The Christmas Hirelings (Children's Book). Mary Elizabeth Braddon
home. And yet I feel sometimes as if my heart were slowly turning to ice.
“Break, thou deep vase of chilling tears,
That time has shaken into frost.”
Sir John Penlyon never forgot the reading of that diary. He remembered the very day and hour when looking for a missing list of family jewels — jewels which his dead wife had worn on state occasions, and which were to go back to the bank, and to lie in darkness, like her who had worn them — he had come upon that old German copy-book, rolled up and thrust far back in the secret drawer, tied with a shabby old ribbon. He remembered sitting by the tireless hearth, in the prettily furnished dressing-room, disused since his wife’s death. He remembered the dull grey autumn sky, and the rain drifting across the leaden sea, and the shags standing on the rocks, drenched and drooping, all nature in low spirits.
The reading of that record of unhappiness, so meekly borne, was not without one good result. Sir John took more notice of his two girls than he had ever done in their mother’s lifetime. Sibyl, the younger, contrived more particularly to find her way into his heart, She was stronger and more vivacious than her elder sister. She was full of daring, a romp, and a tomboy. Lilian was like her mother, and was gentle, and shrinking, and subdued as her mother had been in the presence of the husband she loved and feared. Sibyl had a nature unacquainted with fear; and her father fancied he saw in her all the highest qualities of the Penlyons — beauty, strength, courage.
“If she had but been a boy,” he sometimes said to himself, with a profound sigh.
It seemed a hard thing that such a splendid creature must needs be cheated out of the heritage of her father and grandfather, and of many generations before them, only because she happened to be a daughter instead of a son. The Penlyon estate had been growing in wealth and importance while all those generations of the past were growing from youth to age, through life to death. The Penlyons had developed a great mining district, far off yonder southward towards Truro. They had added farm to farm between Boscastle and Bodmin. Everything had prospered with this proud and ancient race: and from Launceston to Tintagel and Tintagel to Bude there was no such family as the Penlyons of Penlyon Castle.
Sir John was foolishly indulgent to his motherless daughters during the first four or five years of his widowhood, making amends to them for all that had been wanting in his conduct to their mother. His remorse was not for sins of commission, but for sins of omission. He knew that he had not been unkind to his wife. He had only failed to understand her. The poor little diary in the German exercise book had told him how dearly he had been beloved, and how dull and ungrateful he had been.
For nearly five years after his wife’s death Sir John lived at Penlyon Castle, managed his estates, hunted and shot, and in summer did a little yachting along that wild north coast, and southward by Penzance and Falmouth, and as far as the Start Point. In all those five years he had his two children much about him, took them on his yacht, taught them to ride, and was enraptured with the pluck and the endurance shown by the younger, whether on sea or land. She rode a pony that her elder sister dared not mount. Her father took her with him when he went out with the harriers, and she rode up and down those wild hills with a dash and cleverness that enchanted the squires and farmers of the district.
During all this time the girls were in a manner running-wild. They had a nursery governess to look after them whose authority was of the smallest, and who soon came to understand that Sir John Penlyon’s daughters were to do as they liked; and that Loth learning and elegant accomplishments counted for very little at Penlyon Castle.
“Look after their health, Miss Peterson, and see that they change their shoes when they come in from walking,” said Sir John. All the rest is leather and prunella.”
Miss Peterson, who had never read Pope, took this for an allusion to the shoes.
The two girls would have got the better of their governess in any case; but Sir John being avowedly on the side of ignorance, the poor young lady had no chance of making them take kindly to education. They loved the gardens and the hills and the wild sea-beach, and those narrow walks which looked to Miss Peterson like mere ledges on the face of the cliff, and where she could hardly stand for a minute without feeling giddy. They were strong and bold, and free in every movement of their young limbs, while she was London-bred, a weakling, and a very bad walker. Her feet used to ache on those grand moorland roads, and her poor sick soul long for a Royal Blue, or any other friendly omnibus, to take her in and carry her homewards. She was one of those people who say they are very fond of the country in summer. The breezy October days, the white mists of winter, filled her with sadness and dejection.
The two little girls were kind to her after their free-and-easy fashion; but they treated her with a good-natured contempt, She was afraid of a horse; she was afraid of the sea; she was afraid of being blown off the cliff when the wind was high; and she could not walk two miles without feeling tired. She confessed to being troubled with corns.
“Miss Peterson has corns,” cried Sibyl; “isn’t it funny? I thought it was only old people who had corns,”
This free-and-easy life went on for five years. The children throve and grew apace — did what they liked, ate what they liked, and were as idle as they liked. The effect of this indulgence upon their physical health was all that the fondest father could desire. The doctor from Boscastle complained laughingly that the Penlyon nursery wasn’t worth a five-pound note to him from year’s end to year’s end.
“You never have anything the matter with you,” he said, as the children skipped round him in the road, fond of him in their small way, as one of the funny personages of the district.
“I don’t believe I have earned seven and sixpence out of either of you since I lanced your gums.”
“Did you lance my gums?” cried Sibyl. “How funny!”
“You didn’t think it funny then, I can tell you.” said the doctor, grimly.
“Didn’t I? What’s it like? Lance them now,” said Sibyl, curling up her red lips and opening her mouth very wide.
“No, thank you. You’d bite. You look as if you could bite!” laughed the doctor. “I tell you what it is, I believe Miss Peterson is a witch — one of our ancient Cornish witches who has turned herself into a nice-looking young woman.” Mr. Nichols could not so far perjure himself as to say pretty. “ Miss Peterson has bewitched you both. She has charmed away the measles and the whooping-cough. She has cheated me out of my just rights.”
Miss Peterson heard him with a pale smile, shifting her weight from the more painful foot to the foot that pained her a little less. The children went leaping and bounding along the road, the embodiment of healthy, high-spirited childhood.
Sir John praised Miss Peterson for her care of them, and rewarded her, as the school-board mistresses are rewarded, according to results; only the results in this case were physical and not mental, and Sir John’s Christmas present of a silk gown or a ten-pound note was given because his daughters were healthy and happy, rather than because they made any progress with their education. In sober truth, they knew a little less than the village children of the same age at the parish school.
At the end of those five years that pleasant life came to an abrupt close. North Cornwall found out all at once that it could not continue to prosper and to hold its own in the march of progress unless it were represented by Sir John Penlyon. Radical influences were abroad in the land. The Church was in danger, was indeed being fast pushed to the wall by the force of Dissent, its superior in numerical strength. North Cornwall must no longer be given over to the Radical party. It was time that a stand should be made, and a battle should be fought. Sir John Penlyon, said the newspapers, was the man to make that stand, and to fight that battle. He was rich; he had a stake in the country; he was influential; he was fairly popular. He had sat in Parliament fourteen years before for a Cornish borough that was now among the things of the past, a sop long since flung by Conservative Reformers to the Democratic Cerberus. He could never again sit for Blackmount, the hereditary seat of his ancestors, with a constituency of three and twenty; but he could sit for North Cornwall, and North Cornwall claimed him for its own.
Perhaps