Works of Ellen Wood

by Ellen Wood

  The fair was in its full radiance on this fine September day. Drums were beating, fifes were playing, pantaloons were shouting, ladies were dancing, and rival showmen in scarlet and gold tunics were shouting out their seductive attractions, when two respectable-looking maid-servants, each in charge of a little boy, might have been observed in the street, about to enter the enchanted regions. The children were attired in black velvet, trimmed with crape, and their straw hats had black ribbon round them. The younger, a lovely child with a bright complexion and a mass of fair curls, looked nearly three years old; the other was nearly five; not a pretty child, but his countenance one of noble intelligence. An insignificant little fellow enough in years and stature, this elder one; no one to look at: and yet a great many people touched their hats to him, child though he was, and that very fair was being held upon his own land; for he was lord of the manor, and inheritor of Alnwick.

  Benja and George had been wild to set off to it. Indeed, for a week beforehand, from the raising of the first plank for the booths, it could hardly be said that either servants or children for miles round were in their sedate senses. Prance, however, was an exception. Prance seemed to have no affinity with fairs; and she had drawn in her thin lips in withering contempt at Honour’s open longing for it. There was no more cordiality between the two servants than there used to be, and a sharp quarrel would occur now and again, in which Honour, as far as words went, had the best of it. Honour was free-spoken; there was no denying it. This fair had caused a desperate quarrel that same morning. Honour said everything she could to enhance its glories to the children; Prance contradicted every word, and protested it was not a fit place to take them to.

  Mrs. Carleton St. John favoured Honour in the matter, told Prance she would not deprive the children of the shows for anything, and finally ordered her to be quiet. George took his nurse’s part, and said Honour was a “nasty beast.” Benja retaliated that Prance was, and George struck him. Mrs. Carleton St. John for once reproved George, and kissed and soothed Benja. It was a curious thing, not noticed at the time, but recalled by Honour in the future, that this little graciousness on the part of her mistress, this displayed affection for Benja, should have occurred on the day afterwards characterized by the unexpected visit of Mr. Isaac St. John. “As if it had been on purpose!” Honour was wont to repeat to herself with a groan. However, all this partisanship for herself and Benja only put her into a good humour at the time; she could not see the future; and when they started, after an early dinner, Honour was in a state of great delight, satisfied with everything and every one.

  Excepting, perhaps, with Prance. Prance showed no signs whatever of her discomfiture, but followed to the fair with George, impassive and silent as ever. As they were entering the bustle, and the little legs already began to dance to the drums, and the charmed eyes caught the first glimpse of the spangles and all the other enchantments, a dusty travelling carriage-and-four came bowling down the street, and stopped at the Bell Inn, which was situated opposite to the common. Such travelling equipages had become sufficiently rare to be almost a curiosity in the county, and both the maids turned to stare, utterly unsuspicious that it contained one who, as guardian, had all power over the heir of Alnwick.

  The first show they entered (on the principle of keeping the best to the last) was a very sober sort of affair, and purporting to be “An Emporium of Foreign Curiosities.” The admission was threepence, the trumpet was loud, and the showman was magnificent both in person and persuasion.

  “I shall go into this,” said Honour. “I should think you needn’t be afraid of what you’d see inside,” she added to Prance in tones, it must be confessed, of aggravation. “There’s no dancing here.”

  Prance’s only answer was to draw down the corners of her thin lips and walk off with George to a leviathan booth whose company were executing a complicated quadrille before it. Honour paid her threepence, disputed with the money-taker about admitting Benja for three-halfpence, that functionary protesting that there was no half-price for gentlemen’s children, and went into the show.

  Like many other shows, its interior did not realize the outward promise. There was a crocodile in stone, and a few more dead wonders, which Honour turned up her nose at, saying something about demanding back her money: but Benja’s attention had become riveted by the pretty model of a church rising from the midst of green moss. It was white, and its coloured windows were ingeniously shown up by means of a light placed within it. It really was a pretty and conspicuous article in the dark booth, and Benja could not be moved from it. How little did Honour think that that sight was to exercise so terrible an influence on the unconscious child!

