Маргарет Олифант
Phoebe, Junior
CHAPTER XXX
SOCIETY AT THE PARSONAGE
After this dinner-party, such as it was, the Parsonage became gradually the centre of a little society, such as sometimes forms in the most accidental way in a house where there are young men and young women, and of which no one can say what momentous results may arise. They came together fortuitously, blown to one centre by the merest winds of circumstance, out of circles totally different and unlike. Why it was that Mr. May, so good a Churchman, permitted two people so entirely out of his sphere to become his habitual guests and the companions of his children was very perplexing to the outside world, who half in mere surprise, and a little in despite, wondered and commented till they were tired, or till they had become so familiar with the strange spectacle that it ceased to strike them. A rich pupil might be forgiven for being a Dissenter, indeed in Carlingford as elsewhere money made up for most deficiencies; but even natural complacency towards the rich pupil scarcely accounted for the reception of the others. The neighbours could never be quite sure whether the family at the Parsonage knew or did not know that their new friend Northcote was not only acting as Minister of Salem Chapel, but was the assailant of Reginald May at the Anti-Establishment Meeting, and various persons in Grange Lane held themselves for a long time on the tip-toe of preparation, ready to breathe to Mr. May the painful intelligence, in case he was unaware of it. But he never gave them the opportunity. Honestly, he had forgotten the speaker's name at first, and only recognized him when he was introduced by young Copperhead; and then the situation was piquant and amused him, especially the evident confusion and consternation of the culprit when found out.
“I don't know what he thinks he has done to you,” said Clarence, “I could scarcely make him come in. He says he is sure you can't wish to see him.”
This was two days after the dinner, when Horace Northcote came to leave a respectful card, hoping that he might see Ursula at a door or window. Clarence had seized upon him and dragged him in, in spite of himself.
“On the contrary, I am very glad to see him,” said Mr. May, with a smile. He looked at the young Dissenter with a jeer in his eyes. He liked to punish him, having suddenly perceived that this jeer was much more potent than any serious penalty. “If he will promise not to slay me, I shan't quarrel with him.” Mr. May was in such good spirits at this moment that he could afford to joke; his own magnanimity, and the other's confused looks of guilt, overcame his gravity. “Come back again,” he said, holding out his hand; and though Horace retired for the moment utterly confounded, yet the attractions of the cheerful house overcame, after a while, his sense of humiliation and inappropriateness. If the injured family had condoned his offence, why should he mind? and the pleasant girlish friendliness, without any arrière pensée, of Ursula, was enough to have set any man at his ease; the facts of the case being that Mrs. Hurst was away upon a long visit, and that, having no other gossip within the range of her acquaintance, Ursula did not know. Reginald, who did, had the same sense of magnanimity as his father had, and began to like the society of the congenial yet different spirit which it was so strange to him to find under a guise so unlike his own. And Northcote, on his side, finding no house to which he could betake himself among those whom Phœbe called “our own people;” found a refuge, which gradually became dearer and dearer to him, at the Parsonage, and in his profound sense of the generosity of the people who had thus received him, felt his own partizanship wax feebler and feebler every day. He seemed to see the ground cut from under his feet, as he watched the young chaplain at his work. Mr. May, to be sure, was no example of pastoral diligence, but he was a pleasant companion, and had put himself from the first in that position of moral superiority which naturally belongs to an injured person who can forgive heartily and without prejudice. And Ursula! He did not venture to call her Ursula, even in the secret depths of his heart. There a pronoun was enough, as, indeed, incipient Love generally finds it. She spoke to him, smiled at him in the street; and immediately life became a Vita Nuova to him. The young Dissenter was as Dante, and simple Ursula, with her housekeeping books in her hand, became another Beatrice. It is not every one who has the capacity for this perfect and absorbing sentiment; but Horace Northcote had, and for a long time Ursula was as unconscious of it as heart could desire.
