Part 7

Joan and Peter took the substitution of Aunt Phœbe muttering like a Sibyl overhead and Aunt Phyllis, who was really amusing with odd drawings and twisted paper toys and much dancing and running about, in the place of Daddy and Mummy, with the stoical acceptance of the very young. About Daddy and Mummy there hung a faint flavour of departure but no sense of conclusive loss. No clear image and expectation of a return had been formed. No day of definite disappointment ever came. After all the essential habitual person, Mary, was still there, and all the little important routines of child-life continued very much as they had always done.

Yet there was already the dawn of further apprehensions in Peter’s mind at least. One day Peter picked up a dead bird in the garden, a bird dead with no injuries manifest. He tried to make it stand up and peck.

“It ain’t no good, Master Peter; it’s dead,” said Mary.

“What’s dead?” said Peter.

“_That_ is.”

“_Gone_ dead,” said Peter.

“And won’t ever go anything else now—except smell,” said Mary.

Peter reflected. Later he revisited the dead bird and was seen in profound meditation over it. Then he repaired to Aunt Phyllis and confided his intention of immortality.

“Peter,” he said, “not go dead—nohow.”

“Of course not,” said Aunt Phyllis. “He’s got too much sense. The idea!”

This was reassuring. But alone it was not enough.

“Joan not go dead,” he said. “No.”

“Certainly she shan’t,” said Aunt Phyllis and awaited further decisions.

“Pussy not go dead.”

“Not until ninety times nine.”

“Aunt Phyllis not go dead. Marewi not go dead.”

He reflected further. He tried, “Mummy and Daddy not go dead....”

Then after thought, “When are Daddy and Mummy coming back again?”

Aunt Phyllis told a wise lie. “Some day. Not for a long time. They’ve gone—oh, ever so far.”

“Farther than ever so,” said Peter.

He reflected. “When they come back Peter will be a Big Boy. Mummy and Daddy ’ardly know ’im.”

And from that time, Daddy and Mummy ceased to be thought of further as immediate presences, and became hero and heroine in a dream of tomorrow, a dream of returning happiness when life was dull, of release and vindication when life was hard, a pleasant dream, a hope, a basis for imaginative anticipations and pillow fairy tales, sleeping Parents like those sleeping Kings who figure in the childhood of nations, like King Arthur or Barbarossa. Sometimes it was one parent and sometimes it was the other that dominated the thought, “When Mummy comes back.... When Daddy comes back.”

Joan learnt very soon to say it too.

§ 8

Death was too big a thing for Peter to comprehend. He had hardly begun yet with life. And he had made not even a beginning with religion. He had never been baptized; he had learnt no prayers at his mother’s knee. The priceless Mary had come to the Stublands warranted a churchwoman, but as with so many of her class, her orthodoxy had been only a professional uniform to cloak a very keen hostility and contempt for the clergy, and she dropped quite readily into the ways of a household in which religion was entirely ignored. The first Peter heard of religion was at the age of four and a half, and that was from a serious friend of Mary’s, a Particular Baptist, who came for a week’s visit to The Ingle-Nook. The visitor was really distressed at the spiritual outlook of the two children. She borrowed Peter for a “little walk.” She thought she would begin with him and try Joan afterwards. Then as plainly and impressively as possible she imparted the elements of her faith to Peter and taught him a brief, simple prayer. “He’s a Love,” she told Mary, “and so Quick! It’s a _shime_ to keep him such a little heathen. I didn’t say that prayer over twice before he had it Pat.”

Mary was rather moved by her friend’s feelings. She felt that she was going behind the back of the aunts, but nevertheless she saw no great harm in what had happened. The deaths of Arthur and Dolly had shaken Mary’s innate scepticism; she had a vague feeling that there might be grave risks, well worth consideration, beyond the further edge of life.

Aunt Phyllis was the first of the responsible people overhead to discover what had happened. Peter loved his prayer; it was full of the most beautiful phrases; no words had ever so filled his mouth and mind. There was for example, “For Jesus Krice sake Amen.” Like a song. You could use it anywhere. Aunt Phyllis found him playing trains with his bricks in the nursery one afternoon. “_Hoo!_ Chuff-Chuff. Chuff-Chuff. Change for Reigate, change for London. For Jesus Krice sake Amen.”

