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The Curate in Charge
CHAPTER III
AUNT JANE
THE STTHE ST. Johns had one relative, and only one, so far as they knew. This was Miss Jane Maydew, who lived in London, the aunt of their mother, a lady who possessed in her own right – but, alas, only in the form of an annuity – the magnificent income of two hundred and fifty pounds a year. To think that this old lady, with only herself to think of, should have fifty pounds more yearly than a clergyman with a family, and all the parish looking to him! More than once this idea had crossed even Hester’s mind, though she was very reasonable and could make her pounds go further than most people. Miss Maydew was not very much older than her niece, but yet she was an old lady, sixty-five, or thereabouts. She liked her little comforts as well as most people, yet she had laid by fifty pounds of her income for the last twenty years, with the utmost regularity. A thousand pounds is a pretty little sum of money, but it does not seem much to account for twenty years of savings. A stockbroker might make it easily in a morning by a mere transfer from one hand to another; and to think how much wear and tear of humanity can be in it on the other hand! It is discouraging to poor economists to feel how little they can do, labour as they may; but I don’t think Miss Maydew had anything of this feeling. She was on the contrary very proud of her thousand pounds. It was her own creation, she had made it out of nothing; and the name of it, a thousand pounds! was as a strain of music in her ears, like the name of a favourite child. Perhaps it was the completion of this beautiful sum, rounded and finished like a poem, which gave her something of that satisfaction and wish for repose which follows the completion of every great work; and this brought about her visit to Brentburn, and all that directly and indirectly followed it. She had not seen the St. Johns since Hester’s death, though they were her nearest relatives, the natural heirs of the fortune she had accumulated. And the summer was warming into June, and everything spoke of the country. Miss Maydew lived in Great Coram Street, Russell Square. She had two charming large rooms, her bedroom at the back, her sitting-room at the front, the two drawing-rooms in better days of the comfortable Bloomsbury mansion. But even when your rooms are airy and cool, it is hard to fight against that sense of summer which drops into a London street in the warm long days, waking recollections of all kinds, making eyelids drowsy, and the imagination work. Even the cries in the street, the “flowers a blowing and a growing” of the costermongers, the first vegetables, the “groundsel for your birds,” and the very sight of the greengrocer opposite with his groves of young cabbages and baskets of young potatoes awoke this sensation of summer in the heart of the solitary woman at her window. Her youth, which was so full of summer, stirred in her once more, and old scenes all framed in waving foliage of trees and soft enclosures of greensward, came before her closed eyes as she dozed through the long long sunny afternoon. A frugal old maiden, lodging in two rooms in a noisy Bloomsbury street, and saving fifty pounds a year, is as little safe as any poet from such visitations. As she sat there musing in that strange confusion of mind which makes one wonder sometimes whether the things one recollects ever were, or were merely a dream, Hester and Hester’s children came into Miss Maydew’s mind. She had not seen them since her niece’s death, and what might have become of the poor children left with that incapable father? This thought simmered in her fancy for a whole week, then suddenly one morning when it was finer than ever, and the very canaries sang wildly in their cages, and the costermongers’ cries lost all their hoarseness in the golden air, she took the decided step of going off to the railway and taking a ticket for Brentburn. It was not very far, an hour’s journey only, and there was no need to take any luggage with her, as she could return the same night; so the excursion was both cheap and easy, as mild an extravagance as heart could desire.
The air was full of the wild sweet freshness of the pines as she landed on the edge of the common; the seed pods on the gorse bushes were crackling in the heat, the ragged hedges on the roadside hung out long pennons of straggling branches, blossomed to the very tips with wild roses delicately sweet. Miss Maydew was not long in encountering the objects of her interest. As she went along to the rectory, carrying her large brown sunshade open in one hand, and her large white pocket-handkerchief to fan herself in the other, her ears and her eyes were alike attracted by a little group, under the shadow of a great tree just where the gorse and the pines ended. There were two tall girls in print frocks of the simplest character, and large hats of coarse straw; and seated on the root of the tree slightly raised above them, a plain little woman in a brown gown. Some well worn volumes were lying on the grass, but the book which one of the girls held in her hand, standing up in an attitude of indignant remonstrance, was a square slim book of a different aspect. The other held a huge pencil, one of those weapons red at one end and blue at the other which schoolboys love, which she twirled in her fingers with some excitement. Miss Maydew divined at once who they were, and walking slowly, listened. Their voices were by no means low, and they were quite unconscious of auditors and indifferent who might hear.
