Two Maiden Aunts.

by Mary H. Debenham.

CHAPTER I

THE AUNTS

'Child, be mother to this child.'--E. B. BROWNING.

It was seven o'clock on an autumn morning nearly a hundred years ago.

A misty October morning, when the meadows looked grey with the heavy dew, and the sky was only just beginning to show pale blue through the haze which veiled it.

There was a certain little hamlet, just a few cottages cl.u.s.tered together beside a country road, where the world seemed hardly yet awake. The road ran across a wide common, where the cows and horses and geese wandered about pretty much as they chose, and the blackberries grew as they grow only on waste ground. The blackberry season was pretty nearly over, and the damp had taken the taste out of those which the village children had left, but the dewy nights were still warm enough to bring up the mushrooms like fairy tables in all directions, and there was at least one gatherer from the village who had been astir an hour ago, for the common was a well-known mushroom ground, and early birds had the best chance. He was coming back now with a goodly basketful, shaking showers of dew off the gra.s.s at every step and leaving a track of footmarks behind him. Through the mist he looked a sort of giant, but he was only a tall, st.u.r.dy lad of seventeen, in a fustian jacket and the wide hat which countrymen used to wear in the days of our grandfathers. He turned off the common before he reached the village and went down a little lane, at the end of which stood a small gabled house, in a garden where the autumn flowers hung their heads under the heavy dew. There was a paddock behind the house where a cow was feeding, and a gate led through a yard to the back door, and thither the boy was turning when he noticed a little girl in homespun frock and sun-bonnet leaning over the garden gate, looking up rather wistfully at the shuttered windows of the house. She gave a great start as the boy came behind her and laid his hand suddenly on her shoulder.

'Now then, Nance,' he said severely, 'what are you about, disturbing the place at this time in the morning?'

The little girl shook his hand off with an impatient shrug.

'What be you about, Pete, starting me like that? I'm not doing nothing nor disturbing n.o.body. I can look at the cottage, I suppose, without you to call me up for it?'

'Mother'll be fine and angry when she hears what you've been at,' said the boy, 'peeping and prying on the young ladies, and them in trouble.'

Nancy put up her pretty lip with the injured look of a spoilt child.

'I'm not peeping nor prying nor hurting n.o.body, and, if I am, what are you doing, I should like to know?' Then, as she noticed his basket, she clapped her hands with a little triumphant laugh.

'I know what 'tis you're after,' she cried; 'you've been off and got them mushrooms, and you've brought them for the young ladies so as you can see Penny or maybe Miss Betty herself, and hear whether it's really true. And haven't I got some eggs, my own hen's eggs, here for them, and only just waiting till they open the shutters to take them in?'

'Well, why don't you go round to the back door, as is the proper place for you,' said the stern elder brother, 'instead of staring at gentlefolks' houses like a great gawky?'

'Well, come to that, I know which is the biggest gawky of us two,' said pert little Nance; 'and, if you must know, I was just waiting for the chance of Miss Betty coming down, seeing Penny might be in one of her tantrums and not tell me a word.' Then, as the front door of the house suddenly opened, she exclaimed, joyously,

'Look, if she isn't there,' and was darting in at the gate, when her brother caught her and held her back. 'Come away, will you, ye interfering little hussy!' he was beginning hastily, when the girl who had opened the door caught sight of the two and came down the garden path towards them. Spoilt Nancy shook herself free, and with a triumphant glance at her big brother she ran to meet the young lady, and Peter could do nothing but follow her; and, indeed, if the truth must be told, he was not at all sorry to do it, and, perhaps, just a little grateful to naughty Nancy for showing the way.

