Hopes and Fears or, scenes from the life of a spinster

‘Don’t I,’ said Owen, sadly.

Lucilla, even though Mr. Prendergast had just come to share her anxieties, caught her nephew on his way, and popped her last newly completed pinafore over his harlequinism, persuading him that it was most beautiful and new.

The interview passed off better than could have been hoped.  The full-grown, grave-looking man was so different from the mere youth whom Mrs. Murrell had been used to scold and preach at, that her own awe seconded the lectures upon quietness that had been strenuously impressed on her; and she could not complain of his reception of his ‘’opeful son,’ in form at least.  Owen held out his hand to her, and bent to kiss his boy, signed to her to sit down, and patiently answered her inquiries and regrets, asking a few civil questions in his turn.

Then he exerted himself to say, ‘I hope to do my best for him and for you, Mrs. Murrell, but I can make no promises; I am entirely dependent at present, and I do not know whether I may not be so for life.’

Whereat, and at the settled mournful look with which it was spoken, Mrs. Murrell burst out crying, and little Owen hung on her, almost crying too.  Honor, who had been lying in wait for Owen’s protection, came hastily in and made a clearance, Owen again reaching out his hand, which he laid on the child’s head, so as to turn up the face towards him for a moment.  Then releasing it almost immediately, he rested his chin on his hand, and Honor heard him mutter under his moustache, ‘Flibbertigibbet!’

‘When we go home, we will take little Owen with us,’ said Honor, kindly.  ‘It is high time he was taken from Little Whittington-street.  Country air will soon make a different-looking child of him.’

‘Thank you,’ he answered, despondingly.  ‘It is very good in you; but have you not troubles enough already?

‘He shall not be a trouble, but a pleasure.’

‘Poor little wretch!  He must grow up to work, and to know that he must work while he can;’ and Owen passed his hand over those useless fingers of his as though the longing to be able to work were strong on him.

Honor had agreed with Lucilla that father and son ought to be together, and that little ‘Hoeing’s’ education ought to commence.  Cilla insisted that all care of him should fall to her.  She was in a vehement, passionate mood of self-devotion, more overset by hearing that her brother would be a cripple for life than by what appeared to her the less melancholy doom of an early death.  She had allowed herself to hope so much from his improvement on the voyage, that what to Honor was unexpected gladness was to her grievous disappointment.  Mr. Prendergast arrived to find her half captious, half desperate.

See Owen!  Oh, no! he must not think of it.  Owen had seen quite people enough to-day; besides, he would be letting all out to him as he had done the other day.

Poor Mr. Prendergast humbly apologized for his betrayal; but had not Owen been told of the engagement?

Oh, dear, no!  He was in no state for fresh agitations.  Indeed, with him, a miserable, helpless cripple, Lucy did not see how she could go on as before.  She could not desert him—oh, no!—she must work for him and his child.

‘Work!  Why, Cilla, you have not strength for it.’

‘I am quite well.  I have strength for anything now I have some one to work for.  Nothing hurts me but loneliness.’

‘Folly, child!  The same home that receives you will receive them.’

‘Nonsense!  As if I could throw such a dead weight on any one’s hands!’

‘Not on any one’s,’ said Mr. Prendergast.  ‘But I see how it is, Cilla; you have changed your mind.’

‘No,’ said Lucilla, with an outbreak of her old impatience; ‘but you men are so selfish!  Bothering me about proclaiming all this nonsense, just when my brother is come home in this wretched state!  After all, he was my brother before anything else, and I have a right to consider him first!’

‘Then, Cilla, you shall be bothered no more,’ said Mr. Prendergast, rising.  ‘If you want me, well and good—you know where to find your old friend; if not, and you can’t make up your mind to it, why, then we are as we were in old times.  Good-bye, my dear; I won’t fret you any more.’

‘No,’ said he to himself, as he paused in the Court, and was busy wiping from the sleeve of his coat two broad dashes of wet that had certainly not proceeded from the clouds, ‘the dear child’s whole heart is with her brother now she has got him back again.  I’ll not torment her any more.  What a fool I was to think that anything but loneliness could have made her accept me—poor darling!  I think I’ll go out to the Bishop of Sierra Leone!’

‘What can have happened to him?’ thought Phœbe, as he strode past the little party on their walk to the Tower.  ‘Can that wretched little Cilly have been teasing him?  I am glad Robert has escaped from her clutches!’

However, Phœbe had little leisure for such speculations in the entertainment of witnessing her companion’s intelligent interest in all that he saw.  The walk itself—for which she had begged—was full of wonder; and the Tower, which Robert’s slight knowledge of one of the officials enabled them to see in perfection, received the fullest justice, both historically and loyally.  The incumbent of St. Matthew’s was so much occupied with explanations to his boys, that Phœbe had the stranger all to herself, and thus entered to the full into that unfashionable but most heart-stirring of London sights, ‘the Towers of Julius,’ from the Traitors’ Gate, where Elizabeth sat in her lion-like desolation, to her effigy in her glory upon Tilbury Heath—the axe that severed her mother’s ‘slender neck’—the pistol-crowned stick of her father—the dark cage where her favourite Raleigh was mewed—and the whole series of the relics of the disgraces and the glories of England’s royal line—well fitted, indeed, to strike the imagination of one who had grown up in the New World without antiquity.

