Magnum Bonum; Or, Mother Carey's Brood

Certainly, when the pair met again on the eve of the wedding, there never was a more willing bride.

She said she had been very happy. The Colonel and Ellen, as she had been told to call her future sister, had been very kind indeed; they had taken her for long drives, shown her everything, introduced her to quantities of people; but, oh dear! was it absolutely only three weeks since she had been away? It seemed just like three years, and she understood now why the girls who had homes made calendars, and checked off the days. No school term had ever seemed so long; but at Kenminster she had had nothing to do, and besides, now she knew what home was!

So it was the most cheerful and joyous of weddings, though the bride was a far less brilliant spectacle than the bride of last year, Mrs. Robert Brownlow, who with her handsome oval face, fine figure, and her tasteful dress, perfectly befitting a young matron, could not help infinitely outshining the little girlish angular creature, looking the browner for her bridal white, so that even a deep glow, and a strange misty beaminess of expression could not make her passable in Kenminster eyes.

How would Joe Brownlow’s fancy turn out?

CHAPTER II. – THE CHICKENS

     John Gilpin’s spouse said to her dear,       “Though wedded we have been     These twice ten tedious years, yet we       No holiday have seen.”—Cowper.

No one could have much doubt how it had turned out, who looked, after fifteen years, into that room where Joe Brownlow and his mother had once sat tete-a-tete.

They occupied the two ends of the table still, neither looking much older, in expression at least, for the fifteen years that had passed over their heads, though the mother had—after the wont of active old ladies—grown smaller and lighter, and the son somewhat more bald and grey, but not a whit more careworn, and, if possible, even brighter.

On one side of him sat a little figure, not quite so thin, some angles smoothed away, the black hair coiled, but still in resolute little mutinous tendrils on the brow, not ill set off by a tuft of carnation ribbon on one side, agreeing with the colour that touched up her gauzy black dress; the face, not beautiful indeed—but developed, softened, brightened with more of sweetness and tenderness—as well as more of thought—added to the fresh responsive intelligence it had always possessed.

On the opposite side of the dinner-table were a girl of fourteen and a boy of twelve; the former, of a much larger frame than her mother, and in its most awkward and uncouth stage, hardly redeemed by the keen ardour and inquiry that glowed in the dark eyes, set like two hot coals beneath the black overhanging brows of the massive forehead, on which the dark smooth hair was parted. The features were large, the complexion dark but not clear, and the look of resolution in the square-cut chin and closely shutting mouth was more boy-like than girl-like. Janet Brownlow was assuredly a very plain girl, but the family habit was to regard their want of beauty as rather a mark of distinction, capable of being joked about, if not triumphed in.

Nor was Allen, the boy, wanting in good looks. He was fairer, clearer, better framed in every way than his sister, and had a pleasant, lively countenance, prepossessing to all. He had a well-grown, upright figure, his father’s ready suppleness of movement, and his mother’s hazel eyes and flashing smile, and there was a look of success about him, as well there might be, since he had come out triumphantly from the examination for Eton College, and had been informed that morning that there were vacancies enough for his immediate admission.

There was a pensiveness mixed with the satisfaction in his mother’s eyes as she looked at him, for it was the first break into the home. She had been the only teacher of her children till two years ago, when Allen had begun to attend a day school a few streets off, and the first boy’s first flight from under her wing, for ever so short a space, is generally a sharp wound to the mother’s heart.

Not that Allen would leave an empty house behind him. Lying at full length on the carpet, absorbed in a book, was Robert, a boy on whom the same capacious brow as Janet’s sat better than on the feminine creature. He was reading on, undisturbed by the pranks of three younger children, John Lucas, a lithe, wiry, restless elf of nine, with a brown face and black curly head, and Armine and Barbara, young persons of seven and six, on whom nature had been more beneficent in the matter of looks, for though brown was their prevailing complexion, both had well-moulded, childish features, and really fine eyes. The hubbub of voices, as they tumbled and rushed about the window and balcony, was the regular accompaniment of dinner, though on the first plaintive tone from the little girl, the mother interrupted a “Well, but papa,” from Janet, with “Babie, Babie.”

“It’s Jock, Mother Carey! He will come into Fairyland too soon.”

“What’s the last news from Fairyland, Babie?” asked the father as the little one ran up to him.

“I want to be Queen Mab, papa, but Armine wants to be Perseus with the Gorgon’s head, and Jock is the dragon; but the dragon will come before we’ve put Polly upon the rock.”