  “Come along,” she said, rather impatiently. “I could make you as good a one any day, Benja.”

  “How could you make it?” promptly asked Benja.

  “With white paper and thin strips of wood for the frame. Master Benja, then! we shall have Prance going home and telling your mamma that we lost her on purpose. She’s as deceitful as yonder crocodile.”

  “Couldn’t you buy it for me, Honour?” returned Benja, not stirring a peg.

  “Of course I couldn’t,” answered Honour. “What a little simpleton you must be, to ask it! The things here are not for sale; the folks get their living by showing them. And a fine set of worthless rubbish it is! Once for all, are you coming, Master St. John?”

  “Will you promise to make me one?” persisted Benja.

  “Yes, I will. There!”

  “When?”

  “As soon as I can get the things together. Now come.

  Benja reluctantly moved away; but his head and eyes were turned for the last glance, up to the moment when Honour pulled him through the low green-baize opening.

  Meanwhile Mrs. Carleton St. John was sitting alone. She was of remarkably quiet habits by inclination, a great stay-at-home, rarely seeking society or amusement abroad; and the still recent death of her husband tended to keep the Hall pretty free from idle visitors. One sole passion seemed to absorb her whole life, to the exclusion of every other; it filled every crevice of her heart, it regulated her movements, it buried even her natural grief for her husband — and this was love for her child. The word love most inadequately expresses the feeling: it was a passion, threatening to consume every healthy impulse. She was quite aware of it: indeed, her conscience did not allow her to be otherwise.

  One thought was ever present to her; it may be said that it had never left her mind since the day her husband died: that Benja was chief of Alnwick Hall, with all its wealth and dignity; that she, Charlotte St. John, so arrogant by nature; was there only on sufferance, a home accorded to her as his personal guardian; and that George was as nobody. They were as a sharp thorn, these reflections, ever piercing her. They ate into her ill-regulated heart and rankled there. And they went on to another thought, an unwholesome thought, which would have been a wicked thought but that it was not there of her own will; a thought that carried danger in its train. In the first waking of early morning, in the fevered dreams of midnight solitude, in the glare and bustle of noon day, it was ever thrusting itself forward — if Benja were to die, her child would be the inheritor.

  Was she aware of its danger? No. And yet she was fond of tracing it back to its original source — the accident to Benja. When the boy was taken out of the water, drowned as was supposed, and as some one called out, the wild beating of Mrs. St. John’s bosom — not with sorrow — called into life the thought that had certainly never existed there before, or else had lain dormant, Her increasing dislike of Benja should have acted as a warning to her. It was generated by the false view she took of the existing state of things: that Benja was a sort of ogre, whose sole mission on earth was to stand in the light of her child and deprive him of what might have been his birthright. She strove against this dislike — it might be better to call it hatred, for it had grown into that — and she had to exercise a constant check upon herself in her behaviour towards him. None but she kn
ew what it cost her to treat Benja with a semblance of love, or to make no very apparent difference between the children. She did strive against it — let us do her justice! — not from any suspicion of danger, but from her own sense of equity. That very morning, in taking Benja’s part and kissing him, she had acted from an impulse of good principle, an endeavour to do right. But no sooner were the children out of her sight, than the old bad feelings got the better of her, and she sat indulging all sorts of foolish dreams and visions of what she would do were Alnwick George’s instead of Benja’s. Will you believe that she had fallen into the habit of repeating their Christian names to herself, with the prospective title before them?— “Sir Benjamin St. John,”

  “Sir George St. John;” and she thought the one (you need not ask which of the two) sounded a thousand times more charming than the other.

