CHAPTER XII.—THE ROSEBUD SKETCHES FROM MEMORY.
Reader! dear reader! nay, on the chance of your being a young lady, and, therefore, necessarily charming, we will go the whole length of the adjective, and say at once, dearest reader! (of course, asking your pardon for the liberty, and feeling quite sure you are only too ready to grant it, because you are such an amiable sex) don’t you think—(by the way, how very becoming that new plan of plaiting a pig-tail of your back hair, and twisting it round like a coronal over your front hair, is to you—it gives quite a Classical, Grecian, Etruscan, and all that sort of thing, style to your contour)—don’t you think, dearest reader, that we have for much too long a time lost sight of, and practically ignored, and altogether cruelly and abominably deserted, and neglected, the Rosebud of Ashburn? and she all the while, in the self-denial of her nature (a species of self-denial, by the way, which would be very generally practised and become exceedingly popular, if we were but sufficiently philanthropic to divulge the recipe), has only been growing prettier and more fatally fascinating every day.
Oh, that dangerous, irresistible little Rosebud! There she sat, looking as demure as if she wasn’t always ready to smash any amount of hearts into the smallest possible pieces, on the shortest notice imaginable, toiling busily over an absurd little crochet purse, which she was manufacturing literally “by hook and by crook,” against Mr. Selby’s birthday, when she intended to present him with it “to keep all his sovereigns in;” though if he could have kept all his sovereigns in that pretty little folly, the said folly would very soon have had a sinecure, and poor Mr. Selby have been a ruined snob, instead of a prosperous one.
Now, we do not object to mention in confidence, though we should not wish it repeated, that the Rosebud, albeit a most dutiful and affectionate daughter, had, since the boys went to school, found her life very dull and monotonous, and was getting decidedly “hard up” for excitement;—pleasurable excitement would, of course, have been her choice, but even a little mild persecution would not have come amiss, in this dearth of variety: she had expected Sir Thomas Crawley would have given away the living, and some horrid interloper have arrived to turn them out of house and home long ere this, but no; day after day passed by without producing even the ghost of an incident, and the unfortunate and victimised Rosebud was reduced to sit by herself and look pretty, without any one to reap the benefit thereof. What a cruel situation for a vivacious Rosebud!
Mrs. Colville had been absent nearly an hour, and Emily, who stayed at home to get on with her crochet (for the next day was the eventful birthday, and she was alarmed lest her offering should not be ready in time), had been all by her small and pretty self, and had croched away so hard that she had croched herself into a headache;—perceiving this to be the case, she laid down her work and fell a thinking, and having nothing agreeable to reflect upon in the present, she began to “try back,” till she had mentally jibbed as far as the day when she, and her friend Caroline, had been frightened by the footpad, and rescued by an interesting young stranger, whom you and I, dearest reader, know to have been Ernest Carrington, although the Rosebud was still in ignorance of that fact. From sheer listlessness and want of anything better to think about, Emily began speculating as to whom her deliverer could possibly have been, and whether, by any odd chance, she should ever meet him again, and if so, whether he would recollect her, or she him, when it occurred to her to try if she could remember his features well enough to sketch them. Emily had rather a talent for taking likenesses, so she provided herself with a pencil and a piece of paper, and drew away till she had produced, what an auctioneer would have termed, a “splendid portrait of a nice young man.” Having accomplished this feat, she held up her performance to scrutinise it, drawing back her head and bending her slender neck from side to side, like some graceful bird, till she got the light to fall properly upon her sketch,—“Yes, I think that is very like him,” she said, “only it hasn’t got quite his expression—there was something so calm and—spiritual, I suppose it would be called, in his look; he was very handsome, certainly; I wonder who he could be!” Resuming her pencil, she added two or three finishing touches, then appended to it her initials, and the date, with the intention of adding it to a select gallery of portraits of remarkable ball-partners, and other heroes of her imagination, which reposed inviolate within the sacred precincts of her writing-desk; but, at this moment, the house-door opened and Mrs. Colville entered, so hastily that Emily had only time to thrust her portrait between the leaves of the nearest book (which happened to be a volume of Blair’s Sermons), ere her mother had joined her.
“Mamma, you are tired,” she said, as Mrs. Colville, hurriedly drawing off her gloves, seated herself on the sofa; observing her more attentively, she continued, “You look pale, and—— You are not ill? Has anything happened?”
