Magnum Bonum; Or, Mother Carey's Brood

She drew herself up with childish pride and grace saying, “I will attend to Mrs. Brownlow, for she is my cousin and my equal.”

To a certain degree the little maiden kept her word. She was the favourite plaything of the boys, and got on well with Babie, who was too bright and yielding to quarrel with any one.

But Janet’s elder-sisterly authority was never accepted by the newcomer. “I couldn’t mind her, she looked so ugly,” said she in excuse; and probably the heavy, brown, dull complexion and large features were repulsive in themselves to the sensitive fancy of the creature of life and beauty. At any rate, they were jarring elephants, as said Eleanor, who was growing ambitious, and sometimes electrified the public with curious versions of the long words more successfully used by Armine and Babie.

Caroline succeeded in modelling a very lovely profile in bas-relief of the exquisite little head, and then had it photographed. Mary Ogilvie, coming to Kenminster as usual when her holidays began in June, found the photograph in the place of honour on her brother’s chimney-piece, and a little one beside it of the artist herself.

So far as Carey herself was concerned, Mary was much better satisfied. She did not look so worn or so flighty, and had a quieter and more really cheerful tone and manner, as of one who had settled into her home and occupations. She had made friends, too—few, but worth having; and there were those who pronounced the Folly the pleasantest house in Kenminster, and regarded the five o’clock tea, after the weekly physical science lecture at the school, as a delightful institution.

Of course, the schoolmaster was one of these; and when Mary found how all his paths tended to the Pagoda, she hated herself for being a suspicious old duenna. Nevertheless, she could not but be alarmed by finding that her project of a walking tour through Brittany was not, indeed, refused, but deferred, with excuses about having work to finish, being in no hurry, and the like.

“I think you ought to go,” said Mary at last.

“I see no ought in the case. Last year the work dragged, and was oppressive; but you see how different it has become.”

“That is the very reason,” said Mary, the colour flying to her checks. “It will not do to stay lingering here as we did last summer, and not only on your own account.”

“You need not be afraid,” was the muttered answer, as David bent down his head over the exercise he was correcting. She made no answer, and ere long he began again, “I don’t mean that her equal exists, but I am not such a fool as to delude myself with a spark of hope.”

“She is too nice for that,” said Mary.

“Just so,” he said, glad to relieve himself when the ice had been broken. “There’s something about her that makes one feel her to be altogether that doctor’s, as much as if he were present in the flesh.”

“Are you hoping to wear that out? For I don’t think you will.”

“I told you I had no hope,” he answered, rather petulantly. “Even were it otherwise, there is another thing that must withhold me. It has got abroad that she may turn out heiress to the old man at Belforest.”

“In such a hopeless case, would it not be wiser to leave this place altogether?”

“I cannot,” he exclaimed; then remembering that vehemence told against him, he added, “Don’t be uneasy; I am a reasonable man, and she is a woman to keep one so; but I think I am useful to her, and I am sure she is useful to me.”

“That I allow she has been,” said Mary, looking at her brother’s much improved appearance; “but—”

“Moths and candles to wit,” he returned; “but don’t be afraid, I attract no notice, and I think she trusts me about her boys.”

“But what is it to come to?”

“I have thought of that. Understand that it is enough for me to live near her, and be now and then of some little service to her.”

They were interrupted by a note, which Mr. Ogilvie read, and handed to his sister with a smile:—

“DEAR MR. OGILVIE,—Could you and Mary make it convenient to look in this evening? Bobus has horrified his uncle by declining to go up for a scholarship at Eton or Winchester, and I should be very glad to talk it over with you. Also, I shall have to ask you to take little Armine into school after the holidays.

“Yours sincerely,

“C. O. BROWNLOW.”

“What does the boy mean?” asked Mary. “I thought he was the pride of your heart.”

“So he is; but he is ahead of his fellows, and ought to be elsewhere. All measures have been taken for sending him up to stand at one of the public schools, but I thought him very passive about it. He is an odd boy—reserved and self-concentrated—quite beyond his uncle’s comprehension, and likely to become headstrong at a blind exercise of authority.”

“I used to like Allen best,” said Mary.

“He is the pleasantest, but there’s more solid stuff in Bobus. That boy’s school character is perfect, except for a certain cool opinionativeness, which seldom comes out with me, but greatly annoys the undermasters.”

“Is he a prig?”

