CHAPTER II

MY COUSINS

"There's a new foot on the floor, my friend, And a new face at the door, my friend."

I came to England with the swallows, and I think I felt as much a bird of passage as they; more so, indeed, for all the young swallows had been reared under northern skies and were but returning home, while I was as yet a stranger in a new land. My uncle met me at Liverpool, where I had a terrible parting from Madame Montpellier, who had been very good to me on the voyage, and who seemed my last link with the past; and we set out at once upon the long journey to London. I liked my uncle, he reminded me much of my father; there was a merry twinkle in his eye, and a kindliness in his voice which seemed to call for some response, so I made a desperate effort to check my flowing tears and take an interest in the various things he pointed out to me from the window of the railway-carriage. The green fields and hedgerows, the picturesque villages and churches, the smooth rivers and the quiet pastoral scenery as we steamed through the midlands were all new to my wondering eyes, but to watch them from the fast express, as they appeared to whizz rapidly by, made my head ache, and I had curled myself up in a corner and subsided comfortably to sleep long before London was reached.

I am afraid my arrival must have been a bitter disappointment to my little cousins, of whom the elder ones were waiting in the hall to welcome me when our cab drove up. I was so utterly weary with my journey, and I felt so forlornly shy at the sight of so many strange faces around me, that, forgetting both my manners and my good intentions, I burst into a flood of tears, and refused all comfort.

"Better put her to bed," said my aunt briskly; "she's tired out, and it's no use worrying her. After a thorough night's rest she'll be more ready to make friends with us."

I was so miserable that I did not much care what happened to me, so I submitted with a good grace to be undressed, and to swallow the hot milk which they brought me; then with my father's photograph clasped tightly in my hand, I cried myself to sleep on that my first night in my new home. Somehow with the morning sunshine life seemed to wear a different aspect, and instead of telling Aunt Agatha that I could never be happy in England, and begging her to send me straight back to San Carlos by the very next ship, as I had quite made up my mind to do the night before, I went downstairs to breakfast full of curiosity to make the acquaintance of my cousins. I had heard them for some time, as during the last hour the whole upper story of the house had seemed to be pervaded with the noise of small shrill voices, the stamping of feet, the slamming of doors, and finally the melancholy sound of the minor scales on the piano, the performer appearing to get into complications with the sharps and flats, and occasionally to relapse altogether into the major key.

Aunt Agatha came bustling into my bedroom as I fastened the last button of my dress (the voyage had taught me to dispense with Juanita's help), and she stood and surveyed me with a critical eye. Her first impression of me had been hardly a fair one, so I trust that this morning I presented a more favourable appearance.

"Yes," she said slowly, "you have your father's eyes, but otherwise you're the image of your mother: the same slight build, and the same light hair and colour which I remember so well in my poor sister-in-law. Dear me! how little I thought when I said good-bye to her that I should never see her again! You must try to make yourself at home, my dear, among us all. It's hard, I dare say, to settle down into new ways, but if you'll try your best, we will do our part, and I hope you'll soon like England as well as the country you've left behind. Now come with me, and say good-morning to your cousins."

There were so many of them, and of such various ages, that when I entered the nursery I might have supposed myself for the moment in an infant school. From Lucy, the eldest, who was six months older than I, to the baby in long clothes, they descended in a series of eight little steps, all blue-eyed and auburn-haired, all sturdy of limb and lusty of voice, and all dressed in stout brown holland pinafores, warranted to resist the hardest of wear and tear.

"I'm sure you'll soon become friends," said Aunt Agatha, after Lucy, Mary, Edgar, Donald, Frank, Cuthbert, Dorothy, and the baby had all been duly presented. "You're to have lessons in the school-room from Miss Masterman. I've spoken to her about your work. I believe your father mentioned that you hadn't yet begun either French or music. And, Blair, I should like you to go over her clothes after breakfast. I must arrange for Miss Jenkins to come at once for a few days' sewing. Be sure she drinks plenty of milk with her porridge, and be careful she doesn't get into draughts just at first, as she's accustomed to a warmer climate."

Blair was a power in the household. She managed her nursery with the tactics of a general, reducing small rebels to a state of submission with admirable skill, and keeping order among her noisy little crew with a firm though just hand. She might not always be exactly pleasant, but on the whole her moral atmosphere was like an east wind, bracing, though a little trying at times. She accepted an addition to her numerous charges with grim philosophy.

"You'll soon shake down among the others," she said to me, not unkindly. "It seems queer to you, I dare say, after living in a foreign country, with black servants and outlandish cookery, but there's everything in habit, and with plenty of lessons to keep you busy, you'll have no time to fret."

