CHAPTER IV

During all these long years I had grown to tolerate Aunt Penelope. I found that her bark was worse than her bite; I found, too, that if I let her alone, she let me alone. She was always changing b.u.t.tons, and the new boy was invariably called Jonas, just as the last had been. The parrot kept on living, and kept on shouting at intervals every day, "Stop knocking at the door!" but he never would learn any fresh words, although I tried hard to teach him. He did not like me, and snapped at me when I endeavoured to be kind to him. So I concluded that he was a kind of "double" of Aunt Penelope, and left him alone.

The little house was kept scrupulously clean, but the food was of the plainest, and Aunt Penelope wore the oldest and shabbiest clothes, and she dressed me very badly too. At that time in my career I did not greatly mind about dress. What I did mind was that she never would let me talk about father. She always shut me up or turned the conversation.

She had an awful book of musty old sermons, which she set me to read aloud to her the very instant I began to ask her questions about my father, so that by degrees I kept my thoughts to myself. I wrote to father from the very first, but I never got a reply. I used to post the letters myself, so I knew they must have reached him, but he never answered, and as the years went on I wrote less often, for you cannot keep up a correspondence on one side only. I used to wonder at the time if Aunt Penelope kept back his letters to me, but I did not like to accuse her of such a monstrous crime.

At last, however, just after I had pa.s.sed my eighteenth birthday, and was a tall, shabbily-dressed girl, who had learnt all that could be taught at the High School--the only one to which Aunt Penelope could afford to send me--she herself came to me in a state of great excitement, and said that father was returning home.

"He is coming to settle in England," she said. "I must be frank with you, Heather, and tell you that it is not at all to your advantage that he should do so."

"Aunt Penelope," I answered, "why do you say words of that sort?"

"I say them," she replied, "because I know the world and you don't. Your father is not the sort of man who would do any girl the slightest good."

"You had better not speak against him to me," I said.

"I have taken great pains with you," said Aunt Penelope, "and have brought you up entirely out of my own very slender means. You are, for your age, fairly well educated, you understand household duties. You can light a fire as quickly and deftly as any girl I ever met, and you understand the proper method of dusting a room. You can also do plain cooking, and you can make your own clothes. I don't know anything about your intellectual acquirements, but your teacher, Miss Mansel, at the High School, says that you are fairly proficient. Well, my dear, all these things you owe to me. You came to me a very ignorant, very self-opinionated, silly, delicate little girl. You are now a fine, strong young woman. Your father is returning--he will be here to-morrow."

I clasped my hands tightly together. There was no use in saying to this withered old aunt of mine how I pined for him, how his kindly, good-humoured face, his blue eyes, his grizzled locks, had haunted and haunted me for ten long years.

"I understand," said Aunt Penelope, "that your father, after running through all his own money, and all of yours--for your mother had as much to live on as I have--has suddenly come into a new fortune. In his last letter to me he wrote that he wished to take you to London to introduce you to the great world. Now, I earnestly hope, my dear Heather, that you will be firm on this point and refuse to go with him. I am an old woman now, and I need your presence as a return for all the kindness I have done for you, and the life with your father would be anything but good for you. I shall naturally not object to your seeing him again, but, to speak frankly, I think, after all the years of toil and trouble I have spent on you, it is your bounden duty to stay with me and to refuse your father's invitation to go to London with him."

"Stop knocking at the door!" called the parrot at that moment.

When Aunt Penelope had finished her long speech I looked at her and then said quietly:

"I know you have been good to me, and I have been many times a naughty girl to you, but, you see, father comes first, and if he wants me I am going to him."

"I thought you would say so. Your ingrat.i.tude is past bearing."

"Fathers always do come before aunts, don't they?" I asked.

"Oh, please don't become childish again, Heather. Go out and get the tea. I am tired of the want of proper feeling of the present day. Do you know that this morning Jonas broke that valuable Dresden cup and saucer that I have always set such store by? It has spoiled my set."

"What a shame," I answered. And I went into the kitchen to prepare the tea.

