'Do people get over such things, Lance? There was Ophelia, and there was Wilfred in Rokeby-only she was a woman, and he was pipy. Did you ever know of anybody really and truly?'
Lance meditated, but his experience reached no farther than the surgeon's assistant at Minsterham, who was reported to be continually in love, but who did not look greatly the worse for it.
And then Robina suggested that she did not remember that either Wilfred or Ophelia had a cough.
'But my father had,' said Lance in the depths of his throat. 'Don't you know, Robin, it was hard work and trouble and poverty that-did it?'
'Was it?' awe-struck, for she had been so young as to have no clear ideas.
'I've heard it told often enough. My Lady cut off the third curate; and that-and all the rest of it-helped to bring on the decline.'
'But, Lance! At least, that wasn't-love.'
'Nonsense, Robin! Don't you see, whatever takes the heart and spirit out of a man, makes him ready for illness to get hold of?' Lance plucked desperately at the hazels in the hedge, and his eyes were full of tears.
'O Lance, Lance, what can we do?'
'I don't know! I'd let him pitch into me from morning till night if that would do him any good!'
'I'm sure I am very sorry I grumbled. We'll give Wilmet Mr. Froggatt's message, and see what she thinks.'
Poor children! their consternation was such, that they must judge by their own eyes of Felix without loss of time; so they both marched into the shop with Mr. Froggatt's note, and there felt half baffled to see Felix looking much as usual, very busy trying to content a lady with nursery literature, and casting a glance at Robin as if she had no business there.
Wilmet received Mr. Froggatt's message without excitement. She thought it would be a very good thing, but she did not believe Felix would consent; and Alda broke out, 'Then we should have Mr. Froggatt inflicted on us all the evening!'
Nor did Felix consent. He said it was very kind, but his cold was almost gone, and he did not need it. Moreover he had his private doubts whether Alda would be decently gracious to Mr. Froggatt; and Wilmet, whose one object in life was to keep her sister contented and happy at home, could press nothing so disagreeable to her. Altogether, the reception of their hints at home was so prosaically placid, that they were both rather ashamed of the alarm into which they had worked themselves up. Even when Robina privately asked Cherry whether she thought Felix looking well, the answer was eager.
'Oh, very-very well! He looked pulled down when his cold was bad, but he is quite well now.'
'Mrs. Froggatt thought-'
'Oh, you've been talking to Mrs. Froggatt! She thinks nothing so kind as to say one is looking poorly. I said, "How well you are looking, Mrs. Froggatt," one day, and I assure you she only swallowed it by an act of Christian forgiveness. She is fondest of Felix, so of course he looks the worst.'
Robina got no more out of Geraldine, whose fears at that moment were in the form of utterly denying themselves. Commonplace life greatly reassured the two young things, and of the alarm there chiefly remained a certain shame at their own former discontent, and doubly tender feeling towards their fatherly elder brother. Now that they guessed something to be amiss with him, they had no irritation for him-and indeed he gave them no cause for any; the discomfort was partly indeed occasioned by the lack of his usual quiet mirth, but far more by Alda's fastidiousness, and Wilmet's vigilance lest she should be annoyed. This caused restrictions that weighed more heavily on the younger ones than on Lance and Robina, and had the effect of making Angela and Bernard rebellious. They had neither the principle nor the consideration of their two seniors; to them every one seemed simply 'cross,' and against this crossness there was a constant struggle, either of disobedience or of grumble.
Both were at rather an insubordinate age. Angela, having begun school life with getting into a scrape greater than she understood, had acquired a naughty-girl reputation, of the kind that tempts the young mind to live up to it; and her high spirits, boisterous nature, and 'don't care' system made her irrepressible by any one but Wilmet, whose resolute hand might be murmured at, but was never relaxed. While Bernard, hitherto very fairly amenable to Cherry, and a capital little scholar, became infected with the spirit of riot and insubordination. Whatever fastidiousness the children took for fine- ladyism in Alda they treated unmercifully, and resented in their own fashion her complaints, and Wilmet's enforcement of regard to her tastes: nor was Lance always blameless in the tricks played upon her.
It was strange to see the difference made by one incongruous element. A few sneers at Cherry's pronunciation, an injudicious laugh when she was rebuking, and a general habit of making light of her, on Alda's part, upset all Bernard's habits of deference to the sister who had taught him all he knew. His lessons grew into daily battles-miseries to himself and far greater miseries to his teacher, and sufficient misery to the spectator to induce her to do that which the other sisters could scarcely have brought themselves to do on any provocation, namely to complain to Felix, and by and by make a representation, for the general good, she said, that it was a mere farce to leave the boy under Cherry's management.
Cherry, with bitter tears, was forced to own that she could no longer keep him in order nor make him learn, and there was no alternative but to send him to Mr. Ryder's. He had no voice nor ear, so that he could not follow in Lance's steps; and for the present, Bexley was the only resource.
Of course Cherry charged the whole of this upon her poor little self; and some amount of the trouble certainly was due to her incapacity not to show in voice and manner when she was under fret, anxiety, or depression; and now, poor child! all three at once had come upon her. Whether Alda's conversation or the children's naughtiness fretted her most, it would be hard to tell; she was in a continual state of unuttered, vague, and therefore most wearing anxiety on Felix's account, and the physical discomfort of the ungenial spring told on her whole frame and spirits. Alda's talk, when good-humoured, opened such vistas of brightness, amusement, conversation, and above all of beautiful scenes, that they awoke longings and cravings that Cherry had hardly known before. The weariness of the grinding monotony of home seemed to have infected her. She knew it for discontent, and was the more miserable over her want of power to control it, because of the terror that hung over her lest repinings might bring on them all the judicial punishment of a terrible break-up of the home she loved, even while the tedium of the daily round oppressed her. Alternate plaintiveness and weary sharpness of course aggravated both Alda and Bernard, and they knew nothing of the repentant wretchedness that rather weakened than strengthened her.
Little Stella's unfailing docility and sweetness were her great solace. Even Alda was exceedingly fond of Stella, and would have spoilt her if the child had not been singularly firm in her intense love and loyalty to the heads of the family. Angel and Bear were too rough for her, and alarmed her sense of duty; but Lance was her hero; and the happiest moments of those holidays were spent in a certain loft above a warehouse in the court of the printing-office, only attainable by a long ladder. Here, secure that none but favoured ears could hear, Lance practised on his beloved violin, at every hour he could steal, emulating too often Mother Hubbard's dog 'fiddling to mice,' but his audience often including his three younger sisters. He had had scarcely any hints, but his was the nature that could pick music out of anything; and Angela, much more than Robin, was ecstatic in all that concerned the sixth sense, and watched and criticised with rapture, wanted to learn, and pouted at being told that it was not fit for a woman. Among those stacks of paper in the dusty loft, with the stamp and thud of the press close at hand, it was possible to forget, in creating sounds and longing to fulfil the dream of the spirit, that Alda was exacting and trying, Wilmet blind to the annoyances she caused, Cherry striving hard, and not always successfully, with the fretfulness of anxiety, and Felix-they durst not think in what state. That loft and that violin made their fairy- land, and one that rendered it most unusually hard for Lance to learn his holiday task.