Maud Florence Nellie: or, Don't care!

Maud Florence Nellie: or, Don't care!
Christabel Coleridge

Coleridge Christabel R. Christabel Rose

Maud Florence Nellie; or, Don't care!

Chapter One

Maud Florence Nellie

Maud Florence Nellie Whittaker was standing before her little looking-glass, getting ready for her afternoon Sunday school. She was a fine tall girl of fifteen, rather stoutly made, with quantities of light brown hair, which fell on her shoulders and surrounded her plump rosy face with a perfect halo of fringe and friz. She had hazel eyes, which were rather bold and rather stupid, a cocked up nose, and full red lips, which could look sulky; but which were now curved in smiling satisfaction at the new summer hat, all creamy lace and ribbons, which she was fixing at exactly the right angle above her curly hair. She had on a very fashionable cream-coloured costume to match the hat, and altogether she was justified in considering herself as one of the best dressed girls in her class, and one whose good looks were not at all likely to pass unnoticed as she took her way along the sunshiny road that led into the large country town of Rapley. Her fine frock, her big girlish form, and her abundant hair seemed to fill up the little bedroom in which she stood; which had a sloping roof and small latticed windows, though it was comfortably furnished and had no more appearance of poverty than its inhabitant. Florrie Whittaker lived in the lodge at the gate of the great suburban cemetery, which had replaced all the disused churchyards of Rapley. Her father was the gatekeeper and caretaker, and as the cemetery was a very large one the post was important and the salary good. Florrie and her brothers and sisters had run up and down the rows of tomb-stones and played in the unoccupied spaces for as long as most of them could recollect. They saw many funerals everyday, and heard the murmur of the funeral service and the toll of the funeral bell whenever they went out, but it never occurred to them to think that tomb-stones were dismal or funerals impressive; they looked with cheerful living eyes at their natural surroundings, and never thought a bit more of the end of their own lives because they so constantly saw the end of other people’s. Florrie finished herself up with a red rosebud, found her hymn-book and a pair of new kid gloves, and then with a bounce and a clatter ran down the narrow stairs into the family sitting-room below; where the din of voices betokened the father’s absence, and the bustle attendant on starting for school on the part of a boy and two girls younger than herself.

“You’ll all be late, children, and get bad marks from your teachers,” cried Florence, in a loud gay voice.

“And what’ll you be?” was the not unnatural retort of the next sister, Sybil.

“It ain’t the same thing in my class,” returned Florrie. “Teacher knows that girls of my age can’t be punctual like little ones. They’ve to clear away, and mind the children, and all sorts of things to do.”

“And what have you been clearing away?”

“And who have you been minding of?”

“And what have you had to do but put your fine hat on?” rose in a chorus from the indignant children; while another voice put in —

“When I went to school the elders came punctual for the sake of an example.”

“Oh my! Aunt Lizzie, I didn’t see you,” said Florrie. “How d’ye do? There’s plenty of examples nowadays if one wanted them, which I don’t.”

“I’m sure, Aunt Lizzie,” put in the eldest sister, a tall young woman of nineteen or so, “there isn’t harder work in the world than in trying to set an example to Florrie.”

“You don’t set a nice one,” said Florrie.

“It would be a deal better for you, Florence,” said her aunt, “if you did take example by some one. You’re getting a big girl, and that hat and frock are a deal too smart to run about the roads in. When I was a girl, I had a nice brown mushroom hat and a neat black silk jacket, and pleased enough I was with them as a new thing.”

“And did your aunts wear mushroom hats and black silk jackets?” said Florrie.

“My aunts? no, indeed! Whatever are you thinking of, Florence? My aunts were most respectable women, and wore bonnets, when bonnets was bonnets. Hats, indeed!”

“Your hat was in the fashion then, and mine’s in the fashion now,” said Florence saucily; but Aunt Lizzie, refusing to perceive that her niece had made a point, continued, “Aunt Eliza Brown was married to a man in the grocery way, and Aunt Warren, as you very well know, was housekeeper to Mr Cunningham at Ashcroft Hall, and married the head keeper, which her son has the situation to this day.”

“I do tell Florrie,” said the elder sister again, “that she’d look a deal more like a real lady if she dressed a bit quieter than she does.”