Phœbe's admission to the house had been more simple still. A girlish fancy on Ursula's part, a fit of good-nature on her father's, and then that secret thread of connection with Tozer which no one knew of, and the coming of Clarence Copperhead, to please whom Mr. May permitted himself to be persuaded to do much; and in addition to all this, her good looks, her pretty manners, her cleverness and the deference she had always shown in the proper quarter. Mr. May did not enter into the lists with his son, or think of offering himself as a suitor to Phœbe; but he liked to talk to her, and to watch what he called “her little ways,” and to hear her play when Clarence and his violin were otherwise disposed of. He was an experienced man, priding himself on a knowledge of human nature, and Phœbe's “little ways” amused him greatly. What did she mean? – to “catch” Clarence Copperhead, who would be a great match, or to fascinate Northcote? Oddly enough Mr. May never thought of Reginald, though that young man showed an eagerness to talk to Phœbe which was more than equal with his own, and had always subjects laid up ready to discuss with her, when he could find the opportunity. Sometimes he would go up to her in the midst of the little party and broach one of these topics straight on end, without preface or introduction, as which was her favourite play of Shakespeare, and what did she think of the character of King Lear? It was not very wise, not any wiser than his neighbour was, who made pretty little Ursula into the ideal lady, the most gentle and stately figure in poetry; and yet no doubt there was something in both follies that was a great deal better than wisdom. The society formed by these two young pairs, with Clarence Copperhead as a heavy floating balance, and Mr. May and Janey – one philosophical, wise and mistaken; the other sharp-sighted and seeing everything – as spectators, was very pleasant to the close little coterie themselves, and nobody else got within the charmed circle. They grew more and more intimate daily, and had a whole vocabulary of domestic jokes and allusions which no one else could understand. It must be allowed, however, that the outside world was not pleased with this arrangement on either side of the question. The Church people were shocked with the Mays for harbouring Dissenters under any circumstances whatever, and there had not been a Minister at Salem Chapel for a long time so unpopular as Horace Northcote, who was always “engaged” when any of the connection asked him to tea, and preached sermons which went over their heads, and did not remember them when he met them in the street. Tozer was about the only one of the congregation who stood up for the young man. The others thanked Heaven that “he was but tempory,” and on the whole they were right, for certainly he was out of place in his present post.
As for Clarence Copperhead, he led an agreeable life enough among all these undercurrents of feeling, which he did not recognise with any distinctness. He was comfortable enough, pleased with his own importance, and too obtuse to perceive that he bored his companions; and then he considered himself to be slightly “sweet upon” both the girls. Ursula was his favourite in the morning, when he embarrassed her much by persistently seeking her company whenever liberated by her father; but Phœbe was the queen of the evening, when he would get his fiddle with an unfailing complacency which drove Reginald frantic. Whether it was mere good-nature or any warmer impulse, Phœbe was strangely tolerant of these fiddlings, and would go on playing for hours with serene composure, never tired and never impatient. Yet poor Clarence was not an accompanyist to be coveted. He was weak in the ear and defective in science, but full of a cheerful confidence which was as good as genius.
“Never mind, Miss Phœbe,” he would say cheerfully, when he had broken down for the twentieth time, “play on and I'll catch you up.” He had thus a series of trysting places in every page or two, which might have been very laughable to an indifferent spectator, but which aggravated the Mays, father and son, to an intolerable extent. They were the two who suffered. As for Horace Northcote, who was not a great talker, it was a not disagreeable shield for his silent contemplation of Ursula, and the little things which from time to time he ventured to say to her. For conversation he had not the thirst which animated Reginald, and Ursula's talk, though lively and natural, was not like Phœbe's; but while the music went on he could sit by her in a state of silent beatitude, now and then saying something to which Ursula replied if she was disposed, or if she was not disposed put aside by a little shake of her head, and smiling glance at the piano. Sometimes it was simple wilfulness that made her silent; but Northcote set it down to an angelical sweetness which would not wound even the worst of performances by inattention. They were happy enough sitting there under the shelter of the piano, the young man absorbed in the dreams of a young love, the girl just beginning to realize the adoration which she was receiving, with a timid perception of it – half-frightened, half-grateful. She was in spite of herself amused by the idea only half understood, and which she could scarcely believe, that this big grown man, so much more important than herself in everybody's eyes, should show so much respect to a little girl whom her father scolded, whom Reginald sent trotting about on all sorts of errands, and whom Cousin Anne and Cousin Sophy considered a child. It was very strange, a thing to call forth inextinguishable laughter, and yet with a strange touch of sweetness in it, which almost made her cry in wondering gratitude. What she thought of him, Ursula did not ask herself; that he should think like this of her was the bewildering, extraordinary, ridiculous fact that at present filled her girlish head.
