CHAPTER XII.

MISS COSIE.

"Well, to be sure, there never was a little woman so full of hope and tenderness, and love and anxiety, as this little woman was."--_Dickens._

The next hour passed pleasantly enough; the Claytons devoted themselves to their guests' entertainment with an open-heartedness and simple hospitality that seemed natural to them.

In spite of the seclusion in which they lived, and the loneliness of their surroundings, they showed a perfection of breeding and a freedom of idea that surprised and delighted Queenie.

Her shyness and brief reserve soon vanished under the influence of their kindness. After the first few minutes she ceased to feel as though she were a stranger amongst them, and found herself entering into their plans and wishes as though she had known them for years.

"You see Cathy has talked to me about you all, and that is why I feel that I know you," she said, a little apologetically, lifting those strange eyes of hers to Garth. The young man flushed a little, but answered her kindly. Cathy's friend was rather formidable to him; he had at least never met any one in the least like Queenie Marriott; he felt far more at home with Emmie.

Nevertheless, he hid his embarrassment in his usual manner, as though half ashamed of it, by holding his head higher than usual, and laying down the law to his sisters in his dictatorial, good-humored way. Before tea was over Cathy was coaxing him to give them a picnic in the granite quarries, and he had hummed and hesitated a good deal over her request, "just to make himself of importance," whispered the wicked little sister to Queenie.

This led to some conversation about the quarry and quarry-men; and here Garth found himself on his own ground, and talked much and well. He told Queenie, as they all strolled down the lane in the twilight, after Emmie had gone to bed, about his plans for the men's welfare and improvement, "his boys," as he termed them.

There seemed no limits to the good he did amongst them. Queenie felt her respect for him increase as she listened. He had given up one of his fields for cricket, and was himself their captain. He had instituted a reading-room; and Mr. Logan and he had formed a useful library. Here in the winter there were lectures given to the men by the Vicar, and Captain Fawcett, a neighbor of theirs, living in one of the villas lower down; or he himself read to them amusing passages from Dickens and Charles Lever. Garth's reading was none of the finest, as Queenie discovered for herself afterwards, and his singing was even worse in quality; but he would carry it through in a certain sturdy fashion of his own, that was somewhat amusing to the home critics.

Then he had schools for the children; and on alternate Sunday afternoons Mr. Logan held service in the school-room for those unable to come over to Hepshaw Church. More than this was not possible at present; but, as he modestly informed his auditor, that his sister and he had done their best to organize a Sunday school, and to hold weekly Bible-class for such as choose to attend.

"Langley is great among the women," he observed with a bright smile; "she half lives at the cottages. I wish I were half as successful with my boys."

Queenie had yet to learn the value that Garth Clayton set on his boys, and how the best and highest part of his life was lived among them.

It was too dark to go down the village, as Queenie found they all called it; so Langley proposed they should go in by-and-bye and have some music. All the Claytons were musical except Garth, though Garth would have been the last to own his deficiency in this respect, and always held his own manfully in the family concerts, in spite of Cathy's sometimes insisting on stopping her ears with cotton-wool, and Ted's muttered observation, that he never knew that rooks cawed so loudly at night.

But Garth, generally so sensitive to criticism, cared nothing for these home witticisms. He loved to air his lungs freely. He would burst into 'Simon the Cellarer,' or 'the Vicar of Bray,' or, better still, the often-abused 'Village Blacksmith,' with an honest disregard of all soft inflexion or minor chords that was painfully ludicrous. Ted and Cathy would throw themselves back in their chair and laugh noiselessly while the performance went on, and even Langley would bite her lip as her thin flexible fingers moved over the keys, the sounds she evoked almost swallowed up in that mighty bass.

I think, after all, though they laughed they loved to hear it, and would better have spared many a sweeter and choicer thing out of their home daily life. Garth never used half-measures. As Cathy once drily said, "He does everything thoroughly, even to making a noise, or singing, my dear,--I believe he calls it by that name."

His laugh, too, was quite a surprise to Queenie when she heard it first; true, it was rather boyishly loud, but its delicious abandon of mirth was thoroughly infectious; none but Langley could ever hear it without joining in it. He would throw his head back, tossing back the wave of dark hair as he did so, and the strong, even, white teeth would shine under the moustache; while the pealing ha-ha would provoke corresponding mirth.

"It does one good to hear Garth Clayton laugh," Mr. Logan said once. "Only a man with a good conscience could laugh like that."

Queenie sat in her low basket-work chair, watching the ins and outs of this happy home-circle, too thoroughly interested and amused to dream of fatigue, though they had excused her singing that night on that score.