Mrs. Colville smiled faintly. “I am not ill, darling,” she said, “but—but—the new rector is appointed, and we must leave this house next week;” and overcome by the idea of quitting the home where she had passed so many happy years with him who was no more, but whom she had loved, nay, still loved so well (for hers was one of those rare and true affections which only begin on earth), the widow burst into tears. In an instant, Emily flew to her side, quietly removed her bonnet, and then, with the delicate instinct of a true woman’s nature, feeling that her sympathy could best be shown by silent tenderness, she gently drew her mother’s head towards her till it rested on her bosom, and suffered her to weep unrestrained. But Mrs Colville, although on this occasion the suddenness of the shock had overcome her habitual self-control, was by no means a weak character, and she soon recovered herself.
“I did not mean to distress you thus, dearest,” she said “but the announcement was made to me so abruptly; Sir Thomas—I do not wish to speak against him—but he is not a man of any delicacy of feeling.”
“He!” interrupted Emily, “he has no more feeling than the most obdurate old paving-stone that ever refused to be macadamised.”
“He has certainly not shown much consideration towards us in our sorrow,” returned the widow, “but I bear him no ill-will: he only exacts his legal rights, and I have no business to blame because nature has not gifted him with delicate perception. But I was going to tell you: Mr. Selby received a note from him this morning, saying—but here it is; Mr. Selby gave it to me to show you.”
As she spoke, Mrs. Colville placed the note in her daughter’s-hands. It ran thus:—
“Dear Sir,—I have at length found a suitable person on whom to bestow the living of Ashburn. The new incumbent will read himself in on Sunday next. I presume, from the length of time which has elapsed since the late rector’s decease, that his family have quitted the parsonage. Should this not be the case, will you apprise Mrs. Colville of my desire that she should do so with as little loss of time as possible. The gentleman to whom I have given the preferment, holds most strongly the same views as myself, as to the necessity of guarding against the deterioration of Church property, and has, at my suggestion, written to Mrs. Colville’s solicitor, to announce his intention of claiming, to the utmost farthing, the sum due for dilapidations; which debt I depend upon you to see liquidated. You will oblige me by doing everything in your power to facilitate all arrangements the new rector may wish to make. I leave Ashburn early to-morrow for London; therefore shall be glad to see you this evening, when I can explain my intentions more fully.
“I remain, dear sir,
“Yours, &c.,
“Thomas Crawley, K.C.B.”
“What a cruel, heartless letter!” exclaimed Emily; “and this horrible new rector appears to be as unfeeling as his patron, but of course Sir Thomas lias picked out some dreadful old creature like himself; he had better have given the living to dear, tiresome Mr. Slowkopf than to this unpleasant man. But mamma, dearest, what is to become of us?”
“Mr. Selby advises my taking the cottage on the common,” was the reply: “it will just hold us and the boys, and I do not wish to quit this neighbourhood, at least till Percy is old enough to leave school.”
“Well, the plan has its advantages; it would break my heart to leave dear Caroline, certainly,” rejoined the Rosebud, musing; “the worst feature in the case is this dreadful new rector—I’ve taken a thorough aversion to him already—it is so unpleasant to dislike one’s clergyman! I know he will be horrible, I’ve a presentiment about him, and my presentiments always come true.”
And so the Rosebud chatted on, partly to make up for her long silence, and partly to divert her mother from the sad thoughts which she could see were still depressing her, till Sarah coming to lay the cloth for their frugal meal, she tripped off to get ready for dinner, quite forgetting a certain portrait she had sketched; and Mrs. Colville, being of a neat and orderly disposition, perceiving a stray volume of Blair’s Sermons lying about, put it, and all it contained, away in its proper place in the book-shelves.
Saturday came, and with it the new rector; he was to stay at Mr. Selby’s till the rectory was ready for him. Despite her prejudices and presentiments, the Rosebud was decidedly curious to see him, and actually made a pretence to gather some flowers for the drawing-room (although they were to leave on Monday), in hopes that, hidden behind the great laurel, she might catch a glimpse of him in the act of arriving, Caroline having told her by what train he was to travel. But unfortunately, after waiting a quarter of an hour, she had just gone into the house for the garden-scissors, when the railway fly drove past, and her utmost endeavours only enabled her to catch the retreating outline of—a black leather portmanteau. Before she went in, however, Mr. Slowkopf, who in his heavy way was always extremely gallant towards the Rosebud, made his appearance, clad in his best suit of black (which was inferior to any other clergyman’s worst), on his way to dine chez Selby, and be introduced to his new rector; and hearing from the young lady (who looked upon him in the light of a half-childish grandpapa, or thereabouts) that she wished to learn something of the appearance, manners, habits, customs, zoology, pathology, ethnology, and general statistics, of the illustrious stranger, he promised to look in for five minutes on his way home (being Saturday night, he should come away very early), and report progress.