But if they were sweet to Northcote, these evenings were the crown of Clarence Copperhead's content and conscious success; he was supremely happy, caressing his fiddle between his cheek and his shoulder, and raising his pale eyes to the ceiling in an ecstasy. The music, and the audience, and the accompanyist all together were delightful to him. He could have gone on he felt not only till midnight, but till morning, and so on to midnight again, with short intervals for refreshment. Every ten minutes or so there occurred a break in the continuity of the strain, and a little dialogue between the performers.
“Ah, yes, I have missed a line; never mind; go on, Miss Phœbe, I will make up to you,” he said.
“It is those accidentals that have been your ruin,” said Phœbe laughing; “it is a very hard passage, let us turn back and begin again,” and then the audience would laugh, not very sweetly, and (some of them) make acrid observations; but the pianist was good-nature itself, and went back and counted and kept time with her head, and with her hand when she could take it from the piano, until she had triumphantly tided him over the bad passage, or they had come to the point of shipwreck again. During these labours, Phœbe, who was really a good musician, ought to have suffered horribly; but either she did not, or her good-nature was stronger than her good taste, for she went on serenely, sometimes for hours together, while her old and her young admirers sat secretly cursing (in such ways as are becoming to a clergyman) each in his corner. Perhaps she had a slight degree of pleasure in the evident power she had over father and son; but it was difficult fully to understand her views at this somewhat bewildering period of her life, in which she was left entirely to her own resources. She was herself groping a little through paths of uncertain footing, enjoying herself a great deal, but not seeing clearly where it led to, and having no definite purpose, or chart of those unknown countries in her mind.
“How you can go on,” said Reginald, on one of these occasions, having at length managed to seize upon and get her into a corner, “for hours, having your ears sacrificed and your patience tried by these fearful discords, and smile through it, is a mystery which I cannot fathom! If it was only consideration for your audience, that might be enough to move any one – but yourself – ”
“I don't seem to feel it so very much myself.”
“And yet you are a musician!”
“Don't be too hard upon me, Mr May. I only play – a little. I am not like my cousins in the High Street, who are supposed to be very clever at music; and then poor Mr. Copperhead is a very old friend.”
“Poor Mr. Copperhead! poor us, you mean, who have to listen – and you, who choose to play.”
“You are very vindictive,” she said, with a piteous look. “Why should you be so vindictive? I do what I can to please my friends, and – there is no doubt about what poor Clarence likes best; if you were to show me as plainly what you would like —quite plainly, as he does – ”
“Don't you know?” said Reginald, with glowing eyes. “Ah, well! if I may show you plainly – quite plainly, with the same results, you may be sure not to be left long in doubt. Talk to me! it is easier, and not so fatiguing. Here,” said the young man, placing a chair for her; “he has had your patient services for two hours. Do only half as much for me.”
“Ah! but talking is a different thing, and more – difficult – and more – personal. Well!” said Phœbe, with a laugh and a blush, taking the chair, “I will try, but you must begin; and I cannot promise, you know, for a whole hour.”
“After you have given that fellow two! and such a fellow! If it was Northcote, I might be equally jea – displeased, but I could understand it, for he is not a fool.”
“I think,” said Phœbe, looking towards the other end of the room, where Northcote was occupied as usual close to Ursula's work-basket, “that Mr. Northcote manages to amuse himself very well without any help of mine.”
“Ah!” cried Reginald, startled; for of course it is needless to say that the idea of any special devotion to his little sister had never entered his mind. He felt disposed to laugh at first when the idea was suggested to him, but he gave a second look, and fellow-feeling threw a certain enlightenment upon the subject. “That would never do,” he said gravely; “I wonder I never thought of it before.”
