The Quiver, Annual Volume 10/1899

Mr. Graydon and his daughter Pamela were jogging leisurely home from the little market town of Lettergort. There was no reason to hurry, and if there had been, Frisky, the little fat pony, whose frisky days were long over, would not have been aware of it.

It was very hot, a morning of late summer; but Pamela's creamy cheeks were as cool as the firm petals of a lily. She bore as if accustomed to it the jog-trot of the pony and the frequent ruts into which their chariot bumped, flinging her from the seat as though she were the football in a hotly contested game.

Mr. Graydon kept up a contented whistling when he was not commenting on the fields and the cattle as they passed. That had been a long, hot summer, and for once in a century people had begun to long for the patter of rain on the leaves.

"Woa, Frisky-woa, little lad! That's a nice colt of Whelan's down there by the sally-tree. Do you see, Pam? Now, I hope the poor fellow will get a handful of money for it. He'll need it this summer," Mr. Graydon would say.

Or, again, it would be a farmer going their own way from Lettergort.

"Good-morning, John."

"Good-morning, your honour. How did the calves do wid your honour?"

"I'm not complaining, John. Murray of Slievenahoola gave me thirty shillings apiece for them. It was as much as I hoped for."

"Aye, they wor but weanlin's. An' 'tis no use keepin' stock this summer."

"How did you do with the heifers, John?"

"Didn't get the price of their feed, your honour. Wirra! 'tis a desperate summer. The hay wasn't worth cuttin', and the oats is pitiful."

Again, it would be a labourer with a scythe on his shoulder whom Mr. Graydon would stop to ask after his household concerns. Everywhere they passed a smile followed Mr. Graydon's broad back in its faded homespuns.

"'Tis a rale pleasant word he has in his mouth, God bless him! an' him a rale gentleman an' all," followed him from many a cottage-door.

"You've done your marketing, Pam," said her father, turning to her.

"I'd plenty of time, dad, while you chatted to your million acquaintances."

"And sold my calves, Pam."

"You might have sold a thousand in the time."

"Well, well, Pam, it is my little world, you see. I hope the perishable things won't be broken when we come to the rut by Murphy's gate. 'Tis a foot and a half deep at least. Johnny Maher ought really to mend this road."

"You ought to make him, dad. What's the good of being a magistrate?"

"What indeed, Pam! Sure, I never get a job done for myself. There's old Inverbarry now, and he a lord, and he's getting the private road through his park mended at the public expense. And he as rich as Cr?sus, the old sinner!"

Mr. Graydon rubbed his hands with benevolent amusement. His daughter glanced at him with a pucker between her white brows. The violet-blue eyes under curling black lashes exactly reproduced her father's, though at this moment the expressions were widely different.

"You're too easy-going, dad. You should make Johnny Maher mend the road."

Mr. Graydon dropped a rein to pull one of his daughter's silky black curls.

"You wouldn't be having me too hard on the poor fellow, and he with a sick wife and an old mother and a pack of children. Eh, little Pam?"

Pamela shook her head severely, and the red mouth, which had drooped at the corners when she was serious, parted over white teeth in a laugh fresh as a child's.

"How did the calves do wid your honour?"

"You've no conscience, dad, any more than Lord Inverbarry or Johnny Maher. You're conniving at their wrongdoing, you see."

"Maybe I am, Pam-maybe I am. Only I don't suppose it seems wrongdoing to them-at least, not to Johnny Maher, poor fellow. Inverbarry ought to know better."

They jogged along for a few minutes till there was another jolt. Simultaneously there was a crash at their feet, and Mr. Graydon pulled up with an exclamation.

"There goes some of your crockery, Pam. I hope it's not the lad's looking-glass."

"Never mind," said Pam, with a sigh of despair. "Perhaps now you'll get Johnny Maher to see to the road. If it's his looking-glass, he'll have to shave as Mick St. Leger used, with the lid of a can for his looking-glass."

"Ah, poor Mick was used to our ways. He didn't mind. But this is a public-school man. We'll have to furbish up for him, little Pam, and put our best foot foremost, eh?"

"It looks like it," said Pam, gazing down at the jumbled parcels at her feet. "I'll tell you what it is," she said: "it's the glass for his bedroom window. It is all in smithereens. He'll have to put up with the brown-paper panes, as Mick St. Leger did."

