The Lark

  ‘Oh, well – he doesn’t count,’ Jane said. ‘He’s all on the side of honest toil. Besides, he’s got an uncle: a rich uncle. If the miserable Dix had had an uncle he might be in a very different position to-day. Come on, I say. Down with dissipation! Long live the shop!’

  The shop was indeed becoming very engrossing. As more and more flowers budded and bloomed in the lovely, neglected garden of Cedar Court, business became more and more brisk, and the bag of money that had to be carried home nightly was heavier and heavier.

  The peonies were out now – great balls of splendid crimson – and the white balls of the gueldre-rose, sheaves of violet and purple flags, the wide graceful arches of Solomon’s seal, armfuls of lilac sweet as Spring herself, tall tulips rosy and white and gold, the yellow stars of the leopard’s bane – oxslips, cowslips, and always forget-me-nots; the garden room was a bower of beauty, and behind the changing glory of the spring flowers the old-panelled walls were changing bit by bit – a little at a time they were gradually regaining their ancient beauty of grey oak, as the meretricious gas-green veil was slowly scraped away. By Jane and Lucilla? Well, not altogether.

  Mr Simmons’s faith in his old boss had not been wholly justified. Science has not yet found a solvent which will remove paint instantaneously without injuring the surface of the wood below. There is no royal road to the hidden oak, and even the most accomplished chemist will be driven to fall back on plain old-fashioned scrubbing and careful scraping. Scrubbing and scraping is hard work for ladies. Mr John Rochester liked hard work; he said so, more than once.

  Do not suppose that he was always in the garden room during shop hours. Far from it. Many a scrub and scrape did he administer in the late evenings when he whistled at his lonely work and enjoyed the solitude as your real worker does enjoy it. Many a morning’s sun from a sky flushed with rose and gold peeped through the branches of the cedars and lighted Mr Rochester at his task. Still, there were times when his scrubbings and scrapings coincided with the selling of the flowers, and while the two girls arranged their beautiful stock-in-trade, made and sold their bouquets, and struggled with their day-book and their cash, he honourably kept himself to himself and scraped away in the background exactly like a real workman. If you think that two ladies ought not to have allowed a comparative stranger (Mr Dix was now the positive one) to do so much for them, I can only remind you that it is difficult to repel a determined assistant – unless you wish to quarrel with it; also that Mr John Rochester, as the nephew of their landlord, had a certain natural footing, as it were, in Cedar Court; further, that the presence of one to whom sums had no terrors was really a boon to the business, that they really did want to get rid of the gas-green paint, and that soda did take the skin off their hands. But why seek to labour the point? The girls often gave each other dozens of good reasons why it was so right and natural for Mr Rochester to be so often in the garden room – any one of which would be sufficient to convince any young person. Anyhow, there he very often was.

  As the week matured, and still more as it declined, the imminent visit of Mr Dix loomed larger and larger and less and less desirable in the eyes of his prospective hostesses. Jane, in particular, found herself on Saturday contemplating with positive dismay this terrible tea-party. She hesitated to express her sentiments to Lucilla – she had no desire to revive the discussion that had raged on the train coming home last Monday.

  That Saturday was a very special day, for on it, at last, the traces of the gas-green paint vanished, and the garden room was again as it had once been – soft-coloured wood from floor to ceiling. Mr Rochester had brought most interesting cakes to celebrate the completion of the great work. It was as they ate these companionably, admiring the oak-panelling and now and then breaking off to attend to customers, that Jane yielded to an unexplained impulse, and said suddenly:

  ‘We’re going to have tea here to-morrow as well. A Mr Dix is coming. Won’t you come too?’

  ‘It would be very nice,’ Lucilla put in before he could answer, ‘but as Mr Dix is coming to talk about business, I am afraid Mr Rochester would find it rather dull.’

  On which more than hint Mr Rochester acted instantly, and lied obligingly about an unfortunate engagement with an old friend to play tennis.

  ‘At Wimbledon,’ he added, remembering just in time how he had told the girls he had no friends at Leabridge.

  ‘You’re lucky,’ said Jane, telling herself that she admired his readiness to be snubbed. ‘I wish we could get tennis. Yes, I know there’s a local club, but we mustn’t go making acquaintances. They only eat up your time.’

