The Clever Woman of the Family. Yonge Charlotte Mary

no hope but in getting him alone, and at his mother’s reluctant desire, he followed her to the dining-room; but there he turned dogged and indifferent, made a sort of feint of doing what he was told, but whether she tried him in arithmetic, Latin, or dictation, he made such ludicrous blunders as to leave her in perplexity whether they arose from ignorance or impertinence. His spelling was phonetic to the highest degree, and though he owned to having done sums, he would not, or did not answer the simplest question in mental arithmetic. “Five apples and eight apples, come, Conrade, what will they make?”

      “A pie.”

      That was the hopeful way in which the examination proceeded, and when Rachel attempted to say that his mother would be much displeased, he proceeded to tumble head over heels all round the room, as if he knew better; which performance broke up the seance, with a resolve on her part that when she had the books she would not be so beaten. She tried Francis, but he really did know next to nothing, and whenever he came to a word above five letters long stopped short, and when told to spell it, said, “Mamma never made him spell;” also muttering something depreciating about civilians.

      Rachel was a woman of perseverance. She went to the bookseller’s, and obtained a fair amount of books, which she ordered to be sent to Lady Temple’s. But when she came down the next morning, the parcel was nowhere to be found. There was a grand interrogation, and at last it turned out to have been safely deposited in an empty dog-kennel in the back yard. It was very hard on Rachel that Fanny giggled like a school-girl, and even though ashamed of herself and her sons, could not find voice to scold them respectably. No wonder, after such encouragement, that Rachel found her mission no sinecure, and felt at the end of her morning’s work much as if she had been driving pigs to market, though the repetition was imposing on the boys a sort of sense of fate and obedience, and there was less active resistance, though learning it was not, only letting teaching be thrown at them. All the rest of the day, except those two hours, they ran wild about the house, garden, and beach—the latter place under the inspection of Coombe, whom, since the “Jolly Mariner” proposal, Rachel did not in the least trust; all the less when she heard that Major Keith, whose soldier-servant he had originally been, thought very highly of him. A call at Myrtlewood was formidable from the bear-garden sounds, and delicate as Lady Temple was considered to be, unable to walk or bear fatigue, she never appeared to be incommoded by the uproar in which she lived, and had even been seen careering about the nursery, or running about the garden, in a way that Grace and Rachel thought would tire a strong woman. As to a tete-a-tete with her, it was never secured by anything short of Rachel’s strong will, for the children were always with her, and she went to bed, or at any rate to her own room, when they did, and she was so perfectly able to play and laugh with them that her cousins scarcely thought her sufficiently depressed, and comparing her with what their own mother had been after ten months’ widowhood, agreed that after all “she had been very young, and Sir Stephen very old, and perhaps too much must not be expected of her.”

      “The grand passion of her life is yet to come,” said Rachel.

      “I hope not,” said Grace.

      “You may be certain of that,” said Rachel. “Feminine women always have it one time or other in their lives; only superior ones are exempt. But I hope I may have influence enough to carry her past it, and prevent her taking any step that might be injurious to the children.”

      CHAPTER II. RACHEL’S DISCIPLINE

      “Thought is free, as sages tells us—

          Free to rove, and free to soar;

      But affection lives in bondage,

          That enthrals her more and more.”

JEAN INGELOW.

      An old friend lived in the neighbourhood who remembered Fanny’s father, and was very anxious to see her again, though not able to leave the house. So the first day that it was fine enough for Mrs. Curtis to venture out, she undertook to convey Fanny to call upon her, and was off with a wonderfully moderate allowance of children, only the two youngest boys outside with their maid. This drive brought more to light about Fanny’s past way of life and feelings than had ever yet appeared. Rachel had never elicited nearly so much as seemed to have come forth spontaneously to the aunt, who had never in old times been Fanny’s confidante.

      Fanny’s life had been almost a prolonged childhood. From the moment of her marriage with the kind old General, he and her mother had conspired to make much of her; all the more that she was almost constantly disabled by her state of health, and was kept additionally languid and helpless by the effects of climate. Her mother had managed her household, and she had absolutely had no care, no duty at all but to be affectionate and grateful, and to be pretty and gracious at the dinner parties. Even in her mother’s short and sudden illness, the one thought of both the patient and the General had been to spare Fanny, and she had been scarcely made aware of the danger, and not allowed to witness the suffering. The chivalrous old man who had taken on himself the charge of her, still regarded the young mother of his children as almost as much of a baby herself, and devoted himself all the more to sparing her trouble, and preventing her from feeling more thrown upon her by her mother’s death. The notion of training her to act alone never even occurred to him, and when he was thrown from his horse, and carried into a wayside-hut to die, his first orders were that no hurried message might be sent to her, lest she might be startled and injured by the attempt to come to him. All he could do for her was to leave her in the charge of his military secretary, who had long been as a son to him. Fanny told her aunt with loving detail all that she had heard from Major Keith of the brave old man’s calm and resigned end—too full of trust even to be distressed with alarms for the helpless young wife and children, but committing them in full reliance to the care of their Father in heaven, and to the present kindness of the friend who stood by his pillow.

      The will, which not only Rachel but her mother thought strangely unguarded, had been drawn up in haste, because Sir Stephen’s family had outgrown the provisions of a former one, which had besides designated her mother, and a friend since dead, as guardians. Haste, and the conscious want of legal knowledge, had led to its being made as simple as possible, and as it was, Sir Stephen had scarcely had the power to sign it.

      It was Major Keith who had borne the tidings to the poor little widow, and had taken the sole care of the boys during the sad weeks of care utter prostration and illness. Female friends were with her, and tended her affectionately, but if exertion or thought were required of her, the Major had to be called to her sofa to awaken her faculties, and she always awoke to attend to his wishes, as though he were the channel of her husband’s. This state of things ended with the birth of the little girl, the daughter that Sir Stephen had so much wished for, coming too late to be welcomed by him, but awakening her mother to tearful joy and renewed powers of life. The nine months of little Stephana’s life had been a tone of continual change and variety, of new interests and occupations, and of the resumption of a feeling of health which had scarcely been tasted since the first plunge into warm climates. Perhaps it was unreasonable to expect to find Fanny broken down; and she talked in her own simple way with abundant overflowing affection of her husband; but even Mrs. Curtis thought it was to her more like the loss of her own father than of the father of her children; and though not in the least afraid of anything unbecoming in her gentle, retiring Fanny, still felt that it was more the charge of a girl than of a widow, dreaded the boys, dreaded their fate, and dreaded the Major more.

      During this drive, Grace and Rachel had the care of the elder boys, whom Rachel thought safer in her keeping than in Coombe’s. A walk along the cliffs was one resource for their amusement, but it resulted in Conrade’s climbing into the most break-neck places, by preference selecting those that Rachel called him out of, and as all the others thought it necessary to go after him, the jeopardy of Leoline and Hubert became greater than it was possible to permit; so Grace took them by the hands, and lured them home with promises of an introduction to certain white rabbits at the lodge. After their departure, their brothers became infinitely more obstreperous. Whether it were that Conrade had some slight amount of consideration for the limbs of his lesser followers, or whether the fact were—what Rachel did not remotely imagine—that he was less utterly unmanageable with her sister than with herself, certain it is that the brothers went into still more