That benevolent old gentleman cared only for roses and fishing and virtuous living. His happy disposition had remained unsoured by the nine wounds, twenty-nine imprisonments, and double sentence of death by hanging, drawing and quartering, which he had received in the wars. He gave proof of it by offering to teach any of the children from Ling House who wished it. But they were so idle and played truant so often and Mr. Wake hated so much to report their deficiencies to Lady Ingleby, whom he regarded as the most dreadful and also ineffectual she-dragon he had ever encountered, that Eliza and Molly were the only two who profited by it, by reason of Eliza’s studious tastes and her affection for her sister. Eliza indeed had the makings of a scholar, Mr. Wake had declared.
And whatever Eliza did, Molly would begin to do too, and more quickly, but would go no farther than the exact point which she judged might be of use to her, for she had her mother’s rather short-sighted eye for a bargain, and was of no mind to spend any labour that was unlikely to be profitable.
Thus when Lady Ingleby succeeded in inveigling a distant cousin into a visit to Ling House and an alliance with one of its daughters, it was the younger, Molly, who impressed him with beauty and wit, where her elder sister struck him only as an abrupt, awkward girl. Eliza in her arbitrary fashion quarrelled with Molly for marrying “a wretched little numskull of a man,” as though the girl could do anything else but what she was told, even if she had been fool enough to wish to. Molly transferred her allegiance from Eliza to her mother, for now that she was a rich merchant’s wife in a country house in the village of Kensington, near London, it was necessary to have someone at home to shock and delight with her tales of impropriety and splendour.
A meditative and even philosophic mood is induced in the most practical minds by the endless process of preserving plums and curing bacon, mutton and beans for the winter. Standing at the long table in her still-room, gaunt, weary, her hooded eyes fixed on her occupation, Lady Ingleby would repeat to herself some account of a rout or visit to a great house that Moll had paid, or Maria as she now called herself, to the derision of the younger members of her family who dubbed her Mollietta Maria or the Queen Mother. Her letters gave Lady Ingleby a pleasure such as she had never had from her eldest son. She loved him too much. Anxiety, anguish and then bitterness had been his filial offering.
Since daughters did not matter so much, they were perhaps more satisfactory, she decided in the monotony of her still-room. But then Eliza’s dark head went past the narrow window, moody, defiant, and Lady Ingleby revoked her decision. Eliza would not listen to Molly’s letters, she snorted when her mother called her Maria; she stalked on her solitary way, paying no attention to anyone, saying she wished she were a man, but refusing to speak to one. Her mother was sure that girls had never been like that in her day.
Five in a bed was not an excessive allowance in those days when beds were enormous but few, and children many. The younger children of Sir Roderick and Lady Ingleby all slept together in the four-post bed in the west room, when at last they had been herded home, for Nan and the boys would run with the village children till any hour in the late summer dusk, playing I Spy or Hare and Hounds or Jacob’s Ladders.
There were the two younger sisters, Alice and Nan, and then the three little boys, much younger than they, for the two children born after Nan had died in infancy. Alice was two years older than Nan, and had always wanted to sleep with her elder sisters instead and share their secrets. She called the others the children and was always telling them to be quiet and let her go to sleep, but they never regarded her. They laughed and kicked and fought for the inside places on cold nights and there whispered stories of goblins who might creep up from under the bed, and pull the blankets away from the vanquished ones on the outside. So that the struggle for warmth and safety would begin all over again until Nurse would hear them and come up and scold them, her cap nodding over her candle as she poked it through the curtains, lighting up their snug, secret room and all the grinning faces on the long bolster, and all the hands that shot out, clutching at her apron as she turned to go.
“Nurse, Nurse, just one story.”
“Well, what shall it be then?”
“Tell us how you were fetching peas in the field and heard the poor reverend gentleman roaring for help.”