“Well, yes, I’m afraid he is. He’s unpopular, for he does not care for games; but his brother is popular enough for both.”

“Jock?—the monkey!”

“His brains run to mischief. I’ve had to set him more impositions than any boy in the school, and actually to take his form myself, for simply the undermasters can’t keep up discipline or their own tempers. As to poor M. le Blanc, I find him dancing and shrieking with fury in the midst of a circle of snorting, giggling boys; and when he points out ce petit monstre, Jock coolly owns to having translated ‘Croquons les,’ let us croquet them; or ‘Je suis blesse,’ I am blest.”

“So the infusion of brains produces too much effervescence.”

“Yes, but the whole school has profited, and none more so than No. 2 of the other family, who has quite passed his elder brother, and is above his namesake whenever it is a case of plodding ability versus idle genius. But, after all, how little one can know of one’s boys.”

“Or one’s girls,” said Mary, thinking of governess experiences.

It was a showery summer evening when the brother and sister walked up to the Folly in a partial clearing, when the evening sun made every bush twinkle all over with diamond drops. Childish voices were heard near the gate, and behind a dripping laurel were seen Elvira, Armine, and Barbara engaged in childhood’s unceasing attempt to explore the centre of the earth.

“What do you expect to find there?” they were asked.

“Little kobolds, with pointed caps, playing at ball with rubies and emeralds, and digging with golden spades,” answered Babie.

“And they shall give me an opal ring,” said Elfie, “But Armine does not want the kobolds.”

“He says they are bad,” said Babie. “Now are they, Mr. Ogilvie? I know elder women are, and erl kings and mist widows, but poor Neck, that sat on the water and played his harp, wasn’t bad, and the dear little kobolds were so kind and funny. Now are they bad elves?”

Her voice was full of earnest pleading, and Mr. Ogilvie, not being versed in the spiritual condition of elves could best reply by asking why Armine thought ill of their kind.

“I think they are nasty little things that want to distract and bewilder one in the real great search.”

“What search, my boy?”

“For the source of everything,” said Armine, lowering his voice and looking into his muddy hole.

“But that is above, not below,” said Mary.

“Yes,” said Armine reverently; “but I think God put life and the beginning of growing into the earth, and I want to find it.”

“Isn’t it Truth?” said Babie. “Mr. Acton said Truth was at the bottom of a well. I won’t look at the kobolds if they keep one from seeing Truth.”

“But I must get my ring and all my jewels from them,” put in Elfie.

“Should you know Truth?” asked Mr. Ogilvie. “What do you think she is like?”

“So beautiful!” said Babie, clasping her fingers with earnestness. “All white and clear like crystal, with such blue, sweet, open eyes. And she has an anchor.”

“That’s Hope?” said Armine.

“Oh! Hope and Truth go hand in hand,” said Babie; “and Hope will be all robed in green like the young corn-fields in the spring.”

“Ah, Babie, that emerald Hope and crystal Truth are not down in the earth, earthy,” said Mary again.

“Nay, perhaps Armine has got hold of a reality,” said Mr. Ogilvie. “They are to be found above by working below.”

“Talking paradox to Armine?” said the cheerful voice of the young mother. “My dear sprites, do you know that it is past eight! How wet you are! Good night, and mind you don’t go upstairs in those boots.”

“It is quite comfortable to hear anything so commonplace,” said Mary, when the children had run away, to the sound of its reiteration after full interchange of good nights. “Those imps make one feel quite eerie.”

“Has Armine been talking in that curious fashion of his,” said Carey, as they began to pace the walks. “I am afraid his thinker is too big—as the child says in Miss Tytler’s book. This morning over his parsing he asked me—‘Mother, which is realest, what we touch or what we feel?’ knitting his brows fearfully when I did not catch his meaning, and going on—‘I mean is that fly as real as King David?’ and then as I was more puzzled he went on—‘You see we only need just see that fly now with our outermost senses, and he will only live a little while, and nobody cares or will think of him any more, but everybody always does think, and feel, and care a great deal about King David.’ I told him, as the best answer I could make on the spur of the moment, that David was alive in Heaven, but he pondered in and broke out—‘No, that’s not it! David was a real man, but it is just the same about Perseus and Siegfried, and lots of people that never were men, only just thoughts. Ain’t thoughts realer than things, mother?’”

“But much worse for him, I should say,” exclaimed Mary.

