The Son of His Father. Mrs. Oliphant
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you’ll give me a little milk, or some water, to revive me, I’ll be quite right in a minute,’ she said.
‘That may be true,’ said Mrs. Box, ‘for goodness knows the best of folks you can’t see into their heart; but a man as has been in prison ain’t like any other man. They learn such a deal of harm, even if it’s not in them to begin with. I’ve just made the tea for breakfast, and here’s a nice cup—that’ll do you more good than anything else—and sit down a moment and get your breath. I said to William, “There’s Mrs. Sandford a-talking to that brute; you go and see that she’s all right.” But William, he said to me, “If anyone can bring him to his senses it’s just Mrs. Sandford will do it.” So we stood and we watched. And what did he say to you, ma’am?—and dear, dear, how it’s taken all the nice colour out of your cheeks.’
‘Thank you for the tea. It has done me a great deal of good,’ said the old lady; ‘and now I must go home, for Mr. Sandford will be wondering what has become of me. Poor man, he was very amenable, after all, when one comes to think of it. I told him Edgeley was no place for the like of him, and that perhaps he might get work in the town: and you see he has gone away. Oh, poor soul! He was some poor woman’s boy once, that perhaps has broken her heart for him, Mrs. Box, and never thought to see him come to that, any more than you or me.’
‘Well, that’s true, ma’am,’ said Mrs. Box. ‘We don’t know what they’ll come to, as we’re so proud of when they’re children. Hold up your head, Willie, do! and ask Mrs. Sandford to let you carry her basket, as is always heavy with things for the poor.’
‘Not this morning, Mrs. Box. I had but an egg or two in it,’ said Mrs. Sandford, opening the lid to show that it was empty. There was a certain suspicion, she thought, in this speech. ‘There is no need for troubling Willie; but he is a fine, good-natured boy, and always willing to carry a parcel or run an errand. Good-morning to you all; you are kind folks.’
She thought the tea had saved her as she set out again down the village street. But her limbs still tottered, and she walked slowly, thinking the way twice as long as usual. They all called out how pale she was when she got in.
‘It is going out,’ she said, ‘without a cup of tea or anything, which was all my own fault.’
‘And why did you go out so early, without saying a word,’ said her husband. ‘Charity, my dear, is a fine thing; but you should not carry it too far. Neither that nor anything else is good when it’s carried too far.’
Mrs. Sandford only smiled and said it would be difficult to go too far when there were so many poor people, and pretended to make a very good breakfast behind the tea-urn. After breakfast she lay down a little on the sofa, saying that it was the most ridiculous thing in the world to be so tired for nothing, and that she must have taken something that disagreed with her, for the stomach was at the bottom of everything when one grew old. It was still holiday time with John, and he insisted upon staying with her when grandfather went out for that daily walk which nothing short of death in the house would have made him leave off. John was unusually grave. He came and sat beside the sofa with a very perplexed countenance.
‘Grandmamma,’ he said, ‘I feel all mixed. I am so puzzled with remembering something. Remembering and forgetting. Wasn’t I somehow mixed up when I was a little chap with the name of May?’
CHAPTER VII.
COMRADES.
‘So we’ve got to leave off work, Jack. I don’t know how you may feel, but I don’t like it at all.’
This was what Elly Spencer said as she put her books together in Mr. Cattley’s study on a day in January not long before that on which the holidays, if they had been only holidays, would have come to an end. She was sixteen—a little younger than John Sandford, hitherto her constant companion and class-fellow. The relations between them were even more close than this, as the class consisted but of these two. Occasionally there had been a little emulation between them, even by times a keen prick of rivalry, but Mr. Cattley had made it very distinctly understood that, while John was more accurate in point of grammar and all the scaffolding of study, Elly was the one who caught the poetry or the meaning most quickly, and jumped at the signification of a sentence even when she did not know all the words of which it was composed. This was true to a certain extent, but not perhaps to the full length to which the curate carried it; but it had a very agreeable effect as between the two students, and carried off everything that might have been too sharp in their rivalry.
Thus Elly’s part was clearly defined, and so was John’s. If by chance the girl remembered a rule of construction before the boy on some exceptional occasion, or the boy perceived the sense of a passage before the girl, it made a laugh instead of any conflict of mutual jealousy.
‘Why, here’s Jack and Elly changing places,’ the curate would say, and no harm was done. The link between the two was, however, a very unusual one to exist between a boy and girl. They were like brother and sister, they were two comrades in the completest sense of the words, and yet they were something more. They were like each other’s second self in different conditions. Elly could not very well imagine what she would do were she Percy or Dick—who had strayed away from the habits of their home, into those of public schoolboys, members of a great corporation bound by other laws; but she thought she could quite imagine what she would do were she John, or Jack, as the young ones called him.
It did not indeed enter into Jack’s mind to realise what he should do were he Elly; for that is one inalienable peculiarity of the human constitution that no male creature can put himself in the place of a woman, as almost all female creatures imaginatively place themselves in that of some man. It is the one intimate mark of constitutional superiority which makes the meanest man more self-important than the noblest woman. Elly knew exactly what she would do if she were John. It was like herself going out into the world, planning the future, foreseeing all that was to happen. If it had been possible for her to go out into the world too, and have a profession, which with a sigh of regret she acknowledged was not possible, she would have done it just as he was going to do it. His enthusiasm about lighthouses had indeed been struck out by Elly, who had read all about the Eddystone ‘in a book,’ as she said, and who thenceforward had done nothing but talk about it till she became a bore to her brothers, and set John’s congenial soul aflame.
John and she talked between themselves about ‘the boys’ with a great deal of honest kindness, but perhaps just a little contempt—contempt is too hard, too unpleasant a word; but then toleration always implies this more or less. The boys got into scrapes: they thought of nothing but their shooting or their fishing: they were dreadfully bored on wet days, or when, as they said, there was ‘nothing to do.’
‘Jack and I can always find something to do,’ Elly said.
Perhaps it was after hearing one of these speeches that Mrs. Egerton, called at the rectory Aunt Mary, decided that Elly had carried her studies far enough, and had better now devote herself to feminine accomplishments, and carry on the lighter part of her education at home. This decision coincided in point of time with the resolution of Mr. and Mrs. Sandford to withdraw John from the curate’s charge; so that, though it had a certain dolorous character as a break-up, there was none of the painful feeling on either part of being sent away from those studies which another more fortunate was still carrying on.
John and Elly had come together by one impulse to remove their books. The room in which they had worked was Mr. Cattley’s study, the front parlour of the house in which he lodged; for the curate being only, as it were, in the position of a temporary inhabitant (notwithstanding that no known inducement would have been enough to carry him away from Edgeley) had no house of his own, but lodged where all the curates had lodged within the memory of man, in Mrs. Sibley’s, whose house stood obliquely at the end of the village street, commanding a beautiful view of the street itself, and everything that went on there. The street was broad, and almost all the houses had little gardens,