Chapter VII: Drifting Into Haven

It is a soft, calm evening, early in April, and Dr. Faunthorpe’s shabby old house is as much brightened by the westering sunlight as it can be brightened by anything less than the three coats of paint for which its worm-eaten woodwork has been languishing for the last twenty years. There has not been a five-pound note expended upon the repair or the beautification of Robert Faunthorpe’s house within the memory of the oldest inhabitant of Redcastle. It is scrupulously clean, and that is the best that can be said of it. There is a small garden in front, where flourish those homely perennials which demand little care and no artificial nutriment,--lupins, Canterbury bells, flags, London pride, polyanthuses, primroses, and wall-flowers. Behind the house there is a long strip of ground where the surgeon cultivates cabbages and potatoes, leeks and potherbs, leaving only two narrow borders for floriculture. Happily there are ancient rose bushes in these neglected borders,--rose bushes from which Beauty’s father might have gathered those large red cup-shaped cabbage roses that grow in a child’s picture book. The borders are edged with box, tall and thick,--box that has been growing for a century. The low red walls, crumbling into hollows where the birds have pecked at the brickwork, crowned with dragon’s-mouth, stonecrop, and houseleek, would be delicious in a picture, and are not unlovely in reality. At the bottom of this long narrow garden there is a patch of ground set apart for the benefit of Scrub, the pony, upon which grow purple-flowered tares, three crops in a twelvemonth sometimes.

Within, the house has a certain air of homely comfort. The shabby old furniture has that well-worn look which in some wise endears goods and chattels to their owners. Beeswax and labour have done their best to brighten and beautify the ancient mahogany bureaus, the clumsy walnutwood bedsteads and tables,--made at a time when walnutwood was almost as cheap as deal. Cracked old jars and bottles of common blue delf adorn the tall narrow wooden mantelpieces; curtains of watered moreen, once crimson, but faded to a tawny brown, drape the deeply recessed windows of parlour and surgery. The rooms are spacious, but low; the ceilings sustained by massive beams painted black. The walls are for the most part paneled, and the paneling has been painted a dingy pink or a dirty drab. To keep this paneling spotless is the old servant’s anxious care, and much house-flannel and soft soap are expended thereupon to Dr. Faunthorpe’s aggravation,--that good easy man having no passion for cleanliness in the abstract.

A wide stone passage leads from the front door to the half-glass door opening into the back garden, thus letting light and air through the old house. A clumsy mahogany-framed barometer, a row of hat-pegs, and a faded map of England are the only furniture of this passage, or hall, as a modern house-agent would call it. A roomy, solid old staircase, with shallow treads, and ponderous balusters, leads to the upper chambers, which are numerous and of fair size. To the right of the front door is the parlour, on the left the surgery. Behind the surgery is the best parlour; behind the every-day parlour is the large stone-paved kitchen.

For this house, with its acre of garden, Dr. Faunthorpe pays twenty pounds a year; so there is some saving of house-rent in residence at Redcastle, if your soul aspires not after any higher state than comfortable vegetation, and you are content to inhabit the inferior end of the town.

Dr. Faunthorpe paces his front garden on this calm April evening, smoking his pipe. He is a smoker as well as a snuffer, and finds solace in tobacco after his daily round. This is his hour of rest and leisure. True that it may be broken in upon at any moment by some sudden call for his services, but his regular daily labour, his measured grind at life’s mill, is over.

He prefers the small front garden for his evening pipe to the larger ground at the back,--first, because he is to the fore if wanted; and secondly, because, his house being on the high road, it is just possible that something may go by, vehicle or passenger, to the enlivenment of his leisure.

He is meditative and silent, but not alone. His niece Marion, a tall girl with wavy light hair, and a pre-Raphaelite figure, stands in a listless attitude by the gate. His niece Jenny, an overgrown girl of twelve, with a very short frock and stalwart legs, encased in brown worsted stockings, is watering the flowers, and making as much mess as it is possible to make in the operation.