Aunt Phyllis sat down in the little chair. “Peter,” she said, “who is this Jesus Krice?”

Peter was reluctant to give information. “I know all about ’im,” he said, and would at first throw no other light on the matter.

Then he relented and told a wonder. He turned his back on his brick train and drew close to Aunt Phyllis. His manner was solemn and impressive exactly as Mary’s friend’s had been; his words were as slow and deliberate. “Jesus Krice could go dead and come alive again,” he said, “over and over, whenever He wanted to.”

And having paused a moment to complete the effect of this marvel, Peter turned about again, squatted down like a little brown holland mushroom with a busy little knob on the top, and resumed his shouting. “_Hoo!_ Chuff-Chuff. Chuff-Chuff. Chuff.”

§ 9

One day Mary with an unaccustomed urgency in her manner hurried Joan and Peter out of the garden and into the nursery, and there tidied them up with emphasis. Joan showed fight a bit but not much; Peter was thinking of something else and was just limp. Then Mary took them down to the living-room, the big low room with the ingle-nook and the dining-table in the far bay beside the second fireplace. There they beheld a large female Visitor of the worst sort. They approached her with extreme reluctance, impelled by Mary’s gentle but persistent hand. The Visitor was sitting in the window-seat with Aunt Phyllis beside her. And Aunt Phœbe was standing before the little fireplace. But these were incidental observations; the great fact was the Visitor.

She was the largest lady that Peter had ever seen; she had a plumed hat with black chiffon and large purple bows and a brim of soft black stuff and suchlike things, and she wore a large cape in three tiers and a large black feather boa that hissed when she moved and disseminated feathers. Her shoulders were enormously exaggerated by a kind of vast epaulette, and after the custom of all loyal Anglicans in those days her neck was tightly swathed about and adorned with a big purple bow. Everything she wore had been decorated and sewn upon, and her chequered skirts below were cut out by panels and revelations of flounced purple. In the midst of this costume, beneath the hat and a pale blonde fuss of hair, was set a large, pale, freckled, square-featured face with two hard blue eyes and a fascinating little tussock of sandy hair growing out of one cheek that instantly captured the eye of the little boy. And out of the face proceeded a harsh voice, slow, loud, and pitched in that note of arrogance which was the method of the ruling class in those days. “So _these_ are our little Wards,” said the voice, and as she spoke her lips wrinkled and her teeth showed.

She turned to Phyllis with a confidential air, but spoke still in the same clear tones. “Which is the By-blow, my dear, the Boy or the Gel?”

“Lady Charlotte!” exclaimed Phyllis, and then spoke inaudibly, explaining something.

But Peter made a note of “By-blow.” It was a lovely word.

“Not even in Black. They ought to wear Black,” he heard the big lady say.

Then he found himself being scrutinized.

“Haugh!” said the big lady, making a noise like the casual sounds emitted by large wading birds. “They both take after the Sydenhams, anyhow. They might be brother and sister!”

“Practically they are,” said Aunt Phœbe.

Lady Charlotte confuted her with an unreal smile. “Practically _not_,” she said decisively.

There was a little pause. “Well, Master Stubland,” said the Visitor abruptly and quite terrifyingly. “What have _you_ got to say for yourself?”

As Peter had not yet learnt to swear freely, he had nothing to say for himself just at that moment.

“Not very Bright yet,” said Lady Charlotte goadingly. “I suppose they have run wild hitherto.”

“It was poor Arthur’s wish——” began Aunt Phyllis.

“We must alter all that now,” Lady Charlotte interrupted. “Tell me your name, little boy.”

“Peter Picktoe,” said Peter with invention. “You going to stop here long?”

“So you’ve found your tongue at last,” said Lady Charlotte. “That’s only your nickname. What’s your proper name?”

“Can we go out in the garden now, Auntie?” said Peter; “and play at By-blows?”

“Garden now,” said Joan.

“He’s Brighter than you seem to think,” said Aunt Phœbe with gentle sarcasm.

“Commina _Garden_,” said Joan, tugging at Peter’s pinafore.

“But I must ask him his name first,” said Lady Charlotte, “and,” with growing firmness, “he must tell it me. Come! What is your name, my dear?”

“Peter,” prompted Mary.

