The Cuckoo in the Nest. Volume 1/2. Oliphant Margaret
Does gardener go to the market to buy the new ones like mamma goes to buy clothes for me? How do the snowdrops know when it’s time to come up out of the told, told ground?” Fortunately, he had so many things to ask that he seldom paused for an answer. Sir Giles laid up these questions in his heart, and reported them to my lady. “He asked me to-day if it hurt the field when the farmers ploughed it up? I declare I never thought how strange things were before, and the posers that little ’un asks me!” cried the old man. Lady Piercey smiled with a superior certainty, based upon Mangnall’s Questions and other instructive works, that she was not so easily posed by Osy. She had instructed him as to where tea and coffee came from, and taught him to say, “Thank you, pretty cow,” thus accounting for his breakfast to the inquisitive intelligence. But there was one thing that brought a spasm to Lady Piercey’s face, especially when, as now and then happened, she hid the little truant from his mother, and saved Osy from a scolding, as he nestled down amid her voluminous skirts and lifted up a smiling, rosy little face, in great enjoyment of the joke and the hiding place. Sometimes as she laid her hand upon his curly head with that sensation of half-malicious delight in coming between the little sinner and his natural governor, which is common to the grand-parent, there would come a sudden contraction to her face, and a bitter salt tear would spring to her eye. If Gervase had a child like that to be his father’s heir! Why was not that delightful child the child of Gervase, instead of being born to those who had nothing to give him? It was upon Margaret, who had not a penny, that this immeasurable gift was bestowed. And no woman that could be the mother of such a boy would ever marry Gervase! Oh! no, no – a barmaid, to give him a vulgar brat, who, perhaps – . But the thoughts of angry love and longing are not to be put into words.
Margaret went to the end of the gallery to her own room, where her child’s soft breath was just audible as he slept. She went and looked at him in his little crib, a little head like an angel’s, upon the little white pillow. But it was not only in a mother’s tender adoration that she stood and looked at her child. To hurt any one was not in Margaret Osborne’s heart, but there had come into it for some time back a dart of ambition, a gleam of hope: little Osy, too, was of the Piercey blood. She herself was a Piercey, much more a Piercey than Gervase, poor fellow. If an heir was wanted, who so fit as her boy? Far more fit than old General Piercey, whom nobody knew. Oh! not for worlds, not for anything that life could give, would she harm poor Gervase, or any man. But the barmaid and her possible progeny were as odious to Margaret as to Lady Piercey: and where, where could any one find an heir like Osy, the little prince, who had conquered and taken possession of the great house?
CHAPTER V
It has been stated by various persons afflicted with that kind of trouble, that to be enlightened above one’s fellows is a great trial and misery. I don’t know how that may be, but it is certainly a great trouble to be a Softy, to have a fluid brain in which everything gets disintegrated, and floats about in confusion, and never to be able to lay hold upon a subject distinctly either by head or tail, however much it may concern you. This was the case of poor Gervase the morning after he had received that evening address from his mother in her nightcap, which was so well adapted to confuse any little wits the poor fellow had. That his marriage might be forbidden, and his very name taken from him, and himself reduced to draw beer at the Seven Thorns for his living, instead of making a lady of Patty, and lifting her out of all such necessities, overwhelmed his mind altogether. If it was true, he had better, in fact, have nothing more to say to Patty at all. A forlorn sense that it might be well for her in such a case to turn to Roger, who at least would deliver her from drawing beer, lurked in the poor fellow’s breast. Nothing would humiliate Gervase so much as the triumph of Roger, who had always been the one person in the world who pointed the moral of his own deficiencies to the unfortunate young squire; and there swelled in his breast a sort of dull anguish and sense of contrast, in which Roger’s triumphant swing of the bat and kick of the football mingled with his carrying off of the woman whom poor Gervase admired and adored, adding a double piquancy to the act of renunciation which he was slowly spelling out in his own dumb soul. Nobody would try to take away that fellow’s name. He had a cottage of his own