“What does ‘nice’ mean?” cried the elder, flourishing the book. “Why, is it not ladylike? If one is clever, and has a gift, is one not to use it? Not nice? I want to know what nice means?”
“My dear,” said the governess, “I wish you would not always be asking what everything means. A great many things are understood without explanation in good society – ”
“But we don’t know anything about good society, nor society at all. Why is it not nice for Mab to draw? Why is it unladylike?” cried the girl, her eyes sparkling. As for the other one, she shrugged her shoulders, and twirled her pencil, while Miss Brown looked at them with a feeble protestation, clasping her hands in despair.
“Oh, Cicely! never anything but why? – why?” she said, with lofty, yet pitying disapproval, “You may be sure it is so when I say it.” Then, leaving this high position for the more dangerous exercise of reason. “Besides, the more one thinks of it, the more improper it seems. There are drawings of gentlemen in that book. Is that nice, do you suppose? Gentlemen! Put it away; and, Mabel, I desire you never to do anything so very unladylike again.”
“But, Miss Brown!” said the younger; “there are a great many gentlemen in the world. I can’t help seeing them, can I?”
“A young lady who respects herself, and who has been brought up as she ought, never looks at gentlemen. No, you can’t help seeing them; but to draw them you must look at them; you must study them. Oh!” said Miss Brown with horror, putting up her hands before her eyes, “never let me hear of such a thing again. Give me the book, Cicely. It is too dreadful. I ought to burn it; but at least I must lock it away.”
“Don’t be afraid, Mab; she shan’t have the book,” said Cicely, with flashing eyes, stepping back, and holding the volume behind her in her clasped hands.
Just then Miss Maydew touched her on the sleeve. “I can’t be mistaken,” said the old lady; “you are so like your poor mother. Are you not Mr. St. John’s daughter? I suppose you don’t remember me?”
“It is Aunt Jane,” whispered Mab in Cicely’s ear, getting up with a blush, more conscious of the interruption than her sister was. The artist had the quickest eye.
“Yes, it is Aunt Jane; I am glad you recollect,” said Miss Maydew. “I have come all the way from town to pay you a visit, and that is not a small matter on such a hot day.”
“Papa will be very glad to see you,” said Cicely, looking up shy but pleased, with a flood of colour rushing over her face under the shade of her big hat. She was doubtful whether she should put up her pretty cheek to kiss the stranger, or wait for that salutation. She put out her hand, which seemed an intermediate measure. “I am Cicely,” she said, “and this is Mab; we are very glad to see you, Aunt Jane.”
Miss Brown got up hastily from under the tree, and made the stranger a curtsy. She gave a troubled glance at the girls’ frocks, which were not so fresh as they might have been. “You will excuse their schoolroom dresses,” she said, “we were not expecting any one; and it was so fine this morning that I indulged the young ladies, and let them do their work here. Ask your aunt, my dears, to come in.”
