a door in the shadowy passage opened, and a woman’s face, thin and vinegary of aspect, looked out, and a shrill voice cried:
“Didn’t I tell you I wanted another penn’orth of milk fetched, you young torment? But, law, you’re like the rest of them, that’s all! I may slave my life out, and there isn’t one of you will as much as lift a finger to help me.”
The boy disappeared upon this, grumbling sulkily; and Sigismund opened a door leading into a parlour.
The room was large, but shabbily furnished and very untidy. The traces of half-a-dozen different occupations were scattered about, and the apartment was evidently inhabited by people who made a point of never putting anything away. There was a work-box upon the table, open, and running over with a confusion of tangled tapes, and bobbins, and a mass of different-coloured threads, that looked like variegated vermicelli. There was an old-fashioned desk, covered with dusty green baize, and decorated with loose brass-work, which caught at people’s garments or wounded their flesh when the desk was carried about; this was open, like the work-box, and was littered with papers that had been blown about by the summer breeze, and were scattered all over the table and the floor beneath it. On a rickety little table near the window there was a dilapidated box of colours, a pot of gum with a lot of brushes sticking up out of it, half-a-dozen sheets of Skelt’s dramatic scenes and characters lying under scraps of tinsel, and fragments of coloured satin, and neatly-folded packets of little gold and silver dots, which the uninitiated might have mistaken for powders. There were some ragged-looking books on a shelf near the fire-place; two or three different kinds of inkstands on the mantel-piece; a miniature wooden stage, with a lop-sided pasteboard proscenium and greasy tin lamps, in one corner of the floor; a fishing-rod and tackle leaning against the wall in another corner; and the room was generally pervaded by copy-books, slate-pencils, and torn Latin grammars with half a brown-leather cover hanging to the leaves by a stout drab thread. Everything in the apartment was shabby, and more or less dilapidated; nothing was particularly clean; and everywhere there was the evidence of boys.
I believe Mr. Sleaford’s was the true policy. If you have boys, “cry havoc, and let loose the dogs of war;” shut your purse against the painter and the carpenter, the plumber and glazier, the upholsterer and gardener; “let what is broken, so remain,”—reparations are wasted labour and wasted money. Buy a box of carpenter’s tools for your boys, if you like, and let them mend what they themselves have broken; and, if you don’t mind their sawing off one or two of their fingers occasionally, you may end by making them tolerably useful.
Mr. Sleaford had one daughter and four sons, and the sons were all boys. People ceased to wonder at the shabbiness of his furniture and the dilapidation of his house, when they were made aware of this fact. The limp chintz curtains that straggled from the cornice had been torn ruthlessly down to serve as draperies for Tom when he personated the ghost in a charade, or for Jack when he wanted a sail to fasten to his fishing-rod, firmly planted on the quarter-deck of the sofa. The chairs had done duty as blocks for the accommodation of many an imaginary Anne Boleyn and Marie Antoinette, upon long winter evenings, when Horace decapitated the sofa-pillow with a smoky poker, while Tom and Jack kept guard upon the scaffold, and held the populace—of one—at bay with their halberds—the tongs and shovel. The loose carpets had done duty as raging oceans on many a night, when the easy-chair had gone to pieces against the sideboard, with a loss of two wine-glasses, and all hands had been picked up in a perishing state by the crew of the sofa, after an undramatic interlude of slaps, cuffs, and remonstrances from the higher powers, who walked into the storm-beaten ocean with cruel disregard of the unities. Mr. Sleaford had a room to himself up-stairs—a Bluebeard chamber, which the boys never entered; for the barrister made a point of locking his door whenever he left his room, and his sons were therefore compelled to respect his apartment. They looked through the keyhole now and then, to see if there was anything of a mysterious nature in the forbidden chamber; but, as they saw nothing but a dingy easy-chair and an office-table, with a quantity of papers scattered about it, their curiosity gradually subsided, and they ceased to concern themselves in any manner about the apartment, which they always spoke of as “Pa’s room.”
Chapter 3.
Isabel.
The garden at the back of Mr. Sleaford’s house was a large square plot of ground, with fine old pear-trees sheltering a neglected lawn. A row of hazel-bushes screened all the length of the wall upon one side of the garden; and wherever you looked, there were roses and sweet-brier, espaliered apples, and tall straggling raspberry-bushes, all equally unfamiliar with the gardener’s pruning knife; though here and there you came to a luckless bush that had been hacked at and mutilated in some amateur operations of “the boys.”
It was an old-fashioned garden, and had doubtless once been beautifully kept; for bright garden-flowers grew up amongst the weeds summer after summer, as if even neglect or cruel usage could not disroot them from the familiar place they loved. Thus rare orchids sprouted up out of beds that were half full of chickweed, and lilies-of-the-valley flourished amongst the ground-sel in a shady corner under the water-butt. There were vines, upon which no grape had ever been suffered to ripen during Mr. Sleaford’s tenancy, but which yet made a beautiful screen of verdant tracery all over the back of the house, twining their loving tendrils about the dilapidated Venetian shutters, that rotted slowly on their rusted hinges. There were strawberry-beds, and there was an arbour at one end of the garden in which the boys played at “beggar my neighbour,” and “all fours,” with greasy, dog’s-eared cards in the long summer afternoons; and there were some rabbit-hutches—sure evidence of the neighbourhood of boys—in a sheltered corner under the hazel-bushes. It was a dear old untidy place, where the odour of distant pigsties mingled faintly with the perfume of the roses; and it was in this neglected garden that Isabel Sleaford spent the best part of her idle, useless life.
She was sitting in a basket-chair under one of the pear-trees when Sigismund Smith and his friend went into the garden to look for her. She was lolling in a low basket-chair, with a book on her lap, and her chin resting on the palm of her hand, so absorbed by the interest of the page before her that she did not even lift her eyes when the two young men went close up to her. She wore a muslin dress a good deal tumbled and not too clean, and a strip of black velvet was tied round her long throat. Her hair was almost as black as her brother’s, and was rolled up in a great loose knot, from which a long untidy curl fell straggling on her white throat—her throat was very white, with the dead, yellowish whiteness of ivory.
“I wish that was ‘Colonel Montefiasco,’” said Mr. Smith, pointing to the book which the young lady was reading. “I should like to see a lady so interested in one of my books that she wouldn’t so much as look up when a gentleman was waiting to be introduced to her.”
Miss Sleaford shut her book and rose from her low chair, abashed by this reproach; but she kept her thumb between the pages, and evidently meant to go on with the volume at the first convenient opportunity. She did not wait for any ceremonious introduction to George, but held out her hand to him, and smiled at him frankly.
“Yon are Mr. Gilbert, I know,” she said. “Sigismund has been talking of you incessantly for the last week. Mamma has got your room ready; and I suppose we shall have tea soon. There are to be some chops on purpose for your friend, Sigismund, mamma told me to tell you.”
She glanced downwards at the book, as much as to say that she had finished speaking, and wanted to get back to it.
“What is it, Izzie?” Sigismund asked, interpreting her look.
“Algerman Mountfort.”
“Ah, I thought so. Always his books.”
A faint blush trembled over Miss Sleaford’s pale face.
“They are so beautiful!” she said.
“Dangerously beautiful, I’m afraid, Isabel,” the young man said, gravely; “beautiful sweetmeats, with opium inside the sugar. These books don’t make you