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The girls came back, telling in eager scared voices how, while gathering butcher’s broom in Farmer Hodges’ home copse, a savage dog had flown out at them, but had been kept at bay by Mr. Clarence Winslow with an umbrella, while they escaped over the stile.

Clarence had not come into the drawing-room with them, and while my mother, who had a great objection to people standing about in out-door garments, sent them up to doff their bonnets and furs, I repaired to our room, and was horrified to find him on my bed, white and faint.

‘Bitten?’ I cried in dismay.

‘Yes; but not much.  Only I’m such a fool.  I turned off when I began taking off my boots.  No, no—don’t!  Don’t call any one.  It is nothing!’

He was springing up to stop me, but was forced to drop back, and I made my way to the drawing-room, where my mother happened to be alone.  She was much alarmed, but a glass of wine restored Clarence; and inspection showed that the thick trowser and winter stocking had so protected him that little blood had been drawn, and there was bruise rather than bite in the calf of the leg, where the brute had caught him as he was getting over the stile as the rear-guard.  It was painful, though the faintness was chiefly from tension of nerve, for he had kept behind all the way home, and no one had guessed at the hurt.  My mother doctored it tenderly, and he begged that nothing should be said about it; he wanted no fuss about such a trifle.  My mother agreed, with the proud feeling of not enhancing the obligations of the Fordyce family; but she absolutely kissed Clarence’s forehead as she bade him lie quiet till dinner-time.

We kept silence at table while the girls described the horrors of the monster.  ‘A tawny creature, with a hideous black muzzle,’ said Emily.  ‘Like a bad dream,’ said Miss Fordyce.  The two fathers expressed their intention of remonstrating with the farmer, and Griff declared that it would be lucky if he did not shoot it.  Miss Fordyce generously took its part, saying the poor dog was doing its duty, and Griff ejaculated, ‘If I had been there!’

‘It would not have dared to show its teeth, eh?’ said my father, when there was a good deal of banter.

My father, however, came at night with mamma to inspect the hurt and ask details, and he ended with, ‘Well done, Clarence, boy; I am gratified to see you are acquiring presence of mind, and can act like a man.’

Clarence smiled when they were gone, saying, ‘That would have been an insult to any one else.’

Emily perceived that he had not come off unscathed, and was much aggrieved at being bound to silence.  ‘Well,’ she broke out, ‘if the dog goes mad, and Clarence has the hydrophobia, I suppose I may tell.’

‘In that pleasing contingency,’ said Clarence smiling.  ‘Don’t you see, Emily, it is the worst compliment you can pay me not to treat this as a matter of course?’  Still, he was the happier for not having failed.  Whatever strengthened his self-respect and gave him trust in himself was a stepping-stone.

As to rivalry or competition with Griff, the idea seemingly never crossed his mind, and envy or jealousy were equally aloof from it.  One subject of thankfulness runs through these recollections—namely, that nothing broke the tie of strong affection between us three brothers.  Griffith might figure as the ‘vary parfite knight,’ the St. George of the piece, glittering in the halo shed round him by the bright eyes of the rescued damsel; while Clarence might drag himself along as the poor recreant to be contemned and tolerated, and he would accept the position meekly as only his desert, without a thought of bitterness.  Indeed, he himself seemed to have imbibed Nurse Gooch’s original opinion, that his genuine love for sacred things was a sort of impertinence and pretension in such as he—a kind of hypocrisy even when they were the realities and helps to which he clung with all his heart.  Still, this depression was only shown by reserve, and troubled no one save myself, who knew him best guessed what was lost by his silence, and burned in spirit at seeing him merely endured as one unworthy.

In one of our varieties of Waverley discussions the crystal hardness and inexperienced intolerance of youth made Miss Fordyce declare that had she been Edith Plantagenet, she would never, never have forgiven Sir Kenneth.  ‘How could she, when he had forsaken the king’s banner?  Unpardonable!’

Then came a sudden, awful silence, as she recollected her audience, and blushed crimson with the misery of perceiving where her random shaft had struck, nor did either of us know what to say; but to our surprise it was Clarence who first spoke to relieve the desperate embarrassment.  ‘Is forgiven quite the right word, when the offence was not personal?  I know that such things can neither be repaired nor overlooked, and I think that is what Miss Fordyce meant.’

‘Oh, Mr. Winslow,’ she exclaimed, ‘I am very sorry—I don’t think I quite meant’—and then, as her eyes for one moment fell on his subdued face, she added, ‘No, I said what I ought not.  If there is sorrow’—her voice trembled—‘and pardon above, no one below has any right to say unpardonable.’