‘Just look what puddles you are making in the path, stupid,’ exclaims the elder sister, peevishly regarding the efforts of her junior. ‘I do wish you’d leave things alone. You’re always up to some mischief or other.’

‘I suppose I shouldn’t be mischievous if I let the primroses die for want of water,’ remonstrates the junior, in no wise abashed. ‘That’s what you’d do, with your laziness and fine-lady ways. You were bad enough before you went to stay with uncle Stephen, but you’re ever so much worse now. I’m sure I wish he’d kept you there instead of sending you back, like a bad penny. Uncle Robert and I were as jolly as sandboys while you were away.’

The young person sets down her water-pot and delivers this diatribe with arms akimbo, like Madame Angot’s daughter. Marion shudders.

‘Sandboys! What an expression for a young lady!’ she ejaculates.

‘Pray where’s the harm in sandboys?’ demands the incorrigible Jenny. ‘They’re more respectable than you, as far as I can see, for they get their own living.’

‘My dear,’ remonstrates uncle Robert mildly, ‘that is not the way to address your elder sister.’

‘Why does she come and loaf about here, then, with her stuckupishness? Why doesn’t she go and be a governess like Sibyl? If she heard what Hester says of her she’d be ashamed of herself.’

‘My love, you have no right to quote Hester.’

‘Hester is an impertinent, mischief-making creature,’ exclaims Marion.

‘And as to your sister going out as a governess, my dear,’ continues uncle Robert mildly, ‘with her expectations it would be about the most foolish thing she could do.’

‘Expectations,--dead men’s shoes!’ exclaims the terrible child, twirling the watering-can so that its last drops sprinkle Marion’s pretty blue dress. ‘I should hate myself if _I_ was mean enough to calculate upon what any one would leave me.’

‘Quite right of you,’ says Marion, with a supercilious laugh--that sneering schoolgirl laugh, which we all remember to have been crushed by occasionally in our youth,--‘for certainly no one is likely to leave _you_ money.’

‘I dare say not, with you in the way,’ answers the irrepressible Jenny. ‘They’d feel they were doing an act of charity bestowing their fortune on you, for it would be the same as leaving it to the Asylum for Idiots. One simpleton provided for, at any rate.’

With this the imp swings round upon her heels as on a pivot, brandishes the watering-pot as an Indian savage his club, and gallops into the house. Jane Faunthorpe never walks. She has the action of an unbroken colt, and seems, when in motion, to have as many legs as that animal. When she comes downstairs there is a sound as of a sack of coals flung from the upper story. How the old house sustains itself under her youthful vigour is a mystery to the parish doctor.

‘I’d run after her and give her a good box on the ears,’ says Marion, viciously, ‘if I didn’t want to see the omnibus go by.’

_The_ omnibus is a stunted covered vehicle, like a carrier’s cart garnished with glazed windows, which plies between the station and the outskirts of Redcastle, and it is nearly time for this conveyance to pass with its evening freight. There are sometimes as many as five people arrive by the six o’clock train from Krampston,--nay, the Krampston train sometimes brings that rare bird, a passenger from London.

‘It’s a pity you ever sent that child to a day school, uncle Robert,’ Marion remarks presently, wiping the waterspots daintily from her dress. ‘She was bad enough before, but now she is simply intolerable.’

‘My love, I couldn’t afford a boarding school, and I was obliged to send her somewhere,’ replies the surgeon, in his longsuffering way. ‘At home she was learning only to dig potatoes and to whistle, neither of which pursuits is an attractive accomplishment in a young lady. The child is not bad at bottom.’

‘Perhaps not,’ answers Marion, snappishly, ‘but the bottom must be a long way down. I’ve never come to it yet.’

‘She is very warm-hearted.’

‘Yes, if warmth of heart consists in rushing at one like an avalanche, hugging one round the neck like a bear, and rumpling one’s collar atrociously, without the faintest provocation.’

‘She is not of an idle disposition,’ remonstrates the uncle. ‘I found her cleaning the back kitchen windows at half-past six this morning. No one had asked her to do it.’