"I play very little; but I am supposed to sing tolerably well, that is, most people like my voice," she had said, quite frankly, in answer to their polite inquiries.

"She sings like an angel," was Cathy's verdict on this; "her voice is as fresh and clear and true as a lark's, but her fingers move over the keys a little like drum-sticks. I have often told you so, Queen; you put all your expression in your voice."

"I shall ask Miss Clayton to play my accompaniments," was Queenie's graceful answer. She was not a bit annoyed at her friend's plain speaking; she liked to be told of her faults, and always set herself earnestly to mend them.

She practised sedulously after this evening, and gleaned all manner of hints from Langley.

"You must teach your fingers to speak; they make acquaintance too stiffly with the keys," Langley said once to her. "You play so correctly, too; it is such a pity you do not make us feel your music."

"My life has been all drudgery, you see," Queenie answered, humbly; "there has been so little music in it, all the harmony got jarred out of it somehow. It has been only grinding at hard tasks, rubbing out sums for little girls, and putting them in again; one couldn't learn to play tunes happily after that."

"But you sing, and so sweetly too."

"Ah, one learns that at church; singing is part of one's religion," went on the girl reverently. "Nothing, however sordid and hard, can keep religion out of one's life; it is just there always. Slaves sing, you know, and blind chaffinches, and poor miners under-ground over their work. It keeps off bad thoughts. Oh, every one must sing," she finished with a smile, feeling that now for the first time in her young toil-worn life she was really resting on her oars.

Only resting for a brief space though; by-and-bye she must take them up again, and row on bravely, against the stream perhaps, through marshes of sedgy weeds, fighting against a sullen current, perhaps drifted into deeper waters, but always with the broad blue sky above her, with tints of silver-lined clouds and possible sunshine, with hopes of safe harborage by-and-bye.

"I help myself, and therefore God will help me," Queenie had often said to herself in her sorely-tried youth. "I am afraid of nothing but doing wrong, and seeing Emmie suffer; the rest I can bear;" and this belief in herself saved them both.

"I am going to take you to see all our celebrities," announced Cathy solemnly at the breakfast table the next morning. "It is Langley's district day, and she will have nothing to say to any of us until lunch time. I propose that we leave Emmie with Deborah to shell peas, while we do Hepshaw thoroughly."

"You must take me into the church first," observed Queenie, quite prepared for a long morning of delicious idleness, and in the true holiday spirit, alert and ready for any chance enjoyment. "I think there is something delightful in making acquaintance with a fresh place; even seeing fresh faces and hearing different voices gives me an odd indescribable sort of pleasure."

"You poor prisoner, yes," returned her friend sympathizingly, as they walked down the little garden path at the side of the house, and passed through the gate that opened on the churchyard, with its long terrace planted picturesquely with sycamores. "You are like a nun; you have only peeped at the world through a sort of invisible grating in Miss Titheridge's front parlor. You must make up for lost time, and live every moment thoroughly, as Garth and I do."

"That is just it; we don't half live our lives, we girls," replied Queenie dreamily; "half of us seem asleep; our faculties lie dormant, and get rusted just for want of use. Miss Titheridge hung round my neck like a mill-stone; she literally crushed and pulverized all the best parts of me. It is being born again; it is a sort of moral regeneration, this feeling of freedom, this--oh, how can I make you understand it all, Cathy!"

"Seeing is believing," was the brusque answer. "You are a different creature, my dear Madam Dignity; you were like the frond of my favorite prickly shield fern that I was watching yesterday. You were all there, you know, the greenness and the freshness; but one could not get at you, you were so tightly swathed and coiled up."

"Yes," returned Queenie joyously; "and now I have found myself, my own individuality. I do think, seriously, that I have a larger capacity for living than other people. I have good health, that is one thing; my constitution is perfect; then I love work, I really and literally do, Cathy. Work braces one, it brings all one's faculties into play; work is rest; inaction, idleness; pleasure for the sake of pleasure, is simply paralysis of one's higher life, it is premature old age."

"I wish I felt as you do," was the half-envious answer; "there is nothing little about you, Queenie, Garth said so last night."

"Did he? you should not have told me that, Cath."

"Why not pray. I just asked him how he liked you; I wanted to get at his opinion, you see, and he answered, just as gravely as though he were mentor, that he thought I had chosen my friend wisely, that you seemed a thoroughly healthy-minded girl."