“Work!” said Miss Maydew, somewhat crossly, “I heard nothing but talk. Yes, I should like to go in, if you please. It is a long walk from the station – and so hot. Why, it is hotter here than in London, for all you talk about the country. There you can always get shade on one side of the street. This is like a furnace. I don’t know how you can live in such a blazing place;” and the old lady fanned herself with her large white handkerchief, a sight which brought gleams of mischief into Mab’s brown eyes. The red and blue pencil twirled more rapidly round than ever in her fingers, and she cast a longing glance at the sketch-book in Cicely’s hand. The girls were quite cool, and at their ease under the great beech-tree, which threw broken shadows far over the grass, – shadows which waved about as the big boughs did, and refreshed the mind with soft visionary fanning. Their big hats shadowed two faces, fresh and cool like flowers, with that downy bloom upon them which is the privilege of extreme youth. Miss Brown, who was concerned about their frocks, saw nothing but the creases in their pink and white garments; but what Miss Maydew saw was (she herself said) “a picture;” two fair slim things in white, with touches of pink, in soft shade, with bright patches of sunshine flitting about them, and the green background of the common rolled back in soft undulations behind. Poor lady! she was a great contrast to this picture; her cheeks flushed with the heat, her bonnet-strings loosed, fanning herself with her handkerchief. And this was what woke up those gleams of fun in Mab’s saucy eyes.
“But it is not hot,” said Mab. “How can you speak of a street when you are on the common? Don’t you smell the pines, Aunt Jane, and the honey in the gorse? Come under the tree near to us; it is not the least hot here.”
“You are a conceited little person,” said Aunt Jane.
“Oh no! she is not conceited – she is only decided in her opinions,” said Cicely. “You see we are not hot in the shade. But come in this way, the back way, through the garden, which is always cool. Sit down here in the summer-house, Aunt Jane, and rest. I’ll run and get you some strawberries. They are just beginning to get ripe.”
“You are a nice little person,” said Miss Maydew, sitting down with a sigh of relief. “I don’t want any strawberries, but you can come and kiss me. You are very like your poor mother. As for that thing, I don’t know who she is like – not our family, I am sure.”
“She is like the St. John’s,” said Cicely solemnly; “she is like papa.”
Mab only laughed. She did not mind what people said. “I’ll kiss you, too,” she said, “Aunt Jane, if you like; though you don’t like me.”
“I never said I didn’t like you. I am not so very fond of my family as that. One can see you are a pickle, though I don’t so much mind that either; but I like to look at this one, because she is like your poor mother. Dear, dear! Hester’s very eyes, and her cheeks like two roses, and her nice brown wavy hair!”
The girls drew near with eager interest, and Mab took up in her artist’s fingers a great handful of the hair which lay upon her sister’s shoulders. “Was mamma’s like that?” she said in awe and wonder; and Cicely, too, fixed her eyes upon her own bright locks reverentially. It gave them a new strange feeling for their mother to think that she had once been a girl like themselves. Strangest thought for a child’s mind to grasp; stranger even than the kindred thought, that one day those crisp half-curling locks, fall of threads of gold, would be blanched like the soft braids under Mrs. St. John’s cap. “Poor mamma!” they said simultaneously under their breath.
“Brighter than that!” said Miss Maydew, seeing across the mists of years a glorified vision of youth, more lovely than Hester had ever been. “Ah, well!” she added with a sigh, “time goes very quickly, girls. Before you know, you will be old, too, and tell the young ones how pretty you were long ago. Yes, Miss Audacity! you mayn’t believe it, but I was pretty, too.”
“Oh yes, I believe it!” cried Mab, relieved from the momentary gravity which had subdued her. “You have a handsome nose still, and not nearly so bad a mouth as most people. I should like to draw you, just as you stood under the beech-tree; that was beautiful!” she cried, clapping her hands. Miss Maydew was pleased. She recollected how she had admired the two young creatures under that far-spreading shade; and it did not seem at all unnatural that they should in their turn have admired her.
“Mabel! Mabel!” said Miss Brown, who knew better, lifting a warning finger. Miss Maydew took up the sketch-book which Cicely had laid on the rough table in the summer-house. “Is this what you were all talking about?” she said. But at this moment the governess withdrew and followed Cicely into the house. She walked through the garden towards the rectory in a very dignified way. She could not stand by and laugh faintly at caricatures of herself as some high-minded people are capable of doing. “I hope Miss Maydew will say what she thinks very plainly,” she said to Cicely, who flew past her in a great hurry with a fresh clean white napkin out of the linen-press. But Cicely was much too busy to reply. As for Mab, I think she would have escaped too, had she been able; but as that was impossible, she stood up very demurely while her old aunt turned over the book, which was a note-book ruled with blue lines, and intended for a more virtuous purpose than that to which it had been appropriated; and it was not until Miss Maydew burst into a short but hearty laugh over a caricature of Miss Brown that Mab ventured to breathe.