The Jonas of that day was a small boy of thirteen. He wore the very antiquated suit of b.u.t.tons which the first Jonas had appeared in ten years ago. He had very fat, red cheeks, and small, puffy eyes, and a little b.u.t.ton of a mouth, and he was always asleep except when Aunt Penelope was about, when he ran and raced and pretended to do a lot, and broke more things than can be imagined. He awoke now when I entered the kitchen.

"Jonas, you are a bad boy," I said; "the kettle isn't boiling, and the fire is nearly out."

"I'll pour some paraffin on the fire and it will blaze up in a minute,"

said Jonas.

"You won't do anything of the kind; it is most dangerous--and Jonas, what a shame that you should have broken that Dresden cup and saucer!"

"Lor', miss, it was very old," said Jonas. "We wears out ourselves, so does the chaney."

"Now don't talk nonsense," said I, half laughing. "Cut some bread and I'll toast it. Jonas, I am a very happy girl to-day; my dear father is coming back to-morrow."

"Lor'," said Jonas, "I wouldn't be glad if my gov'nor wor coming back.

He's sarvin' his time, miss, but don't let on that you know."

"Serving his time?" I answered. "What is that?"

"Lor', miss, he's kept by the Government. They has all the expense of him, and a powerful eater he ever do be!"

I did not inquire any further, but went on preparing the tea. When it was ready I brought it to Aunt Penelope.

"Do you know," I said, as I poured her out a cup, "that Jonas says his father is 'serving his time'? What does that mean?"

Aunt Penelope turned red and then white. Then she said, in a curious, restrained sort of voice:

"I wouldn't use that expression if I were you, Heather. It applies to people who are detained in prison."

"Oh!" I answered. Then I said, in a low tone, "I am very sorry for Jonas."

The next day father came back. Ten years is a very long time to have done without seeing your only living parent, and if father had been red and grizzled when last I beheld him, his hair was white now.

Notwithstanding this fact, his eyes were as blue as ever, and he had the same jovial manner. He hugged and hugged me, and pushed me away from him and looked at me again, and then he hugged me once more, and said to Aunt Penelope:

"She does you credit, Penelope. She does, really and truly. When we have smartened her up a bit, and--oh! you know all about it, Penelope--she'll be as fine a girl as I ever saw."

"I have taught Heather to regard her clothes in the light in which the sacred Isaac Watts spoke of them," replied Aunt Penelope:

"Why should our garments, made to hide Our parents' shame, provoke our pride?

Let me be dressed fine as I will, Flies, flowers, and moths, exceed me still."

"That's a very ugly verse, if you will permit me to say so, Penelope,"

remarked my father, and then he dragged me down to sit on his knee.

He was wonderfully like his old self, and yet there was an extraordinary change in him. He used to be--at least the dream-father I had thought of all these years used to be--a very calm, self-contained man, never put out nor wanting in self-possession. But now he started at intervals and had an anxious, almost nervous manner. Aunt Penelope would not allow me to sit long on my father's knee.

"You forget, Heather, that you are not a child," she said. "Jump up and attend to the Major's comforts. I do not forget, Major, how particular you used to be about your toast. You were an awful fidget when you were a young man."

"Ha! ha!" said my father. "Ha! ha! And I am an awful fidget still, Pen, an awful fidget. But Heather makes good toast; she's a fine girl--that is, she will be, when I have togged her up a bit."

Here he winked at me, and Aunt Penelope turned aside as though she could scarcely bear the sight. After tea, to my infinite disgust, I was requested to leave the room. I went up to my tiny room, and, to judge from the rise and fall of two voices, an animated discussion was going on downstairs. At the end of half an hour Aunt Penelope called to me to come down. As I entered the room the parrot said, "Stop knocking at the door!" and my father remarked:

"I wonder, Penelope, you don't choke that bird!" Aunt Penelope turned to me with tears in her eyes.

"Heather, your father wishes you to join him in London at once. He has arranged, however, that you shall spend a certain portion of each year with me."

"Yes," remarked my father, "the dull time in the autumn. You shall always have her back then--that is, until she marries a duke or someone worthy of her."

"Am I really to go with you, Daddy?" I asked. "Really and truly?"

"Not to come with me to-night, pretty pet," he answered, pinching my cheek as he spoke. "I must find a habitation worthy of my little girl.