For that was how Nurse always referred to Mr. Wake, whom she had heard a-bellowing and a-hollering on a Monday afternoon many years ago. Down went her basket and all the peas scattered, and off she ran to the gate and there snatched up a corn-pike and so with all her petticoats bundled up round her waist, and leaping like a hare (though Nan saw it more like a cow), she skedaddled down into the road and there saw poor Mr. Wake with all his fishing things tumbled in the mud and he lying flat in the midst of them, knocked to the ground, shot through the top of the head, and wounded in nine places though none fatally, and all by that rascally Roundhead Captain Moreton who stood over him with his pistols, daring him to rise, as if the poor clergyman were capable of such a thing.
“Ah, but it was his turn to roar when I got him in the back with my pike. Down went his pistols, and off he ran down the road with a noise like a mad bull, and me after him, but never got another chance to spit my fine beef.”
“Yes, but you’ve left out what he said.”
“There now, you’re remembering it all and telling me to tell it again. What was it he said, now—”
“Hag, harridan, bitch, witch,” they shouted, for this was part of the game, and Nurse was in honour bound to forget her story just at this point. Once again the bully fled and the stout heroine pursued; the Reverend William Wake, a pleasant true-hearted parson if ever there was one, was induced to sit up and sip brandy, admitting mildly that the Captain’s attack had been “somewhat to his detriment,” and recovered to continue his turbulent career until peace restored him to his roses.
“True it is what Sir Roderick says, we live in stirring times.”
“You did,” said Nan, who always wished she had been in the wars.
Then Nurse tucked them in all over again, saying she would slap hard any hand that was now put outside. So that they had now to lie very still and only whisper, pretending that they were hiding from Old Noll who had had a wart on his nose as big as a walnut, which the Devil had made when he pricked him for his own and made him swear to eat nothing but children for supper ever since, and so he still did, now he was in Hell. Or they were Hop o’ my Thumb and his nine brothers and sisters in the great bed where the ogre had put them when he meant to come at night and chop off all their heads at one blow. At this point little Frank always began to whimper, nor would he be comforted by the assurance that the ingenious Hop o’ my Thumb contrived that the ogre should instead cut off the heads of his own ten children, all asleep in their bed.
Each tried to frighten the others most. The familiar places in their countryside became strange and terrible. A wizard lived inside Gaddiscombe Hill where they played at Tom Tiddler’s Ground by day, picking up buttercups and daisies instead of gold and silver. Old Mary down in Long Lane turned into a black cat at night and had cursed Farmer Dray’s dog for chasing her, so that it ran mad and died. Whoever fell asleep under the hollow thorn-tree on the common woke to find that nobody remembered them, that their playmates were old and shrivelled and the world was all different. They could see the thorn-tree through their own window if they craned their necks at the left-hand corner, and Jamie once tried so hard that he got his head caught between the bars. The common went up and down in a dark waving line against the evening sky, and just in the tail of the left eye was the thorn-tree, flinging out its crooked fingers as though it beckoned them.
Nan would lie with her knees hunched up though they all complained of the cold hollow it made in the bedclothes. “That is the hill the King marched over,” she said, and she saw him going away over the hill, after one look at her (for her father had always declared that the King had looked straight at her as she sat perched upon his shoulder), going
away to London, and all the world running after him spreading itself vaster and vaster, like a peacock’s tail, dancing and shouting as though they were mad. And she and her father had never yet gone to London, but one day they would, and see the King again.
One foot up and one foot down
That’s the way to London town.
She marched two fingers up over the mound of blankets she had made with her knees, but before she could reach the top the others would make her put her arm into the bed again so as not to pull the clothes away from them.
She was a troublesome bedfellow for even when she lay still and silent she could brew mischief, against herself as well as them, for she would lie staring at the columns of solid blackness made by the bedposts until some trick of reflected moonlight through their broken window-shutter made her fancy she saw a hand round the post. She had known quite well what it was, but the more she said to herself, “Yes, it is like a hand,” the more she began to believe it was a hand, and presently she thought the hand had shifted, it was higher up, until suddenly she terrified herself and the others by shrieking, “Look, look! There is a pair of hands climbing up the bedpost.”