“You wicked little thing! Are these yours?” said Miss Maydew; “and how dared you let that poor woman see them? Why, she is there to the life!”
“Oh! Aunt Jane, give me the book! She has never seen them: only a few innocent ones at the beginning. Oh! please give me the book! I don’t want her to see them!” cried Mab.
“You hate her, I suppose?”
“Oh! no, no! give me the book, Aunt Jane! We don’t hate her at all; we like her rather. Oh! please give it me before she comes back!”
“Why do you make caricatures of her, then?” said Miss Maydew, fixing her eyes severely on the girl’s face.
“Because she is such fun!” cried Mab; “because it is such fun. I don’t mean any harm, but if people will look funny, how can I help it? Give me the book, Aunt Jane!”
“I suppose I looked funny too,” said Miss Maydew, “under the beech-tree, fanning myself with my pockethandkerchief. I thought I heard you giggle. Go away, you wicked little thing! Here is your sister coming. I like her a great deal better than you!”
“So she is, a great deal better than me,” said Mab, picking up her book. She stole away, giving herself a serious lecture, as Cicely tripped into the summer-house carrying a tray. “I must not do it again,” she said to herself. “It is silly of me. It is always getting me into scrapes; even papa, when I showed him that one of himself!” Here Mab paused to laugh, for it had been very funny – and then blushed violently; for certainly it was wrong, very wrong to caricature one’s papa. “At all events,” she said under her breath, “I’ll get a book with a lock and key as soon as ever I have any money, and show them only to Cicely; but oh! I must, I must just this once, do Aunt Jane!”
Cicely meanwhile came into the summer-house carrying the tray. “It is not the right time for it, I know,” she said, “but I felt sure you would like a cup of tea. Doesn’t it smell nice – like the hay-fields? Tea is always nice, is it not, Aunt Jane?”
“My darling, you are the very image of your poor mother!” said Miss Maydew with tears in her eyes. “She was always one who took the trouble to think what her friends would like best. And what good tea it is, and how nicely served! Was the kettle boiling? Ah! I recognise your dear mother in that. It used always to be a saying with us at home that the kettle should always be boiling in a well-regulated house.”
Then the old lady began to ask cunning questions about the household: whether Cicely was in the habit of making tea and carrying trays about, as she did this so nicely; and other close and delicate cross-examinations, by which she found out a great deal about the qualities of the servant and the governess. Miss Maydew was too clever to tell Cicely what she thought at the conclusion of her inquiry, but she went in thoughtfully to the house, and was somewhat silent as the girls took her all over it – to the best room to take off her bonnet, to their room to see what a pretty view they had, and into all the empty chambers. The comments she made as she followed them were few but significant. “It was rather extravagant of your papa to furnish it all; he never could have wanted so large a house,” she said.
“Oh! but the furniture is the Rector’s, it is not papa’s,” cried her conductors, both in a breath.
“I shouldn’t like, if I were him, to have the charge of other people’s furniture,” Miss Maydew replied; and it seemed to the girls that she was rather disposed to find fault with all poor papa’s arrangements, though she was so kind to them. Mr. St. John was “in the parish,” and did not come back till it was time for the early dinner; and it was late in the afternoon when Miss Maydew, knocking at his study door, went in alone to “have a talk” with him, with the intention of “giving him her mind” on several subjects, written fully in her face. The study was a well-sized room looking out upon the garden, and furnished with heavy book-shelves and bureaux in old dark coloured mahogany. The carpet was worn, but those mournful pieces of furniture defied the action of time. She looked round upon them with a slightly supercilious critical glance.