Clarence bowed his head, and his lips framed, but he did not utter, ‘Thank you.’  Emily nervously began reading aloud the page before her, full of the jingling recurring rhymes about Sir Thomas of Kent; but I saw Ellen surreptitiously wipe away a tear, and from that time she was more kind and friendly with Clarence.

CHAPTER XX
VENI, VIDI, VICI

 
‘None but the brave,
None but the brave,
None but the brave deserve the fair.’—
 

Song.

Christmas trees were not yet heard of beyond the Fatherland, and both the mothers held that Christmas parties were not good for little children, since Mrs. Winslow’s strong common sense had arrived at the same conclusion as Mrs. Fordyce had derived from Hannah More and Richard Lovell Edgeworth.  Besides, rick-burning and mobs were far too recent for our neighbours to venture out at night.

But as we were all resolved that little Anne should have a memorable Christmas at Chantry House, we begged an innocent, though iced cake, from the cook, painted a set of characters ourselves, including all the dolls, and bespoke the presence of Frank Fordyce at a feast in the outer mullion room—Griff’s apartment, of course.  The locality was chosen as allowing more opportunity for high jinks than the bookroom, and also because the swords and pistols in trophy over the mantelpiece had a great fascination for the two sisters, and to ‘drink tea with Mr. Griffith’ was always known to be a great ambition of the little queen of the festival.  As to the mullion chamber legends, they had nearly gone out of our heads, though Clarence did once observe, ‘You remember, it will be the 26th of December;’ but we did not think this worthy of consideration, especially as Anne’s entertainment, at its latest, could not last beyond nine o’clock; and the ghostly performances—now entirely laid to the account of the departed stable-boy—never began before eleven.

Nor did anything interfere with our merriment.  The fun of fifty years ago must be intrinsically exquisite to bear being handed down to another generation, so I will attempt no repetition, though some of those Twelfth Day characters still remain, pasted into my diary.  We anticipated Twelfth Day because our guests meant to go to visit some other friends before the New Year, and we knew Anne would have no chance there of fulfilling her great ambition of drawing for king and queen.  These home-made characters were really charming.  Mrs. Fordyce had done several of them, and she drew beautifully.  A little manipulation contrived that the exquisite Oberon and Titania should fall to Martyn and Anne, for whom crowns and robes had been prepared, worn by her majesty with complacent dignity, but barely tolerated by him!  The others took their chance.  Parson Frank was Tom Thumb, and convulsed us all the evening by acting as if no bigger than that worthy, keeping us so merry that even Clarence laughed as I had never seen him laugh before.

Cock Robin and Jenny Wren—the best drawn of all—fell to Griff and Miss Fordyce.  There was a suspicion of a tint of real carnation on her cheek, as, on his low, highly-delighted bow, she held up her impromptu fan of folded paper; and drollery about currant wine and hopping upon twigs went on more or less all the time, while somehow or other the beauteous glow on her cheeks went on deepening, so that I never saw her look so pretty as when thus playing at Jenny Wren’s coyness, though neither she nor Griff had passed the bounds of her gracious precise discretion.

The joyous evening ended at last.  With the stroke of nine, Jenny Wren bore away Queen Titania to put her to bed, for the servants were having an entertainment of their own downstairs for all the out-door retainers, etc.  Oberon departed, after an interval sufficient to prove his own dignity and advanced age.  Emily went down to report the success of the evening to the elders in the drawing-room, but we lingered while Frank Fordyce was telling good stories of Oxford life, and Griff capping them with more recent ones.

We too broke up—I don’t remember how; but Clarence was to help me down the stairs, and Mr. Fordyce, frowning with anxiety at the process, was offering assistance, while we had much rather he had gone out of the way; when suddenly, in the gallery round the hall giving access to the bedrooms, there dawned upon us the startled but scarcely displeased figure of Jenny Wren in her white dress, not turning aside that blushing face, while Cock Robin was clasping her hand and pressing it to his lips.  The tap of my crutches warned them.  She flew back within her door and shut it; Griff strode rapidly on, caught hold of her father’s hand, exclaiming, ‘Sir, sir, I must speak to you!’ and dragged him back into the mullion room leaving Clarence and me to convey ourselves downstairs as best we might.

‘Our sister, our sweet sister!’

We were immensely excited.  All the three of us were so far in love with Ellen Fordyce that her presence was an enchantment to us, and at any rate none of us ever saw the woman we could compare to her; and as we both felt ourselves disqualified in different ways from any nearer approach, we were content to bask in the reflected rays of our brother’s happiness.