If it were a satisfaction to be praised and thanked for this expedition, Phœbe had it; for on her return she was called into Owen’s room, where his first words to her were of thanks for her good-nature to his friend.

‘I am sure it was nothing but a pleasure,’ she said.  ‘It happened that Robert had some boys whom he wanted to take.’  Somehow she did not wish Owen to think she had done it on his own account.

‘And you liked him?’ asked Owen.

‘Yes, very much indeed,’ she heartily said.

‘Ah! I knew you would;’ and he lay back as if fatigued.  Then, as Phœbe was about to leave him, he added—‘I can’t get my ladies to heed anything but me.  You and Robert must take pity on him, if you please.  Get him to Westminster Abbey, or the Temple Church, or somewhere worth seeing to-morrow.  Don’t let them be extortionate of his waiting on me.  I must learn to do without him.’

Phœbe promised, and went.

‘Phœbe is grown what one calls a fine young woman instead of a sweet girl,’ said Owen to his sister, when she next came into the room; ‘but she has managed to keep her innocent, half-wondering look, just as she has the freshness of her colour.’

‘Well, why not, when she has not had one real experience?’ said Lucilla, a little bitterly.

‘None?’ he asked, with a marked tone.

‘None,’ she answered, and he let his hand drop with a sigh; but as if repenting of any half betrayal of feeling, added, ‘she has had all her brothers and sisters at sixes and sevens, has not she?’

‘Do you call that a real experience?’ said Lucilla, almost with disdain, and the conversation dropped.

Owen’s designs for his friend’s Sunday fell to the ground.  The backwoodsman fenced off the proposals for his pleasure, by his wish to be useful in the sick-room; and when told of Owen’s desire, was driven to confess that he did not wish for fancy church-going on his first English Sunday.  There was enough novelty without that; the cathedral service was too new for him to wish to hear it for the first time when there was so much that was unsettling.

Honor, and even Robert, were a little disappointed.  They thought eagerness for musical service almost necessarily went with church feeling; and Phœbe was the least in the world out of favour for the confession, that though it was well that choirs should offer the most exquisite and ornate praise, yet that her own country-bred associations with the plain unadorned service at Hiltonbury rendered her more at home where the prayers were read, and the responses congregational, not choral.  To her it was more devotional, though she fully believed that the other way was the best for those who had begun with it.

So they went as usual to the full service of the parish church, where the customs were scrupulously rubrical without being ornate.  The rest and calm of that Sunday were a boon, coming as they did after a bustling week.

All the ensuing days Phœbe was going about choosing curtains and carpets, or hiring servants for herself or Mervyn.  She was obliged to act alone, for Miss Charlecote, on whom she had relied for aid, was engrossed in attending on Owen, and endeavouring to wile away the hours that hung heavily on one incapable of employment or even attention for more than a few minutes together.  So constantly were Honor and Lucy engaged with him, that Phœbe hardly saw them morning, noon, or night; and after being out for many hours, it generally fell to her lot to entertain the young Canadian for the chief part of the evening.  Mr. Currie had arrived in town on the Monday, and came at once to see Owen.  His lodgings were in the City, where he would be occupied for some time in more formally mapping out and reporting on the various lines proposed for the G. O. and S. line; and finding how necessary young Randolf still was to the invalid, he willingly agreed to the proposal that while Miss Charlecote continued in London, the young man should continue to sleep and spend his evenings in Woolstone-lane.

CHAPTER XXIX

Have you seen but a bright lily grow,
Before rude hands have touched it?
Have you marked but the fall of the snow,
Before the soil hath smutched it?

    —Ben Jonson

At the end of a week Mervyn made his appearance in a vehement hurry.  Cecily’s next sister, an officer’s wife, was coming home with two little children, for a farewell visit before going to the Cape, and Maria and Bertha must make way for her.  So he wanted to take Phœbe home that afternoon to get the Underwood ready for them.

‘Mervyn, how can I go?  I am not nearly ready.’

‘What can you have been doing then?’ he exclaimed, with something of his old temper.

‘This house has been in such a state.’

‘Well, you were not wanted to nurse the sick man, were you?  I thought you were one that was to be trusted.  What more is there to do?’

Phœbe looked at her list of commissions, and found herself convicted.  Those patterns ought to have been sent back two days since.  What had she been about?  Listening to Mr. Randolf’s explanations of the Hiawatha scenery!  Why had she not written a note about that hideous hearth-rug?  Because Mr. Randolf was looking over Stowe’s Survey of London.  Methodical Phœbe felt herself in disgrace, and yet, somehow, she could not be sorry enough; she wanted a reprieve from exile at Hiltonbury, alone and away from all that was going on.  At least she should hear whether Macbeth, at the Princess’s Theatre, fulfilled Mr. Randolf’s conceptions of it; and if Mr. Currie approved his grand map of the Newcastle district, with the little trees that she had taught him to draw.

Perhaps it was the first time that Mervyn had been justly angry with her; but he was so much less savage than in his injustice that she was very much ashamed and touched; and finally, deeply grateful for the grace of this one day in which to repair her negligence, provided she would be ready to start by seven o’clock next morning.  Hard and diligently she worked, and very late she came home.  As she was on her way up-stairs she met Robert coming out of Owen’s room.