“I don’t want to look like a lady. I want to have my fun,” said Florrie. “Come on, Ethel, if you’re coming; I want to catch up with Carrie and Ada. Good-bye, aunt; I like lessons best in school.”

And off dashed Florrie through the summer sunshine, between the avenue of monuments, her hair flying, her skirts swinging, and her loud lively voice sounding behind and before her as she scurried along.

“Well!” said Aunt Lizzie, “she be a one, surely. That girl wants a tight hand over her, Martha Jane, if ever a girl die yet.”

Aunt Lizzie – otherwise Mrs Stroud – was an excellent person, and had “kept her brother’s family together,” as she expressed it, ever since their mother’s death; but she was not invariably pleasant, and her eldest niece disliked being called Martha Jane much more than Florence disliked being scolded for her finery. When all the younger ones had such beautiful names – Maud Florence Nellie, Ethel Rosamond, and Sybil Eva Constance – it was hard upon her that she had been born before her mother’s love of reading, and perhaps her undeveloped love of the beautiful things of life, had overcome the family traditions. “Martha” was bad enough, and she did not know that the children’s use of “Matty” was a fashionable variation of it. But “Martha Jane!”

She was not, however, saucy like Florence, so she only sighed a little and said:

“I do my best, indeed, aunt; but won’t you lay off your mantle and sit down comfortably? Father won’t be in yet. He likes to be round, when so many friends come to visit the graves and put flowers, in case of mischief, and the children won’t be back for near two hours.”

Mrs Stroud was a stout comfortable woman, not very unlike what her niece Florence might be after five and thirty more years in a workaday world had marked and subdued her beaming countenance. She was glad to sit down after the hot walk, take off her cloth mantle, which, though an eminently dignified and respectable garment, was rather a heavy one for a June day, and fan herself with her pocket-handkerchief, while she inquired into the well-being of her nieces and nephews. Martha Jane was of a different type – dark and slim, with pretty, rather dreamy grey eyes, and a pale refined face. She was a good girl, and tried to do her duty by her young brothers and sisters; but she had not very strong health or spirits, and in many ways she wished that her life was different from what fate had made it.

“That there Florrie,” said Mrs Stroud, “ain’t the sort of girl to be allowed to stravage about the roads by herself for two hours.”

“Why, aunt, she must go to her Bible class,” said Martha meekly.

“Well,” said Mrs Stroud, “there’s girls that aren’t calculated for Bible classes, in my opinion. Does she come in punctual from her work on weekdays?”

“Oh, yes, aunt, and it’s supposed that George meets her. Not that he always does; but she has to look out for him. And Mrs Lee keeps her very strict at the shop. She don’t have her hair flying about on weekdays, nor dress fine, and she’s a good girl for her work and very civil, Mrs Lee says. You wouldn’t know Florrie when she’s behaving.”

“Pity she don’t behave always then,” said Mrs Stroud.

“That’s just the thing,” said Martha, “I tell her, aunt, constant. I tell her to read the tales out of the library, and see what the young ladies are like that are written about in them. And she says a tale may be a tale, but she ain’t in a book, and she don’t want to be. Florrie’s always got an answer ready.”

“Well, Martha Jane, I don’t hold much with wasting time over tales and novels myself. You read a deal too many, and where’s the good?”

“I should waste my time more than I do but for some talcs I’ve read,” said Martha, colouring.

“Well, ‘Waste not, want not.’ Read your Bible, I say.”

“That’s not in the Bible, Aunt Lizzie.”

“It might be,” said Mrs Stroud; “there’s a deal of truth in it. But, bless you, Martha, it ain’t talcs nor nonsense of that kind that signifies. Florrie must be held in. She’s that saucy, and that bouncing and set on her own way, that there’s only one in the family she’s like, Martha Jane, and that’s ’Enery himself.”

“Harry! Oh, Aunt Lizzie! But she’s a girl.”

“Well, Martha Jane, and if she is? There’s plenty of ways for girls to trouble their families. You wasn’t more than eleven or so when ’Enery went; but surely you can recollect him, ramping round. Why, when he come to sit with his family he was like an engine with the steam up for starting off again! And he went about that audacious!”

“I can remember his jumping me off the tomb-stones,” said Martha.