“I thought of Pisistratus Caxton, and wrote to Mr. Ogilvie. It is a great pity, but I am afraid he ought not to dwell on such things till his body is grown up to his mind.”

“Yes, school is the approved remedy for being too clever,” said Mr. Ogilvie. “You are wise. It is a pity, but it will be all the better for him by-and-by.”

“And the elder ones will take care the seasoning is not too severe,” said Caroline, with a resolution she could hardly have shown if this had been her first launch of a son. “But it was about Bobus that I wanted to consult you. His uncle thinks him headstrong and conceited, if not lazy.”

“Lazy he is certainly not.”

“I knew you would say so, but the Colonel cannot enter into his wish to have more physical science and less classics, and will not hear of his going to Germany, which is what he wishes, though I am sure he is too young.”

“He ought not to go there till his character is much more formed.”

“What do you think of his going on here?”

“That’s a temptation I ought to resist. He will soon have outstripped the other boys so that I could not give him the attention he needs, and besides the being with other boys, more his equals, would be invaluable to him.”

“Well, he is rather bumptious.”

“Nothing is worse for a lad of that sort than being cock of the walk. It spoils him often for life.”

“I know exactly the sort of man you mean, always liking to lay down the law and talking to women instead of men, because they don’t argue with him. No, Bobus must not come to that, and he is too young to begin special training. Will you talk to him, Mr. Ogilvie? You know if my horse is not convinced I may bring him to the water, but it will be all in vain.”

They had reached the outside of the window of the dining-room, where the school-boys were learning their lessons for the morrow. Bobus was sitting at the table with a small lamp so shaded as to concentrate the light on him and to afford it to no one else. On the floor was a servant’s flat candlestick, mounted on a pile of books, between one John sprawling at full length preparing his Virgil, the other cross-legged, working a sum with ink from a doll’s tea-cup placed in the candlestick, and all the time there was a wonderful mumbling accompaniment, as there always was between those two.

“I say, what does pulsum come from?”

“What a brute this is of a fraction! Skipjack, what will go in 639 and 852?”

“Pulsum, a pulse—volat, flies. Eh! Three’ll do it. Or common measure it at once.”

“Bother common measure. The threes in—”

“Fama, fame; volat, flies; pulsum, the pulse; cecisse, to have ceased; paternis regnis, in the paternal kingdom. I say wouldn’t that rile Perkins like fun?”

“The threes in seven—two—in eighteen—”

“I say, Johnny, is pulsum from pulco?”

“Never heard of it.”

“Bobus, is it pulco, pulxi, pulsum?”

“Pulco—I make an ass of myself,” muttered Bobus.

“O murder,” groaned Johnny, “it has come out 213.”

“Not half so much murder as this pulsum. Why it will go in them both. I can see with half an eye.”

“Isn’t it pello—pulsum?”

“Pello, to drive out. Hurrah! That fits it.”

“Look out, Skipjack, there’s a moth.”

“Anything worth having?” demanded Bobus.

“Only a grass eggar. Fama, fame; volat, flies; Idomoeea ducem, that Idomaeeus the leader; pulsum, expelled. Get out, I say, you foolish beggar” (to the moth).

“Never mind catching him,” said Bobus, “we’ve got dozens.”

“Yes, but I don’t want him frizzling alive in my candle.”

“Don’t kick up such a shindy,” broke out Johnny, as a much stained handkerchief came flapping about.

“You’ve blotted my sum. Thunder and ages!” as the candlestick toppled over, ink and all. “That is a go!”

“I say, Bobus, lend us your Guy Fawkes to pick up the pieces.”

“Not if I know it,” said Bobus. “You always smash things.”

“There’s a specimen of the way we learn our lessons,” said Caroline, in a low voice, still unseen, as Bobus wiped, sheathed, and pocketed his favourite pen, then proceeded to turn down the lamp, but allowed the others to relight their candle at the expiring wick.

“The results are fair,” said Mr. Ogilvie.

“I think of your carpet,” said Mary, quaintly.

“We always lay down an ancient floorcloth in the bay window before the boys come home,” said Carey, laughing. “Here, Bobus.”

And as he came out headforemost at the window, the two ladies discreetly drew off to leave the conversation free.

“So, Brownlow,” said Mr. Ogilvie, “I hear you don’t want to try your luck elsewhere.”

