CHAPTER XXIV.
WE AND THE BOYS—WE AND THE BOYS AND OUR FADS—THE LAMP OF ZEAL—CLEMENT ON UNREALITY—JACK’S OINTMENT.
Our life on the moors was, I suppose, monotonous. I do not think we ever found it dull; but it was not broken, as a rule, by striking incidents.
The coming and going of the boys were our chief events. We packed for them when they went away. We wrote long letters to them, and received brief but pithy replies. We spoke on their behalf when they wanted clothes or pocket-money. We knew exactly how to bring the news of good marks in school and increased subscriptions to cricket to bear in effective combination upon the parental mind, and were amply rewarded by half a sheet, acknowledging the receipt of a ten-shilling piece in a match-box (the Arkwrights had a strange habit of sending coin of the realm by post, done up like botanical specimens), with brief directions as to the care of garden or collection, and perhaps a rude outline of the head-master’s nose—“In a great hurry, from your loving and grateful Bro.”
We kept their gardens tidy, preserved their collections from dust, damp, and Keziah, and knitted socks for them. I learned to knit, of course. Every woman knits in that village of stone. And “between lights” Eleanor and I plied our needles on the boys’ behalf, and counted the days to the holidays.
We had fresh “fads” every holidays. Many of our plans were ambitious enough, and the results would, no doubt, have been great had they been fully carried out. But Midsummer holidays, though long, are limited in length.
Once we made ourselves into a Field Naturalists’ Club. We girls gave up our “spare dress wardrobe” for a museum. We subdivided the shelves, and proposed to make a perfect collection of the flora and entomology of the neighbourhood. Eleanor and I really did continue to add specimens whilst the boys were at school; but they came home at Christmas devoted, body and soul, to the drama. We were soon converted to the new fad. The wardrobe became a side-scene in our theatre, and Eleanor and Clement laboured day and night with papers of powdered paint, and kettles of hot size, in converting canvas into scenery. “Theatricals” promised to be a lasting fancy; but the next holidays were in fine weather, and we made the drop-curtain into a tent.
When the boys were at school, Eleanor and I were fully occupied. We took a good deal of pains with our room: half of it was mine now. I had my knick-knack table as well as Eleanor, my own books and pictures, my own photographs of the boys and of the dear boys, my own pot plants, and my own dog—a pug, given to me by Jack, and named “Saucebox.” In Jack’s absence, Pincher also looked on me as his mistress.
Like most other conscientious girls, we had rules and regulations of our own devising: private codes, generally kept in cipher, for our own personal self-discipline, and laws common to us both for the employment of our time in joint duties—lessons, parish work, and so forth. I think we made rather too many rules, and that we re-made them too often. I make fewer now, and easier ones, and let them much more alone. I wonder if I really keep them better? But if not, may God, I pray Him, send me back the restless zeal, the hunger and thirst after righteousness, which He gives in early youth! It is so easy to become more thick-skinned in conscience, more tolerant of evil, more hopeless of good, more careful of one’s own comfort and one’s own property, more self-satisfied in leaving high aims and great deeds to enthusiasts, and then to believe that one is growing older and wiser. And yet those high examples, those good works, those great triumphs over evil, which single hands effect sometimes, we are all grateful for, when they are done, whatever we may have said of the doing. But we speak of saints and enthusiasts for good, as if some special gifts were made to them in middle age which are withheld from other men. Is it not rather that some few souls keep alive the lamp of zeal and high desire which God lights for most of us while life is young?
Eleanor and I worked at our lessons by ourselves. We always had her mother to “fall back upon,” as we said. When we took up the study of Italian in order to be able to read Dante—moved thereto by the attractions of the long volume of Flaxman’s illustrations of the ‘Divina Commedia’—we had to “fall back” a good deal on Mrs. Arkwright’s scholarship. And this in spite of all the helps the library afforded us, the best of dictionaries, English “cribs,” and about six of those elaborate commentaries upon the poem, of which Italians have been so prolific.