Poor Relations Part 9

"Weed, not read!"

"Well, I can't weed, either. I can't do anything without my spectacles."

"Then go away and do nothing."

Harold shuffled off disconsolately, and John rang for his shaving water.

At breakfast Hilda asked anxiously after her son's whereabouts; and John, the last vestige of whose irritation had vanished in the smell of fried bacon and eggs, related the story of the morning's escapade as a good joke.

"But he can't see anything without his spectacles," Hilda exclaimed.

"Oh, he'll find his way to the breakfast table all right," John prophesied.

"These bachelors," murmured Hilda, turning to her mother with a wry little laugh. "Hark! isn't that Harold calling?"

"No, no, no, it's the pigeons," John laughed. "They're probably fretting for their feathers."

"It's to be hoped," said old Mrs. Touchwood, "that he's not fallen into the well by leaving off his spectacles like this. I never could abide wells. And I hate to think of people leaving things off suddenly. It's always a mistake. I remember little Hughie once left off his woollen vests in May and caught a most terrible cold that wouldn't go away--it simply wouldn't go."

"How is Hugh, by the way?" John asked.

"The same as ever," Hilda put in with cold disapproval. She was able to forget Harold's myopic wanderings in the pleasure of crabbing her youngest brother.

"Ah, you're all very hard on poor Hughie," sighed the old lady. "But he's always been very fond of his poor mother."

"He's very fond of what he can get out of you," Hilda sneered.

"And it's little enough he can, poor boy. Goodness knows I've little enough to spare for him. I wish you could have seen your way to do something for Hughie, Johnnie," the old lady went on.

"John has done quite enough for him," Hilda snapped, which was perfectly true.

"He's had to leave his rooms in Earl's Court," Mrs. Touchwood lamented.

"What for? Getting drunk, I suppose?" John inquired, sternly.

"No, it was the drains. He's staying with his friend, Aubrey Fenton, whom I cannot pretend to like. He seems to me a sad scapegrace. Poor little Hughie. I wish everything wasn't against him. It's to be hoped he won't go and get married, poor boy, for I'm sure his wife wouldn't understand him."

"Surely he's not thinking of getting married," exclaimed John in dismay.

"Why no, of course not," said the old lady. "How you do take anybody up, Johnnie. I said it's to be hoped he won't get married."

At this moment Emily came in to announce that Master Harold was up on the roof shouting for dear life. "Such a turn as it give Cook and I, mum," she said, "to hear that garshly voice coming down the chimney.

Cook was nearly took with the convolsions, and if it had of been after dark, mum, she says she's shaw she doesn't know what she wouldn't of done, she wouldn't, she's that frightened of howls. That's the one thing she can't ever be really comfortable for in the country, she says, the howls and the hearwigs."

"I'm under the impression," John declared, solemnly, "that I forbade Harold to go near the roof. If he has disobeyed my express commands he must suffer for it by the loss of his breakfast. He has chosen to go back on the roof: on the roof he shall stay."

"But his breakfast?" Hilda almost whispered. She was so much awed by her brother's unusually pompous phraseology that he began to be impressed by it himself and to feel the first faint intimations of the pleasures of tyranny: he began to visualize himself as the unbending ruler of all his relations.

"His breakfast can be sent up to him, and I hope it will attract every wasp in the neighborhood."

This to John seemed the most savage aspiration he could have uttered: autumnal wasps disturbed him as much as dragons used to disturb princesses.

"Harold likes wasps," said Hilda. "He observes their habits."

This revelation of his nephew's tastes took away John's last belief in his humanity, and the only retort he could think of was a suggestion that he should go at once to a boarding-school.

"Likes wasps?" he repeated. "The child must be mad. You'll tell me next that he likes black beetles."

"He trained a black beetle once to eat something. I forget what it was now. But the poor boy was so happy about his little triumph. You ought to remember, John, that he takes after his father."

John made up his mind at this moment that Daniel Curtis must have married Hilda in a spirit of the purest empirical science.

"Well, he's not to go training insects in my house," John said, firmly.

"And if I see any insects anywhere about Ambles that show the slightest sign of having been encouraged to suppose themselves on an equal with mankind I shall tread on them."

"I'm afraid the crossing must have upset you, Johnnie," said old Mrs.

Touchwood, sympathetically. "You seem quite out of sorts this morning.

And I don't like the idea of poor little Harold's balancing himself all alone on a chimney. It was never any pleasure to me to watch tight-rope dancers or acrobats. Indeed, except for the clowns, I never could abide circuses."

Hilda quickly took up the appeal and begged John to let the gardener rescue her son.

"Oh, very well," he a.s.sented. "But, once for all, it must be clearly understood that I've come down to Ambles to write a new play and that some arrangement must be concluded by which I have my mornings completely undisturbed."

"Of course," said Hilda, brightening at the prospect of Harold's release.

"Of course," John echoed, sardonically, within himself. He did not feel that the sight of Harold's ravening after his breakfast would induce in him the right mood for Joan of Arc. So he left the breakfast table and went upstairs to his library. Here he found that some "illiterate oaf,"

as he characterized the person responsible, had put in upside down upon the shelves the standard works he had hastily ama.s.sed. Instead of setting his ideas in order, he had to set his books in order: and after a hot and dusty morning with the rows of unreadable cla.s.sics he came downstairs to find that the vicarage party had arrived just in time for lunch, bringing with them as the advance guard of their occupation a large clothes basket filled with what Laurence described as "necessary odds and ends that might be overlooked later."

"It's my theory of moving," he added. "The small things first."

He enunciated this theory so reverently that his action acquired from his tone a momentous gravity like the captain of a s.h.i.+p's when he orders the women and children into the boats first.

The moving of the vicarage party lasted over a fortnight, during which John found it impossible to settle down to Joan of Arc. No sooner would he have worked himself up to a suitable frame of mind in which he might express dramatically and poetically the maid's reception of her heavenly visitants than a very hot man wearing a green baize ap.r.o.n would appear in the doorway of the library and announce that a chest of drawers had hopelessly involved some vital knot in the domestic communications. It was no good for John to ask Hilda to do anything: his sister had taken up the att.i.tude that it was all John's fault, that she had done her best to preserve his peace, that her advice had been ignored, and that for the rest of her life she intended to efface herself.

"I'm a mere cipher," she kept repeating.

On one occasion when a bureau of sham ebony that looked like a blind man's dream of Cologne Cathedral had managed to wedge all its pinnacles into the lintel of the front door, John observed to Laurence he had understood that only such furniture from the vicarage as was required to supplement the Ambles furniture would be brought there.

"I thought this bureau would appeal to you," Laurence replied. "It seemed to me in keeping with much of your work."

John looked up sharply to see if he was being chaffed; but his brother-in-law's expression was earnest, and the intended compliment struck more hardly at John's self-confidence than the most malicious review.

"Does my work really seem like gimcrack gothic?" he asked himself.

In a fit of exasperation he threw himself so vigorously into the business of forcing the bureau into the house that when it was inside it looked like a ruined abbey on the afternoon of a Bank Holiday.

"It had better be taken up into the garrets for the present," he said, grimly. "It can be mended later on."

The comparison of his work to that bureau haunted John at his own writing-table for the rest of the morning; thinking of the Bishop of Silchester's objection to Laurence, he found it hard to make the various bishops in his play as unsympathetic as they ought to be for dramatic contrast; then he remembered that after all it had been due to the Bishop of Silchester's strong action that Laurence had come to Ambles: the stream of insulting epithets for bishops flowed as strongly as ever, and he worked in a justifiable pun upon the name of Pierre Cauchon, his chief episcopal villain.