  ‘There’s a tennis-lawn here, you know,’ said Mr Rochester. ‘We could get it in order again, but you’d want a man with a scythe before you could put the mowing-machine over it. By the way, this garden does want a gardener – or gardeners.’

  Lucilla trembled, but Jane let the opening pass.

  ‘Yes, it does,’ she said smoothly. ‘We shall have to think about it. But I’ve never seen any tennis-lawn. Whereabouts is it?’

  ‘Behind the stables.’

  ‘But we’ve never seen any stables!’ said Lucilla.

  ‘Beyond the cottages.’

  ‘But there aren’t any cottages!’

  ‘Ladies, ladies,’ said Mr Rochester, ‘you haven’t half explored your domain. Did you never open the big double door in the garden wall?’

  ‘It’s locked.’

  ‘Where did you think it led?’

  ‘To the road, I suppose. We never thought about it. Oh, let’s go and explore now this minute.’

  ‘You can’t leave the shop,’ Lucilla reminded her.

  ‘Besides, the key isn’t here; but I’ll bring it to-morrow – I mean on Monday.’

  ‘Could you perhaps bring it to-morrow,’ suggested Lucilla, ‘after you get back from – Wimbledon?’

  ‘About seven? Certainly.’

  So it was settled.

  And now it was Sunday afternoon. The garden room, all traces of the shop removed, showed itself as a charming parlour elegantly prepared for the reception of the felonious Dix.

  One of Aunt Lucy’s prettiest tea-cloths embroidered in soft blues and pinks lay between Aunt Lucy’s Sheraton tea-tray and the round table. Aunt Lucy’s silver tea-service glittered upon it among the blue and white of the Chinese cups and saucers. There were flowers, in studied moderation: a few rosy tulips, half a dozen flags among Solomon’s seal, and some purple lilac – but you cannot be moderate with lilac.

  Both girls were a little endimanchées: when you wear opaque pinafores all the week you desire on Sundays the delicate silky-diaphanous.

  It was five o’clock, and the kettle had boiled on the spirit-lamp and had been suppressed because the visitor had not arrived, and it was no use making tea yet. There had been rain in the morning, and every leaf and bud of the garden was newly washed and sparkling in the sun.

  Lucilla was conscious of a sudden relenting.

  ‘Do you know,’ she said, ‘I’m almost glad you did ask him. Think what it will be to him to see a garden like this after prison.’

  ‘Or even after London,’ said Jane. ‘Hush, here he is!’

  But it was not Mr Dix. It was a much older man. He came in at the open door, and he did not say, ‘How do you do?’ or ‘How are you?’ or ‘Good afternoon,’ or any of the things that Mr Dix might have been expected to say. He looked at the flowers, looked at the tea-table, and he looked at the walls – and then he said in a voice (as Jane remarked later) exactly like the voice of the biggest of the three bears in the story:

  ‘Who’s been messing about with the panelling?’

  And he had every right to ask, for he was their landlord, Mr James Rochester, unexpectedly returned from Spain. And at any moment the footstep of the prison bird Dix might sound on the gravel.

  ‘Who did this?’ repeated Mr James Rochester, more like the bear than ever.

  CHAPTER XII

  For once Jane was speechless. It was
Lucilla who rose instantly and went towards the old landlord, with both hands outstretched, delighted recognition in her eyes, and on her lips – words of wonder, indeed, but also of welcome.

  ‘You?’ she said. ‘How wonderful! We thought you were at the Alhambra or Bilbao or somewhere, and here you are! It is nice.’

  By this time Jane was almost herself again, ready to offer her hand and then to push forward the easiest chair.

  ‘It seems rather a cheek to offer you tea in your own house,’ she said, ‘but it would be worse still not to, seeing that we’re here and the tea’s here and you’re here.’

  ‘I am sorry if I am inopportune,’ said the landlord, quite without cordiality. But he took the chair. And again he looked round him.

  ‘You seem to have made yourselves thoroughly at home,’ he said, and he said it grudgingly.

