“What is it? What is the matter?” exclaimed Lady Lamerton. “Run up, Polly Woodley!—no, not you this time; you, Fanny White, and see what they are about upstairs.”
“Please, my lady,” said Polly, peering into the higher regions through the hole, “Bessie have given the baby the knives and forks to play with, ’cause you wont let her rock the cradle, and to keep ’un from crying. He’s a shoving ’em through the floor.”
Then, down through the knot-hole descended a shower of comfits. The child had been given a cornet by its mother, and had eagerly opened it, over the hole where it had poked the fork.
The school floor was overspread with a pink and white hail-shower. In a moment, all order was over. The classes broke up into individual units, all on the floor, kicking, scratching, elbowing, grabbing after the scattered comfits, thrusting fingers into eyes, into soapy water; getting them trodden on, nipped between slates, a wriggling, contending, greedy, noisy tangle of small humanity, and above it stood my lady protesting, and Captain Tubb nibbling the ends of his sandy beard, and looking dazed; and Arminell Inglett, half angry, half amused, altogether contemptuous.
“There!” exclaimed Lady Lamerton, “the bells are going for divine service. In places at once—Let us pray!”
CHAPTER II.
A FOLLOWER.
The church bells were ringing, the Sunday-school had at last been reduced to order, arranged in line, and wriggled, sinuous, worm-like, along the road and up the avenue to the church porch. Lady Lamerton, brandishing her sunshade as a field-marshal’s baton, kept the children in place, and directed the head of the procession.
But with what heart-burnings, what envies, what excited passions did that train sweep on its way. Some of the children had got more comfits than others, and despised those less favoured by luck, and others comfitless envied the more successful. Polly Woodley had secured more comfits than the rest, and had them screwed in the corner of her pocket-handkerchief, and she thrust it exultantly under the eyes of Fanny White, who had come off with one only.
Some sobbed because they had crumpled their gowns, one boy howled because in stooping he had ruptured his nether garments, Joan Ball had broken the feather in her hat, and revenged herself on her neighbour by a stab of pin. One child strewed its tongue with comfits, and when Lady Lamerton did not observe, exposed its tongue to the rest of the children to excite their envy. Another was engaged in wiping out of its eyes the soapy water that in the scuffle had been squirted into them.
Captain Tubb dropped away at the church gates to shake hands with, and talk to, some of the villagers, the inn-keeper to the Lamerton Arms, the churchwarden, the guardian of the poor, and the miller, men who constituted the middle crumb of the parochial loaf.