“The room is very well furnished,” she said, “Mr. St. John; exceedingly well furnished; to rub it up and keep it in order must give your servant a great deal of work.”
“It is not my furniture, but Mr. Chester’s, my rector,” said the curate; “we never had very much of our own.”
“It must give the maid a deal of work all the same, and that’s why the girls have so much housemaiding to do, I suppose,” said Miss Maydew sharply. “To tell the truth, that was what I came to speak of. I am not at all satisfied, Mr. St. John, about the girls.”
“The girls? They are quite well, I think, quite well,” said Mr. St. John meekly. He was not accustomed to be spoken to in this abrupt tone.
“I was not thinking of their health; of course they are well; how could they help being well with so much fresh air, and a cow, I suppose, and all that? I don’t like the way they are managed. They are nice girls, but that Miss Brown knows just about as much how to manage them as you – as that table does, Mr. St. John. It is ridiculous. She has no control over them. Now, I’ll tell you what is my opinion. They ought to be sent to school.”
“To school!” he said, startled. “I thought girls were not sent to school.”
“Ah, that is when they have a nice mother to look after them – a woman like poor Hester; but what are those two doing? You don’t look after them yourself, Mr. St. John?”
“I suppose it can’t be said that I do,” he said, with hesitation: “perhaps it is wrong, but what do I know of girls’ education? and then they all said I should have Miss Brown.”
“Who are ‘they all?’ You should have asked me. I should never have said Miss Brown. Not that I’ve anything against her. She is a good, silly creature enough – but pay attention to me, please, Mr. St. John. I say the girls should go to school.”
“It is very likely you may be right,” said Mr. St. John, who always yielded to impetuosity, “but what should I do with Miss Brown?”
“Send her away – nothing could be more easy – tell her that you shall not want her services any longer. You must give her a month’s notice, unless she was engaged in some particular way.”
“I don’t know,” said the curate in trepidation. “Bless me, it will be very unpleasant. What will she do? What do you think she would say? Don’t you think, on the whole, we get on very well as we are? I have always been told that it was bad to send girls to school; and besides it costs a great deal of money,” he added after a pause. “I don’t know if I could afford it; that is a thing which must be thought of,” he said, with a sense of relief.
“I have thought of that,” said Miss Maydew triumphantly: “the girls interest me, and I will send them to school. Oh, don’t say anything. I don’t do it for thanks. To me their improving will be my recompense. Put all anxiety out of your mind; I will undertake the whole – ”
“But, Miss Maydew!”
“There are no buts in the matter,” said Aunt Jane, rising; “I have quite settled it. I have saved a nice little sum, which will go to them eventually, and I should like to see them in a position to do me credit. Don’t say anything, Mr. St. John. Hester’s girls! – poor Hester! – no one in the world can have so great a claim upon me; and no one can tell so well as I what they lost in poor Hester, Mr. St. John – and what you lost as well.”
The curate bowed his head. Though he was so tranquil and resigned, the name of his Hester went to his heart, with a dull pang, perhaps – for he was growing old, and had a calm unimpassioned spirit – but still with a pang, and no easy words of mourning would come to his lip.
“Yes, indeed,” said Aunt Jane, “I don’t know that I ever knew any one like her; and her girls shall have justice, they shall have justice, Mr. St. John. I mean to make it my business to find them a school – but till you have heard from me finally,” she added, turning back after she had reached the door, “it will be as well not to say anything to Miss Brown.”
“Oh no,” said the curate eagerly, “it will be much best to say nothing to Miss Brown.”
Miss Maydew nodded at him confidentially as she went away, and left him in all the despair of an unexpected crisis. He say anything to Miss Brown! What should he say? That he had no further occasion for her services? But how could he say so to a lady? Had he not always gone upon the amiable ground that she had done him the greatest favour in coming there to teach his daughters, and now to dismiss her – to dismiss her! Mr. St. John’s heart sunk down, down to the very heels of his boots. It was all very easy for Aunt Jane, who had not got it to do; but he, he! how was he ever to summon his courage and say anything like this to Miss Brown?