  Though very conscious of all this, she yet detected no danger in it. The night of her husband’s death, she made a resolve to do her duty by her little step-son; and when the codicil to the will was read, giving Mr. St. John of Castle Wafer the power to remove him from her, she resented it bitterly as a mark of want of confidence in her shown by her husband. No woman could have been more willing in intention to do right by a step-son than Charlotte St. John. If only her strength of will did not fail her, she might succeed. One result of the desire to carry out her resolve, was retaining Honour in her service. She very much disliked the girl, for her strong attachment to Benja in contradistinction to George, and her always taking his part against that rather capricious younger gentleman; but she would not discharge her. To this desire to do her duty, rather than because her husband in dying had expressed a wish that Honour should be retained about Benja, the girl owed the fact that she was still in her place. Honour alone of the servants, save and except perhaps Prance, had detected all along the second Mrs. St. John’s dislike to her little charge. She was aware, as surely as though she had seen it recorded, that her mistress regarded George as he who ought to be the heir, Benja as a usurper; and it aroused within her a feeling of indignation, which sometimes peeped out in her manner. Not sufficiently so for Mrs. St. John openly to find fault with; and she only thought the girl quick in temper. And now I think I have said as much as I can say about the state of mind of Mrs. Carleton St. John. She deliberately intended to do right: but passion and prejudice are strong; unusually strong were they in her; and her mind was undisciplined and ill-regulated.

  As she sat there to-day, the approach of a vehicle in the avenue attracted her attention. She soon saw that it was a fly from the Bell Inn, and all her motherly fears were at once up in arms, lest any accident had happened to Georgy, and he was being brought home, or she fetched to him. But it seemed to contain only one gentleman; and he a stranger; a delicate-looking man, who sat low in the fly.

  Not for a long time had she been so surprised as when the card was brought to her, and she found that her visitor was Mr. St. John of Castle Wafer. Had he come to remove Benja? The thought awoke a momentary affection for the child in her heart, and called up a resentful flush to her cheeks. But resentment faded away as Isaac came in, and held out his hand to her in his open courtesy. She saw she had nothing underhand to fear from him.

  What was perhaps more agreeable to her, as it is to all vain women — and Charlotte St. John was one of them — was the look of honest admiration that shone out of Isaac’s face and manner. She presented a picture deeply interesting — in her young widowhood, in her beauty, in her manner so quiet and subdued. She burst into tears as they talked of her husband, of Benja; and she told Mr. St. John that if he removed Benja from her it would break her heart.

  It was only a figure of speech. And it is very probable that the fact of two thousand a-year of her income being in peril, may have swayed her to earnestness more than any other feeling. Mr. St. John took it all for loving earnestness, and assured her he thought no cause would ever be likely to arise for his removing Benja. In point of fact, Isaac St. John was most warmly impressed in her favour; it was almost as if she had fascinated him.

  “Will you answer me a question?” asked Mrs. St. John. “I cannot get it solved by any one else. Why did my husband leave this power in your hands? Did he doubt me?”

  “I do not know why he left it,” was the answer of Mr. St. John: “unless he thought that you might be too kind to the boy — might indulge him to his detriment. I remember, too, his saying that you were not very strong, and the charge of the two children might be a tax upon you.”

  She did not answer. She began to speak of more general things, and Isaac St. John sat talking with her for some time. She expressed her regret that Benja should happen to be at the fair, and laughed when Mr. St. John spoke of the noise that had assailed his ears from the drums. She pressed him to take up his quarters at the Hall until the morrow, but this he declined; he was only an invalid at best, he said. He had engaged rooms at the Bell for himself and his servant, and he invited Benja to come and breakfast with him on the following morning. Mrs. St. John readily assented to the invitation.

  “You will allow his nurse to attend him,” he said to her, as he rose to leave. “I should like to see and converse with the attendant of my little ward, and offer her a gratuity as an earnest of my favour.”

  As readily as the other request was this acceded to, and Mr. St. John departed, taking final leave of his cousin’s widow — for he intended to leave Alnwick soon after breakfast the following morning.

