“But, oh, what a waste of time—what a waste of time it will be!” cried poor Cicely, when she took refuge in the garden, putting the delicate children to play upon a great rug, stretched on the grass. “To be sure there will be one mouth less to feed, which is always something. You must help me a little while I write my letters, Mab.”
“Who are you going to write to?” said Mab, with colloquial incorrectness which would have shocked out of their senses the Miss Blandys, and all the excellent persons concerned in bringing her up. “Oh yes, I will try to help; but won’t you forgive Annie, just for this little time, and let her stay?”
“I can’t be defied in my own house,” said Cicely, erecting her head with an air which frightened Mab herself; “and I must take to it sooner or later. Wherever we go, it is I that must look after them. Well! it will be a trouble at first; but I shall like it when I get fond of them. Mab, we ought to be fond of them now.”
Mab looked at the children, and then laughed. “I don’t hate them,” she said; “they are such funny little things, as if they had been born about a hundred years before their time. I believe, really, they are not children at all, but old, old men, that know a great deal more than we do. I am sure that Charley could say something very wonderful if he liked. He has a great deal in him, if he would but take his thumb out of his mouth.”
“Charley is my boy,” said Cicely, brightening up; “he is the one I like best.”
“I like him best, too. He is the funniest. Are you going to write there?”
“I must keep my eye upon them,” said Cicely, with great solemnity. She was pleased with her victory, and felt it to be of the most prodigious importance that she should not lose the “influence” she had gained; for she was silly, as became her age, as well as wise. She had brought out her little desk—a very commonplace little article, indeed, of rosewood, with brass bindings—and seated herself under the old mulberry-tree, with the wind ruffling her papers, and catching in the short curling locks about her forehead. (N.B.—Don’t suppose, dear reader, that she had cut them short; those stray curls were carefully smoothed away under the longer braids when she brushed her hair; but the breeze caught them in a way which vexed Cicely as being untidy). It was as pretty a garden scene as you could see; the old mulberry bending down its heavy branches, the babies on the rug at the girl’s feet; but yet, when you look over Cicely’s shoulder, a shadow falls upon the pretty scene. She had two letters to write, and something still less agreeable than her letters—an advertisement for the Guardian. This was very difficult, and brought many a sigh from her young breast.
“‘An elderly clergyman who has filled the office of curate for a very long time in one parish, finding it now necessary to make a change, desires to find a similar——‘”
“Do you think that will do?” said Mab. “It is as if poor papa were a butler, or something—‘filled the office of curate for a long time in one parish’—it does not sound nice.”
“We must not be bound by what sounds nice,” said Cicely. “It is not nice, in fact—is it? How hard it is to put even such a little thing as this as one ought! Will this do better?—‘A clergyman, who has long occupied the position of curate in charge, in a small parish, wishes to hear of a similar——‘ What, Mab? I cannot say situation, can I? that is like a butler again. Oh, dear, dear; it is so very much like a butler altogether. Tell me a word.”