you been to the Water-Colour Exhibition, Miss Ogilvie?”
“Yes; Mr. Acton took me one Saturday afternoon.”
“Oh! then he would be sure to show you Nita Ray’s picture. I want so much to know how it strikes people.”
And Janet had plunged into a regular conversation about exhibitions, pictures, artists, concerts, lectures, &c., before her mother came back, talking with all the eagerness of an exile about her native country. As a governess in her school-room, Miss Ogilvie had had little more than a key-hole view of all these things; but then what she had seen and heard had been chiefly through the Actons, and thus coincided with Janet’s own side of the world, and they were in full discussion when Caroline came back.
“There, I’ve disposed of the butcher and baker!” she said. “Now we can be comfortable again.”
Mary expected Janet to repair to her own lessons, or to listen to those scales which Babie might be heard from a distance playing; but she only appealed to her mother about some picture of last year, and sat down to her drawing, while the conversation on pictures and books continued in animated style. So far from sending her away, Mary fancied that Carey was rather glad to keep to surface matters, and to be prevented from another outbreak of feeling.
The next interruption was from the children, each armed with a pile of open books on the top of a slate. Carey begged Mary to wait, and went outside the window with them, sitting down under a tree whence the murmured sounds of repetition could be heard, lasting about twenty minutes between the two, and then she returned, the little ones jumping on each side of her, Armine begging that Miss Ogilvie would come and see the museum, and Barbara saying that Jock wanted to help to show it off.
“Well, run now and put your own corners tidy,” suggested their mother. “If Jock does not stay in the playground, he will come back in a quarter of an hour.”
“And Mr. Ogilvie will come then. I invited him,” said Babie.
At which Carey laughed incredulously; but Janet, observing that she must go and see that the children did not do more harm than good, walked off, and Mary said—
“I should not wonder if he did act on the invitation.”
“I hope he will. It would have only been civil in me to have asked him, considering that I have taken possession of you,” said Caroline.
“I fully expect to see him on Miss Barbara’s invitation. Do you know, Carey, he says you have transformed his school.”
“Translated it, like Bottom the Weaver.”
“In the reverse direction. He says you have made the mothers see to their boys’ preparation, and wakened up the intellects.”
“Have I? I thought I had only kept my own boys up to the mark. Yes, and there’s Johnny. Do you know, Mary, it is very funny, but that boy Johnny has adopted me. He comes after me everywhere like a shadow, and there’s nothing he won’t do for me, even learning his lessons. You see the poor boy has a good deal of native sense, Brownlow sense, and mind had been more stifled than wanting in him. Nobody had ever put things to him by the right end, and when he once let me do it for him, it was quite a revelation, and he has been so happy and prosperous that he hardly knows himself. Poor boy, there is something very honest and true about him, and so affectionate! He is a little like his uncle, and I can’t help being fond of him. Then Robin is just as devoted to Jock, though I can’t say the results are so very desirable, for Jock is a monkey, I must confess, and it is irresistible to a monkey to have a bear that he can lead to do anything. I hear that Robin used to be the good boy of the establishment, and I am afraid he is not that now.”
“But can’t you stop that?”
“My dear, nobody could think of Jock’s devices so as to stop them, who had not his own monkey brain. Who would have thought of his getting the whole set to dress up as nigger singers, with black faces and banjoes, and coming to dance and sing in front of the windows?”
“There wasn’t much harm in that.”
“There wouldn’t have been if it had been only here. And, oh dear, the irresistible fun of Jock’s capering antics, and Rob moving by mechanism, as stiff and obedient as the giant porter to Flibberti-gibbet.” Carey stopped to laugh. “But then I never thought of their going on to present themselves to Ellen in the middle of a mighty and solemn dinner party! All the grandees, the county people (this in a deep and awful voice), sitting up in their chignons of state, in the awful pause during the dishing-up, when these five little wretches, in finery filched from the rag bag, appear on the smooth lawn, mown and trimmed to the last extent for the occasion, and begin to strike up at their shrillest, close to the open window. Ellen rises with great dignity. I fancy I can see her, sending out to order them off. And then, oh dear, Jock only hopping more frantically than ever round the poor man the hired waiter, who, you must know, is the undertaker’s chief mute, and singing—
‘Leedle, leedle, leedle,
Our cat’s dead.
What did she die wi’?
Wi’ a sair head.
A’ you that kenned her
While she was alive,
Come to her burying
At half-past five.’
And then the Colonel, bestirring himself to the rescue, with ‘go away boys, or I’ll send for the police.’ And then the discovery, when in the height of his wrath, Jock perked up, and said, ‘I thought you would like to have the ladies amused, Uncle Robert.’ He did box his ears then—small blame to him, I must say. I could stand that better than the jaw Ellen gave us afterwards. I beg your pardon, Mary, but it really was one. She thinks us far gone in the ways of depravity, and doesn’t willingly let her little girls come near us.”
“Isn’t that a pity?”
“I don’t know; Essie and Ellie have feelings in their clothes, and don’t like our scrambling walks, and if Ellie does get allured by our wicked ways, she is sure to be torn, or splashed, or something, and we have shrieks and lamentations, and accusations of Jock and Joe, amid floods of tears; and Jessie comes to the rescue, primly shaking her head and coaxing her little sister, while she brings out a needle and thread. I can’t help it, Mary. It does aggravate me to look at her!”
Mary could only shake her head with a mixture of pity, reproof, and amusement, and as a safer subject could not help asking—
“By the bye, why do you confuse your friends by having all the two families named in pairs?”
“We didn’t know we were going to live close together,” said Carey. “But the fact is that the Janets were named after their fathers’ only sister, who seems to have been an equal darling to both. We would have avoided Robert, but we found that it would have been thought disrespectful not to call the boy after his grandfather and uncle.”
“And Bobus is a thoroughly individual name.”
“Then Jock’s name is John Lucas, and we did mean to call him by the second, but it wouldn’t stick. Names won’t sometimes, and there’s a formality in Lucas that would never fit that skipjack of a boy. He got called Jock as a nickname, and now he will abide by it. But Joseph Armine’s second name does fit him, and so we have kept to it; and Barbara was dear grandmamma’s own name, and quite our own.”
Therewith Babie rushed downstairs with “He’s coming, Mother Carey,” and darted out at the house door to welcome Mr. Ogilvie at the gate, and lead him in in triumph, attended by her two brothers. The two ladies laughed, and Carey said, with a species of proud apology—
“Poor children, you see they have been used to be noticed by clever men.”
“Mr. Ogilvie is come to see our museum,” cried Babie, in her patronising tone, jumping and dancing round during his greetings and remarks that