  ‘Yes,’ said Jane, preoccupied with the kettle and spirit-lamp. ‘And you’re not a bit inopportune. In fact it’s very much nicer for you to come when we’re all tidy, though perhaps you’d rather have come on a working day, and found us up to our ears in wet ferns and flower-stalks, and as likely as not no tea ready – at least, it wouldn’t have been such a nice tea as this, and certainly not the best cups.’

  ‘I’m glad to hear that, at any rate,’ he said grimly.

  ‘Oh, of course we wouldn’t use those lovely cups every day,’ said Lucilla, one ear for him and one for the step of the jail-bird on the gravel. Jane’s ears were also doing a double, or, rather, a divided, duty. Both girls were desperately searching for something to say – something to delay the moment when old Mr Rochester should repeat his first big-bear question. Both felt that the longer that could be delayed the better – if they could only get him comfortable, get him interested, give him a really good cup of tea and some of the fat, home-made cakes before having to explain about the panelling.

  ‘The garden,’ Jane began, and, ‘The flowers,’ said Lucilla, at exactly the same moment, and both stopped.

  Then:

  ‘The board,’ they said simultaneously, and again stopped short.

  ‘Why not speak one at a time,’ suggested Mr Rochester, ‘and explain to me …’

  ‘I was just trying to,’ said Jane very quickly, and got in before Lucilla that time. ‘I do hope you don’t mind the board? We couldn’t have sold anything to speak of without a board – and we left the original label …’

  ‘Label?’

  ‘ “This house is not to let.” I do think that’s lovely,’ said Jane, with an air of the completest candour. ‘Do you know, Mr Rochester, I knew you were nice. The very minute I saw that notice I knew it. And when they told me you were …’

  ‘They told you I was what?’

  ‘We knew it was only that they didn’t understand you,’ Lucilla put in.

  ‘They didn’t say anything really dreadful, you know,’ said Jane; ‘only that they didn’t think you would let anyone have the house.’

  ‘Was that all?’

  ‘Well,’ Jane acknowledged, ‘one person did say you were a grampus, but I don’t think he could have been serious.’

  Mr Rochester gave a short, sharp bark of a laugh.

  (‘Come, that’s something!’ Jane told herself. ‘If we can only make him laugh!’)

  ‘Do you take milk and sugar?’ she asked hastily, and acted on his reply.

  ‘Do have a cake. They aren’t bought ones. Our Mrs Doveton made them herself, out of one of Aunt Lucilla’s receipt-books.’

  Lucilla was keeping her end up. ‘It’s such a darling book, bound in violet morocco with gold ferns on it, and the pages are different colours – like girls’ albums – and there are bits of poetry and little pictures stuck in all among the recipes. Dear little pencil sketches of ruined abbeys and thatched cottages, and little paintings of auriculas and tulips and Spanish dancers with fans and white stockings, and valentines with silver loves and cupids and the loveliest verses.’

  ‘It must be a very interesting book,’ said Mr Rochester. ‘And does your Mrs Doveton find her way easily among the poetry and the paintings and the recipes?’

  ‘Oh no!’ said Lucilla, shocked. ‘The book’s never been in the kitchen. We copy out what she’s to make, on the kitchen slate. We tried buying cakes – but they aren’t really nice in the shops here. I can’t think they’re made of real eggs and butter, and they all taste of essence of lemon. Besides, the shop-people call them pastries, and that does sound so dreadful, doesn’t it?’

  ‘It does,’ said he, with the first glance of approval that they dared to recognise. ‘And I am very glad that you perceive it. The vulgarism is getting itself accepted, somehow. “Pastries”! We shall have people talking of “grouses” next, and “deers” and “snipes”. Already the Daily Yell, I understand, allows its American contributors to write of billiards-rooms, to say “around” when they mean “round”, and to use the expression, “he made himself scarce”, in a serious narrative. One of the saddest things in this machine-made century,’ he added, ‘is the neglect, the decay, the corruption, of the English language.’

  ‘I saw billiards-rooms myself, the day we bought a lot of newspapers,’ said Jane helpfully, ‘and I thought it looked horrid, but then I thought it must be a mistake of the printers.’

  ‘Not at all,’ said Mr Rochester, ‘it is intentional. So is that revolting and unnatural plural “pastries”; so is …’

  He was launched. Jane and Lucilla found means to exchange glances of congratulations. But still ears were pricked – as far as young ladies’ ears can be pricked – for the sound of the feet of jail-birds on the gravel. And still none came.