“Peter,” said Peter, satisfied that it was a silly game and anxious to get it over and away from this horror as soon as possible.

“And who gave you that name?”

“Nobody; it’s mine,” said Peter.

“Isn’t the poor child even _beginning_ to learn his Catechism?” asked Lady Charlotte.

“Yes, the garden,” said Aunt Phœbe to Mary, and the scene began to close upon the children as they moved gardenward. Joan danced ahead. Peter followed thoughtfully before Mary’s gentle urgency. What was that last word? “Cattymism?” Then a fresh thought occurred to him.

“Mary,” said Peter, in an impassioned and all too audible undertone; “look. She’s got a Whisker. _Here!_ Troof!”

“It was my brother’s _wish_,” Phyllis was explaining as the children disappeared through the door....

“It isn’t the modern way to begin so early with rote-learning,” said Aunt Phœbe; “the little fellow’s still not five.”

“He’s a pretty good size.”

“Because we haven’t worried his mind yet. Milk, light, play, like a happy little animal.”

“We must change all that now,” said Lady Charlotte Sydenham with conviction.

CHAPTER THE FIFTH THE CHRISTENING

§ 1

Lady Charlotte Sydenham was one of those large, ignorant, ruthless, low-church, wealthy, and well-born ladies who did so much to make England what it was in the days before the Great War. She was educated with the utmost care by totally illiterate governesses who were ladies by birth, chiefly on the importance and privileges of her social position, the Anglican faith and Mrs. Strickland’s “Queens of England”; she had French from a guaranteed Protestant teacher and German from a North German instructress (Lutheran Protestant), who also taught her to play the piano with the force and precision of a crack regiment of cavalry. Subsequently she had improved her mind by reading memoirs and biographies of noble and distinguished people and by travel amidst obvious scenery and good foreign hotels. She had married at two-and-thirty when things were beginning to look rather doubtful for her.

Old Mr. Sydenham, who had made his money and undermined his health in India in the John Company days, had been fifty-four, and from the very outset she had been ever so much too much for him. At sixty-five he had petered out like an exhausted lode. She had already got an abject confidential maid into thorough training, and was fully prepared for widowhood. She hung out big black bonnets and expensive black clothes upon her projections, so as to look larger than ever, and took her place and even more than her place, very resolutely, among the leaders of the county Anglicans.

She had early mastered the simple arts of county family intercourse. Her style in contradiction was very good, her insults were frequently witty, she could pretend to love horses, there was no need for her to pretend to despise and hate tradesmen and working people, and she kept herself well-informed upon the domestic details of the large and spreading family of the “Dear Queen.” She was very good at taking down impertinent people, and most people struck her as impertinent; she could make a young man or a plain girl or a social inferior “feel small” quicker (and smaller) than almost any one in that part of Surrey. She was a woman without vices; her chief pleasure was to feel all right and important and the centre of things, and to that her maid as a sort of grand Vizieress, her well-disciplined little household and her choice of friends ministered. The early fear of “Romanists” in which she had been trained had been a little dispelled by the wider charities of maturity, but she held secularists and socialists in an ever-deepening abhorrence. They planned, she knew, to disturb the minds of the lower classes, upset her investments, behead the Dear Queen, and plunge the whole world into vice and rapine and Sabbath-breaking. She interested herself in such leisure as the care of her own health and comfort left her, in movements designed to circumvent and defeat the aims of these enemies of God and (all that was worth considering in) Man. She even countenanced quite indulgent charities if they seemed designed to take the wind out of the sails of socialism. She drove about the district in a one-horse carriage and delivered devastating calls.

Such was the lady whom Arthur had made one of the four guardians of his little son and niece. He had seen her twice; he had rather liked a short speech of five sentences she made at a Flower Show, and he had heard her being extremely rude to a curate. He believed her to be wealthy and trustworthy and very well suited to act as a counter influence to any extravagant tendencies there might be in Aunt Phœbe. Also she was Dolly’s cousin, and appointing her had seemed a sort of compensation for altering his will without Dolly’s knowledge. Besides, it had been very unlikely that she would ever act. And he had been in a hurry when he altered his will, and could not think of any one else.