“Why would it not do? She is very nice, and he is clever and a rising man; and he is very well off; and you said just now he was not a fool.”
“Nevertheless it would never do,” said Reginald, opposing her pointedly, as he had never opposed her before; and he remained silent for a whole minute, looking across the room, during which long interval Phœbe sat demurely on the chair where he had placed her, looking at him with a smile on her face.
“Well?” she said at length, softly, “it was talk you said you wanted, Mr. May; but you are not so ready to tune up your violin as Mr. Copperhead, though I wait with my fingers on the piano, so to speak.”
“I beg your pardon!” he cried, and then their eyes met, and both laughed, though, as far as Reginald was concerned, in an embarrassed way.
“You perceive,” said Phœbe, rising, “that it is not nearly so easy to please you, and that you don't know half so exactly what you want, as Clarence Copperhead does, though you abuse him, poor fellow. I have got something to say to Ursula! though, perhaps, she does not want me any more than you do.”
“Don't give me up for one moment's distraction; and it was your fault, not mine, for suggesting such a startling idea.”
Phœbe shook her head, and waved her hand as a parting salutation, and then went across the room to where Ursula was sitting, where Horace Northcote at least found her very much in his way. She began at once to talk low and earnestly on some subject so interesting that it absorbed both the girls in a way which was very surprising and unpleasant to the young men, neither of whom had been able to interest the one whose attention he was specially anxious to secure half so effectually. Northcote, from the other side of the table, and Reginald from the other end of the room, gazed and gloomed with discomfited curiosity, wondering what it could be; while Clarence strutted uneasily about the piano, taking up his fiddle now and then, striking a note, and screwing up his strings into concord, with many impatient glances. But still the girls talked. Was it about their dresses or some nonsense, or was it a more serious subject, which could thus be discussed without masculine help? but this matter they never fathomed, nor have they found out till this hour.
CHAPTER XXXI
SOCIETY
Notwithstanding such little social crosses, however, the society at the Parsonage, as thus constituted, was very agreeable. Mr. May, though he had his faults, was careful of his daughter. He sat in the drawing-room every evening till she retired, on the nights their visitors came, and even when it was Clarence only who remained, an inmate of the house, and free to go and come as he pleased. Ursula, he felt, must not be left alone, and though it is uncertain whether she fully appreciated the care he took of her, this point in his character is worth noting. When the young party went out together, to skate, for instance, as they did, for several merry days, Reginald and Janey were, he considered, sufficient guardians for their sister. Phœbe had no chaperon – “Unless you will take that serious office upon you, Ursula,” she said, shrugging her shoulders prettily; but she only went once or twice, so well was she able, even when the temptation was strongest, to exercise self-denial, and show her perfect power of self-guidance. As for old Tozer and his wife, the idea of a chaperon never entered their homely head. Such articles are unnecessary in the lower levels of society. They were anxious that their child should enjoy herself, and could not understand the reason of her staying at home on a bright frosty day, when the Mays came to the door in a body to fetch her.
“No, if they'd have gone down on their knees, nor if I had gone down on mine, would that girl have left me,” cried the old lady, with tears in her eyes. “She do behave beautiful to her old granny. If so be as I haven't a good night, no power on earth would make that child go pleasuring. It's 'most too much at her age.”
But Phœbe confided to Ursula that it was not altogether anxiety about her grandmother.
“I have nobody of my own to go with. If I took grandpapa with me, I don't think it would mend matters. Once or twice it was possible, but not every day. Go and enjoy yourself, dear,” she said, kissing her friend.
Ursula was disposed to cry rather than to enjoy herself, and appealed to Reginald, who was deeply touched by Phœbe's fine feeling. He took his sister to the ice, but that day he went so far as to go back himself to No. 6, actually into the house, to make a humble protest, yet to insinuate his admiration. He was much impressed by, and approved highly of this reticence, having a very high standard of minor morals for ladies, in his mind, like most young men.
“She is not one of the girls who rush about everywhere, and whom one is sick of seeing,” he said.