“What! is Polly Andromeda—?” as a grey parrot’s stand was being transferred from the balcony.

“Yes, papa,” called out Armine. “You see she’s chained, and Bobus won’t play, and Babie will be Queen Mab—”

“I suppose,” said the mother, “that it is not harder to bring Queen Mab in with Perseus than Oberon with Theseus and Hippolyta—”

“You would have us infer,” said the Doctor with grave humour, “that your children are at their present growth in the Elizabethan age of culture—”

But again began a “Well, but papa!” but, he exclaimed, “Do look at that boy—Well walloped, dragon!” as Jock with preternatural contortions, rolled, kicked and tumbled himself with extended jaws to the rock, alias stand, to which Polly was chained, she remarking in a hoarse, low whisper, “Naughty boy—”

“Well moaned, Andromeda!”

“But papa,” persisted Janet, “when Oliver Cromwell—”

“Oh! look at the Gorgon!” cried the mother, as the battered head of an ancient doll was displayed over his shoulder by Perseus, decorated with two enormous snakes, one made of stamps, and the other a spiral of whalebone shavings out of a box.

The monster immediately tumbled over, twisted, kicked, and wriggled so that the scandalised Perseus exclaimed: “But Jock—monster, I mean—you’re turned into stone—”

“It’s convulsions,” replied the monster, gasping frightfully, while redoubling his contortions, though Queen Mab observed in the most admonitory tone, touching him at the same time with her wand, “Don’t you know, Skipjack, that’s the reason you don’t grow—”

“Eh! What’s the new theory! Who says so, Babie?” came from the bottom of the table.

“Nurse says so, papa,” answered Allen; “I heard her telling Jock yesterday that he would never be any taller till he stood still and gave himself time.”

“Get out, will you!” was then heard from the prostrate Robert, the monster having taken care to become petrified right across his legs.

“But papa,” Janet’s voice was heard, “if Oliver Cromwell had not helped the Waldenses—”

It was lost, for Bobus and Jock were rolling over together with too much noise to be bearable; Grandmamma turned round with an expostulatory “My dears,” Mamma with “Boys, please don’t when papa is tired—”

“Jock is such a little ape,” said Bobus, picking himself up. “Father, can you tell me why the moon draws up the tides on the wrong side?”

“You may study the subject,” said the Doctor; “I shall pack you all off to the seaside in a day or two.”

There was one outcry from mother, wife, and boys, “Not without you?”

“I can’t go till Drew comes back from his outing—”

“But why should we? It would be so much nicer all together.”

“It will be horribly dull without; indeed I never can see the sense of going at all,” said Janet.

There was a confused outcry of indignation, in which waves—crabs—boats and shrimps, were all mingled together.

“I’m sure that’s not half so entertaining as hearing people talk in the evening,” said Janet.

“You precocious little piece of dissipation,” said her mother, laughing.

“I didn’t mean fine lady nonsense,” said Janet, rather hotly; “I meant talk like—”

“Like big guns. Oh, yes, we know,” interrupted Allen; “Janet does not think anyone worth listening to that hasn’t got a whole alphabet tacked behind his name.”

“Janet had better take care, and Bobus too,” said the Doctor, “or we shall have to send them to vegetate on some farm, and see the cows milked and the pigs fed.”

“I’m afraid Bobus would apply himself to finding how much caseine matter was in the cow’s milk,” said Janet in her womanly tone.

“Or by what rule the pigs curled their tails,” said her father, with a mischievous pull at the black plaited tail that hung down behind her.

And then they all rose from the table, little Barbara starting up as soon as grace was said. “Father, please, you are the Giant Queen Mab always rides!”

“Queen Mab, or Queen Bab, always rides me, which comes to the same thing. Though as to the size of the Giant—”

There was a pause to let grandmamma go up in peace, upon Mother Carey’s arm, and then a general romp and scurry all the way up the stairs, ending by Jock’s standing on one leg on the top post of the baluster, like an acrobat, an achievement which made even his father so giddy that he peremptorily desired it never to be attempted again, to the great relief of both the ladies. Then, coming into the drawing-room, Babie perched herself on his knee, and began, without the slightest preparation, the recitation of Cowper’s “Colubriad”:—

          “Fast by the threshold of a door nailed fast           Three kittens sat, each kitten looked aghast.”