At that they all screamed, Nurse came running, and thankful they were to see her however she might punish them. Even their mother was only another human being. And following their mother was their father, striding in among this mess of squalling brats and questioning, scolding women. He would not heed who had said what and who was to blame, he took the chief culprit on his knee and told her in a rather thick voice that she was a brave girl and so should not be frightened, and that she was the apple of his eye. There were no punishments, there were no more scoldings even, they were all put back into bed and the blankets tucked round them, and Nan shut her eyes tight and tried to see apples instead of hands, clusters of crab-apples hanging on a branch, as small and red as cherries but sour to taste, apples stored in the loft in heaps and rows, apples of love, which she had heard was the name of a new red juicy fruit that had come from Italy and was not sweet. It was odd that apples of love should not be sweet, and what was the apple of one’s eye?
As they grew older, she and Alice should have gone together as Eliza and Molly had done, and before them Kate and Dorothy who were so much older and by now so long departed, the one of them married and the other dead, that they hardly counted. But Alice found Nan childish and unsympathetic. She herself was gentle and religious; she said she would never marry anyone who had not a high forehead and sad, beautiful eyes like the picture of the Blessed Martyr King Charles, graven on the silver medallion that her father wore always on a thin chain hidden beneath his clothes.
But Nan could not bear to hear how the late King was led to his death on a snowy morning to the sound of muffled drums, how before he started he asked only for an extra shirt so that he should not shiver with the cold and be thought to have trembled with fear. She could see the reproachful, patient eyes, the white lace on black velvet, the black velvet moving slowly over the snow under a grey sky between the ranks of Cromwell’s Ironsides, and Cromwell standing there, no longer the Old Noll, the nursery bogey, but an odiously solemn figure, almost as much a martyr as his victim, saying portentously, “It is a stern necessity.”
Nothing there of the exultation of the conqueror, of the despair or fury of the conquered, just each behaving perfectly. She cried too at hearing of it, but passionately, indignantly,—“Could nobody do anything? Didn’t he even curse Old Noll for a traitor? Oh I hate it, I hate your old King,” and she stamped at Alice whose tears ran down her face in silence, “your wretched sad old King.” She asked for stories instead of the gay and gallant young Prince who had wandered defeated for six weeks in England with a heavy price on his head, disguised as an ostler, as an old woman, even as a Roundhead, gravely rebuking his company for swearing.
“He is far better than the old King.”
“He is not,” cried Alice, showing spirit.
“He is, I say. He is alive for one thing and that alone is better.”
For love of the late King, Alice had committed her only crime. She had stolen her father’s precious copy of the Eikon Basilike, the book of prayers which King Charles had written with his own hand in prison, giving, as the title page averred, “the Pourtraicture of His Sacred Maiestie in His Solitudes and Sufferings.” It had been privately circulated among his faithful adherents, it was dangerous even to own a copy, but many read aloud from it to their household every evening. Sir Roderick did not go as far as that, nor indeed to read it at all after his first essay to conquer the tedium ordained by loyalty. But he kept his copy religiously under the false bottom of the linen-press, from which Alice secretly extracted it and, in exquisite tremors at the enormity of her guilt and the nobility of its cause, kept it hidden under sprigs of rosemary in an old box in the attic. When the noise of the others at play made her head ache, she would steal away up the rickety wooden stair, and sitting under the ten beams that met in five sharp angles like the spread fingers of two hands touching at the tips, she would draw the book from its hiding-place and spell out a word here and there that had been written by the Royal Saint, wishing that she herself could die a death as noble, as heroically submissive, as magnificently spectacular. The sunbeam that fell across her fair hair from the dusty window made a halo round her head and seemed to her a heavenly promise of an early and much-mourned death, such as the Princess Elizabeth had died, at fourteen, in the grim old castle of Carisbrooke, with her pale cheek resting on her father’s Bible, his last gift to her before his execution.