Not that he had gone that length as yet, as we knew before the night was over, when he came down to us.  Even with the dear maiden herself, he had only made sure that she was not averse, and that merely by her eyes and lips; and he had extracted nothing from her father but that they were both very young, a great deal too young, and had no business to think of such things yet.  It must be talked over, etc. etc.

But just then, Griff told us, Frank Fordyce jumped up and turned round with the sudden exclamation, ‘Ellen!’ looking towards the door behind him with blank astonishment, as he found it had neither been opened nor shut.  He thought his daughter had recollected something left behind, and coming in search of it, had retreated precipitately.  He had seen her, he said, in the mirror opposite.  Griff told him there was no mirror, and had to carry a candle across to convince him that he had only been looking at the door into the inner room, which though of shining dark oak, could hardly have made a reflection as vivid as he declared that his had been.  Indeed, he ascertained that Ellen had never left her own room at all.  ‘It must have been thinking about the dear child,’ he said.  ‘And after all, it was not quite like her—somehow—she was paler, and had something over her head.’  We had no doubt who it was.  Griff had not seen her, but he was certain that there had been none of the moaning nor crying, ‘In fact, she has come to give her consent,’ he said with earnest in his mocking tone.

‘Yes,’ said Clarence gravely, and with glistening eyes.  ‘You are happy Griff.  It is given to you to right the wrong, and quiet that poor spirit.’

‘Happy!  The happiest fellow in the world,’ said Griff, ‘even without that latter clause—if only Madam and the old man will have as much sense as she has!’

The next day was a thoroughly uncomfortable one.  Griff was not half so near his goal as he had hoped last night when with kindly Parson Frank.

The commotion was as if a thunderbolt had descended among the elders.  What they had been thinking of, I cannot tell, not to have perceived how matters were tending; but their minds were full of the Reform Bill and the state of the country, and, besides, we were all looked on still as mere children.  Indeed, Griff was scarcely one-and-twenty, and Ellen wanted a month of seventeen; and the crisis had really been a sudden impulse, as he said, ‘She looked so sweet and lovely, he could not help it.’

The first effect was a serious lecture upon maidenliness and propriety to poor Ellen from her mother, who was sure that she must have transgressed the bounds of discretion, or such ill-bred presumption would have been spared her, and bitterly regretted the having trusted her to take care of herself.  There were sufficient grains of truth in this to make the poor girl cry herself out of all condition for appearing at breakfast or luncheon, and Emily’s report of her despair made us much more angry with Mrs. Fordyce than was perhaps quite due to that good lady.

My parents were at first inclined to take the same line, and be vexed with Griff for an act of impertinence towards a guest.  He had a great deal of difficulty in inducing the elders to believe him in earnest, or treat him as a man capable of knowing his own mind; and even thus they felt as if his addresses to Miss Fordyce were, under present circumstances, taking almost an unfair advantage of the other family—at which our youthful spirits felt indignant.

Yet, after all, such a match was as obvious and suitable as if it had been a family compact, and the only objection was the youth of the parties.  Mrs. Fordyce would fain have believed her daughter’s heart to be not yet awake, and was grieved to find childhood over, and the hero of romance become the lover; and she was anxious that full time should be given to perceive whether her daughter’s feelings were only the result of the dazzling aureole which gratitude and excited fancy had cast around the fine, handsome, winning youth.  Her husband, however, who had himself married very young, and was greatly taken with Griff, besides being always tender-hearted, did not enter into her scruples; but, as we had already found out, the grand-looking and clever man of thirty-eight was, chiefly from his impulsiveness and good-nature, treated as the boy of the family.  His old father, too, was greatly pleased with Griff’s spirit, affection, and purpose, as well as with my father’s conduct in the matter; and so, after a succession of private interviews, very tantalising to us poor outsiders, it was conceded that though an engagement for the present was preposterous, it might possibly be permitted when Ellen was eighteen if Griff had completed his university life with full credit.  He was fervently grateful to have such an object set before him, and my father was warmly thankful for the stimulus.

That last evening was very odd and constrained.  We could not help looking on the lovers as new specimens over which some strange transformation had passed, though for the present it had stiffened them in public into the strictest good behaviour.  They would have been awkward if it had been possible to either of them, and, save for a certain look in their eyes, comported themselves as perfect strangers.

The three elder gentlemen held discussions in the dining-room, but we were not trusted in our playground adjoining.  Mrs. Fordyce nailed Griff down to an interminable game at chess, and my mother kept the two girls playing duets, while Clarence turned over the leaves; and I read over The Lady of the Lake, a study which I always felt, and still feel, as an act of homage to Ellen Fordyce, though there was not much in common between her and the maid of Douglas.  Indeed, it was a joke of her father’s to tease her by criticising the famous passage about the tears that old Douglas shed over his duteous daughter’s head—‘What in the world should the man go whining and crying for?  He had much better have laughed with her.’