And just as she had with great excitement—

          “Taught him never to come there no more,”

Armine broke in with “Nine times one are nine.”

It was an institution dating from the days when Janet made her first acquaintance with the “Little Busy Bee,” that there should be something, of some sort, said or shown to papa, whenever he was at home or free between dinner and bed-time, and it was considered something between a disgrace and a misfortune to produce nothing.

So when the two little ones had been kissed and sent off to bed, with mamma going with them to hear their prayers, Jock, on being called for, repeated a Greek declension with two mistakes in it, Bobus showed a long sum in decimals, Janet, brought a neat parallelism of the present tense of the verb “to be” in five languages—Greek, Latin, French, German, and English.

“And Allen—reposing on your honours? Eh, my boy?”

Allen looked rather foolish, and said, “I spoilt it, papa, and hadn’t time to begin another.”

“It—I suppose I am not to hear what till it has come to perfection. Is it the same that was in hand last time?”

“No, papa, much better,” said Janet, emphatically.

“What I want to see,” said Dr. Brownlow, “is something finished. I’d rather have that than ever so many magnificent beginnings.”

Here he was seized upon by Robert, with his knitted brow and a book in his hands, demanding aid in making out why, as he said, the tide swelled out on the wrong side of the earth.

His father did his best to disentangle the question, but Bobus was not satisfied till the clock chimed his doom, when he went off with Jock, who was walking on his hands.

“That’s too tough a subject for such a little fellow,” said the grandmother; “so late in the day too!”

“He would have worried his brain with it all night if he had not worked it out,” said his father.

“I’m afraid he will, any way,” said the mother. “Fancy being troubled with dreams of surging oceans rising up the wrong way!”

“Yes, he ought to be running after the tides instead of theorising about them. Carry him off, Mother Carey, and the whole brood, without loss of time.”

“But Joe, why should we not wait for you? You never did send us away all forlorn before!” she said, pleadingly. “We are all quite well, and I can’t bear going without you.”

“I had much rather all the chickens were safe away, Carey,” he said, sitting down by her. “There’s a tendency to epidemic fever in two or three streets, which I don’t like in this hot weather, and I had rather have my mind easy about the young ones.”

“And what do you think of my mind, leaving you in the midst of it?”

“Your mind, being that of a mother bird and a doctor’s wife, ought to have no objection.”

“How soon does Dr. Drew come home?”

“In a fortnight, I believe. He wanted rest terribly, poor old fellow. Don’t grudge him every day.”

“A fortnight!” (as if it was a century). “You can’t come for a fortnight. Well, perhaps it will take a week to fix on a place.”

“Hardly, for see here, I found a letter from Acton when I came in. They have found an unsophisticated elysium at Kyve Clements, and are in raptures which they want us to share—rocks and waves and all.”

“And rooms?”

“Yes, very good rooms, enough for us all,” was the answer, flinging into her lap a letter from his friend, a somewhat noted artist in water-colours, whom, after long patience, Carey’s school friend, Miss Cartwright, had married two years ago.

There was nothing to say against it, only grandmamma observed, “I am too old to catch things; Joe will let me stay and keep house for him.”

“Please, please let me stay with granny,” insisted Janet; “then I shall finish my German classes.”

Janet was granny’s child. She had slept in her room ever since Allen was born, and trotted after her in her “housewifeskep,” and the sense of being protected was passing into the sense of protection. Before she could be answered, however, there was an announcement. Friends were apt to drop in to coffee and talk in the evening, on the understanding that certain days alone were free—people chiefly belonging to a literary, scientific, and artist set, not Bohemian, but with a good deal of quiet ease and absence of formality.

This friend had just returned from Asia Minor, and had brought an exquisite bit of a Greek frieze, of which he had become the happy possessor, knowing that Mrs. Joseph Brownlow would delight to see it, and mayhap to copy it.

For Carey’s powers had been allowed to develop themselves; Mrs. Brownlow having been always housekeeper, she had been fain to go on with the studies that even her preparation for governess-ship had not rendered wearisome, and thus had become a very graceful modeller in clay—her favourite pursuit—when her children’s lessons and other occupations left her free to indulge in it. The history of the travels, and the account of the discovery, were given and heard with all zest, and in the midst others came in—a barrister and his wife to say good-bye before the circuit, a professor with a ticket for the gallery at a scientific dinner, two medical students, who had been made free of the house because they were nice lads with no available friends in town.