But Alice could not die of a broken heart for her own father’s death. He had been too rough and careless and noisy; and there was nothing tragic about him and his great laugh. She rested her pale cheek on the book of the Princess Elizabeth’s father.
There Nan discovered her, but did not give her away, nor even laugh at her except at first. But Alice forgot to draw herself up or turn into a haughty elder sister. She had clutched the book to her and said, “Don’t tell, don’t let them take it away.”
“I won’t tell,” said Nan, staring at the thing that had transfigured her usually pale and passive sister; “let me hold it once.”
She held it. She said, “They say that before the King came home, they would have hanged one for keeping this. I won’t tell,” she added again, and put it away herself in the box and laid the dried rosemary over it.
She wished that she herself had a secret treasure, one that it was life to keep and death to have discovered. But she did not want the book and could not think what such a treasure could be. She went rather slowly out of the attic, and no one else discovered Alice’s secret for two and a half centuries, when it was sold to an American for a sum that would have made Sir Roderick’s fortune ten times over.
Alice remained by the window until presently she heard Nan shouting to her brothers in the yard below, and saw her come running through it and down into the hayfield with the boys and dogs round her. She had wished to kiss Nan as she laid the book in the box and said she would not tell; now Nan was running away from her and she felt they would never meet again. She was lonely and envious of the other’s vigour; she thought that perhaps after all she would rather live and go to London.
Death or life, which should she choose? For to her, as to Nan, the world lay before her, she could do as she liked. They lay in bed that night holding each other’s hands, thinking that as soon as they were old enough they had only to hold them out and take what they wished.
One night when the little boys were asleep, Nan whispered to her, “I have a secret to tell you. One of us is to be married but I don’t know which.”
“It is I of course. I am the elder.”
“Yes, but our mother thinks it may be well to be rid of me first. I heard her talking of it with Nurse. I was under the window. Nurse thinks it should be you.”
“Who is the bridegroom?”
Nan had not heard this point mentioned, but hoped it might be some London gentleman,
for her mother was reading to herself a letter from Mollietta Maria as though it bore on the matter, and cackled like a turkey hen, though she would not tell Nurse why.
Next week they heard that Tumpleton Park was to be sold, which had belonged to Sir Roderick’s estates since the Wars of the Roses. He had refused to allow it to go. The week after, they were told that one of them also was to go, with the Park, to Mr. Hambridge of Cricketts Manor. He had visited their mother on business one day when they had all been sent out on a picnic. They had once seen him at Rampton Market a year before when they had gone in to sell old Ginger, and he was there for a cock-fight. Nan had noticed a burly, red-faced man who stood among the market stalls and shouted in a jolly way to the man who owned the rival cock. That had reminded her of her father, and she had felt sympathy with him when instead of talking to her mother, who was being very polite to him, he turned his back on them and trudged off with his opponent for a drink together. But she did not wish to marry someone who lived not so very far from home, and who, for all she knew, never went to London.
The girls waited in a very different suspense to hear which was to be bride; both were disappointed it was Nan.
With the example of Eliza before her, Lady Ingleby had seen that Nan also might early become unmanageable, and what was worse, unmarriageable. Alice, though older, was docile and fair-haired and should make an easy match, though it was difficult to tell. Young people changed so fast nowadays, and sentiment no longer had the marriage-marketable value it had possessed in her young days. Men now liked girls to be brisk and lively, and nobody cared about the martyred King. “It is positively démodé to be beheaded,” Maria had written in proud quotation from a friend at Court. That had been her contribution to the marriage problem, and it had startled Lady Ingleby’s jealous resentment against the Stuarts into a delighted chuckle.
None So Pretty Page 2