“Ah! He jumped off tomb-stones once too often. It all came of ramping about and reading, so there’s lessons in it for you and Florence both. Well, I promised a call on Mrs Taylor at the upper lodge, so I’ll stroll up quietly and meet your father, and come back for a cup of tea.”

Martha made no objection to this proposal; for though she never “answered back,” nor asserted herself against her elders, she strongly resented the connection between ramping about and reading, and between herself and the troublesome Florence, and was very glad to get rid of her aunt for the present.

She sat still when Mrs Stroud, having assumed her mantle and opened her parasol, walked up the cemetery to meet her brother. She really wished to be a good elder sister; but what could she do with a girl only three years younger than herself, and with more “go” in her little finger than poor Martha had in her whole body?

Surely Florence was not going to be like poor Harry! Martha called him “poor Harry” in her thoughts – it is an epithet often applied half in kindness and half in contempt to the family ne’er-do-weel; but she had not a very pleasant recollection of this absent brother. If Florrie was rude, inconsiderate, and bouncing, she was nothing to Harry at fifteen. Martha recollected his utterly unscrupulous teasing and bullying alternating with rough good-nature, which had made her hopelessly afraid of him. He got situations, and lost them by practical jokes. He was started in a good place at a large printing establishment in Rapley, and, after sundry smaller feats, had sent the rector of the parish a packet of playbills announcing the performance that night of “The Corsican Brothers” and “Cut off with a Shilling;” while the manager of the theatre received the rector’s notices of a missionary meeting, also being got up in a hurry on some special occasion. Neither the rector nor the manager spared the printer, and as Harry Whittaker had been heard sniggering with a companion over the exchange, it could not pass as a mistake, so that situation came to an end. Then he had to content himself with being errand-boy at a linen-draper’s. There somehow the ball dresses which should have been delivered to Lady Temple in time for the county ball floated down the river instead, and were landed the next afternoon mashed up in their cardboard boxes.

And worst of all, a dreadful night, which Matty never did forget, when some poor people, coming in the dusk to one of those sad hurried evening funerals which terrible infection sometimes necessitates, had been frightened – how she did not know, but cruelly and unfeelingly by Harry’s means. Martha remembered her father’s just annoyance and anger. Harry had been sent away to his Uncle Warren’s, where something else happened – Martha never knew what – and that was the last she heard of her eldest brother.

A little while before, mother had died, and father grew severe and strict, and Aunt Lizzie bustled them about till a year ago, when, late in life, she married a well-to-do ironmonger, and turned her energies on to her step-children.

Since then Martha Jane had done her best for her three sisters, for the brother, George, who had a good post as clerk on the railway, and for Johnnie and Arthur, the youngest of the family, who still attended the day school. The Whittaker girls had never been sent to a national school, but had got, or were getting, their education at one of the many “Establishments for Young Ladies” which prevailed at Rapley. It was supposed that in this way they would be less likely to “make acquaintances;” but acquaintances are very easily made by sociable people, and Mrs Stroud had always thought it the proper thing to send them all to Sunday school. Martha, however, had had very little of this. She was a good girl, with a turn for church-going, and the interest of most well-disposed girls of her day in varieties of church services, church music, and church decorations; but she had no personal tie to the church which the Whittakers attended, and she had not found the connection between these tastes and the duties of life.

She was rather imaginative, and she read every story book she could lay her hands on – religious domestic tales from the parochial library, novels from that provided for the servants of the railway company, which her brother brought home, and quantities of penny serial fiction. Very little of it was absolutely bad. Martha would not have read it if she had known it to be so, but a great deal of it was extremely unreal, silly, and frivolous. Martha’s taste and critical powers were so uncultivated that she hardly knew that one book was of a higher tone than another, any more than she knew that it was better written. There were fine sentiments which she admired in all of them about love and constancy and self-devotion, and perhaps Martha was not to blame if she thought that people usually died in carrying out these virtues. Still, the character of the books did make a difference to her; for she was not one to whom a tale was nothing but a tale, and if she learnt from some that ladies wore wonderful and ever-varying costumes, and spent their time in what she would have called “talking about the gentlemen,” she learnt from others that they studied hard, and devoted themselves much to the good of their fellow-creatures and the comfort of their families.