that he could take her to, dang him! Gervase was beguiled for a moment into his old indignant thought that such a man playing cricket all over the county would probably come to the workhouse in the end, and that this was where Patty might find herself, if she preferred the athlete to himself; but he threw off the idea in his new evanescent impulse. She was too clever for that! She’d find a way to keep a man straight, whether it was a poor fellow who was not clever, or one that was too good at every kind of diversion. I am no great believer in heredity, and the house of Piercey was by no means distinguished for its chivalrous instincts or tendencies; yet I am glad to think that some vague influence from his ancient race had put this idea of giving up Patty, if he could bring only trouble and no bettering to her, into his dull and aching head. If he had been wiser, he would probably have kept away from her in this new impulse of generosity, but he was not wise at all, his first idea was to go to Patty, and tell her, and receive her orders – which no doubt she would give peremptorily – to go away from her. He never expected anything else. He was capable of giving her up, for her good, if he found himself unable to make a lady of her, in a dull sort of way, as a necessity; but he was not capable of the thought that she might stand by him to her own hurt. It seemed quite natural to him – not a thing to be either blamed or doubted – that as soon as it was proved that he could not make a lady of her, she would send him away.
It was a dull morning, warm but grey, the sky, or rather the clouds hanging low, and the great stretch of the moorland country lying flat underneath, its breadth of turf and thickets of gorse, and breaks of sandy road and broken ground all running into one sombre, greyish, greenish, yellowish colour in the flat tones of the sunless daylight. Such a day in weariness embodied, taking the spring out of everything. The very birds in the big trees behind the Seven Thorns were affected by it and chirruped dejectedly, fathers and mothers swiftly snubbing any young thing that attempted a bit of song. The seven thorns themselves, which were old trees and knocked about by time and weather and the passing of straw-laden carts, and other drawbacks, looked shabbier and older than ever: no place for any lovers’ meeting. Gervase had not the heart to go into the house. He sat down on the bench outside, like any tramp, and neither called to Patty, nor attempted any way of attracting her attention. She had seen him, I need not say, coming over the downs. She had eyes everywhere – not only in the back of her head, as the ostler and the maid at the Seven Thorns said, but at the tips of her fingers, and in the handle of the broom with which she was as usual sweeping briskly out the dust and sand of yesterday, and striking into every corner. The weather did not affect Patty. It needed something more than a grey day to discourage her active spirits. But when she found that her suitor did not come in, did not call her, did not even beat with his knuckles on the rough wooden table outside, to let it be known that he was there, surprise entered her breast; surprise and a little alarm. She had never let it be known by any one that she was moved by Gervase’s suit. In her heart she had always been convinced that the Softy would not be allowed to marry, and her pride would not allow her to run the risk of such a defeat. At the same time there was always the chance that her own spirit might carry him through, and the prospect was too glorious to be altogether thrown away; so that when Patty became aware that he was sitting there outside, with not heart enough to say Boh! to a goose – alarm stole over her, and to contemplate the possible failure of all these hopes, was more than she could calmly bear. She stood still for a minute or two listening, with her head a little on one side, and all her faculties concentrated upon the sounds from the door: but heard nothing except the aimless scrape of his foot against the sandy pebbles outside. Finally she went out, and stood on the threshold, her broom still in her hand.
“Oh! so it is you, Mr. Gervase! I couldn’t think who it could be that stuck there without a word to nobody. You’ve got a headache, as I said you would.”
“No – I’ve got no headache. If I’ve anything, it’s here,” said poor Gervase, laying his hand on what he believed to be his heart.
“Lord, your stomach, then!” said Patty with a laugh – “but folks don’t say that to a lady; though I dare to say it’s very true, for beer is a real heavy thing, whatever you men may say.”
“I am not thinking of beer,” said Gervase. “I wish there was nothing more than that, Patty, between