The early riser from the cottage was a girl of thirteen, a very pretty little girl, with a fair, fresh face, sunshiny hazel eyes, and hair of that golden brown colour which the bracken wears in autumn. She seemed to have dressed in rather a hurry, for her long black frock was not quite perfectly fastened, the muslin scarf round her shoulders was just a little crooked, and the black ribbon which tied the bright hair had not managed to catch it all, so that a few curly locks came tumbling out at the side. She had shut the house door very quietly, and she held up her finger for a sign of silence as she came down the path; and Nancy, who had started off running to meet her, stopped as if a sudden feeling of shyness had come over her, a feeling, it must be owned, which didn't often trouble Nancy, certainly not towards Miss Betty Wyndham, whom she had known ever since she could remember. But then she had never seen Miss Betty look quite like this before, in her black frock and with such a grave look in her merry eyes, a look that was rather sad, and yet, perhaps, more serious than sad, and that somehow made Nancy stop and curtsey and Peter pull off his hat with that sort of shy respect which the most careless among us must pay to a fresh sorrow or loss. But, in spite of her grave look, Miss Betty seemed very pleased to see them.

'Good morning, Pete; good morning, Nancy,' she said. 'How kind of you to come so early! Did you guess I should be down?'

'I thought maybe you would, miss,' said Nancy, 'only the shutters being up I thought you must be asleep still.'

'I dressed in the dark,' said Miss Betty, giving her scarf a little tug which didn't straighten it much, 'because I didn't want to wake Angel.

Poor Angel, she was so late coming to bed last night; I'd been asleep ever so long and woken up again while she was talking to Penny.'

And then she stopped and looked from one to the other with a questioning look in her eyes.

'You know, don't you?' she said at last; 'you've heard about the sad thing that's happened?'

For once in a way Nancy left her brother to answer.

'We haven't heard nothing for certain, Miss Betty,' he said, 'only people talked, and we knew Penny had gone to fetch you home; but father said we weren't to say nothing till we knew for certain.'

'It's quite true,' said Miss Betty gravely,' quite dreadfully true, Pete. Our brother, Mr. Bernard, has been killed in the West Indies, and we are very poor now; we have left school and come home to live.'

I fear that the last piece of news so much did away with the sadness of the first that Nancy's face broadened into a delighted smile, and she only just cut short an exclamation of joy. Luckily Miss Betty was not looking at her, and she saw Peter's frown and felt a little ashamed of herself.

'I want to tell you everything,' Miss Betty went on; 'it was very nice of your father not to want people to talk, but now we should like every one to know because we are very proud of my brother, and we want our friends to be. Will you come into the arbour and I'll tell you?' and she led the way across the garden while Peter and Nancy followed willingly enough. The arbour was that sort of bower which we see in old-fashioned pictures and sing about in old songs. There had been roses climbing over it all the summer, and a few blossoms hung there still, pale and fragrant, among a tangle of clematis and everlasting peas. On the little gra.s.s plot just outside the arbour there was a stone figure, not like the nymphs and Cupids and water-carriers which we find in trim old-fashioned gardens and stately pleasure grounds, but the chipped worn figure of a lady, lying with folded hands and a quaint head-dress and straight falling hair. No one quite knew where that statue came from, except that it must have lain once upon a tomb in some church or monastery chapel, and in evil days, when men had forgotten their reverence for holy ground and the quiet dead, the tomb must have been destroyed, and the figure defaced and thrown out as rubbish. Then some one later on had brought her to the cottage and set her up as an ornament to the garden, leaning against a tree, and looking very strange and uncomfortable. When Betty and her sister were little children they were half afraid of the tall grim figure, which looked queer and uncanny among the bushes in the twilight, but as they grew older and knew more about her, they lost their fear of her and began to be sorry for her, and they got Peter and some of the village boys to move her out of her unnatural position and lay her down on the gra.s.s as she had once lain on her tomb in the church, and planted flowers beside her. And the great purple convolvulus, or, as I love to call it by its sweet old name, the Morning Glory, seeded itself every year, and twined its soft tendrils and opened its lovely flowers all about the poor lady, as if it wanted to hide all the marks of hard usage, and the gra.s.s made her a soft pillow, and the pink rose petals dropped all about her, and she looked as if she were happily asleep among the flowers. And when she was being moved the boys came upon some other pieces of stone among the bushes, which might have been part of the same tomb. There was one bit with part of a coat-of-arms on it which no one could make out, and another bit with some letters, many of them quite defaced, but after a lot of puzzling and rubbing the moss off, the little girls managed to read the two words, 'Demoiselle Jehanne.' Miss Angelica felt sure it was French, and she copied it out and took it back to school to ask her schoolmistress what it meant.

