and she said, scornfully, “I should like to see him literally rolling in gold. It must be like Midas. Do you mean that he sleeps on it, Jessie? How hard and cold!”
“Nonsense,” said Jessie; “you know what I mean.”
“I know what literally rolling in gold means, but I don’t know what you mean.”
“Don’t bully her, Janet,” said Allen; “we are not so stupid, are we, Jessie? Come and show me the walnut-tree you were telling me about.”
“What’s the matter, Janet?” said her mother, coming in a moment or two after, and finding her staring blankly out of the window, where the two had made their exit.
“O mother, Jessie has been talking such gossip, and Allen likes it, and won’t have it stopped! I can’t think what makes Allen and Bobus both so foolish whenever she is here.”
“She is a very pretty creature,” said Carey, smiling a little.
“Pretty!” repeated Janet. “What has that to do with it?”
“A great deal, as you will have to find out in the course of your life, my dear.”
“I thought only foolish people cared about beauty.”
“It is very convenient for us to think so,” said Carey, smiling.
“But mother—surely everybody cares for you just as much or more than if you were a great handsome, stupid creature! How I hate that word handsome!”
“Except for a cab,” said Carey.
“Ah! when shall I see a Hansom again?” said Janet in a slightly sentimental tone. But she returned to the charge, “Don’t go, mother, I want you to answer.”
“Beauty versus brains! My dear, you had better open your eyes to the truth. You must make up your mind to it. It is only very exceptional people who, even in the long run, care most for feminine brains.”
“But, mother, every one did.”
“Every one in our world, Janet; but your father made our home set of those exceptional people, and we are cast out of it now!” she added, with a gasp and a gesture of irrepressible desolateness.
“Yes, that comes of this horrid move,” said the girl, in quite another tone. “Well, some day—” and she stopped.
“Some day?” said her mother.
“Some day we’ll go back again, and show what we are,” she said, proudly.
“Ah, Janet! and that’s nothing now without him.”
“Mother, how can you say so, when—?” Jane just checked herself, as she was coming to the great secret.
“When we have his four boys,” said her mother. “Ah! yes, Janet—if—and when—But that’s a long way off, and, to come back to our former subject,” she added, recalling herself with a sigh, “it will be wise in us owlets to make up our minds that owlets we are, and to give the place to the eaglets.”
“But eaglets are very ugly, and owlets very pretty,” quoth Janet.
Carey laughed. “That does not seem to have been the opinion of the Beast Epic,” said she, and the entrance of Babie prevented them from going further.
Janet turned away with one of her grim sighs at the unappreciative world to which she was banished. She had once or twice been on the point of mentioning the Magnum Bonum to her mother, but the reserve at first made it seem as if an avowal would be a confession, and to this she could not bend her pride, while the secrecy made a strange barrier between her and her mother. In truth, Janet had never been so devoted to Mother Carey as to either granny or her father, and now she missed them sorely, and felt it almost an injury to have no one but her mother to turn to.
Her character was not set in the same mould, and though both could meet on the common ground of intellect, she could neither enter into the recesses of her mother’s grief, nor understand those flashes of brightness and playfulness which nothing could destroy. If Carey had chosen to unveil the truth to herself, she would have owned that Allen, who was always ready, tender and sympathetic to her, was a much greater comfort than his sister; nay, that even little Babie gave her more rest and peace than did Janet, who always rubbed against her whenever they found themselves tete-a-tete or in consultation.
Meantime Babie had been out with her two little cousins, and came home immensely impressed with the Belforest gardens. The house was shut up, but the gardens were really kept up to perfection, and the little one could not declare her full delight in the wonderful blaze she had seen of banks of red, and flame coloured, and white, flowering trees. “They said they would show me the Americans,” she said. “Why was it, mother? I thought Americans were like the gentleman who dined with you one day, and told me about the snow birds. But there were only these flower-trees, and a pond, and statues standing round it, and I don’t think they were Americans, for I know one was Diana, because she had a bow and quiver. I wanted to look at the rest, but Miss James said they were horrid heathen gods, not fit for little girls to look at; and, mother, Ellie is so silly, she thought the people at Belforest worshipped them. Do come and see them, mother. It is like the Crystal Palace out-of-doors.”
“Omitting the Crystal,” laughed some one; but Babie had more to say, exclaiming, “O mother, Essie says Aunt Ellen says Janet and I are to do lessons with Miss James, but you won’t let us, will you?”
“Miss James!” broke out Janet indignantly; “we might as well learn of old nurse! Why, mother, she can’t pronounce French, and she never heard of terminology, and she thinks Edward I. killed the bards!” For the girls had spent a day or two with their cousins in the course of the move.
“Yes,” broke in Barbara, “and she won’t let Essie and Ellie teach their dolls their lessons! She was quite cross when I was showing them how, and said it was all nonsense when I told her I heard you say that I half taught myself by teaching Juliet. And so the poor dolls have no advantages, mother, and are quite stupid for want of education,” pursued the little girl, indignantly. “They aren’t people, but only dolls, and Essie and Ellie can’t do anything with them but just dress them and take them out walking.”
“That’s what they would wish to make Babie like!” said her elder sister.
“But you’ll not let anybody teach me but you, dear, dear Mother Carey,” entreated the child.
“No, indeed, my little one.” And just then the boys came rushing in to their evening meal, full of the bird’s nest that they had been visiting in their uncle’s field, and quite of opinion that Kenminster was “a jolly place.”
“And then,” added Jock, “we got the garden engine, and had such fun, you don’t know.”
“Yes,” said Bobus, “till you sent a whole cataract against the house, and that brought out her Serene Highness!”
The applicability of the epithet set the whole family off into a laugh, and Jock further made up a solemn face, and repeated—
“Buff says Buff to all his men,
And I say Buff to you again.
Buff neither laughs nor smiles,
But carries his face