"I think we will go into the church now," interrupted Queenie, somewhat irrelevantly. There was a little flush of pleasure in her cheek. She was glad he had said that; it was just the sort of praise she most coveted. She wanted Cathy's people to think well of her; if the truth must be known, she hungered for their appreciation as a half-starved child might have done. Crumbs would not satisfy her; condescension or kindness would not feed her thoroughly; she must have their full commendation, their equal friendship. She had known them so long, she had seen them all so perfectly with her inner vision, that she could not feel as a stranger amongst them.

"I am so at home with them already," she had said to her friend the previous night. "There are no hard beginnings; we are friends to start with; there is no thawing, because there is no ice," she had said, with a certain vague enthusiasm, which, nevertheless, had been perfectly understood by Cathy. "One has so much hard up-hill work with most people," she had continued, talking out her thoughts half to herself. "Don't you know exactly how common-place people make acquaintance, how laboriously they try to find out one's tastes! They do it about as gracefully as though they were breaking stones on the highway, or hammering flints as boys do to elicit sparks, and all the time looking as though they knew you had nothing in you worth coming to light. Oh, it is terribly fatiguing. I once heard a very clever man liken modern society to the mummy-room of the British Museum. He said, 'Human beings were so swathed and bound up in conventionality that there was no getting at the real thing at all.'"

"I like Langley's way of knowing people," Cathy had answered; "she just knows them at once, takes it for granted, I mean, that all that interests her interests them. We had such an argument about it one day, when I would have it that she had bored some one about the soup-kitchen. 'I was so full of it myself that I knew that I should not talk so well on any other subject,' was her sole apology. And then she told me I was quite wrong, 'that people, after all, liked to be treated as reasonable beings, and not like children pleased with sugar-plums. "Give, and it shall be given you," was just as true in social intercourse as it was in the sense first intended. If you sow tares you will reap tares, child; always remember that,' she had finished. I prefer scattering precious grain. You have no idea how often one reaps a rich harvest. It is the real thing, you see, and people like that."

Queenie and Cathy were largely given to conversations such as these. It was just talking out their thoughts, as they called it. They aired all manner of quaint subjects in this way, these two honest-hearted girls. Both were a little vague at times; most women are. Cathy always amused her friend mightily. She had a habit at certain times, in her "goody moods," as she termed them, of taking herself to pieces to examine her moral mechanism, just as though she were examining the works of a new watch, as Queenie would tell her, clogging the wheels and stopping progress all the time. "If you are always taking yourself up by the roots to see how you grow you won't grow at all," she assured her in her droll way. "You ought not always to be looking at your defects and blemishes in the glass. People freckle from the sun sometimes; but I don't believe over-much sunshine hurts any one. Keep tight hold of the reins, never let go, and then try and forget everything but the road you are travelling. Forget nothing but yourself; mamma always said that."

There was something very fresh and sweet in this girlish intercourse, devoid as it was of vanity and selfishness; they were tolerably equal in capacity; neither could teach the other much, but they could learn together. It was as though they were two young gleaners following the reapers: now one gathered a stray sheaf and tossed it into the lap of the other; everything--an idea, a thought--was just a golden ear to be winnowed into grain. At times their content would have filled a granary.

Happy season of youth! when everything is delightful because everything is new; when harvests are more bountiful; when the mildew and the blight and the canker-worm are unknown; when the sky and earth meet and touch softly; when beautiful thoughts steal like strange birds in the twilight; when the glimmer of a star will provoke a reverie; when a hand-clasp will wake a world of dreams; when the whole universe is not too big a setting for one small beating heart; when one believes in one's guardian angel, and heaven is so near--so near.

It is not always so. Alas! alas! for the anointed eyes purged from their youthful blindness, made wise with the serpent-knowledge of evil and good. Tread softly here, ye worldlings, with lifted sandals and bated breath; for here, as in all real lovely things fresh from the Maker's hand, is indeed holy ground.

Queenie was moderate in her praises of Hepshaw church; nevertheless, it pleased her with a certain sense of fitness. There was no beauty of architecture, no tastefulness of detail; it was just a village church, adapted to the needs of a rustic population.

But there was something grateful in its simplicity. Through the open door the fresh sweet winds blew straight from heaven; the shadows of the sycamores swept without the porch; some leaves rustled on the threshold. Queenie walked down the narrow aisle, turning over the well-worn books on the desks. A smile crossed her face when she saw the font; the mean little stone stoup struck her as incongruous. "It seems a pity to see that," she said very simply, "I can almost cover it with the palm of my hand; it ought to be so wide and massive, filled to the brim with purifying and regenerating water, lavishly given and lavishly bestowed, not doled in drops."

