And John would throw himself into his chair, in an untidy living-room of Lletharrog, no longer recognisable as the neat, trim parlour of Barbara's days, and pulling tiny Henry on his knee, and with Fanny looking over one shoulder, and Johnnie over the other, ha would proceed to show them the precious case of flies, the gaudy feathers proving an irresistible attraction to the children. There would be a dog on the opposite chair, and a cat on the hearth-rug, nuzzling a brood of young kittens, while toys, needlework, and books lay strewn about the floor, and Fanny-Rosa, seized with a sudden passion for dressmaking, leant over the table with a large pair of scissors, preparing to cut wastefully into the folds of an evening gown to make herself a jacket which might hide something of her once more widening figure.
The coming of the babies made little difference to Fanny-Rosa's looks. She was, so her husband thought, as lovely as the day he married her; she was still wayward, careless and capricious, the true daughter of Simon Flower. Her servants never knew where they were with her. One day she would be generous, indulgent, giving them roast for dinner and suggesting a holiday for the lot of them, and the day after a scolding whirlwind would burst into the kitchen, with a packet of sugar in her hand which she swore had been stolen from her untidy store-cupboard, and a flow of language would escape from their flaming mistress that the servants would declare afterwards could only have been learnt from the lads in her father's stables. John, hearing the tirade of wrath from the living-room, would laugh quietly to himself and go out into the garden. Fanny-Rosa would have her scene, and enjoy herself hugely, storm upstairs to the children's bedroom afterwards and probably beat the frightened girl from the village who had replaced old Martha, and then, like a burst of sunshine after rain, come singing after her husband, with small Henry tucked under her arm and Johnnie capering at her heels.
"Visiting Lletharrog," Eliza would say, on returning to sedate Brodrick House, Saunby, after a stay of a week with her brother and his family, "is like visiting a bear-house. There is nowhere to sit, because the chairs are full of dogs or kittens or babies' napkins. The cooking is atrocious. I can swear my bed was damp when I arrived, but I did not like to say anything, as Fanny-Rosa had embroidered me a nightgown fit for a queen, which was laid out upon the sheets. The first morning she put the whole household to making jam. I am sure none of it will set, for the shocking waste of sugar-the children all upon the table eating it up as fast as it was put into the pan."
"And yet dear John seems very well content?" asked Barbara, her forehead wrinkling in anxiety.
"Oh, he's as happy as the day is long, in all the confusion. He does nothing whatever but sit in his chair and laugh. He has grown side-whiskers, to save himself the trouble of shaving, he told me."
"And the children?"
"The children are all very pretty and quite uncontrollable, and as for darling Johnnie, he may be wild and quick-tempered, but he is the most affectionate of them all, and quite attached himself to me, calling me his "most dear aunt Eliza," and would I marry him when he became a man!"
Poor Eliza, who would soon be forty, was proud of any proposal these days, even if it came from her six-year-old nephew.
Once a year John and Fanny-Rosa and the children would be invited to Clonmere for a period of three months, and as Copper John spent most of his day at the mines, and his evening in the library, the invasion of the young family caused little disturbance to his routine. Fanny-Rosa, with her usual artfulness, made herself particularly charming, and young Johnnie, grasping instinctively that bad behaviour might very well result in discomfort to himself, was quiet and subdued in his grandfather's presence, and only let his spirits soar when the sound of horses' hoofs had died away along the drive.
Then there would be a shout, and a whoop of delight, and a flourishing of bows and arrows, and woe betide young Fanny playing with her dolls outside on the grass, or Henry struggling with his top, or baby Edward sucking his comforter when their eldest brother was about, for the doll would be in the rhododendrons in three minutes, and the top flung into the creek, and the baby with his petticoats tossed above his head, and Johnnie himself doing a war-dance with a cock's feather stuck in his dark curls, aiming an arrow at his protesting aunt Barbara, who defended herself behind a parasol. "Johnnie darling, you must be careful, you will do some damage," and Johnnie darling, caring not at all, launched his arrow with a war-cry into the parasol, and then took to the woods to torment old Baird, pulling his peaches off the walls, digging up the lettuce plants, and puncturing the old man in the behind with an arrow when his back was turned.
"Why should Johnnie be so wild?" asked Barbara of her brother, removing the nest of young mice from her work-box. "We never played such pranks as children. He is so intelligent and affectionate in other ways, but he appears to lack a sense of proportion."
"He has the faults of all of us, and none of the virtues," said John. "I cannot beat him, because I see him do all the things that I have always longed to do myself, and never dared."
"I cannot believe you ever wished to pour a basin of slops over poor old Mrs. Casey, when she was peeling the potatoes, or tie a cracker round a cow's udders, as Johnnie did yesterday, so Mahoney told me," protested Barbara. "The last was a most dangerous thing to do."
"It certainly shows a rather warped sense of the ridiculous," said Johnnie's father, "but I would dearly love to do such a thing myself."
"I don't believe it. You just say that to defend Johnnie."
"The boy will be ruined, you know, unless someone takes him in hand," said Doctor Armstrong seriously, who was Johnnie's godfather. "If he were mine I should beat him regularly, once a week, until he learnt manners. What is the use of his having intelligence unless he knows how to use it? Besides, he is not all that clever. Young Henry there will have a far better brain, you wait and see, and no nonsense about him."
"I don't believe beating Johnnie would do any good," said his father. "I've seen more high-spirited dogs ruined by a whipping than were ever made by one.
Upbringing has little to do with forming character, that is my opinion. Johnnie was born wild, and he will stay wild, and nothing you or I or Fanny-Rosa can do will ever change him."
And John, at thirty-six, with one or two grey hairs already in his dark head, thrust his hands into his pockets and strolled off across the grass in search of his first-born, thinking with a smile and a pain in his heart of his son's begetting, and how he was created out of love, and passion, and doubt, and tenderness, under the white moonlight on Hungry Hill.
"The truth of the matter is," said Doctor Armstrong to Barbara, "that the boy is not enough of a Brodrick, and rather too much of a Flower. When I think of what goes on at Castle Andriff, I find myself shaking my head over the future of Clonmere."
For to good, sober Willie Armstrong, born and bred in Buckinghamshire, and with fifteen years in the service of his king, life over here was something he found difficult to understand, especially as led by Simon Flower of Andriff. A man of fifty-eight who spent most of his time in the cellar or playing cards with his groom, while his roof crumbled above his head and his tenants mocked him to his face, was, so Doctor Armstrong considered, a figure more to be pitied than despised, but when he allowed his young daughter Matilda to elope with a cobbler from the village, a fellow already married, and invited her to live with her lover in the lodge of Castle Andriff and have one baby after another, then, Doctor Armstrong considered, a man such as Simon Flower was a menace to the country that had bred him. He could not understand how the old fellow could hold up his head in society, but then society was very different here from what it was the other side of the water.