‘Of course not. That’s just the reason she did it.’

‘If you would take a little more pains with her, Marion,’ suggests Dr. Faunthorpe, timidly----

‘Pains! I might take _agonies_, and without the least effect. Didn’t I begin to teach her music----’

‘Yes, my dear, but you didn’t go on.’

‘Well, you just try to teach her anything, uncle Robert--just try--that’s all,’ says Marion, with awful significance, and then breaks out with a sigh, ‘Oh dear, is this precious old omnibus never coming?’

‘It is rather late, my dear. But as it isn’t going to bring us any one we care about, we needn’t worry ourselves about it.’

‘It would be something to look at just for a minute. If you only knew what a difference there is between the look-out down here and above Bar. There there’s almost always something going by--Mrs. Stormont’s basket carriage, or Master Groshen’s pony, or the butcher’s cart.’

‘Ah, my dear, I’m afraid that long visit to your uncle Trenchard has spoiled you for my quiet home.’

‘No, it hasn’t, uncle,’ answers the girl, with a little gush of feeling in the midst of her petulance, just strong enough to show the better side of her nature--‘no, it hasn’t, for this is home and that isn’t. I should always feel that if I spent the rest of my life with uncle Stephen. Of all the old fidgets----! Well, I suppose I oughtn’t to say anything against him, for he has been very kind to me in his way. He has given me a good deal of money from first to last, though I must say he doled it out stingily, as if he liked the money better than me; and it is nice staying at his house--one feels one’s self somebody. Only think of the Stormonts, and the Groshens, and the Marlin Spykes calling on him before he had been three weeks in Redcastle, while you’ve lived here thirty years and they’ve never called upon you.’

‘People at this end of the town are not visited, my dear,’ replies the doctor, mildly, as one who bows to the mysterious ways of Providence and questions not. ‘I dare say the _élite_ of Redcastle called upon your uncle out of kindness, he being a stranger.’

‘He being a millionaire, uncle, that’s what you mean. Very much they’d have called upon him if he’d been a stranger who wanted to get his living. Think of the Stormonts giving a dinner party on purpose for him, and inviting _me_--after ignoring me for the last four years--staring me in the face, after church, for two hundred Sundays, and taking no more interest in me than if I were a stone cherub on a tablet in the minster, and now, all of a sudden, being so fond of me. It’s too ridiculous. If I was as worldly as they are, I’d take a little more pains not to show it.’

‘The world is worldly, my love,’ replies uncle Robert, with his resigned air. ‘You can hardly expect it to be otherwise. For my part, I am very glad to think that the Stormonts have taken notice of you, and that you’ve been invited out with Mr. Trenchard. It may lead to your making a good marriage, though you needn’t set your mind upon that now, as it is tolerably certain your uncle will leave you an independence. I only wish Sibyl were at home to have her share of good fortune.’

‘It’s her own fault if she isn’t,’ says Marion.

‘Say rather her conscientiousness, my dear. She doesn’t like to leave Mrs. Hazleton in a difficulty about her children; and very right too. But I hope Mrs. Hazleton will suit herself with a new governess very soon, and let Sibyl come home. Mr. Trenchard has asked for her so often, and it really seems flying in the face of Providence for her to be out of the way.’

‘If she wasn’t a stupid, she wouldn’t be at Mrs. Hazleton’s beck and call,’ says Marion, and then exclaims, shrilly, ‘Here’s the omnibus, and lots of people inside. Why, there’s some one nodding to us--a lady in a gray hat--and--I declare, the ’bus is stopping. Why, it’s Sibyl.’

The blundering vehicle stops before Dr. Faunthorpe’s gate; a shabby carpet bag--only a carpet bag--is handed down from the roof, and in the next instant Sibyl is in the homely little garden, sobbing hysterically on her uncle’s shoulder.

He presses her to his breast tenderly, and looks in the pale, wan face.

‘Why, my darling, how ill you look--how changed--how thin!’

‘I’ve had so much hard work, uncle,’ she answers, faintly, ‘but, thank God, I am at home at last.’