And the mistress said she was right, it was most likely old Norman-French such as was talked in England five or six hundred years ago, and that 'demoiselle' was the t.i.tle of a young lady, and 'Jehanne'

was the old way of writing Jeanne or Jane. So Angelica and Betty decided directly that it must be the name of their stone lady, and called her 'Demoiselle Jehanne,' or, to make it clearer to Peter and their other village friends, 'Miss Jane.' And it was wonderful what a companion Miss Jane had become to them: they never felt really alone when they were sitting beside her. Betty made up stories about her, and Angelica wondered about her and about the days when she was alive, and how old she was when she died, and whether she ever saw Edward the Black Prince, and whether she had a father and a mother who were very sad when they put that figure over her grave. And often when anything had gone wrong with the sisters, they would come and sit down on the gra.s.s by the arbour and tell it to Miss Jane, and feel as if she sympathized with them and comforted them. And if more lucky little girls are inclined to laugh at them, I would ask them to be thankful that they are happier than my two little sisters, and have a mother to whom they can go and tell their troubles instead of whispering them into the broken stone ear of Miss Jane.

And perhaps it was partly that old custom of theirs that made Betty at this moment, when she wanted to tell about the great change that was coming into her life, lead the way to the arbour and sit down on the bench close to the silent figure among the trailing creepers. Peter and Nancy stood in front of her and waited for her to speak, both a little embarra.s.sed, as we are when we aren't quite sure how we ought to feel and what we ought to say. It was very sad, of course, about Mr.

Bernard Wyndham being dead, but, as they had neither of them ever seen him in their lives, it was rather difficult to mind very much. But then they knew they ought to think about what Miss Betty was feeling.

Nancy looked at Pete and felt that it would be dreadful to have one's brother killed, even if he did scold one and keep one in order rather too much. But then a brother who had been in the West Indies for twelve out of the thirteen years of one's life was different from a brother who was always there to get one blackberries and lift one over hedges, and even box one's ears when one required it. And besides, as I have said, Miss Betty did not look exactly very sad, only grave and just the least little bit important. So they waited to hear what she had to say.

'It is quite true, Pete and Nancy,' she began; 'Mr. Bernard has been killed in a dreadful rising of the natives in the West Indian Islands.

He was very, very brave--of course we knew he would be that--and he has died as an Englishman ought to die, so we shall never be able to show him all the things we wanted to show him, and to introduce him to all of you here, as we always thought we should.' Miss Betty's voice began to shake a little for the first time, and Pete and Nancy waited in respectful silence. After a minute she went on:

'But Angel says we must try to be very proud to think of him dying so bravely, for she says that women all over England are giving up so much, that we ought to be glad to think that we have given something too. And now I am coming to the part that is the most surprising.

Only think--our brother was married, married out there eight years ago, and he never told us! I suppose he wanted to give us a beautiful surprise when he brought us a new sister home.'

She waited for somebody to say something. Peter's face did not look as if he thought the surprise a very beautiful one.

'Beg your pardon, Miss Betty,' he said doubtfully, 'but Mr. Bernard's lady, she'd--she'd be black, I suppose?'

'Black!' exclaimed Betty in horror. 'Oh, dear me, no, Peter! Of course she wouldn't be black. There are English people in the West Indies or my brother wouldn't have been there, and it was an English lady he married; but, poor lady, she died when she'd only been our sister not quite a year. I suppose that was why Bernard never told us afterwards, because of not wanting us to know what we'd missed. It was very, very brave and very unselfish of him, of course, but Angel and I wish he had, because then we could have written and said how sorry we were, and perhaps comforted him a little. And now I'm coming to the most surprising thing of all. My brother had a little boy, and he is seven years old now, and he is in England and he will be here to-night.' Miss Betty hurried out these last pieces of news one on the top of the other, and then stopped and looked at her hearers, who certainly seemed surprised enough to satisfy her.

'Poor little gentleman!' said kind-hearted Peter, ''tis a sad coming to England for him, for sure, and him an orphan and alone in the world, as one may say.'