  The fly had conveyed him almost through the park on his return to the Bell, when he saw two women-servants, in charge of two children. Rightly guessing who they were, he stopped the fly, opened the door, and talked to them from his seat.

  A noble boy, his ward, with an open, intelligent countenance; a pretty little toy-boy the other, with his bright face, his fair curls, and his indulged petulance peeping out even then. The children were at home with him at once, showing him the fairings they carried — one a child’s kaleidoscope, the other a drum. Benja told him some unintelligible story of a “church” Honour was going to make for him; Georgy sounded the rataplan on his drum. He inquired of Honour whether she was the nurse mentioned to him by her late master, who had been with the child from his birth. Upon her saying she was, he told her she was to be at the Bell with Master St. John the next morning at nine o’clock; he handed a sovereign to Prance; he won the boys’ hearts by a promise of a whole cargo of fairings to be sent up that evening; and then he drove on. Not one of them had noticed his hump; but they thought what a little low gentleman he was in stature.

  Benja had taken home a fairing for his mamma — a blue-and-white smelling-bottle, flat as a half-crown, with a narrow neck in which was a little cork as stopper. It had cost threepence, and he kissed her as he gave it to her. George’s fairing to his mamma had been a Banbury cake, but he had unfortunately eaten it on his way home. Whether the contrast touched her, or that with Mr. St. John in the vicinity she did not choose to be otherwise than loving, certain it was that she kissed Benja heartily in return, praised his present as she put it into her waistband, and told Georgy he was a selfish little fellow. How gratified Honour was, and how, in manner, she crowed over Prance, Prance would not condescend to observe. Mrs. St. John was all graciousness, bade Honour make Master Benja very nice indeed for the following morning, and said the pony-carriage should take them down.

  The appointment was kept. Benja was treated to jam and other good things as he sat at breakfast with Mr. St. John — Brumm and Honour waiting on them. Afterwards, when the cloth was removed, Mr. Brumm had orders to take Master St.

  John to the fair and show him the elephant, or anything else Mr. Brumm might deem expedient; and Honour was requested to take a seat while Mr. St. John talked to her.

  He really saw no means of ascertaining whether Benja was well done by at the Hall, excepting this — the putting a direct question to the nurse. After what he had seen of the Hall’s mistress the previous day, he would as soon suspect himself of being ill trea
ted, as any child over whom she had control. Still it was as well to make sure upon the point.

  Honour answered his questions as straightforwardly as she could. But, it should be remarked, that in her present mood of graciousness towards her mistress (or it should perhaps rather be said of that lady’s graciousness to her), she spoke more favourably of Mrs. St. John than she would have done at almost any previous time. She was not indulgent to Master Benja; but on the other hand she was not generally unkind to him, was the substance of her answer.

  This rather surprised Mr. St. John. “I should have thought her in danger of being too kind,” he said.

  Honour shook her head. “Mrs. St. John is too kind by a great deal to her own child, sir; she indulges him dreadfully; but there’s no fear that she will ever do that by Master Benja.”

  “I suppose you do not mean to say that Mrs. St. John is unkind to him?” returned Mr. St. John, rather at a loss how to frame his words with a due regard to ‘what was due to the dignity of that lady, when speaking of her to her servant.

  “Well, no, sir, I can’t say that she is unkind. She treats the two very much alike, only that she is always kissing and clasping the little one, and has him so much more with her. She boxed Master Benja’s ears the other day and made him cry. For no fault, either, that I could find out.”

  Mr. St. John smiled. “A little wholesome correction is good for boys, you know.”

  “I’m not saying that it isn’t, sir. Altogether, things have gone on much more comfortably since my master’s death than I used to fancy they would. There’s not much to complain of.”

  “On the whole, then, you cannot see cause for any interference on my part? You see no reason why Master St. John should not remain at the Hall under his step-mother’s charge?”