"Never mind, never mind. The lad's a gentleman, and he'll see we're gentlefolk, though we're as poor as church mice. He won't mind, you'll see, Pam; gentlemen never do mind these things."

"You're thinking of Mick still, dad. You forget that Gwynne man who wouldn't stay because he got nothing but potatoes for three days. As if we could help the roads being frozen and Frisky not being able to get to Lettergort! Do you remember Gwynne's face over the potato-cake the third day? Yet I'm sure Bridget had done her best. What with potatoes in their jackets, and mashed, and with butter, and without, and in a salad, and at last in a cake, I'm sure there was no sameness about the diet."

"Gwynne was a-well, of course, he was a gentleman, but as disagreeable as a gentleman can be. Besides, Pam, potatoes probably didn't agree with him; they don't with everyone, you know, and Gwynne was dyspeptic. I don't know what the lads are coming to. In my young days we didn't even know the word dyspepsia, much less the thing."

"Gwynne was hateful," said Pamela. "He expected us to kill the chickens for him when every single chicken was a pet, and so tame, dear things! that they would walk into the drawing-room and perch on your knee."

"Perhaps that's why Gwynne wanted them killed," said Mr. Graydon.

"Nasty thing!" said Pamela. "I was glad when we saw his back. He couldn't bear the dear dogs lying on his bed either, though Mary told him it was a proof of their friendliness towards him. He fired his bootjack after Mark Antony, you remember, and though it's not easy to stir up Mark Antony, yet I'm glad he had the spirit to go for Gwynne's legs."

"Mark Antony had been burying bones under Gwynne's pillow, my dear."

"Only because it was a wet day, and he never liked to go out in the rain. I daresay if he'd had time he'd have removed the bones to the garden. However, I don't suppose this youth will be like Gwynne. What do you think, dad?"

"His father was the best fellow ever stepped on shoe-leather. If the lad is like him, we shan't complain. What a handsome, dashing fellow he was! I can see him now in his scarlet and gold lace that night at Lady Westbury's ball, where I first met--"

He broke off suddenly with a little sigh. "That was another world, Pam."

"A world well lost-was it not?-dad."

"Aye, a world well lost, little girl."

It was plain to see that a tender intimacy existed between this father and daughter.

"I daresay he'll find my ways rather old-fashioned, Pam. It was an odd thing that his father should have remembered me, and have wished the lad to come to me."

"It would have been odd if he hadn't," said Pam shortly.

"There are new ways and new methods in the world since I was at Oxford. I daresay the lad'll find me rather rusty in my knowledge."

"You'll teach over his head, as you always do, and you'll get great delight out of it. You'll forget all about your pupil, and you'll go mouthing Greek poetry till we think downstairs that the study chimney is on fire. And while you're growling and thundering the youth will be making caricatures of you under the table, or cutting his name deep in the oak of your precious study table."

"Is that my way, little Pam?"

"That's your way, dad. There was never one of your pupils that could follow you, only little Sells, and he died young, poor boy!"

"Ah, little Sells. I am proud of Sells. He died fighting the small-pox with all the heroic soul in his little body. He had the making of a fine scholar."

"Never mind, dad. None of us can do more than die heroically. And Sells would always have been a poor curate. They'd never have made him a bishop."

"I suppose not, poor lad! Scholarship doesn't count for much, Pam."

"Or you wouldn't be here, dad."

"I'd always be in the ruck, Pam; I'm afraid I'm a worthless old fellow. From what you say, Pam, I'm as much of a failure at the teaching as anything else. I'm really afraid it's true."

"Never mind, dad. As Mick St. Leger said, you taught them better things. It isn't your fault that you're over their heads."

"Did poor Mick say that, now?" said Mr. Graydon, answering the first part of her sentence. "Mick was a good boy; but no scholarship in him. A child could beat Mick at the Greek verbs."

"He was more at home with a rod or a gun," assented Pamela. "Only for the noise he made you'd never know he was in the house. There was no fun he wasn't up to."

Mr. Graydon's face suddenly became serious.

"You'll remember this lad's not Mick, Pam," he said; "you and Sylvia, I mean, for, of course, Mary is always prudent. Don't behave with him as if you were all boys together. Now, that locking Mick in the hayloft, or going with him to Whiddy Fair, would never do with this boy."

