Old Kensington

by Anne Thackeray Ritchie

'Costello is again in trouble,' says John. 'It is too bad of him, with that poor wife of his and all those children. I have to go round to the Court about him now. Tell George I shall be back in ten minutes.'

'I have kept some clothes for them,' said Cassie. 'They are such nice little children,' and she looks up flushed and all over ravellings at the relenting curate, who puts Mrs. Costello down in his relief-book.

All over John Morgan's study, chairs and tables, such books are lying, with pamphlets, blue books, black books, rolls and registers, in confusion, and smelling of tobacco.

In this age of good reports and evil reports people seem like the two boys in Dickens's story, who felt when they had docketed their bills that they were as good as paid. So we classify our wrongs and tie up our miseries with red tape; we pity people by decimals, and put our statistics away with satisfied consciences. John Morgan wrote articles from a cold and lofty point of view, but he left his reports about all over the room, and would rush off to the help of any human being, deserving or undeserving. He had a theory that heaven had created individuals as well as classes; and at this very moment, with another bang of the door, he was on his way to the police-court, to say a good word for the intemperate Costello, who was ruefully awaiting his trial in the dark cell below.

George, although comfortably established in the Morgan study, was also tired of waiting, and found the house unusually dull. For some time past he had been listening to a measured creaking noise in the garden; then came a peal of bells from the steeple; and he went to the window and looked out. The garden was full of weeds and flowers, with daisies on the lawn, and dandelions and milkwort among the beds. It was not trimly kept, like the garden at home; but George, who was the chief gardener, thought it a far pleasanter place, with its breath of fresh breeze, and its bit of blue over-roof. For flowers, there were blush-roses, nailed against the wall, that Rhoda used to wear in her dark hair sometimes, when there were no earwigs in them; and blue flags, growing in the beds among spiked leaves, and London pride, and Cape jessamine, very sweet upon the air, and also ivy, creeping in a tangle of leaves and tendrils. The garden had been planted by the different inhabitants of the old brown house—each left a token. There was a medlar-tree, with one rotten medlar upon a branch, beneath which John Morgan would sit and smoke his pipe in the sun, while his pupils construed Greek upon the little lawn. Only Carlo was there now, stretching himself comfortably in the dry grass (Carlo was one of Bunch's puppies, grown up to be of a gigantic size and an unknown species). Tom Morgan's tortoise was also basking upon the wall. The creaking noise went on after the chimes had ceased, and George jumped out of window on to the water-butt to see what was the matter. He had forgotten the swing. It hung from a branch of the medlar-tree to the trellis, and a slim figure, in a limp cotton dress, stood clinging to the rope—a girl with a black cloud of hair falling about her shoulders. George stared in amazement. Rhoda had stuck some vine-leaves in her hair, and had made a long wreath, that was hanging from the swing, and that floated as she floated. She was looking up with great wistful eyes, and for a minute she did not see him. As the swing rose and fell, her childish wild head went up above the wall and the branches against the blue, and down 'upon a background of pure gold,' where the Virginian creeper had turned in the sun. George thought it was a sort of tune she was swinging, with all those colours round about her in the sultry summer day. As he leaped down, a feeling came over him as if it had all happened before, as if he had seen it and heard the creaking of the ropes in a dream. Rhoda blushed and slackened her flight. He seemed still to remember it all while the swing stopped by degrees; and a voice within the house began calling, 'Rhoda! Rhoda!'

'Oh! I must go,' said Rhoda, sighing. 'I am wasting my time. Please don't tell Aunt Morgan I was swinging.'

'Tell her!' said George. 'What a silly child you are. Why shouldn't you swing?'

'Oh! she would be angry,' said Rhoda, looking down. 'I am very silly. I can't bear being scolded.'

'Can't you?' says George, with his hands in his pockets. 'I'm used to it, and don't mind a bit.'

'I shouldn't mind it if ... if I were you, and any one cared for me,' said Rhoda, with tearful eyes. She spoke in a low depressed voice.