eye for me. I thought you might find it useful to know about it; it is the very best thing when anyone's knocked you about, only be sure you put it on at once. I send a kiss to Aunt Betty and one to Penny, and my love to Martha and Pete and Nancy and Kiah and Cousin Crayshaw.

'Your affectionate nephew, 'G.o.dFREY WYNDHAM.'

'It's like the champions in the days of chivalry,' said Betty, with shining eyes, 'only instead of a beautiful ladye-love, the darling's been fighting and getting wounded just for his two maiden aunts.

Angel, I believe that Jones is a dear boy. I should like to send a little cake for him when we send G.o.dfrey one. Angel, do you--do you think it's our duty to scold G.o.dfrey for fighting?'

'I'm not sure,' said Angel slowly; and then she added, for once as decidedly as her sister, 'but I'm sure I'm not going to.'

I expect a diary of the lives of Angelica and Betty for the next year or two would have run something in this way:

'G.o.dfrey came home. Heard from G.o.dfrey. G.o.dfrey writes that the cricket season has begun. G.o.dfrey brought home a prize. G.o.dfrey went back to school' (this last with a very black mark against it). But such a diary, though it was deeply interesting to the two young aunts themselves, wouldn't make much of a story to those who didn't mark time by G.o.dfrey's holidays, and so we must just take a leap over several of these uneventful years and come suddenly to the day which all the time had stood in Angel's mind as a sort of background to everything else that happened, the day which she had taught herself to think about, and which she prayed every day of her quiet life that she might be strong and brave to meet.

It was an autumn day, misty and still, like that on which G.o.dfrey had first come to Oakfield, and Cousin Crayshaw came down in the middle of the week. It was late afternoon, and Angel was catching the last light from the window on her sewing; and when she raised her head at the sound of wheels, and saw her cousin get out of his chaise, she knew in one moment that the day she had been preparing for had come. She put her work down with very trembling hands, and went down the path to meet Mr. Crayshaw, knowing quite well what he had to say to her while he made little nervous remarks about the weather, until at last he took a paper out of his pocket and gave it her to read, watching her anxiously all the while. The writing seem to grow dim and uncertain before Angel's eyes, but she knew what it was--the order for Mr. G.o.dfrey Wyndham to join the frigate _Mermaid_, Captain Maitland, ordered to the Channel, there to do the service of a midshipman. Angel's voice sounded to herself rather strange and far-away as she asked:

'When does the _Mermaid_ sail?'

'In four days. Captain Maitland is in London; he'll be here to-morrow.

I have sent for G.o.dfrey. But dear me, dear me, Angelica, he seems very young, very young!'

And Angel said, in the same quiet tones, that G.o.dfrey was nearly fourteen, and how fortunate it was for him to have the chance of being under Captain Maitland; they would be so happy to think of him on board the _Mermaid_. And when she went to find Betty, Mr. Crayshaw took off his spectacles and wiped them and remarked, as he had done on that past Christmas Day:

'Angelica is a good girl, a very good girl!'

After that there was no time at all for thinking. Angel said afterwards that her head seemed to be quite full of nothing but G.o.dfrey's shirts, and a very good thing it was for all of them. Only while she st.i.tched and sorted and packed, she had all the time a feeling that she ought to be saying something to G.o.dfrey now, before he went out into the great terrible world of which she knew so little, something that would help him and strengthen him in the days to come.

But there never came a minute for saying it until the very last evening, when G.o.dfrey's box was packed, and his last visits paid in the village, where the old women cried over him in his uniform. The captain had gone for a walk with Mr. Crayshaw, Penny was getting supper ready, and Angel and Betty and G.o.dfrey found themselves together in the garden, really with nothing more to do.

It was the twilight hour, which the two young aunts had always given up to G.o.dfrey. Betty used to look grave about it in the old days, and say she was afraid it was very idle; but she always gave in, and joined Angel and G.o.dfrey when they paced up and down the garden walk, or sat in Miss Jane's arbour, or watched the stars come out from the parlour window, or squeezed into the big arm-chair before the fire. They were in the garden this evening, for it was mild and still, with autumn scents in the air and stars coming out behind a misty haze. And now surely was the time for the last words, the tender advice and warnings that were to go with G.o.dfrey out into the world. But somehow Angel and Betty never spoke them after all. Instead they talked about the past; of G.o.dfrey's first coming to Oakfield--'horrid little wretch that I was,' said the nephew--with the curly head, which had only reached Angel's elbow then, rubbing fondly against her shoulder; of Kiah's coming home, and the captain's first visit, and that Christmas party at the Place.

'And do you remember,' G.o.dfrey said, 'that first day I settled to be a sailor?'

'The Sunday afternoon when we saw Kiah? Yes, of course I do, G.o.dfrey.

I never dreamed when we went up to the Place that day what it would put into your head.'

'It wasn't only going to the Place,' said G.o.dfrey thoughtfully; 'I don't know whether I should have settled like that if you hadn't said that to me before.'

'Said what, G.o.dfrey? I don't remember.'

'Don't you, Aunt Angel? I do, every word; about being useful and making the world a bit better. I knew then I'd got to do it, and it was only to settle how; and when I heard about Kiah and the captain, I thought it seemed the nicest way, and I knew it would please you. And it does, doesn't it? That's the best part of going, knowing you're glad for me to go.'

Angelica's hand met Betty's in the dusk and held it tight, and for once it was she who answered for them both:

'Yes, G.o.dfrey dear, very glad and very proud.'

'I told the captain so yesterday,' G.o.dfrey went on; 'and he said I'd better make up my mind directly to be a hero, for I came of an heroic family. That was what he said, and I sha'n't forget. There's the captain and Cousin Crayshaw.'

'Yes, go and meet them,' Angel said, for Betty's hand was trembling in her own and she could hear the catch in her breath that meant she was strangling her tears. She slipped her hand out of G.o.dfrey's arm and let him go forward, while she and Betty drew back through the gap in the yew hedge to Miss Jane's arbour, just where Betty had flung herself down in despair on that first day of G.o.dfrey's coming to Oakfield.

They were almost the same words that she gasped out now on Angel's shoulder, as they sat down on the bench side by side; for Betty, though she was nineteen now and wore her hair in a knot at the top of her head, and considered herself a rather elderly person, was much the same vehement little lady as the Betty we knew at thirteen.

'I can't do it,' she sobbed, 'I can't, it's no use; I'm not the right person to be--to be a hero's aunt. I don't want him to go, I shall die if he gets killed; I sha'n't be proud, I shall only be miserable; what am I to do?'

Angel's arms tightened their clasp, she bent her head low over Betty's fair hair and tried to speak once or twice in vain. Then she said at last:

'Dear, we must just say what we said the first day he came. We want to love him, not our own pleasure in him; we haven't loved him and prayed about him and tried to teach him just for ourselves.'

'Oh, I don't know,' faltered Betty; 'I'm afraid I'm selfish, I'm not brave like you. I thought I should feel like the Spartan mothers, but I don't. I can't think of the country. I can only think of G.o.dfrey.'

'Oh, Betty dear, I'm not brave--I never was. I don't feel a bit like a Spartan mother; but it seems to me we needn't mind about what we feel like. We've only got to try and look brave and help poor Cousin Crayshaw, for he is dreadfully sad, and make it easy for G.o.dfrey to go, and not let him think we're fretting.'

'But if we can't?' sighed Betty.