Just at first I certainly found the shaking-down process rather a rough one. It was all so utterly different from my old life. Accustomed to spend most of my time with my father, I thought it hard to be restricted to the nursery and school-room, and instead of being the centre of my little world, to be only one of a flock who were not favoured with many indulgences.

My aunt, I am sure, did her very best for me according to her lights, and perhaps she thought that I should settle all the sooner if I were left judiciously alone, but, looking back now upon her upbringing, I think she might have shown me more tenderness. She was a tall, handsome woman, with a capable manner, and what she called "sensible" views of life. If she had ever cherished any illusions, they had long ago worn down to the level of strict commonplace. Though she loved her children, in her practical, unsentimental way, they were to her always "the children", to be ruled and reared, clothed and educated, but never in any respect her companions; and a friendship between two people of widely differing ages, such as existed between my father and myself, was a thing she could scarcely understand. There were certain well-arranged regulations for our daily life and conduct, and that any allowance should be made for individual temperament was to her mind neither suitable nor desirable. She treated me as one of her own, and that it was possible for me to need more did not enter into her calculations. But I did need more. I was a child of extremely warm affections, and though I could not have expressed the feeling, my heart felt starved upon the very small amount of love and attention which fell to my share. I tried my best to be brave and not to fret, but sometimes my home-sickness would gain the upper hand, and I have often wet my pillow with bitter tears, longing with a yearning that was almost agony for one kiss from my father before I went to sleep.

With my cousins I was soon a favourite.

"Tell us again about San Carlos, and the forest, and the tree-witches, and the gri-gri man," said Edgar and Mary, who listened spell-bound to my reminiscences of Tasso's marvellous stories; and I would sit in the dusk by the nursery fire, with an audience of eager little faces around me, putting such horrible realism into my narratives that Donald brought Blair from her supper by screaming that the gri-gri man was under his bed, while poor Mary never dared in future to pass the lumber-room door, for fear of seeing a grinning goblin pop his head suddenly out of the darkness.

Though we afterwards became the best of friends, Lucy treated me at first with little airs of superiority and patronage. I am afraid we began our acquaintance with a wordy war.

"You must feel quite glad to be in a proper English house, after living in that queer foreign place," she remarked, by way of opening the conversation.

"No, I'm not," I retorted. "Our house at San Carlos is ever so much nicer than this. It has marble floors, and a terrace, and a pergola."

"I don't know what a pergola is," replied Lucy. "But we have a balcony, and that's quite as good. Your clothes are so funnily made, Blair says she hardly likes to take you out. Mother has sent for Miss Jenkins to make you some new ones. You're going to do lessons with us every day. I wonder if you'll be able to learn with me. Can you speak French?"

"No, but I can speak Spanish."

"Oh, that's no use! Who wants to talk Spanish? Mother said you had learnt it from the servants, and the sooner you forgot it the better."

"I won't forget it. I shall speak it when I go back."

"You're not going back."

"Yes, I am, soon. Father will send for me," I ventured desperately.

"No, not till you're quite grown up. I heard Mother tell Miss Masterman so just now. She said your ways were as queer as your clothes, and you would take a great deal of training before you were fit to be sent to school."

"I _will_ go back! I _will_ speak Spanish!" I declared in great indignation. "Juanita and Tasso can't speak anything else."

"I wonder you care to talk to negroes," said Lucy, tossing back her hair. "I like white people myself, and I'm sure you needn't boast of having been carried about by an old black man!"

The slight to my dear friends stung me even more than the insult to my clothes and my manners, and I ended in a storm of miserable crying. Next to my father I very truly missed those kind companions of my childhood, and ever to forget them seemed to me the basest ingratitude.

My new English clothes were of sober colours and serviceable materials; they seemed to match my new life, and perhaps my manners changed with them, for I soon settled down into the little daily round which was appointed for me. At first I found the regular lessons somewhat of a trial, as I had never been accustomed either to learn systematically, or really to apply myself. But Miss Masterman, our daily governess, was both a kind and clever teacher, and after a while I grew so interested in my work that I easily caught up Lucy, and even began to outstrip her--a little, I fancy, to her chagrin.

I wrote regularly to my father. I have one of these childish letters by me now, for he treasured them carefully, and to read it brings back so keenly the remembrance of those early days that I shall give it a place in these pages. Here it is, exactly as I wrote it, in my most careful round hand.

CHESTNUT AVENUE, June 12th.

"My dearest Father,

"I think of you every day of my life. I have put your photo on my dressing-table, and I kiss it good-night and good-morning as if it were really you. I am trying very hard to be happy, but my two troubles are porridge and scales. Porridge is something like the food Tasso used to mix up for the ducks, only you eat it hot. Blair says it will make me grow strong, and I must take what is given me and not find fault, so I gulp it down, though it nearly chokes me. Scales are detestable. Miss Masterman puts pennies on the backs of my hands, but I cannot help jerking my arm when I turn my thumb under, so they always fall on to the floor, and then she is cross.