"Hush! here comes Mr. Miles," answered Cathy; "he is the boys' schoolmaster. We have no schoolmistress, you know; the old one is married and is going away with her husband. He has come to practise on the organ; he is organist, choirmaster, and I don't know what besides."

"Is he nice?" whispered Queenie. She just caught sight of the pale, serious-looking young man, dressed in shabby black like a Methodist parson of the old school, who came limping up the aisle on one crutch.

"Hum! truth lies sometimes at the bottom of a deep well," was Cathy's ambiguous reply. "Yes, Garth says he is nice; he pities him. Somehow I can't make him out; I don't know why, but I always think of Eugene Aram, or the school-master in the 'Mutual Friend,' when I see him. I am sure he has got a history. I don't like a young man with a history; from a child I never could bear riddles. Ted is quite fond of him, though. I believe half my dislike comes from his persisting in dressing like a broken-down undertaker; he only wants a white tie to make him complete." They were happily in the lane by this time, and Queenie could enjoy her laugh without scruple of conscience.

"Is this the vicarage, Cathy? but of course it is; I knew it from your description. You are a perfect word-painter; all your portraits are true to life."

"That means caricature."

"Well, I suppose so; but, all the same, your likenesses are thoroughly spirited."

"Only I never miss out the moles and the freckles. This is not the ideal vicarage, is it, _ma chère?_ though I could show you one not many miles from here. Crossgill Vicarage is lovely; I must take you to see it some day, as nurse used to say; it is the dearest, most picturesque place. A little river flows through the village just in the middle of the road; and the church is beautiful; and the vicarage a quaint old house with gable ends embosomed in creepers, with the loveliest garden always blazing with flowers."

"That sounds nice."

"When we drive over there we have tea in the hall; it is wainscoted with oak, and there is a lattice window, and an old oak staircase and gallery, all tiny, but so quaint, and the old nurse, nearly eighty, waits upon us; I do love the place so."

"This is bare prose after that," returned Queenie, as they walked up the steep narrow garden, between rows of cabbages and bushes of pale pink and white roses. All sorts of homely old-fashioned flowers bloomed amongst the beans and peas and other vegetables, red and orange nasturtiums, tall spikes of lavender, blue larkspur, and masses of sweet mignonette. "No, not all bare prose," correcting herself and pointing to a bed of pansies, looking in the sunshine like a cluster of gold and violet butterflies poised on motionless velvet wings; "there is a bit of floral painting for you; there is a whole allegory in that."

"An allegory! why, Queenie, you are actually becoming poetical. If Mr. Logan were here he would tell us that that is a species of violet--_Viola tricolor_--called also pansy."

"Believe me, there is a higher meaning in that still, butterfly life. Look at this one with glorious violet wings and just one golden eye; does it not look as though it ought to fly instead of remaining so humbly on its green stalk?"

"Well, my 'Queen of Sheba,'" half impatiently and half amused, "what do you make of that? I am not a Solomon, to answer all your hard questions."

"I think," returned Queenie, hesitating, "that it means to teach us that the true heart's-ease remains content in its own place; it has wings, but they are not ready for flight, they just carry the dew and the sunshine, that is all. Brave little golden hearts, always radiant and smiling," she continued, lightly brushing the bloom with her finger tip.

"Mr. Logan!" ejaculated Cathy, elevating her eyebrows in a sort of comic despair, "will you suggest some appropriate answer in return for this poetical dissertation," and Queenie, blushing hotly, dropped the flowers and turned round.

"My dear young lady, I am afraid I startled you," said Mr. Logan benevolently; "but I did not like to play the eavesdropper any longer, though Miss Catherine was mischievous enough to try and keep me in the background. As it is, I have stolen a very pretty fancy, which I know will delight Charlotte."

"Miss Marriott, Mr. Logan," returned Cathy, with much solemnity. "I know what a stickler you are for conventionalities and etiquette, Mr. Logan, and I could not suffer you to utter another sentence without due introduction."

"Is not that a slight deviation from the truth, my dear Miss Catherine, when you know, at least every one must know, my little failings in that respect? still I was not aware of your friend's name, and I dare say she was equally ignorant of mine."

"No, indeed," returned Queenie, trying to maintain her gravity. Cathy's eyes were dancing with fun, like a mischievous kitten; the wicked little creature knew how difficult it was for her friend not to laugh outright.

Mr. Logan certainly presented a curious appearance to a stranger's eyes. The good man was clad in a brown dressing-gown, patched neatly at the elbows with parti-coloured cloth, and his spectacles were pushed up his forehead, showing a pair of near-sighted blue eyes.