It was all over by half-past ten, and the trio were alone together. “How amusing Mr. Leslie is!” said the young Mrs. Brownlow. “He knows how describe as few people do.”

“Did you see Janet listening to him,” said her grandmother, “with her brows pulled down and her eyes sparkling out under them, wanting to devour every word?”

“Yes,” returned the Doctor, “I saw it, and I longed to souse that black head of hers with salt water. I don’t like brains to grow to the contempt of healthful play.”

“People never know when they are well off! I wonder what you would have said if you had had a lot of stupid dolts, boys always being plucked, &c.”

“Don’t plume yourself too soon, Mother Carey; only one chick has gone through the first ordeal.”

“And if Allen did, Bobus will.”

“Allen is quite as clever as Bobus, granny, if—” eagerly said the mother.

“If—” said the father; “there’s the point. If Allen has the stimulus, he will do well. I own I am particularly pleased with his success, because perseverance is his weak point.”

“Carey kept him up to it,” said granny. “I believe his success is quite as much her work as his own.”

“And the question is, how will he get on without his mother to coach him?”

“Now you know you are not one bit uneasy, papa!” cried his wife, indignantly. “But don’t you think we might let Janet have her will for just these ten days? There can’t be any real danger for her with grandmamma, and I should be happier about granny.”

“You don’t trust Joe to take care of me?”

“Not if Joe is to be out all day. There will be nobody to trot up and down stairs for you. Come, it is only what she begs for herself, and she really is perfectly well.”

“As if I could have a child victimised to me,” said granny.

“The little Cockney thinks the victimising would be in going to the deserts with only the boys and me,” laughed Carey; “But I think a week later will be quite time enough to sweep the cobwebs out of her brain.”

“And you can do without her?” inquired Mrs. Brownlow. “You don’t want her to help to keep the boys in order?”

“Thank you, I can do that better without her,” said Carey. “She exasperates them sometimes.”

“I believe granny is thinking whether she is not wanted to keep Mother Carey in order as well as her chickens. Hasn’t mother been taken for your governess, Carey?”

“No, no, Joe, that’s too bad. They asked Janet at the dancing-school whether her sister was not going to join.”

“Her younger sister?”

“No, I tell you, her half-sister. But Clara Acton will do discretion for us, granny; and I promise you we won’t do anything her husband says is very desperate! Don’t be afraid.”

“No,” said grandmamma, smiling as she kissed her daughter-in-law, and rose to take her candle; “I am never afraid of anything a mother can share with her boys.”

“Even if she is nearly a tomboy herself,” laughed the husband, with rather a teasing air, towards his little wife. “Good night, mother. Shall not we be snug with nobody left but Janet, who might be great-grandmother to us both?”

“I really am glad that Janet should stay with granny,” said Carey, when he had shut the door behind the old lady; “she would be left alone so many hours while you are out, and she does need more waiting on than she used to do.”

“You think so? I never see her grow older.”

“Not in the least older in mind or spirits; but she is not so strong, nor so willing to exert herself, and she falls asleep more in the afternoon. One reason for which I am less sorry to go on before, is that I shall be able to judge whether the rooms are comfortable enough for her, and I suppose we may change if they are not.”

“To another place, if you think best.”

“Only you will not let her stay at home altogether. That’s what I’m afraid of.”

“She will only do so on the penalty of keeping me, and you may trust her not to do that,” said Joe, laughing with the confidence of an only son.

“I shall come back and fetch you if you don’t appear under a fortnight. Did you do any more this morning to the great experiment, Magnum Bonum?”

She spoke the words in a proud, shy, exulting semi-whisper, somewhat as Gutenberg’s wife might have asked after his printing-press.

“No. I haven’t had half an hour to myself to-day; at least when I could have attended to it. Don’t be afraid, Carey, I’m not daunted by the doubts of our good friends. I see your eyes reproaching me with that.”

“Oh no, as you said, Sir Matthew Fleet mistrusts anything entirely new, and the professor is never sanguine. I am almost glad they are so stupid, it will make our pleasure all the sweeter.”

“You silly little bird, if you sit on that egg it will be sure to be addled. If it should come to any good, probably it will take longer than our life-time to work into people’s brains.”

“No,” said Carey, “I know the real object is the relieving pain and saving life, and that is what you care for more than the honour and glory. But do you remember the fly on the coach wheel?”

“Well, the coach wheel means to stand still for a little while. I don’t mean to try another experiment till my brains have been turned out to grass, and I can come to it fresh.”