"I like drawing the best of all my lessons. I have bought a new paint-box with the money you sent me, and I will try and make pictures for you of everything I see. There are no orange-trees or coffee-plantations here. We go walks down long streets with tall houses on both sides, or sometimes into the Park, which I like better, though it is not so nice as the garden at San Carlos, for you may not pick the flowers, and there are sparrows instead of humming-birds. I hope Juanita does not forget to feed the terrapin and the green lizard. Give my love to her, and to Tasso and Pedro and everybody. Aunt Agatha is writing to you herself, and she will put this letter inside hers.

"From your loving little daughter, "PHILIPPA SEATON."

If I found my life in London rather hard to bear at times, I am afraid my attempts to relieve the monotony of my existence were not always a success at head-quarters. I had a lively imagination, and my inventive faculty was continually leading me into planning games which my cousins thought only too delightful, but which were set down as either mess or mischief by those in authority. When Aunt Agatha found us tobogganing down the back staircase in a clothes-basket, she knew at once the instigator of the sport, and she easily guessed who had taken the chairs from the best bedroom to form a menagerie in the nursery. It was I who conceived the brilliant idea of making a sea-side resort for the dolls with the aid of the tea-tray full of water and the sand out of the canary's cage, a most interesting and fascinating pastime for us, but looked at in a very different light by Blair, when she returned to find the younger children with sopping pinafores, and my miniature ocean slowly wending its way in trickles over the nursery floor.

"You get into mischief the moment my back is turned. I'm sure the children never thought of doing such things before you came!" she said severely.

I do not suppose they had, for though they loved a romp, they were not naturally imaginative; but they immensely enjoyed my ideas, and were always ready to fall in with my schemes, from soap slides on the attic-landing to the fairy palace which I constructed in the lumber-room out of old lace curtains hung over towel-rails, or the ogre's den in the housemaid's cupboard under the stairs.

I remember well how, one afternoon, when Blair for a wonder was absent, I seized the golden opportunity to organize a grand game of carnival. The children's pocket-handkerchiefs and silk neckties were collected from the various drawers and hung up as flags on a string fastened from the gas-bracket to the window. All my little cousins were eager to be masquers, and I racked my brains to devise costumes for them out of the very limited materials at my command.

Lucy, in her night-dress, with two sheets of copy-book paper fastened on to her shoulders as wings, made quite a creditable angel. Edgar was an Indian, his face painted in stripes of red and yellow, some feathers plucked from the dusting-broom stuck in his curly locks, and the hearth-brush for a tomahawk. Mary, with my best sash draped artistically over her right shoulder, represented Venus, with Cuthbert for a Cupid; Donald, in Aunt Agatha's furs, stolen shamelessly from her bedroom, rollicked about as a savage; and, as I really had no clothes left for Dorothy, I blacked her face with a piece of coal, and transformed her into a little negro child. I myself was Father Neptune, with a toasting-fork for a trident, and as we paraded round the nursery, pelting each other with pieces of torn-up paper for confetti, I think we rivalled in noise the wildest carnival I had ever witnessed at San Carlos.

We were in the very height of our excitement, and were scrambling eagerly for pretended bon-bons, which Lucy was flinging from an imaginary balcony, when the door was suddenly opened, and Aunt Agatha entered, ushering in a visitor.

"This is my little flock, Mrs. Winstanley--" she began, then stopped short in utter dismay at the scene of confusion before her.

My aunt's sense of humour was not keen; her orderly nursery and tidy family were her pride, and the sight of the tumbled heads and crumpled pinafores, the clothes strewn hither and thither, and the painted and blackened faces of her ordinarily well-behaved darlings was enough to justify her look of extreme annoyance. She turned at once upon the true offender.

"Philippa, what have you been doing with the children?" she asked sharply.

No culprit caught red-handed could have felt more guilty or discomfited than I. I gasped out something incoherent about "carnival", and burst into tears.

But here the visitor saved the situation.

"It is very kind of the little ones to be _en fÍte_ to welcome us, Mrs. Seaton," she said gently. "My own children often dress up when they wish to give me a treat. I have not seen a carnival since I was last at Nice, and I don't think any of the masquers were so natural as these. So this is little Philippa!" she continued as she sat down, and drew me quietly to her side. "I hope you will learn to love me some day, for your mother was my dearest friend, and I could not pass through London to-day without taking the opportunity of coming to see her only child."

She kissed me with a warmth I had missed since I bade that last good-bye to my father; there were tears in her eyes, and, strangely moved, I clung to her, crying a little, but more comforted than I could have found words to tell.

It was thus that I first made acquaintance with one of the truest friends of my life.