but her heart was won when she found Mr. Underwood as deep in the voluntary school struggle as she could be. Her brother held up his hands, and warned her that it was quite enough to be in the fray without going over it again, and that the breath of parish troubles would frighten away the invalid.
“I’ll promise not to molest him,” she said.
“Besides,” said Lance, “one can look at other people’s parishes more philosophically than at one’s own.”
He had begun to grow a little anxious about his boy, but presently from the garden, up from the cliff-path, the two bounded in—little Felix with the brightest of eyes and rosiest of cheeks, and a great ruddy, white-beaded sea-urchin held in triumph in his hands.
“Oh, please,” he cried, “my hands are too dirty to shake; we’ve been digging in the sand. It’s too splendid! And they ought to have spines. When they are alive they walk on them. There’s a bay! Oh, do come down and look for them.”
“And pray what would become of Aunt Cherry’s house, sir? Miss Mohun, may I take him to make his paws presentable?”
“A jolly little kid,” pronounced Fergus, lingering before performing the same operation, “but he has not got his mind opened to stratification, and only cares for recent rubbish. I wish it was a half-holiday, I would show him something!”
The General, who had a great turn for children, and for the chase in any form, was sufficiently pleased with little Felix’s good manners and bright intelligence about bird, beast, and fish, as to volunteer to conduct him to the region most favourable to spouting razor-fish and ambulatory sea-urchins. The boy turned crimson and gasped—
“Oh, thank you!”
“Thank you indeed,” said his father, when he had been carried off to inspect Fergus’s museum in the lumber-room. “‘To see a real General out of the wars’ was one great delight in coming here, though I believe he would have been no more surprised to hear that you had been at Agincourt than in Afghanistan. ‘It’s in history,’ he said with an awe-stricken voice.”
When Fergus, after some shouting, was torn from his beloved museum, Felix came down in suppressed ecstasy, declaring it the loveliest and most delicious of places, all bones and stones, where his father must come and see what Fergus thought was a megatherium’s tooth. The long word was pronounced with a triumphant delicacy of utterance, amid dancing bounds of the dainty, tightly-hosed little legs.
The General and his companion went their way, while the other two had a more weary search, resulting in the choice of not the most inviting of the houses, but the one soonest available within convenient distance of church and sea. When it came to practical details, Miss Mohun was struck by the contrast between her companion’s business promptness and the rapt, musing look she had seen when she came on him listening to the measured cadence of the waves upon the cliffs, and the reverberations in the hollows beneath. And when he went to hire a piano she, albeit unmusical, was struck by what her ears told her, yet far more by the look of reverent admiration and wonder that his touch and his technical remarks brought out on the dealer’s face.
“Has that man, a bookseller and journalist, missed his vocation?” she said to herself. “Yet he looks too strong and happy for that. Has he conquered something, and been the better for it?”
He made so many inquiries about Fergus and his school, that she began to think it must be with a view to his own pretty boy, who came back all sea-water and ecstasy, with a store of limpets, sea-weeds, scales, purses, and cuttle-fish’s backbones for the delectation of his sisters. Above all, he was eloquent on the shell of a lacemaker crab, all over prickles, which he had seen hanging in the window of a little tobacconist. He had been so much fascinated by it that General Mohun regretted not having taken him to buy it, though it appeared to be displayed more for ornament than for sale.
“It is a disgusting den,” added the General, “with ‘Ici on parle Francais’ in the window, and people hanging about among whom I did not fancy taking the boy.”
“I know the place,” said Miss Mohun. “Strange to say, it produces rather a nice girl, under the compulsion of the school officer. She is plainly half a foreigner, and when Mr. Flight got up those theatricals last winter she sung most sweetly, and showed such talent that I thought it quite dangerous.”
“I remember,” said her brother. “She was a fairy among the clods.”
The next morning, to the amazement of Miss Mohun, who thought herself one of the earliest of risers, she not only met the father and son at early matins, but found that they had been out for two hours enjoying sea-side felicity, watching the boats come in, and delighting in the beauty of the fresh mackerel.
“If they had not all been dead!” sighed the tender-hearted little fellow. “But I’ve got my lacemaker for Audrey.”
“‘The carapace of a pagurus,’ as Fergus translated it.” Adding, “I don’t know the species.”
“I can find out when father has time to let us look at the big natural history book in the shop,” said Felix. “We must not look at it unless he turns it over, so Pearl and I are saving up to buy it.”
“For instance!” said his father, laughing.
“Oh, I could not help getting something for them all,” pleaded the boy, “and pagurus was not dear. At least he is, in the other way.”
“Take care, Fely—he won’t stand caresses. I should think he was the first crab ever so embraced.”
“I wonder you got entrance so early in the day,” said Miss Mohun.
“The girl was sweeping out the shop, and singing the morning hymn, so sweetly and truly, that it would have attracted me anyway,” said Lancelot. “No doubt the seafaring men want ‘baccy at all hours. She was much amazed at our request, and called her mother, who came out in remarkable dishabille, and is plainly foreign. I can’t think where I have seen such a pair of eyes—most likely in the head of some chorus-singer, indeed the voice had something of the quality. Anyway, she stared at me to the full extent of them.”
So Lancelot departed, having put in hand negotiations for a tolerable house not far from St. Andrew’s Church, and studied the accommodation available for horses, and the powers of the pianos on hire.
CHAPTER VI. – ST. ANDREW’S ROCK
Helpmates and hearthmates, gladdeners of gone years,
Tender companions of our serious days,
Who colour with your kisses, smiles, and tears,
Life’s worn web woven over wonted ways.—LYTTON.
“How does he seem now?” said Geraldine, as Lancelot came into the drawing-room of St. Andrew’s Rock at Rockquay, in the full glare of a cold east windy May evening.
“Pretty well fagged out, but that does not greatly matter. I say, Cherry, how will you stand this? Till I saw you in this den, I had no notion how shabby, and dull, and ugly it is.”
“My dear Lance, if you did but know how refreshing it is to see anything shabby, and dull, and ugly,” Mrs. Grinstead answered with imitative inflections, which set Anna Vanderkist off into a fit of laughter, infecting both her uncle and aunt. The former gravely said—
“If you had only mentioned it in time, I could have gratified you more effectually.”
“I suppose it is Aunt Cherry’s charity,” said Anna, recovering. “The reflection that but for her the poor natives would never have been able to go to their German baths.”
“Oh, no such philanthropy, my dear. It is homeliness, or rather homeyness, that is dear to my bourgeoise mind. I was afraid of spick-and-span, sap-green aestheticism, but those curtains have done their own fading in pleasing shades, that good old sofa can be lain upon, and there’s a real comfortable crack on that frame; while as to the chiffonier, is not it the marrow of the one Mrs. Froggatt left us, where Wilmet kept all the things in want of mending?”
“Ah!