Charlotte Yonge - Magnum Bonum; Or, Mother Carey's Brood

“Why, Mother Carey,” said that little wretch, “it is just that she doesn’t know anything about anything in London.”

“Yes,” chimed in little Armine, who was hanging to his mother’s skirts; “she thought she should get to the Park by Duke Street.”

“That did not make it right for you not to be obedient,” said Carey, trying for severity.

“But we couldn’t, mother.”

“Couldn’t?” both echoed.

“No,” said Jock, “or we should be still in Piccadilly. Mother Carey, she told us not to cross till it was safe.”

“And she stood up like the Duke of Bedford in the Square,” added Armine.

Janet caught her mother’s eye, and both felt a spasm of uncontrollable diversion in their throats, making Janet turn her back, and Carey gasp and turn on the boys.

“All that is no reason at all. Go up to the nursery. I wish I could trust you to behave like a gentleman, when your aunt is so kind as to take you out.”

“I did , mother! I did hand her across the street, and dragged her out from under all the omnibus horses,” said Jock in an injured tone, while Janet could not refrain from a whispered comparison, “Like a little steam-tug,” and this was quite too much for all of them, producing an explosion which made the tall and stately dame look from one to another in such bewildered amazement, that struck the mother and daughter as so comical that the one hid her face in her hands with a sort of hysterical heaving, and the other burst into that painful laughter by which strained spirits assert themselves in the young.

Mrs. Robert Brownlow, in utter astonishment and discomfiture, turned and walked off to her own room. Somehow Carey and Janet felt more on their ordinary terms than they had done all these sad days, in their consternation and a certain sense of guilt.

Carey could adjudicate now, though trembling still. She made Jock own that his Serpentine plans had been unjustifiable, and then she added, “My poor boy, I must punish you. You must remember it, for if you are not good and steady, what will become of us.”

Jock leapt at her neck. “Mother, do anything to me. I don’t mind, if you only won’t look at me like that!”

She sat down on the stairs, all in a heap again with him, and sentenced him to the forfeit of the ship, which he endured with more tolerable grace, because Armine observed, “Never mind, Skipjack, we’ll go partners in mine. You shall have half my cargo of gold dust.”

Carey could not find it in her heart to check the voyages of the remaining ship, over the uncarpeted dining-room; but as she was going, Armine looked at her with his great soft eyes, and said, “Mother Carey, have you got to be the scoldy and punishy one now?”

“I must if you need it,” said she, going down on her knees again to gather the little fellow to her breast; “but, oh, don’t—don’t need it.”

“I’d rather it was Uncle Robert and Aunt Ellen,” said Jock, “for then I shouldn’t care.”

“Dear Jock, if you only care, I think we sha’n’t want many punishments. But now I must go to your aunt, for we did behave horribly ill to her.”

Aunt Ellen was kind, and accepted Carey’s apology when she found that Jock had really been punished. Only she said, “You must be firm with that boy, Caroline, or you will be sorry for it. My boys know that what I have said is to be done, and they know it is of no use to disobey. I am happy to say they mind me at a word; but that John of yours needs a tight hand. The Colonel thinks that the sooner he is at school the better.”

Before Carey had time to get into a fresh scrape, the Colonel was ringing at the door. He had to confess that Dr. Lucas had said Mrs. Joe Brownlow was right about Vaughan, and had made it plain that his offer ought not to be accepted, either in policy, or in that duty which the Colonel began to perceive towards his brother’s patients. Nor did he think ill of her plan respecting Dr. Drake; and said he would himself suggest the application which that gentleman was no doubt withholding from true feeling, for he had been a favourite pupil of Joe Brownlow, and had been devoted to him. He was sure that Mrs. Brownlow’s good sense and instinct were to be trusted, a dictum which not a little surprised her brother-in-law, who had never ceased to think of “poor Joe’s fancy” as a mere child, and who forgot that she was fifteen years older than at her marriage.

He told his wife what Dr. Lucas had said, to which she replied, “That’s just the way. Men know nothing about it.”

However, Dr. Drake’s offer was sufficiently eligible to be accepted. Moreover, it proved that the most available house at Kenminster could not be got ready for the family before the winter, so that the move could not take place till the spring. In the meantime, as Dr. Drake could not marry till Easter, the lower part of the house was to be given up to him, and Carey and Janet felt that they had a reprieve.

Kem’ster, as county tradition pronounced what was spelt Kenminster, a name meaning St. Kenelm’s minster, had a grand collegiate church and a foundation-school which, in the hands of the Commissioners, had of late years passed into the rule of David Ogilvie, Esq., a spare, pale, nervous, sensitive-looking man of eight or nine and twenty, who sat one April evening under his lamp, with his sister at work a little way off, listening with some amusement to his sighs and groans at the holiday tasks that lay before him.

“Here’s an answer, Mary. What was Magna Charta? The first map of the world.”

“Who’s that ingenious person?”

“Brownlow Major, of course; and here’s French, who says it was a new sort of cow invented by Henry VIII.—a happy feminine, I suppose, to the Papal Bull. Here’s a third! The French fleet defeated by Queen Elizabeth. Most have passed it over entirely.”

“Well, you know this is the first time you have tried such an examination, and boys never do learn history.”

“Nor anything else in this happy town,” was the answer, accompanied by a ruffling over of the papers.

“For shame, David! The first day of the term!”

“It is the dead weight of Brownlows, my dear. Only think! There’s another lot coming! A set of duplicates. They haven’t even the sense to vary the Christian names. Three more to be admitted to-morrow.”

“That accounts for a good deal!”

“You are laughing at me, Mary; but did you never know what it is to feel like Sisyphus? Whenever you think you have rolled it a little way, down it comes, a regular dead weight again, down the slope of utter indifference and dulness, till it seems to crush the very heart out of you!”

“Have you really nobody that is hopeful?”

“Nobody who does not regard me as his worst enemy, and treat all my approaches with distrust and hostility. Mary, how am I to live it down?”

“You speak as if it were a crime!”

“I feel as if it were one. Not of mine, but of the pedagogic race before me, who have spoilt the relations between man and boy; so that I cannot even get one to act as a medium.”

“That would be contrary to esprit de corps.”

“Exactly; and the worst of it is, I am not one of those genial fellows, half boys themselves, who can join in the sports con amore; I should only make a mountebank of myself if I tried, and the boys would distrust me the more.”

“Quite true. The only way is to be oneself, and one’s best self, and the rest will come.”

“I’m not so sure of that. Some people mistake their vocation.”

“Well, when you have given it a fair trial, you can turn to something else. You are getting the school up again, which is at least one testimony.”