Little did the elders know what was going on in the next room, where there was a grand courtship among the dolls; the hero being a small jointed Dutch one in Swiss costume, about an eighth part of the size of the resuscitated Celestina Mary, but the only available male character in doll-land!  Anne was supposed to be completely ignorant of what passed above her head; and her mother would have been aghast had she heard the remarkable discoveries and speculations that she and Martyn communicated to one another.

CHAPTER XXI
THE OUTSIDE OF THE COURTSHIP

 
‘Or framing, as a fair excuse,
The book, the pencil, or the muse;
Something to give, to sing, to say,
Some modern tale, some ancient lay.’
 

Scott.

It seems to me on looking back that I have hardly done justice to Mrs. Fordyce, and certainly we—as Griffith’s eager partisans—often regarded her in the light of an enemy and opponent; but after this lapse of time, I can see that she was no more than a prudent mother, unwilling to see her fair young daughter suddenly launched into womanhood, and involved in an attachment to a young and untried man.

The part of a drag is an invidious one; and this must have been her part through most of her life.  The Fordyces, father and son, were of good family, gentlemen to their very backbones, and thoroughly good, religious men; but she came of a more aristocratic strain, had been in London society, and brought with her a high-bred air which, implanted on the Fordyce good looks, made her daughter especially fascinating.  But that air did not recommend Mrs. Fordyce to all her neighbours, any more than did those stronger, stricter, more thorough-going notions of religious obligation which had led her husband to make the very real and painful sacrifice of his sporting tastes, and attend to the parish in a manner only too rare in those days.  She was a very well-informed and highly accomplished woman, and had made her daughter the same, keeping her children up in a somewhat exclusive style, away from all gossip or undesirable intimacies, as recommended by Miss Edgeworth and other more religious authorities, and which gave great offence in houses where there were girls of the same age.  No one, however, could look at Ellen, and doubt of the success of the system, or of the young girl’s entire content and perfect affection for her mother, though her father was her beloved playfellow—yet always with respect.  She never took liberties with him, nor called him Pap or any other ridiculous name inconsistent with the fifth Commandment, though she certainly was more entirely at ease with him than ever we had been with our elderly father.  When once Mrs. Fordyce found on what terms we were to be, she accepted them frankly and fully.  Already Emily had been the first girl, not a relation, whose friendship she had fostered with Ellen; and she had also become thoroughly affectionate and at home with my mother, who suited her perfectly on the conscientious, and likewise on the prudent and sensible, side of her nature.

To me she was always kindness itself, so kind that I never felt, as I did on so many occasions, that she was very pitiful and attentive to the deformed youth; but that she really enjoyed my companionship, and I could help her in her pursuits.  I have a whole packet of charming notes of hers about books, botany, drawings, little bits of antiquarianism, written with an arch grace and finish of expression peculiarly her own, and in a very pointed hand, yet too definite to be illegible.  I owe her more than I can say for the windows of wholesome hope and ambition she opened to me, giving a fresh motive and zest even to such a life as mine.  I can hardly tell which was the most delightful companion, she or her husband.  In spite of ill health, she knew every plant, and every bit of fair scenery in the neighbourhood, and had fresh, amusing criticisms to utter on each new book; while he, not neglecting the books, was equally well acquainted with all beasts and birds, and shed his kindly light over everything he approached.  He was never melancholy about anything but politics, and even there it was an immense consolation to him to have the owner of Chantry House staunch on the same side, instead of in chronic opposition.

The family party moved to a tall house at Bath, but there still was close intercourse, for the younger clergyman rode over every week for the Sunday duty, and almost always dined and slept at Chantry House.  He acted as bearer of long letters, which, in spite of a reticulation of crossings, were too expensive by post for young ladies’ pocket-money, often exceeding the regular quarto sheet.  It was a favourite joke to ask Emily what Ellen reported about Bath fashions, and to see her look of scorn.  For they were a curious mixture, those girlish letters, of village interests, discussion of books, and thoughts beyond their age; Tommy Toogood and Prometheus; or Du Guesclin in the closest juxtaposition with reports of progress in Abercrombie on the Intellectual Powers.  It was the desire of Ellen to prove herself not unsettled but improved by love, and to become worthy of her ideal Griffith, never guessing that he would have been equally content with her if she had been as frivolous as the idlest girl who lingered amid the waning glories of Bath.