Of course Emily told her mamma of this arrangement, and of course Mrs. Colville smiled, and called her a silly little goose for not having patience to wait till to-morrow; adding that, for her own part, she was used to Mr. Slowkopf, and should be sorry to see any one else in his place; and then with a sigh she quitted the room.
Ten o’clock came, and with it Mr. Slowkopf, who looked and felt rather peculiar, which might be accounted for by the fact that his usual beverage was spring water, but that, on the evening in question, he had been prevailed upon to drink two or three glasses of wine. Instead of creeping into the most lonely corner of the apartment, and finding something uncomfortable to sit upon, he advanced boldly into the room, and saying cheerfully, “Well, you see, ladies, here I am,” he drew an arm-chair exactly between Mrs. Colville and the fire, and seated himself thereupon, chuckling with the air of a man conscious of a good joke, but completely in the dark as to what might be the nature or subject thereof.
The Rosebud was so deeply affected (in what manner we leave our readers to guess) by this unaccountable behaviour, that she dared not trust herself to speak; so Mrs. Colville, seeing that the curate appeared likely to chuckle himself to sleep without making any further attempts at conversation, began—
“Well, Mr. Slowkopf, are your never going to satisfy our curiosity?”
Thus abjured, that individual started, looked round in confusion, and then in some degree relapsing into his usual manner only smiling vacantly all the time, he said—
“Before I can comply with your request, my dear madam, I must inquire to what particular subject the curiosity to which you allude especially applies?”
“Oh! Mr. Slowkopf, you’re only trying to tease,” exclaimed Emily, recovering her voice and her curiosity simultaneously. “Of course about the new rector: what’s he like? come tell us—quick!”
“He’s like,” replied the curate, pausing on each syllable, as if conversation were an electric telegraph office, and he had to pay extra for every additional word he uttered—“he’s very like—most other young clergymen.”
“Then he is young?” continued Emily interrogatively: “is he tall, gentlemanly, handsome?”
“He’s not, at least as far as I observed—but such things don’t make much impression on me” (“I wonder what does!” was Emily’s sotto voce comment)—“but I should say, he’s not what would be generally called—hard-featured. I only hope,” he continued solemnly—“I only hope that he may turn out sound: there was something I didn’t like about that Hock.”
“Indeed!” returned Emily, looking very grave, with the exception of her eyes, which were laughing wickedly, “incipient spavin, perhaps.”
For a moment Mr. Slowkopf gazed at her in sheer amazement; then a faint consciousness of her meaning gradually dawned upon him, and he replied—
“Similarity of sound has not unnaturally misled you in regard to the import of my observation, Miss Emily: the Hock to which I alluded was not, as you conceive, the elbow-joint of a horse’s hind-leg, but a choice sample of Rhenish wine, hospitably produced by Mr. Selby for our gratification; in regard to which Mr. Carrington was pleased to observe that it was not the only good thing that came from Germany—a remark which I conceived might refer to the German school of theology, whence, by logical progression, I was led to doubt the soundness of the new rector’s doctrinal views.”
And having delivered himself of this ponderous explanation, Mr. Slowkopf rose up as suddenly as if he had been propelled by a spring, after the fashion of that much-enduring public character Jack-in-a-box, and abruptly taking leave of the two ladies, broke his shins over a chair, and was gone.
“Why, mamma dear, what has come to the creature?” exclaimed Emily: “is he going entirely to take leave of the few senses wherewith nature has so scantily endowed him?”
“You’re too pert to him, my love,” was the reply; “he’s a very excellent young man; and always drinking water at home, is naturally more elated by a glass or two of wine, than a less abstemious person would be.”
“Oh! that is the secret, is it—the wretch; I shall send him some teetotal tracts to-morrow. I’ve got ‘A Voice from the Pump,’ and ‘Cold Comfort for chilly Christians,’ still left: they’ll suit his case charmingly.”
And so saying, the incorrigible Rosebud tripped off to bed where, straightway falling asleep, she dreamed, that being in church, and the new rector turning out to be a fine young piebald centaur, she clearly perceived, as he cantered up the pulpit stairs, whisking a most unclerical switch tail, that he was decidedly spavined in the off hind-leg.