“No, sir.”

“Do you object to telling me why?”

“I see no use in it,” said Bobus, never shy, and further aided by the twilight; “I do quite well enough here.”

“Should you not do better in a larger field among a higher stamp of boys?”

“Public school boys are such fools!”

“And what are the Kenites?”

“Well, not much,” said Bobus, with a twitch in the corner of his mouth; “but I can keep out of their way.”

“You mean that you have gained your footing, and don’t want to have to do it again.”

“Not only that, sir,” said the boy, “but at a public school you’re fagged, and forced to go in for cricket and football.”

“You would soon get above that.”

“Yes, but even then you get no peace, and are nobody unless you go in for all that stuff of athletics and sports. I hate it all, and don’t want to waste my time.”

“I don’t think you are quite right as to there being no distinction without athletics.”

“Allen says it is so now.”

“Allen may be a better judge of the present state of things, but I should think there was always a studious set who were respectable.”

“Besides,” proceeded Bobus, warming with his subject, “I see no good in nothing but classics. I don’t care what ridiculous lies some old man who never existed, or else was a dozen people at once, told about a lot of ruffians who never lived, killing each other at some place that never was. I like what you can lay your finger on, and say it’s here, it’s true, and I can prove it, and explain it, and improve on it.”

“If you can,” said Mr. Ogilvie, struck by the contrast with the little brother.

“That’s what I want to do,” said Bobus; “to deal with real things, not words and empty fancies. I know languages are necessary; but if one can read a Latin book, and understand a Greek technical term, that’s all that is of use. If my uncle won’t let me study physical science in Germany, I had rather go on here, where I can be let alone to study it for myself.”

“I do not think you understand what you would throw away. What is the difference between Higg, the bone-setter, and Dr. Leslie?”

“Higg can do that one thing just by instinct. He is uneducated.”

“And in a measure it is so with all who throw themselves into some special pursuit without waiting for the mind and character to have full training and expansion. If you mean to be a great surgeon—”

“I don’t mean to be a surgeon.”

“A physician then.”

“No, sir. Please don’t let my mother fancy I mean to be in practice, at everyone’s beck and call. I’ve seen too much of that. I mean to get a professorship, and have time and apparatus for researches, so as to get to the bottom of everything,” said the boy, with the vast purposes of his age.

“Your chances will be much better if you go up from a public school, trained in accuracy by the thorough work of language, and made more powerful by the very fact of not having followed merely your own bent. Your contempt for the classics shows how one-sided you are growing. Besides, I thought you knew that the days are over of unmitigated classics. You would have many more opportunities, and much better ones, of studying physical science than I can provide for you here.”

This was a new light to Bobus, and when Mr. Ogilvie proved its truth to him, and described the facilities he would have for the study, he allowed that it made all the difference.

Meantime the two ladies had gone in, Mary asking where Janet was.

“Gone with Jessie and her mother to a birthday party at Polesworth Lawn.”

“Not a good day for it.”

“It is the perplexing sort of day that no one knows whether to call it fine or wet; but Ellen decided on going, as they were to dance in the hall if it rained. I’m sure her kindness is great, for she takes infinite trouble to make Janet producible! Poor Janet, you know dressing her is like hanging clothes on a wooden peg, and a peg that won’t stand still, and has curious theories of the beautiful, carried out in a still more curious way. So when, in terror of our aunt, the whole female household have done their best to turn out Miss Janet respectable, between this house and Kencroft, she contrives to give herself some twitch, or else is seized with an idea of the picturesque, which sets every one wondering that I let her go about such a figure. Then Ellen and Jessie put a tie here, and a pin there, and reduce the chaotic mass to order.”

It was not long before Janet appeared, and Jessie with her, the latter having been set down to give a message. The two girls were dressed in the same light black-and-white checked silk of early youth, one with pink ribbons and the other with blue; but the contrast was the more apparent, for one was fresh and crisp, while the other was flattened and tumbled; one said everything had been delightful, the other that it had all been very stupid, and the expression made even more difference than the complexion, in one so fair, fresh, and rosy, in the other so sallow and muddled. Jessie looked so sweet and bright, that when she had gone Miss Ogilvie could not help exclaiming, “How pretty she is!”

“Yes, and so good-tempered and pleasant. There is something always restful to me in having her in the room,” said Caroline.