He was a tall spare man, with the plainest face, Queenie thought, she had ever seen, the features were so rugged and irregular; the spectacles and grey hair gave him an elderly appearance. Queenie heard afterwards that he was only in his fortieth year, and that Miss Cosie was quite ten years older.

The eyes were the only redeeming features. Either seen with or without the spectacles they were mild and yet keen; they could beam softly, as they did now at the two girls, with hearty benevolence, or dart searching glances that seemed to quiver like an arrow-point in the recesses of one's conscience. "They look through and through you," Cathy said once; "it is just like throwing a torch into a dark place, it brings all sorts of hidden things to light,--cobwebs and little foolishnesses, and odds and ends of rubbish."

"I like eyes that talk," was Queenie's answer to this. She liked Mr. Logan's face, in spite of its plainness; his voice too was so pleasant. She conceived a warm respect for the Vicar of Hepshaw on this first visit. In spite of his somewhat worn and homely appearance, the innate dignity of the man made itself felt as he walked beside them in his old threadbare garment.

"Charlotte; where are you, Charlotte?" he exclaimed, raising his voice as they stood in what was termed the best sitting-room, a somewhat humble apartment with one small window.

"Here, Christopher, my dear," responded a small chirping voice from the inner recesses of the house, and a tiny woman tripped softly after it.

Miss Cosie! who could help giving her the name, she was so small and so compact, with such a comfortable pincushion-like compactness; a little grey mouse of a woman, with, her grey dress, and grey Shetland shawl crossed over her shoulders, and the two large glossy curls pinned up on either side of the small head, which she was always patting with her little fat hands.

Why her very voice had a cosy sound in it. "My dear" seemed to drop perpetually out of it; it was a caressing, petting sort of voice, with a continual hush in it. "Hush! there, there, my dear," was her panacea for every one, from a crying child to a widowed virago. "There, there, my dear, we can't have him back, but I dare say he is better off," or "there, there, my good man, go home to your poor wife," to a six-foot piece of drunken ruffianism she met staggering through the village and vociferating oaths in the darkness. "There, there, poor thing, he has lost himself, and is just daft; hush! we won't listen; the devil is schoolmaster to-night, and is teaching him a little bit of his own language."

Cosie! why the name was an inspiration; it fitted her to a nicety. Charlotte was simply a badinage, something for which her godmother was to blame, not she; no one but her brother would ever call her by such a term; it was almost crushing--but Miss Cosie!

Queenie called her by it at once, after the little woman had tripped up to her and lightly kissed her on the cheek, and then patted her with her white dimpled hand.

"There, there, my dear, I knew we should be friends; take off your bonnet and stay, and you shall taste my ginger wine."

This was always Miss Cosie's first speech to strangers. It was true no one ever wore bonnets in Hepshaw; but it was one of her ways to lament their disuse among the younger generation, as a falling-off of the good old times.

"Such fly-away, foolish things, my dear; now," as she would say, "a bonnet is so much more comfortable and becoming, and a pretty face looks so well in it. Shady! nonsense, my love, you can always wear an ugly if you are afraid of your complexion; but bonnets were bonnets in those days, one did not carry a nosegay tied up in straw then."

Miss Cosie's one idea in life, next to petting people, was her brother. No one, in her opinion, could come up to him; he was simply perfect.

"Such a mind, such a genius, and yet as simple as a child," she would exclaim. Her love and pride in him fairly bubbled over at times. Christopher, or Kit, as she sometimes called him, was the object of her sisterly idolatry. It was odd and yet touching to see her protecting tenderness; perhaps her ten years' seniority had given the motherly element to her affections. "You see, Kit is still a boy to me," she would say sometimes; "when he was a little fellow I used to put him to bed and sing him to sleep. I never can forget that somehow; and, dear me, my dear, he is still so helpless,--these clever men are, you know,--he never can remember even to put on a warm flannel or take a clean handkerchief out of his drawer; I just have to go in and put everything ready to his hand."

"Why, when the bishop came once," continued Miss Cosie, lifting her hands and eyes, "he was actually going to the station in that brown dressing-gown of his, if I had not run down the lane after him. Think what his lordship would have said at seeing one of his clergy dressed out in that ragged-robin fashion!"

"I have found out what flower Miss Cosie most resembles," said Queenie, when, after an hour's chat, they had left the vicarage. "Guess, Cathy."

"Little eyebright, I should say, or the ox-eyed daisy."

"No; the pansy of course. Cathy, how can you be so dense! why she looks and talks and breathes of nothing but heart's-ease."