Now Lady Charlotte was not by any means satisfied by her visit to The Ingle-Nook. The children looked unusually big for their years and disrespectful and out of hand. It was clear they had not taken to her. The nurse, too, had a sort of unbroken look in her eye that was unbecoming in a menial position. The aunts were odd persons; Phyllis was much too disposed to accentuate the father’s wishes, and Lady Charlotte had a most extraordinary and indecent feeling all the time she was talking to her that Aunt Phœbe wasn’t wearing stays. (Could the woman have forgotten them, or was it deliberate? It was like pretending to be clothed when you were really naked.)

Their conversation had been queer, most queer. They did not seem to realize that she was by way of being a leader in the county and accustomed to being listened to with deference. Nearly everything she said they had quietly contradicted or ignored. The way in which the children were whisked away from her presence was distinctly disrespectful. She had a right, it was her duty, to look at them well and question them clearly about their treatment, to see that they had proper treatment, and it was necessary that they should fully understand her importance in their lives. But those two oddly-dressed young women—youngish women, rather, for probably they were both over thirty—did not themselves seem to understand that she was naturally the Principal Guardian.

Phyllis had been constantly referring to the wishes of this Stubland person who had married George Sydenham’s Dolly. Apparently the woman supposed that those wishes were to override every rational consideration for the children’s welfare. After all, the boy was as much Dolly’s child as a Stubland, and as for the girl, except that the Stublands had been allowed to keep her, she wasn’t a Stubland at all. She wasn’t anything at all. She was pure Charity. There was not the slightest obligation upon Any one to do Anything for her. Making her out to be an equal with a legitimate child was just the subversive, wrong-headed sort of thing these glorified shoddy-makers, the Stublands, would do. But like to like. Their own genealogy probably wouldn’t bear scrutiny for six generations. She ought to be trained as a Maid. There were none too many trained Maids nowadays. But Arthur Stubland had actually settled money on her.

There was much to put right in this situation, a great occasion for a large, important lady to impress herself tremendously on a little group of people insultingly disposed to be unaware of her. The more she thought the matter over the more plainly she saw her duty before her. She did not talk to servants; no lady talks to servants; but it was her habit to think aloud during the ministrations of Unwin, her maid, and often Unwin would overhear and reply quite helpfully.

“It’s an odd job I’ve got with these two new Wards of mine,” she said.

“They put too much on you, m’lady,” said Unwin, pinning.

“I shall do what is Right. I shall see that what is Right is done.”

“You don’t spare yourself enough, m’lady.”

“I must go over again and again. Those women don’t like me. I disturb them. They’re up to no good.”

“It won’t be the first Dark Place, m’lady, you’ve thrown light into.”

The lady surveyed her reflection in the glass with a knowing expression. She knitted her brows, partly closed one eye, and nodded slowly as she spoke.

“There’s something queer about the boy’s religious instruction. It’s being kept back. Now why did they get embarrassed when I asked _who_ were the godparents? I ought to have followed that up.”

“My godfathers and godmothers wherein I was made,” murmured Unwin, with the quiet satisfaction of the well-instructed.

“Properly it’s the business of the godparents. I have a right to know.”

“I suppose the poor boy _has_ godparents, m’lady,” said Unwin, coming up from obscure duties with the skirt.

“But of _course_ he has godparents!”

“Pardon me, m’lady, but not _of course_.”

“But what do you mean, Unwin?”

“I hardly like to say it, m’lady, of relations, ’owever distant, of ours. Still, m’lady——”

“Don’t Chew it about, Unwin.”

“Then I out with it, m’lady. ’Ave they been baptized, m’lady, either of them? ’Ave they been baptized?”

§ 2

Before a fortnight was out Lady Charlotte had made two more visits to The Ingle-Nook, she had had an acrimonious dispute upon religious questions with Phœbe, and she was well on her way to the terrible realization that these two apparently imbecile ladies in the shapeless “arty” dresses were really socialists and secularists—of course, like all other socialists and secularists, “of the worst type.” It was impossible that those two unfortunate children should be left in their aunts’ “clutches,” and she prepared herself with a steadily increasing determination and grandeur to seize upon and take over and rescue these two innocent souls from the moral and spiritual destruction that threatened them. Once in her hands, Lady Charlotte was convinced it would not be too late to teach the little fellow a proper respect for those in authority over him and to bring home to the girl an adequate sense of that taint upon her life of which she was still so shockingly unaware. The boy must be taught not to call attention to people’s physical peculiarities, and to answer properly when spoken to; a certain sharpness would not be lost upon him; and it was but false kindness to the girl to let her grow up in ignorance of her disadvantage. Sooner or later it would have to be brought home to her, and the later it was the more difficult would it be for her to accept her proper position with a becoming humility. And a thing of immediate urgency was, of course, the baptism of both these little lost souls.