“Restful?” said Janet, with one of her unamiable sneers. “Yes, she and H. S. H. sent me off to sleep with their gossip on the way home! O mother, there’s another item for the Belforest record. Mr. Barnes has sent off all his servants again, even the confidential man is shipped off to America.”

“You seem to have slept with one ear open,” said her mother. “And oh!” as Janet took off her gloves, “I hope you did not show those hands!”

“I could not eat cake without doing so, and Mr. Glover supposed I had been photographing.”

“And what had you been doing?” inquired Mary, at sight of the brown stains.

“Trying chemical experiments with Bobus,” said her mother.

“Yes!” cried Janet, “and I’ve found out why we did not succeed. I thought it out during the dancing.”

“Instead of cultivating the ‘light fantastic toe,’ as the Courier calls it.”

“I danced twice, and a great plague it was. Only with Mr. Glover and with a stupid little middy. I was thinking all the time how senseless it was.”

“How agreeable you must have been!”

“One can’t be agreeable to people like that. Oh, Bobus!” as he came into the room with Mr. Ogilvie, “I’ve found out—”

“I thought Jessie was here,” he interrupted.

“She’s gone home. I know what was wrong yesterday. We ought to have isolated the hypo—”

“Isolated the grandmother,” said Bobus. “That has nothing to do with it.”

“I’m sure of it. I’ll show you how it acts.”

“I’ll show you just the contrary.”

“Not to-night,” cried their mother, as Bobus began to relight the lamp. “You two explosives are quite perilous enough by day without lamps and candles.”

“You endure a great deal,” said Mr. Ogilvie.

“I’m not afraid of either of these two doing anything dangerous singly, for they are both careful, but when they are of different minds, I never know what the collision may produce.”

“Yes,” said Bobus, “I’d much sooner have Jessie to help me, for she does what she is bid, and never thinks.”

“That’s all you think women good for,” said Janet.

“Quite true,” said Bobus, coolly.

And Mr. Ogilvie was acknowledged by his sister to have done a good deed that night, since the Folly might be far more secure when Janet tried her experiments alone.

CHAPTER XIV. – PUMPING AWAY

     The rude will scuffle through with ease enough,     Great schools best suit the sturdy and the rough.     Soon see your wish fulfilled in either child,     The pert made perter, and the tame made wild.                                                  Cowper.

Robert Otway Brownlow came out fourth on the roll of newly-elected scholars of S. Mary, Winton, and his master was, as his sister declared, unwholesomely proud of it, even while he gave all credit to the Folly, and none to himself.

Still Mary had her way and took him to Brittany, and though her present pupils were to leave the schoolroom at Christmas, she would bind herself to no fresh engagement, thinking that she had better be free to make a home for him, whether at Kenminster or elsewhere.

When the half-year began again Bobus was a good deal missed, Jock was in a severe idle fit, and Armine did not come up to the expectations formed of him, and was found, when “up to Mr. Perkins,” to be as bewildered and unready as other people.

All the work in the school seemed flat and poor, except perhaps Johnny’s, which steadily improved. Robert, whose father wished him to be pushed on so as to be fit for examination for Sandhurst, opposed, to all pressure, the passive resistance of stolidity. He was nearly sixteen, but seemed incapable of understanding that compulsory studies were for his good and not a cruel exercise of tyranny. He disdainfully rejected an offer from his aunt to help him in the French and arithmetic which had become imminent, while of the first he knew much less than Babie, and of the latter only as much as would serve to prevent his being daily “kept in.”

One chilly autumn afternoon, Armine was seen, even by the unobservant under-master, to be shivering violently, and his teeth chattering so that he could not speak plainly.

“You ought to be at home,” said Mr. Perkins. “Here, you, Brownlow maximus, just see him home, and tell his mother that he should be seen to.”

“I can go alone,” Armine tried to say; but Mr. Perkins thought the head-master could not say he neglected one who was felt to be a favoured scholar if he sent his cousin with him.

So presently Armine was pushed in at the back door, with these words from Rob to the cook—“Look here, he’s been and got cold, or something.”

Rob then disappeared, and Armine struggled in to the kitchen fire, white, sobbing and panting, and, as the compassionate maids discovered, drenched from head to foot, his hair soaked, his boots squishing with water. His mother and sisters were out, and as cook administered the hottest draught she could compound, and Emma tugged at his jacket, they indignantly demanded what he had been doing to himself.