“Ah! ‘tis you that really need the holiday,” said Carey, wistfully; “much more than any of us. Look at this great crow’s foot,” tracing it with her finger.

“Laughing, my dear. That’s the outline of the risible muscle. A Mother Carey and her six ridiculous chickens can’t but wear out furrows with laughing at them.”

“I only know I wish it were you that were going, and I that were staying at home.”

          “‘You shall do my work to-day,            And I’ll go follow the plough,’”

said her husband, laughing. “There are the notes of my lecture, if you’ll go and give it.”

“Ah! we should not be like that celebrated couple. You would manage the boys much better than I could doctor your patients.”

“I don’t know that. The boys are never so comfortable, when I’ve got them alone. But, considering the hour, I should think the best preliminary would be to put out the lamp and go to bed.”

“I suppose it is time; but I always think this last talk before going upstairs, the best thing in the whole day!” said the happy wife as she took the candle.

CHAPTER III. – THE WHITE SLATE

     Dark house, by which once more I stand     Here in the long unlovely street.     Doors, where my heart was wont to beat     So quickly, waiting for a hand—     A hand that can be clasped no more.     Behold me, for I cannot sleep.—Tennyson.

“Mother Carey,” to call her by the family name that her husband had given the first day she held a baby in her arms, had a capacity of enjoyment that what she called her exile could not destroy. Even Bobus left theory behind him and became a holiday boy, and the whole six climbed rocks, paddled, boated, hunted sea weeds and sea animals, lived on the beach from morning to night; and were exceedingly amused by the people, who insisted on addressing the senior of the party as “Miss,” and thought them a young girl and her brothers under the charge of Mrs. Acton. She, though really not a year older than her friend, looked like a worn and staid matron by her side, and was by no means disposed to scramble barefoot over slippery seaweed, or to take impromptu a part in the grand defence of the sand and shingle edition of Raglan Castle.

Even to Mrs. Acton it was a continual wonder to see how entirely under control of that little merry mother were those great, lively, spirited boys, who never seemed to think of disobeying her first word, and, while all made fun together, and she was hardly less active and enterprising than they, always considered her comfort and likings.

So went things for a fortnight, during which the coming of the others had been put off by Dr. Drew’s absence. One morning Mr. Acton sought Mrs. Brownlow on the beach, where she was sitting with her brood round her, partly reading from a translation, partly telling them the story of Ulysses.

He called her aside, and told her that her husband had telegraphed to him to bid him to carry her the tidings that good old Mrs. Brownlow had been taken from them suddenly in the night, evidently in her sleep.

Carey turned very white, but said only “Oh! why did I go without them?”

It was such an overwhelming shock as left no room for tears. Her first thought, the only one she seemed to have room for, was to get back to her husband by the next train. She would have taken all the children, but that Mrs. Acton insisted, almost commanded, that they should be left under her charge, and reminded her that their father wished them to be out of London; nor did Allen and Robert show any wish to return to a house of mourning, being just of the age to be so much scared at sorrow as to ignore it. And indeed their mother was equally new to any real grief; her parents had been little more than a name to her, and the only loss she had actually felt was that of a favourite schoolfellow.

She had no time to think or feel till she had reached the train and taken her seat, and even then the first thing she was conscious of was a sense of numbness within, and frivolous observation without, as she found herself trying to read upside down the direction of her opposite neighbour’s parcels, counting the flounces on her dress, and speculating on the meetings and partings at the stations; yet with a terrible weight and soreness on her all the time, though she could not think of the dear grannie, of whom it was no figure of speech to say that she had been indeed a mother. The idea of her absence from home for ever was too strange, too heartrending to be at once embraced, and as she neared the end of her journey on that long day, Carey’s mind was chiefly fixed on the yearning to be with her husband and Janet, who had suffered such a shock without her. She seemed more able to feel through her husband—who was so devoted to his mother, than for herself, and she was every moment more uneasy about her little daughter, who must have been in the room with her grandmother. Comfort them? How, she did not know! The others had always petted and comforted her, and now—No one to go to when the children were ailing or naughty—no one to share little anxieties when Joe was out late—no one to be the backbone she leant on—no dear welcome from the easy chair. That thought nearly set her crying; the tears burnt in her strained eyes, but the sight of the people opposite braced her, and she tried to fix her thoughts on the unseen world, but they only wandered wide as if beyond her own control, and her head was aching enough to confuse her.