The Cuckoo in the Nest. Mrs. Oliphant
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dear, you’re quite grown up, don’t you know; quite a man now. You mustn’t be so mischievous, just like a boy. Poor Uncle Giles, you must not play tricks upon him; he likes a quiet game.”
“Don’t you be a fool, Meg. Why, that was what I was doing all the night, playing his quiet game. Poor old father, he got into a temper, but bless you ’twasn’t my fault. It’s that old ass, Dunning, that’s always getting in everybody’s way.”
“Of course he would like you best, Gervase—but Dunning knows all his ways. Your game might be better fun——”
“I should think so,” said the poor Softy. “My game is the game, and Dunning spoils everything. It ain’t my fault, though every one of you gets into a wax with me,”—Gervase’s lip quivered a little as if he might have cried—“and me giving up everything only to please them!” he said.
“I am sure they are pleased to see you always indoors and not spending your time in that dreadful place.”
“What dreadful place? That is all you know—I’d never have come home any more but for them that’s there. It was she that sent me to please the old folks. But I shan’t go on much longer if you all treat me like this. I’ve tried my best to make the time pass for them, Meg, to give them a laugh and that. And they huff me and cuff me as if I was a fool. Why do they always call me a fool,” cried the poor fellow with a passing cloud of trouble, “whatever I do?”
“Oh, Gervase!” cried Margaret, full of pity. “But why did she want you so particularly to please them just now?”
He stared at her for a moment, then laughed and nodded his head. “You’d just like to know!” he said, “but she didn’t mean me to be nice to you, Meg; for she’s always afraid I’ll be driven to marry you—though a man must not marry his grandmother, you know.”
Margaret repented in a moment of the flush of anger that flew over her. “You can make her mind easy on that point,” she said gravely; “but oh, Gervase, I am afraid it will make them very unhappy if you go on with this fancy; they would never let you bring her here.”
“Fancy!” he cried, “I’m going to marry her. You can’t call that a fancy; and if you think you can put me off it, or the whole world!—Get along Meg, I don’t want to talk to you any more.”
“But I want very much to talk to you, Gervase.”
Gervase looked at her with a smile of foolish complacency. “I dare say you think me silly,” he cried, “but here’s two of you after me. Get along, Meg; whatever I do I’m not going to take your way.”
“You must do as you please, then,” said Margaret in despair; “but remember, Gervase,” she said, turning back before she reached the door, “your father is old, and you might drive him into a fit if you go on as you did to-night—and where would you be then?” she added, with an appeal to the better feeling in which she still believed.
“Why, I’d be in his place, and she’d be my lady,” cried the young man, with a gleam of cruel cunning, “and nobody could stop me any more, whatever I liked to do.”
But next evening there seemed to be in his mind some lingering regard for what she had said. Gervase left his father alone, and devoted himself to his mother, who was more able to take care of herself. He offered to wind her silks, and entangled them hopelessly with delighted peals of laughter. He took her scissors to snip off the ends for her, and put the sharp points through the canvas, until Lady Piercey, in her exasperation, gave him a sudden cuff on his cheek.
“You great fool!” she cried—“you malicious wretch! Do you want to spoil my work as well as everything else? I wish you were little enough to be whipped, I do; and I wish I had whipped you when you were little, when it might have done you some good. Margaret, what do you mean sitting quiet there, enjoying yourself with a book and me driven out of my senses? That’s what he wants to do, I believe—to drive us mad and get his own way; to make us crazy, both his poor father and me.”
“No, I don’t,” cried Gervase, “and you oughtn’t to hit me—I’ll hit back again if you do it again. It hurts—you’ve got a fist like a butcher, though you’re such an old lady.” He rubbed his cheek for a moment dolefully, and then again burst out laughing. “You look like old Judy in the show, mamma, when she hits her baby: only you’re so fat you could never get into it, and your voice is gruff like the old showman’s—not squeaky, like Mrs. Punch. I’ve cut all the silks into nice lengths for you to work with—ain’t you obliged to me? Look here,” he said, holding out his work. Poor Lady Piercey clapped her fat hands together loudly in sheer incapacity of expression. It made a loud report like a gun fired off to relieve her feelings, and Sir Giles looked up from his quiet game with Dunning, not without a subdued amusement that she should now be getting her share.
“What’s the matter, what’s the matter, my lady? Is that cub of yours playing some of his pranks? It’s your turn to-night, it appears, and serves you right, for you always back him up.”
“Oh, you fool, you fool, you fool!” cried the old lady in her passion. And then she turned her fiery eyes on her husband with a look of contempt and fury too great for words. “Meg!” she cried, putting out her hand across the table and grasping Mrs. Osborne’s arm, “If you’re ever driven wild like me, never you look for sympathy to a man! when they see you nearly mad with trouble they give you a look, and chuckle! that’s what they always do. Put down the scissors, you, you, you——”
“Oh, and to think,” she cried wildly, “that that’s my only son! Oh, Giles, how can you play your silly games, and sit and see him—the only one we have between us, and he’s a born fool! And me, that was so thankful to see him stay at home, and give up going out to his low company! And now I can’t abide him. I can’t abide to see him here!”
This happened on the night when Patty, frightened and dejected, shut herself up in the room which she had meant for her bridal bower, and cried her eyes out because of Gervase’s absence. The poor Softy was thus of as much importance as any hero, turning houses and hearts upside down.
CHAPTER XI.
A whole week, and nothing had been seen or heard of Gervase at the Seven Thorns. Even old Hewitt remarked it, with a taunt to his daughter. “Where’s your Softy, that was never out of the house, Miss Patty, eh? Don’t seem to be always about at your apron string, my lass, as you thought you was to keep him there. Them gentlemen,” said old Hewitt, “as I’ve told you, Softy or not, they takes their own way, and there’s no trust to be put in them. He’s found some one else as he likes better, or maybe you’ve given him the sack, Patty, eh? And that’s a pity, for he was a good customer,” the landlord said.
“Whether I’ve given him the sack or he’s found some one he likes better, don’t matter much to any one as I can see. I’ll go to my work, father, if you’ve got nothing more sensible than that to say.”
“Sensible or not, he’s gone, and a good riddance,” said her father. “I ain’t a fine Miss, thick with the rector and the gentry, like you; but I declare, to see that gaby laughing and gaping at the other side of the table, turned me sick, it did. And I hopes as we’ll see no more of him, nor none of his kind. If you will have a sweetheart, there’s plenty of good fellows about, ’stead of a fool like that.”
Patty did not stamp her foot as she would have liked to do, or throw out her arms, or scream with rage and disappointment. She went on knocking her broom into all the corners, taking it out more or less in that way, and tingling from the bunch of hair fashionably dressed on the top of her head, to the toe of her high-heeled shoes, with suppressed passion. She would not make an exhibition of herself. She would not give Ellen, the maid-servant, closely observing her through the open door of the back kitchen, nor Bob, the ostler, who had also heard