“I think it is very silly,” cried Janey. “Who cares for a chaperon! and why shouldn't Phœbe have her fun, like the rest, instead of shutting herself up in a stuffy room with that dreadful old Mrs. Tozer?”
Her brother reproved her so sharply for this speech that Janey withdrew in tears, still asking “Why?” as she rushed to her room. Clarence Copperhead, for his part, stroked his moustache and said it was a bore.
“For she is the best skater of all the ladies here,” he said. “I beg your pardon, Miss Ursula. She's got so much go in her, and keeps it up like fun. She's the best I know for keeping a fellow from getting tired; but as it's Thursday, I suppose she'll be there in the evening.”
Clarence never called them anything but Miss Ursula and Miss Phœbe, dropping the prefix in his thoughts. He felt that he was “a little sweet upon” them both; and, indeed, it had gleamed dully across his mind that a man who could marry them both need never be bored, but was likely always to find something “to do.” Choice, however, being necessary, he did not see his way so clearly as to which he would choose. “The mountain sheep are sweeter, but the valley sheep are fatter,” he said to himself, if not in these immortal words, yet with full appreciation of the sentiment. Ursula began to understand dinners with a judicious intelligence, which he felt was partly created by his own instructions and remarks; but in the evening it was Phœbe who reigned supreme. She was so sensible that most likely she could invent a menu all out of her own head, he thought, feeling that the girl who got him through the “Wedding March” with but six mistakes, was capable of any intellectual feat. He had not the slightest doubt that it was in his power to marry either of the girls as soon as he chose to intimate his choice; and in the mean time he found it very agreeable to maintain a kind of mental possibility of future proprietorship of them both.
And thus the pleasant life ran on in the most agreeable absorption and abstraction from the world outside. “Don't ask any one else; why should we have any one else?” they all said, except Janey, who had condescended to appear in the evening in her best frock, though she was not admitted at dinner, and who thought a few additional guests, and a round game now and then, would be delightful variations upon the ordinary programme; but the others did not agree with her. They became more and more intimate, mingling the brother and sister relationship with a something unnamed, unexpressed, which gave a subtle flavour to their talks and flirtations. In that incipient stage of love-making this process is very pleasant even to the spectators, full of little excitements and surprises, and sharp stings of momentary quarrel, and great revolutions, done with a single look, which are infinitely amusing to the lookers-on. The house became a real domestic centre, thought of by each and all with tender sentiment, such as made its owners somewhat proud of it, they could scarcely tell why. Even Mr. May felt a certain complacence in the fact that the young men were so fond of the Parsonage, and when he heard complaints of the coldness and dullness of domestic intercourse, smiled, and said that he did not feel it so, with that pleasant sense of something superior in himself to cause this difference, which is sweet to the greatest Stoic; for he was not as yet enlightened as to the entire indifference of the little circle to any charm in him, and would have been utterly confounded had any one told him that to the grave and reflective Northcote, whom he had treated with such magnanimous charity, binding him (evidently) by bonds of gratitude to himself for ever, it was little Ursula, and not her father, who was the magnet of attraction. Mr. May was a clever man, and yet it had not occurred to him that any comparison between his own society and that of Ursula was possible. Ursula! a child! He would have laughed aloud at the thought.