In pursuit of these entirely praiseworthy aims Lady Charlotte was subjected to a series of very irritating rebuffs that did but rouse her to a greater firmness. On her fourth visit she was not even allowed to see the children; the specious excuse was made that they were “out for a walk,” and when she passed that over forgivingly and said: “It does not matter very much. What I want to arrange today is the business of the Christening,” both aunts began to answer at once and in almost identical words. Phœbe gave way to her sister. “If their parents had wanted them Christened,” said Aunt Phyllis, “there was ample time for them to have had it done.”

“_We_ are the parents now,” said Lady Charlotte.

“And two of us are quite of the parents’ mind.”

“You forget that I also speak for my nephew Oswald,” said Lady Charlotte.

“But _do_ you?” said Aunt Phyllis, with almost obtruded incredulity.

“Certainly,” said Lady Charlotte, with a sweeping, triumphant gesture, a conclusive waving of the head.

“You know he is on his way back from Uganda?” Aunt Phyllis remarked with an unreal innocence.

Lady Charlotte had not known. But she stood up gallantly to the blow. “I know he will support me by insisting upon the proper treatment of these poor children.”

“What can a man know about the little souls of children?” cried Phœbe.

But Aunt Phyllis restrained her. “I have no doubt Mr. Sydenham will have his own views in the matter,” said Phyllis.

“I have no doubt he will,” said Lady Charlotte imposingly....

Even Mary showed the same disposition to insolence. As Lady Charlotte was returning along the little path through the bushes that ran up to the high road where her carriage with the white horse waited, she saw Mary and the children approaching. Peter saw Lady Charlotte first and flew back. “Lady wiv de Whisker!” he said earnestly and breathlessly, and dodged off into the bushes. Joan hesitated, and fled after him. By a detour the fluttering little figures outflanked the great lady and escaped homeward.

“Come _here_, children!” she cried. “I want you.”

Spurt on the part of the children.

“They are really most distressingly Rude,” she said to Mary. “It’s inexcusable. Tell them to come back. I have something to say to them.”

“They won’t, Mum,” said Mary—though surely aware of the title.

“But I tell you to.”

“It’s no good, Mum. It’s shyness. If they won’t come, they won’t.”

“But, my good woman, have you _no_ control?”

“They always race ’ome like that,” said Mary.

“Then you aren’t fit to control them. As one of the children’s guardians, I—— But we shall see.”

She went her way, a stately figure of passion.

“Orty old Ag,” said Mary, and dismissed the encounter from her mind.

§ 3

“You got your rights like anybody, m’lady,” said Unwin.

It was that phrase put it into Lady Charlotte’s head to consult her solicitor. He opened new vistas to her imagination.

Lady Charlotte’s solicitor was a lean, long, faded blond of forty-five or so. He was the descendant of five generations of Lincoln’s Inn solicitors, a Low Churchman, a man of notoriously pure life, and very artful indeed. He talked in a thin, high tenor voice, and was given to nibbling his thumbnail and wincing with his eyes as he talked. His thumbnail produced gaps of indistinctness in his speech.

“Powers of a guardian, m’lady. Defends upon whafower want exercise over thinfant.”

“I do _wish_ you’d keep your thumb out of your mouth,” said Lady Charlotte.

“Sorry,” said Mr. Grimes, wincing and trying painfully to rearrange his arm. “Still, I’d like to know—position.”

“There are three other guardians.”

“Generous allowance,” said Mr. Grimes. “Do you all act?”

“One of us is lost in the Wilds of Africa. The others I want to consult you about. They do not seem to me to be fit and proper persons to be entrusted with the care of young children, and they do not seem disposed to afford me a proper share in the direction of affairs.”

“Ah!” said Mr. Grimes, replacing his thumb. “Sees t’point t’Chacery.”

Lady Charlotte disregarded this comment. She wished to describe Aunts Phyllis and Phœbe in her own words.