In the Roar of the Sea. Baring-Gould Sabine
that when overcome the boy would be as other boys are.
Now these children – they were aged eighteen, but Jamie looked four years younger – sat in their father’s chair, clinging to each other, all in all to one another, for they had no one else to love and who loved them.
“Listen to me, Jamie.”
“Yes, Ju, I be – ”
“Don’t say ‘I be’ – say ‘I am.’”
“Yes, Ju.”
“Jamie, dear!” she drew her arm tighter about him; her heart was bounding, and every beat caused her pain. “Jamie, dear, you know that, now dear papa is gone, and you will never see him in this world again, that – ”
“Yes, Ju.”
“That I have to look to you, my brother, to stand up for me like a man, to think and do for me as well as for yourself – a brave, stout, industrious fellow.”
“Yes, Ju.”
“I am a girl, and you will soon be a man, and must work for both of us. You must earn the money, and I will spend it frugally as we both require it. Then we shall be happy again, and dear papa in Paradise will be glad and smile on us. You will make an effort, will you not, Jamie? Hitherto you have been able to run about and play and squander your time, but now serious days have come upon us, and you must fix your mind on work and determine – Jamie – mind, screw your heart to a strong determination to put away childish things and be a man, and a strength and a comfort to me.”
He put up his lips to kiss her cheek, but could not reach it, as her head was leaning on her hand away from him.
“What are you fidgeting at, my dear?” she asked, without stirring, feeling his body restless under her arm.
“A nail is coming out,” he answered.
It was so; whilst she had been speaking to him he was working at one of the brass studs, and had loosened its bite in the chair.
“Oh, Jamie! you are making work by thus drawing out a nail. Can you not help me a little, and reduce the amount one has to think of and do? You have not been attending to what I said, and I was so much in earnest.” She spoke in a tone of discouragement, and the tone, more than the words, impressed the susceptible heart of the boy. He began to cry.
“You are cross.”
“I am not cross, my pet; I am never cross with you, I love you too dearly; but you try my patience sometimes, and just now I am overstrained – and then I did want to make you understand.”
“Now papa’s dead I’ll do no more lessons, shall I?” asked Jamie, coaxingly.
“You must, indeed, and with me instead of papa.”
“Not rosa, rosæ?”
“Yes, rosa, rosæ.”
Then he sulked.
“I don’t love you a bit. It is not fair. Papa is dead, so I ought not to have any more lessons. I hate rosa, rosæ!” He kicked the legs of the chair peevishly with his heels. As his sister said nothing, seemed to be inattentive – for she was weary and dispirited – he slapped her cheek by raising his hand over his head.
“What, Jamie, strike me, your only friend?”
Then he threw his arms round her again, and kissed her. “I’ll love you; only, Ju, say I am not to do rosa, rosæ!”
“How long have you been working at the first declension in the Latin grammar, Jamie?”
He tried for an instant to think, gave up the effort, laid his head on her shoulder, and said:
“I don’t know and don’t care. Say I am not to do rosa, rosæ!”
“What! not if papa wished it?”
“I hate the Latin grammar!”
For a while both remained silent. Judith felt the tension to which her mind and nerves had been subjected, and lapsed momentarily into a condition of something like unconsciousness, in which she was dimly sensible of a certain satisfaction rising out of the pause in thought and effort. The boy lay quiet, with his head on her shoulder, for a while, then withdrew his arms, folded his hands on his lap, and began to make a noise by compressing the air between the palms.
“There’s a finch out there going ‘chink! chink!’ and listen, Ju, I can make ‘chink! chink!’ too.”
Judith recovered herself from her distraction, and said:
“Never mind the finch now. Think of what I say. We shall have to leave this house.”
“Why?”
“Of course we must, sooner or later, and the sooner the better. It is no more ours.”
“Yes, it is ours. I have my rabbits here.”
“Now that papa is dead it is no longer ours.”
“It’s a wicked shame.”
“Not at all, Jamie. This house was given to papa for his life only; now it will go to a new rector, and Aunt Dunes2 is going to fetch us away to another house.”
“When?”
“To-day.”
“I won’t go,” said the boy. “I swear I won’t.”
“Hush, hush, Jamie! Don’t use such expressions. I do not know where you have picked them up. We must go.”
“And my rabbits, are they to go too?”
“The rabbits? We’ll see about them. Aunt – ”
“I hate Aunt Dunes!”
“You really must not call her that; if she hears you she will be very angry. And consider, she has been taking a great deal of trouble about us.”
“I don’t care.”
“My dear, she is dear papa’s sister.”
“Why didn’t papa get a nicer sister – like you?”
“Because he had to take what God gave him.”
The boy pouted, and began to kick his heels against the chair-legs once more.
“Jamie, we must leave this house to-day. Aunt is coming to take us both away.”
“I won’t go.”
“But, Jamie, I am going, and the cook is going, and so is Jane.”
“Are cook and Jane coming with us?”
“No, dear.”
“Why not?”
“We shall not want them. We cannot afford to keep them any more, to pay their wages; and then we shall not go into a house of our own. You must come with me, and be a joy and rest to me, dear Jamie.”
She turned her head over, and leaned it on his head. The sun glowed in their mingled hair – all of one tinge and lustre. It sparkled in the tears on her cheek.
“Ju, may I have these buttons?”
“What buttons?”
“Look!”
He shook himself free from his sister, slid his feet to the ground, went to a bureau, and brought to his sister a large open basket that had been standing on the top of the bureau. It had been turned out of a closet by Aunt Dionysia, and contained an accumulation of those most profitless of collected remnants – odd buttons, coat buttons, brass, smoked mother-of-pearl, shirt buttons, steel clasps – buttons of all kinds, the gathering together made during twenty-five years. Why the basket, after having been turned out of a lumber closet, had been left in the room of death, or why, if turned out elsewhere, it had been brought there, is more than even the novelist can tell. Suffice it that there it was, and by whom put there could not be said.
“Oh! what a store of pretty buttons!” exclaimed
Dunes is the short for Dionysia.