But all this pleasant society, though father and daughter both agreed that it cost nothing, for what is a cake and a cup of tea? and the late dinners and the extra maid, and the additional fires, and general enlargement of expenditure made immense inroads, it must be allowed, into the additional income brought by Clarence Copperhead. The first quarter's payment was spent, and more than spent, before it came. The money that was to be laid up for that bill of Tozer's – perhaps – had now no saving peradventure left in it; for the second half would not be due till two months after the Tozer bill, and would but be half, even if procurable at once. Mr. May felt a slight shock while this gleamed across his mind, but only for a moment. There was still a month, and a month is a long time, and in the mean time James was almost certain to send something, and his Easter offerings might, probably would, this year be something worth having. Why they should be better than usual this year Mr. May did not explain to himself; his head was a little turned it must be supposed by the momentary chance of having more money in his hands than he used to have. Already he had got into the habit of ordering what he wanted somewhat recklessly, without asking himself how the things he ordered were to be paid for, and, as so often happened, followed up that first tampering with the rules of right and wrong by a general recklessness of the most dangerous kind. He was not so much alone as he had been; his house, in which he was infinitely more amiable than of old, had become more pleasant to him; he liked his life better. His son was independent with an income of his own, and therefore he felt much more respect for him, and treated him as a companion. His daughter had developed, if not in the way of entrées, a talent for dinners which raised her very much in his eyes; and naturally the regard shown to her by the visitors reacted upon Mr. May, though it had not crossed his mind as yet that any one could be in love with Ursula. All this made him happier in spite of himself. When you begin to esteem and be proud of your children your life is naturally happier than when you scoff and jeer at them, and treat them as creatures of inferior mould to yourself. Mr. May found out all at once that Reginald was a fine young fellow, that Ursula was pretty and pleasant, and that droll Janey, with her elf-locks and angles, was amusing at least, if no more. As for the little ones, they were considerably thrust into a corner when the elder youth forced itself into the front. They learned their lessons in corners, and had their tea by themselves, and were much humbled and subdued from the moment in which their school-books and toys had meandered over the whole house, and their looks and likings had been just as important as anything else. When there is no mother to protect them, the elder sister's first lover marks a terribly critical period for the children of the house. They were banished from the drawing-room, except on special occasions, when they came en grande tenue, in their best things, and were jeered at by Mr. Copperhead. He called them “the kids,” both Amy and Robin were aware, and they resented it unspeakably. Thus the inward happiness of the Mays confined itself to the upper regions of the family. Even Betsy regretted the days when, if she had more to do, she had at least “her kitchen to herself,” and nobody to share the credit. There was more fuss and more worry, if a trifle less labour, and the increase in consequence which resulted from being called cook, instead of maid-of-all-work, was scarcely so sweet in possession as had seemed in prospect.
“Them late dinners” were the object of her perpetual railings; “oh, how much more comfortable it was, if gentry would but think so, to have your dinner at two, and get done with your washing up before you was cleaned, or had any occasion to bother yourself about your cap!” When little Amy cried over the loneliness of “the children's tea,” which they frequently had to pour out for themselves, Betty gave her a cake and a kiss, and felt disposed to cry too.
“And she don't know, poor child, not the half,” said Betty, which was a kind of oracular sentence difficult for Betty herself to understand. The children had nothing to do with the late dinner; they were sent to bed earlier than they used to be, and scolded if any distant sounds of romps made itself audible at seven o'clock when their elders were dining; and then when the little ones went injured to bed, and Johnnie, indignant, worked at his lessons by himself in a corner of the old nursery, deeply aware that his school-boy boots and jacket were quite unfit for the drawing-room, the grown-up young people ran lightly upstairs, all smiles and pleasure, and those delightful evenings began.
The children sometimes could not get to sleep for the piano and the raspings of the fiddle, which sounds of mirth suggested nothing but the wildest enjoyment to them; and when the door opened now and then, bursts of laughter and mingling voices would come out like the sounds the Peri heard at the gates of Paradise. The elder ones were happy; their little atoms of individual life had all united for the moment into one sunshiny and broad foundation, on which everything seemed to rest with that strange sense of stability and continuance, which such a moment of happiness, though it carries every element of change in it, almost invariably brings. It felt as if it might go on for ever, and yet the very sentiment that inspired it made separation and convulsion inevitable – one of those strange paradoxes which occur every day.
Thus the year crept round, and winter melted away with all its amusements, and spring began. Mr. Northcote's time at Salem Chapel was more than half over, a fact on which the congregation congratulated itself much.
“If so be as he had a settled charge of his own, I shouldn't be sorry to see him gone to-morrow,” said one of the recent members.
“Settled charge! You take my word,” said Mrs. Pigeon, who was getting old, but always continued a woman of spirit, “he'll never have a settled charge in our connection. He carries on here, 'cause he can't help hisself, but he ain't cut out for a pastor, and he's a deal too thick with them Church folks. A parson, too! I'd 'a thought he had more pride.”