'No, Peter, one mayn't say anything of the kind,' said Miss Betty, pulling herself up and looking as dignified as she possibly could. 'Of course, he's an orphan, poor dear little boy! but he can't be alone in the world at all when he's got two aunts, and his aunt Angelica and I will take good care he never feels like an orphan, the darling.'

Nancy's eyes opened their very widest. 'But, Miss Betty,' she said, 'I thought aunts were old people.'

'Oh, Nancy!' said Betty, with an air of wisdom; 'you have a very great deal to learn, Nancy, dear. It is not the age that makes the aunt, Nancy, it is the nephew or the niece. And as for being old, Angelica and I aren't so very young. She was sixteen last winter and I am thirteen, and people have done a great deal at thirteen, as you'll learn when you read biography. And, even if we haven't been so very old before, we have to begin now and grow up at once, for we are going to live here and be independent ladies, with our cousin, Mr. Crayshaw, coming down now and then from London to see us, and--and talk over business, and advise us about our money matters, and we shall have G.o.dfrey, our nephew G.o.dfrey, to take care of and educate. Angel says,'

she went on after a minute, while the faces of her listeners showed great satisfaction at the arrangements, 'that we must put everything else on one side and bring up our nephew as his father would have wished, to be a proper English gentleman and a credit to his family.

She says we can fit ourselves to do any duty that we have got to do, and our duty now is to be good aunts, and we must be _that_ with all our might;' and here the good aunt broke off suddenly as her eye fell for the first time on the baskets which her listeners were holding.

'Did you bring those for us?' she exclaimed. 'Oh, how kind of you!

Are those Polly's eggs, Nance? I guessed they were, and the mushrooms are off the common, I know. Whereabouts did you get them, Pete? I must go with you some day very soon, I'm longing----'

And then as if with a sudden recollection the eager little lady pulled herself up, smoothed her crooked kerchief, and shook the rebellious hair out of her eyes, and went on in her most sober tones: 'I don't know, Peter, whether I shall be able to come mushrooming much now. Of course my nephew will take up a good deal of my time, and I'm not sure whether many mushrooms are quite a good thing for children. But eggs will be very nice for his breakfast--a new-laid egg every day, I think, not too hard-boiled. And there's just one more little thing; I hope you won't mind, but I fancy if you could get into the way of calling us Miss Angelica and Miss Elizabeth when our nephew is there it would be a good thing, and make him look up to us more. You won't mind my saying so, will you? And now I think I must go, because Angel--because Miss Angelica will be up; so good-bye, and thank you very much indeed for coming.'

And the next minute Miss Betty was gone, starting off in her usual whirlwind fashion, then pulling herself up and marching along solemnly and with the dignity which became the aunt.

But she forgot her dignity when she got upstairs, and met her sister coming out of her bedroom to look for her with a little shade of anxiety in her face. Angelica Wyndham was one of those very gentle, thoughtful people who are so tender about their neighbours' happiness, so fearful of hurting and slow to put their own wishes forward, that we hardly know how powerful that very gentleness makes them in their little world. Everybody loved Angel, and said how sweet she was and how pretty; but they hardly knew how they came to consider her and to go out of their way to please her, just because she always thought so much about other people that really it was a shame to vex her. She was not particularly quick, except with that sort of quickness which we can all learn by being thoughtful for others, and watchful to please and help them. She was not nearly so clever as Betty, and she knew it quite well, and was never a bit jealous when Betty pa.s.sed her in cla.s.s and learnt her lessons in half the time; and Betty, on her side, thought there was no one in all the world like Angel and would have done anything to please her, and always hoped that one day she might be half as wise and good. And so this morning, when she saw her sister standing in the doorway, with the little worried anxious look in her gentle eyes, she flung her arms round her, and stood on tip-toe to kiss her, exclaiming eagerly:

'Angel dear, did you wonder where I was? Did I wake you getting up? I left the blinds down on purpose. I've only been talking to Pete and Nancy, and telling them all about it, and Nancy's brought us some eggs, and Pete's got such a basket of mushrooms!'

'You haven't been on the common for mushrooms this morning, have you, dear?' asked Angelica.