The Christmas Hirelings (Children's Book). Mary Elizabeth Braddon

I had long wished to write a story about children, which should be interesting to childish readers, and yet not without interest for grown-up people: but that desire might never have been realized without the unexpected impulse of a suggestion, dropped casually in the freedom of conversation at a table where the clever hostess is ever an incentive to bright thoughts. The talk was of Christmas; and almost everybody agreed that the season, considered from the old-fashioned festal standpoint, was pure irony. Was it not a time of extra burdens, of manifold claims upon everybody’s purse and care, of great expectations from all sorts of people, of worry and weariness? Except for the children! There we were unanimous.

Christmas was the children’s festival — for us a rush and a scramble, and a perpetual paying away of money; for them a glimpse of Fairyland.

“If we had no children of our own,” said my left-hand neighbor, “we ought to hire some for Christmas.”

I thought it was a pretty fancy; and on that foundation built the little story of the Christmas Hirelings, which is now reproduced in book form from last year’s Christmas Number of the Lady’s Pictorial, and which I hope even after that wide circulation all over the English-speaking world may find a new public at home — the public of mothers and aunts and kind uncles, in quest of stories that please children. This story was a labour of love, a holiday task, written beside the fire in the long autumn evenings when the south-west wind was howling in the Forest trees outside.

The living models for the three children were close at hand, dear and familiar to the writer; and Moppet’s long words and quaint little mannerisms are but the pale reproduction of words and looks and gestures in the tiny girl who was then my next-door neighbor, and who is now far away in the shadow of the Himalayas.

The character of Mr. Danby, whom some of my critics have been kind enough to praise, was suggested by the following passage in the first series of the “Greville Memoirs,” copied in my commonplace-book long ago, when everybody was reading those delightful reminiscences: —

“Old Creevy — an attorney or barrister — married a widow, who died a few years ago. She had something, he nothing. His wife died, upon which event he was thrown upon the world with about two hundred a year, or less, no home, few connections, a great many acquaintance, a good constitution, and extraordinary spirits. He possesses nothing but his clothes, no property of any sort; he leads a vagrant life, visiting a number of people who are delighted to have him, and sometimes roving about to various places as fancy happens to direct, and staying till he has spent what money he has in his pocket. He has no servant, no home, no creditors; he buys everything as he wants it at the place he is at; he has no ties upon him, and has his time entirely at his own disposal and that of his friends. He is certainly a living proof that a man may be perfectly happy and exceedingly poor, or rather without riches, for he suffers none of the privations of poverty, and enjoys many of the advantages of wealth. I think he is the only man I know in society who possesses nothing.”

M. E. B.

LYNDHURST,

November 1st, 1894.

Prologue

Table of Contents

The scene was the library at Penlyon Place, commonly called for shortness — Place. The personages were Sir John Penlyon, a great landed proprietor, and a line gentleman of the early Victorian school; his niece, Miss Adela Hawberk, a smart young lady, whose paternal home was in South Kensington: and Mr. Danby, the useful friend, whose home was everywhere. Home of his own Mr. Danby had none. He had drifted lightly on the stream of life for the last forty years, living in other people’s houses, and, more or less, at other people’s expense; yet there lived not the man or woman who would have dared to describe Mr. Danby as a sponge or a toady, as anybody’s hanger-on or parasite. Mr. Danby only went where he was wanted; and the graces of his manner and the qualities of his mind and heart were such that Mr. Danby was wanted everywhere. He had invitations three years deep. His engagements were as far in the future as the calculations in the nautical almanac. Some people, who had been trying for years to get Mr. Danby to their houses, compared him to that star whose inhabitants may now be contemplating the Crimean War of 1854.

Sir John Penlyon and Mr. Danby had been schoolfellows at Eton, and chums at Christchurch; and, whomsoever else he disappointed, Mr. Danby never omitted his annual visits to Penlyon Place. He Christmassed there, and he Eastered there, and he knew the owner of the fine old Tudor house inside and out, his vices and his virtues, his weaknesses, and his prejudices.

“That there Danby,” said Sir John’s valet, “can turn the old chap round his finger; hut he’s a good feller, is Danby, a gentleman to the marrer, and nobody’s any the worse for ‘is hinfluence.”

The library at Penlyon was one of those rooms in which to live seems enough for bliss. A lovely old room, full of fantastic lights and shadows in the December gloaming; a spacious room, lined with books in the most exquisite bindings, for the binding of his books was more to Sir John than the letterpress inside. He was very fond of his library; he was very fond of his books. He looked at the bindings; and he read the newspapers and magazines which were heaped on a carved oak table at one end of the room.

Miss Hawberk sat in a low chair, with her feet on the fender, apparently lost in admiration of her Queen Anne shoes. She had lately come in from a long walk on the moor with the useful friend, and had changed her clump-soled boots for these pointed toes, which set off the high instep that was considered a family mark of the Penlyons. A flat-footed Penlyon would have been thrust out and repudiated by the rest of the clan, perhaps, like a sick cow to which the herd gives the coup de grâce.

Sir John was standing on the hearth-rug with his back to the crackling

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