"That was five years ago, dad," answered Pamela, looking with a demure smile at the hem of her pink cotton frock where it covered her shoes. "We were wild little colts of girls, then, with our hair down our backs. Besides, we never meant to leave Mick in the hayloft; we only forgot he was there in the delight of finding a wild bees' nest; and we cried coming home from Whiddy Fair, we were so tired and so hungry."

"Till I overtook you with Frisky, and drove you home and comforted you."

"You should have spanked us, dad, and sent Mick to the right-about."

"So I should. If you'd been boys, I daresay I'd have known a better way with you. But what can one do with little girls? Then poor Mick. I knew it wasn't Mick's fault. You'd been leading him astray, as usual."

But Frisky had pulled up suddenly at a rather dilapidated gate, with a post falling to pieces, and the two halves of the gate fastened together with a piece of string. Out of the lodge within poured a stream of blue-eyed and chubby children, who stood regarding Frisky and his freight with shy and friendly smiles.

"Halloa, you rascals," called out Mr. Graydon, "run and call your mother, some of you. Gone with your father's dinner, is she? She seems to be always gone with your father's dinner. You can't get down to open the gate, Pam? No, I see you can't; you're built in with parcels round your feet. Here, take the reins, and I'll get down myself. Only don't let Frisky get his head, or he'll run off with the other post, as he did with that one."

"Frisky is not likely to do that, dad. He's got more sedate since those days. It was about the same time that Sylvia and I locked Mick in the hayloft."

"Five years ago, Pam? It can't be five years ago. I'd never have left that post unmended five years. Why, it was only the other day I was saying I'd have over the mason from Lettergort to mend it."

He had now done fumbling with the tie of the gate, and Pamela drove into the overgrown avenue. While he was replacing the bit of string he kept up a running fire of jests with the small, shame-faced children, to which she listened with a half-smile.

"Dear old dad," she said to herself. "He has been so long letting things go that he even forgets that he has let them go. And I'm his own daughter."

She took up a breadth of her pink frock and looked at it. There was a rent of at least three inches in it. Pamela shook her head in mute self-reproach.

"It'll never do for 'Trevithick's lad,' as the dear dad calls him. I don't suppose he's used to young women with rents in their frocks. And I am a young woman, and so is Sylvia, though our own father has never found it out."

As she sat waiting, a dreamy smile came to her lips and a softness to her eyes. It was like a prophecy of what "Trevithick's lad" was to bring-like the dawn of love, sweet and bitter, that was to bring Pam the hoyden into her woman's inheritance.

"Come along, dear," she said with a start, turning to her father: it seemed as if his head-pattings of the children would never come to an end. "Frisky's getting uneasy, and will bolt with me and the crockery, if you don't hurry up."

Her father jumped into the little cart with a laugh.

"I forgot that you were waiting, Pam, those infants have such pleasing ways. But as for Frisky running away with you, why, bless me! he's had time to get old since he ran away with the post; at least, so you say, though I should never have believed it-never!"

"And now," said Pam, "you're going to be turned out of house and home for the next few days. Unhappy man, you little know how you've carried soap and scrubbing brushes for your own destruction."

Mr. Graydon gave a gasp of genuine alarm.

"Soap and scrubbing brushes! But what for, Pam? I am sure everything is very clean-except my books; and I won't have the books touched, mind that-I won't have my books touched."

"Indeed, then, and I'd advise you to say that to Bridget yourself, for I'm sure I won't. She's taken a fit of industry, and says she might as well be living among haythens, wid th' ould dust an' dirt the masther's for ever gatherin'. 'Them ould books of his,' she says, 'would be a dale better for a rub of a damp cloth, and then a polish up wid a duster.'"

"Pam!" cried the unhappy gentleman. "She wouldn't dare put a damp cloth near my books."

"She'd dare most things, would Bridget. It's your vellum covers she's after chiefly. She says they're unnaturally dirty."

She looked at the beloved face, which bore a look of genuine dismay over its genial ruddiness.

"Never mind, dad," she said. "Bridget promises great things; but between you and me I believe the great clearing up will just end in what she herself calls a lick and a promise. I don't suppose she'll ever get so far as your possessions-I don't really believe she will."

"Don't let her, Pamela darling, will you?" said her father entreatingly. "Why, good gracious! my classics in vellum! A damp cloth! And Bridget's damp cloth! It would be enough to send me to an asylum."

"Come along," she said.