The "Upper's" gain was our loss. Henceforward the Clinkers were always with us. (Nobody favoured Salvation with her new surname.) But the chief loser by her change of state was, alas, poor Brother Brawn. The sisters let the High Street Mansion, the aforetime E.E.E., and moved, inseparably, into the White House. There, sandwiched between a gentle détraquée and a scolding shrew, our bleating leader found repentance, if no leisure more.
"I told 'ee so," said Aunt Jael. "'E've done it now. There is no hope."
The husband certainly had none, though his spouse, dreamily quoting Luke-one-thirteen, declared that she had, and the good sister-in-law er-er-er'd and plied her unsteady needle on swaddling-clothes, while muttering always to herself "John! Thou shalt call his name John!" ...
Neither school nor Lawn nor Clinkers, however, seemed anything but incidental to my life in the big house at Number Eight, always for me the first of external things. Here too there were changes.
Mrs. Cheese had come back. Servant after servant had passed away like that grass which in the morning groweth up and in the evening withereth away. Stability reigned in the kitchen once more. Relations with Aunt Jael partook of the nature of an armed truce. Both restrained themselves, Mrs. Cheese because she wanted to stay, Aunt Jael because she wanted her to; though the former was a bit too fond of making it clear that she had come back to us for my Grandmother's sake only, "and not to plaize zome others I cude mention." Despite her loyal affection for my Grandmother, the real person for whose sake she had come back was herself. At sixty she was too old to break with old habits, such as our kitchen and her routine therein, or with Aunt Jael, who was a habit also, if a bad one.
From this time Grandmother occupies a larger place in my memories than Aunt Jael. Why, I am somewhat puzzled to say; for their life, and my life with them, went on just as of old. Perhaps now that beatings became rarer, it was natural that she whose skill therein had been the terror of my earlier childhood should loom less large. Perhaps it was that Aunt Jael, my bad angel, appeared tame in her badness by the side of Uncle Simeon (but then should Grandmother, my good angel, have become faint in my affections besides Robbie; whereas I liked her better and thought of her more). Perhaps it was that Grandmother's gentler qualities would naturally have made less impression on a little child than Aunt Jael's harsh ones, or anybody's good qualities than anybody's bad ones. Further, I now saw more of Grandmother, as Aunt Jael developed the habit of confining herself to her bedroom for days at a stretch, only emerging on to the landing to rain curses over the banisters on Mrs. Cheese for a useless, shiftless idler, unfit to wait on a suffering bedridden old martyr, or on Grandmother for a selfish, ungrateful sister always absent from her elder's bed of pain; or (oftenest) on me.
With outdoor exercise and good food, which now for the first time I enjoyed together, I became healthier and I think happier. Though I still lived for my daydreams, I had less time on my hands.
What with dusting and bed-making and cooking, what with homework and meals and prayers and ceaseless reading of the Word in public and private, and Aunt Jael's and Grandmother's expositions, I found my days too full to yield the time I needed for thinking and talking to myself: for living. I got into the habit of stealing odd quarters-of-an-hour in the attic. Aunt Jael was on my scent in a moment. How I loathed her when a luxurious heart-to-heart talk between Mary and Myself was interrupted by her hoarse scolding voice.
"Child! Child! Now then. Down from the garret, now. No monkey tricks."
Perhaps as an attraction to hold me downstairs, the portals of the dining-room bookcase were at last thrown open to me. The wealth therein would have seemed meagre, perhaps, to worldlier spirits; to me, for whom all books save One (and one other) had always been closed, it was a gold mine. Of unequal yield. With some of the more desiccated devotional works I saw at once that I could make no headway. Such were Aunt Jael's beloved "Thoughts on the Apocalypse" and a row of funereally-bound tomes devoted to the exposition of prophecy. Laid sideways on the bottom shelf was that musty fusty giant, our celebrated copy of the "Trowsers Bible." I liked Matthew Henry's great Commentary in three huge black volumes, with the dates at the top of every page, from which I learnt that this world was made in the year B.C. 4004 (six thousand years ago: a brief poor moment lost in the facing-both-ways Eternity that haunted me), and that Christ was born four years Before Christ. Certain books demolishing the Darbyites or Close Brethren and their fellow-sinners at the other pole of Error pleased me by their hairsplitting arguments and vituperative abuse. Then there was "Grace abounding to the Chief of Sinners" by Master John Bunyan.