We all made them a visit there when Martyn was taken to a preparatory school in the place.  Mrs. Fordyce took me out for drives on the beautiful hills; and Emily and I had a very delightful time, undisturbed by the engrossing claims of love-making.  Very good, too, were our friends, after our departure, in letting Martyn spend Sundays and holidays with them, play with Anne as before, say his Catechism with her to Mrs. Fordyce, and share her little Sunday lessons, which had, he has since told, a force and attractiveness he had never known before, and really did much, young as he was, in preparing the way towards the fulfilment of my father’s design for him.

When the Rectory was ready, and the family returned, it was high summer, and there were constant meetings between the households.  No doubt there were the usual amount of trivial disappointments and annoyances, but the whole season seems to me to have been bathed in sunlight.  The Reform Bill agitations and the London mobs of which Clarence wrote to us were like waves surging beyond an isle of peace.  Clarence had some unpleasant walks from the office.  Once or twice the shutters had to be put up at Frith and Castleford’s to prevent the windows from being broken; and once Clarence actually saw our nation’s hero, ‘the Duke,’ riding quietly and slowly through a yelling, furious mob, who seemed withheld from falling on him by the perfect impassiveness of the eagle face and spare figure.  Moreover a pretty little boy, on his pony, suddenly pushed forward and rode by the Duke’s side, as if proud and resolute to share his peril.

‘If Griffith had been there!’ said Ellen and Emily, though they did not exactly know what they expected him to have done.

The chief storms that drifted across our sky were caused by Mrs. Fordyce’s resolution that Griffith should enjoy none of the privileges of an accepted suitor before the engagement was an actual fact.  Ellen was obedient and conscientious; and would neither transgress nor endure to have her mother railed at by Griff’s hasty tongue, and this affronted him, and led to little breezes.

When people overstay their usual time, tempers are apt to get rather difficult.  Griffith had kept all his terms at Oxford, and was not to return thither after the long vacation, but was to read with a tutor before taking his degree.  Moreover bills began to come from Oxford, not very serious, but vexing my father and raising annoyances and frets, for Griff resented their being complained of, and thought himself ill-used, going off to see his own friends whenever he was put out.

One morning at breakfast, late in October, he announced that Lady Peacock was in lodgings at Clifton, and asked my mother to call on her.  But mamma said it was too far for the horse—she visited no one at that distance, and had never thought much of Selina Clarkson before or after her marriage.

‘But now that she is a widow, it would be such a kindness,’ pleaded Griff.

‘Depend upon it, a gay young widow needs no kindness from me, and had better not have it from you,’ said my mother, getting up from behind her urn and walking off, followed by my father.

Griff drummed on the table.  ‘I wonder what good ladies of a certain age do with their charity,’ he said.

And while we were still crying out at him, Ellen Fordyce and her father appeared, like mirth bidding good-morrow, at the window.  All was well for the time, but Griff wanted Ellen to set out alone with him, and take their leisurely way through the wood-path, and she insisted on waiting for her father, who had got into an endless discussion with mine on the Reform Bill, thrown out in the last Session.  Griff tried to wile her on with him, but, though she consented to wander about the lawn before the windows with him, she always resolutely turned at the great beech tree.  Emily and I watched them from the window, at first amused, then vexed, as we could see, by his gestures, that he was getting out of temper, and her straw bonnet drooped at one moment, and was raised the next in eager remonstrance or defence.  At last he flung angrily away from her, and went off to the stables, leaving her leaning against the gate in tears.  Emily, in an access of indignant sympathy, rushed out to her, and they vanished together into the summer-house, until her father called her, and they went home together.

Emily told me that Ellen had struggled hard to keep herself from crying enough to show traces of tears which her father could observe, and that she had excused Griff with all her might on the plea of her own ‘tiresomeness.’

We were all the more angry with him for his selfishness and want of consideration, for Ellen, in her torrent of grief, had even disclosed that he had said she did not care for him—no one really in love ever scrupled about a mother’s nonsense, etc., etc.

We were resolved, like two sages, to give him a piece of our minds, and convince him that such dutifulness was the pledge of future happiness, and that it was absolute cruelty to the rare creature he had won, to try to draw her in a direction contrary to her conscience.

However, we saw him no more that day; and only learnt that he had left a message at the stables that dinner was not to be kept waiting for him.  Such a message from Clarence would have caused a great commotion; but it was quite natural and a matter of course from him in the eyes of the elders, who knew nothing of his parting with Ellen.  However, there was annoyance enough, when bedtime came, family prayers were over, and still there was no sign of him.  My father sat up till one o’clock, to let him in, then gave it up, and I heard his step heavily mounting the stairs.