  It seemed to Jane that she and Lucilla had quite enough on their hands in this sudden necessity for soothing Mr Rochester and compelling him to refrain from the subject of the panels till he could contemplate it through a haze of shortcake, without having to introduce to him such an acquaintance as Mr Dix, a young man who had not only been in prison – that, Jane felt, might happen by accident to any of us – but was actually not ashamed of it.

  ‘… The degradation of the language,’ Mr Rochester was saying. ‘The depraved Cockney accent of half-educated teachers replacing the sturdy local dialects …’

  The girls leaned forward, attitude and expression alike designed to convey the impression of rapt attention. ‘If he’ll only keep on till he’s had his second cup,’ Jane told herself, ‘it won’t be so bad.’ He finished the first and accepted the second. There was a pause, which both girls were afraid to break.

  ‘What,’ he asked suddenly, ‘do you call the article of food which is baked in an earthenware dish, rather deep and usually of an oval form, though sometimes round or oblong: outside is pastry, within are apples, cloves and sugar? What do you call it?’

  ‘Is it a riddle?’ Jane asked.

  ‘No, no,’ he said impatiently; ‘a perfectly plain question. You recognise the thing from my description? Well, what do you call it?’

  ‘An apple-pie, of course,’ said Lucilla and Jane almost together.

  ‘Good,’ said Mr Rochester, actually rubbing his hands, ‘but, believe me, there are young women – yes, and women old enough to know better – who think that they show refinement by calling an apple-pie an apple-tart. Why don’t they consult their dictionaries? A tart is an open piece of pastry with jam, apple, or what-not on it. In the pie the apple or other adjunct is covered.’

  ‘Of course it is.’

  ‘Of course it is,’ repeated Mr Rochester; ‘and now,’ he went on, putting down his cup and speaking quite mildly, ‘perhaps you will tell me …’

  They looked at each other and felt that the hour had struck. They must tell the truth about the panelling.

  ‘… Tell me,’ he ended unexpectedly, ‘how you managed to get into the house again?’

  ‘But we didn’t,’ said Jane. ‘You said we weren’t to and we didn’t. Of course we didn’t.’

  ‘Then how did you get these things out?’

  ‘
?’

  ‘The chairs and tables – the tea-things – the flower-vases – the Belgian pottery?’

  Again, and now really startled, they looked at each other. Was it possible that their benefactor could be insane?

  ‘You put them here for us – don’t you remember?’ said Jane gently.

  ‘It won’t do, my dear,’ he answered with almost equal gentleness. ‘I may be absent-minded – in fact I am. I may be forgetful – of trifles – but I am not so silly as you suppose. Come – why deny it, when here the things are? Own up! How did you get into the house?’

  ‘We didn’t,’ said Jane with extreme coldness. ‘Please don’t doubt our word. We shouldn’t have dreamed of doing anything so dishonourable.’

  ‘We found the things here, you know,’ Lucilla explained quietly. ‘Don’t you think you must have given orders for the place to be made nice for us, and then forgotten about it? We found it all ready for us, and the looking-glass and the jug and basin’ – she swung open the door of the further cupboard as she spoke – ‘and all the beautiful jugs and vases.’ The other cupboard opened at her touch, confirming her words. ‘And the new tap by the front door – all so convenient and so lovely. And we did think it so frightfully nice of you; and we have been so grateful and thought about you such a lot – and wished you luck, and that you might find whatever you were looking for in Spain. You are absent-minded, you know. You must have ordered it, and forgotten, Do try to remember. And don’t be so cross,’ she added, with a sudden inspiration of courage, ‘because we really haven’t done anything to deserve it.’

  ‘I apologise for having doubted a lady’s word,’ said Mr Rochester with blighting courtesy, ‘but my position is a difficult one. The age of miracles is past. And I know that I did not give any such order as you suggest, because I remember perfectly a sudden sense of remissness which overcame me between Tours and Bordeaux, just because I had not given such an order. I wondered how you would get on, and whether you would have to disarrange Hope Cottage in order to make the garden room possible even as a living-room for part of the day.’