And at home my father forbade any further mention
of such rank folly and deception. The inner
mullion chamber was turned into a lumber-room, and
as weeks passed by without hearing or seeing any more
of lady or of lamp, we began to credit the wonderful
freaks of the goblin page.
Soon as she parted thence—the fearful twayne,
That blind old woman and her daughter deare,
Came forth, and finding Kirkrapine there slayne,
For anguish greate they gan to rend their heare
And beate their breasts, and naked flesh to teare;
And when they both had wept and wayled their fill,
Then forth they ran, like two amazed deere,
Half mad through malice and revenging will,
To follow her that was the causer of their ill.’
Spenser.
The Christmas vacation was not without another breeze
about Griffith’s expenses at Oxford.
He held his head high, and declared that people expected
something from the eldest son of a man of property,
and my father tried to convince him that a landed estate
often left less cash available than did the fixed
salary of an office. Griff treated all in his
light, good-humoured way, promised to be careful,
and came to me to commiserate the poor old gentleman’s
ignorance of the ways of the new generation.
There ensued some trying weeks of dark days, raw frost,
and black east wind, when the home party cast longing,
lingering recollections back to the social intercourse,
lamp-lit streets, and ready interchange of books
and other amenities we had left behind us. We
were not accustomed to have our nearest neighbours
separated from us by two miles of dirty lane, or
road mended with excruciating stones, nor were they
very congenial when we did see them. The Fordyce
family might be interesting, but we younger ones
could not forget the slight to Clarence, and, besides,
the girls seemed to be entirely in the schoolroom,
Mrs. Fordyce was delicate and was shut up all the
winter, and the only intercourse that took place was
when my father met the elder Mr. Fordyce at the magistrates’
bench; also there was a conference about Amos Bell,
who was preferred to the post left vacant by George
Sims, in right of his being our tenant, but more
civilised than Earlscombers, a widow’s son, and
not sufficiently recovered from his accident to be
exposed to the severe tasks of a ploughboy in the
winter.
Mrs. Fordyce was the manager of a book-club, which
circulated volumes covered in white cartridge paper,
with a printed list of the subscribers’ names.
Two volumes at a time might be kept for a month
by each member in rotation, novels were excluded, and
the manager had a veto on all orders. We found
her more liberal than some of our other neighbours,
who looked on our wants and wishes with suspicion
as savouring of London notions. Happily we could
read old books and standard books over again, and
we gloated over Blackwood and the Quarterly, enjoying,
too, every out-of-door novelty of the coming spring,
as each revealed itself. Emily will never forget
her first primroses, nor I the first thrush in early
morning.
