‘There is no one whom I could leave in mine,’ said Eleanor, believing what she said. ‘No one else would have the nine of them always in her thoughts. I ought to be saying good night to the three youngest at the moment.’
‘That is a duty I shall be pleased to share with you. And I do not pity you for being left with it.’
They mounted to the nursery and found its occupants nearing the end of their day.
‘You will soon be in your little bed,’ said Eleanor to Nevill.
‘By Hatton.’
‘Yes, unless you would like to begin to share a room with Gavin.’
‘By Hatton,’ said her son, looking puzzled and uninterested.
‘Yes, for a little while you can stay with her.’
‘All night. Stay with Hatton all night.’
‘How soon are you going away?’ said Gavin, to his father.
‘In about seven days.’
‘That is a week,’ said Honor.
‘All night, all night,’ said Nevill, beating his hand on his mother’s knee.
‘Yes, yes, all night. Honor, talk nicely to Father about his going. Tell him how you will miss him.’
Honor began to cry; Fulbert put his arm about her; Nevill gave her a look of respectful concern; Gavin surveyed her with a frown.
‘There, dry your eyes and don’t lean against Father,’ said Eleanor. ‘He is as tired as you are, at the end of the day. She was hiding her feelings, poor child.’
‘She didn’t hide them,’ said Gavin.
‘She tried to; she did not want to upset Father. You mind about his going too, don’t you?’
‘If we say we mind, he knows,’ said Gavin, who was successfully hiding his own jealousy of his sister’s interest.
‘Father will be gone away. Gallop-a-trot,’ said Nevill, illustrating this idea of progress.
‘Nevill doesn’t know much,’ said Gavin.
‘Well, he is only three,’ said Eleanor. ‘Neither did you at that age.’
‘Father come back soon,’ said Nevill, showing his grasp of the situation.
‘I think I knew more,’ said Gavin.
‘We shall expect good reports of your lessons, if you talk like that.’
‘It is boys at school who have reports,’ said Gavin, mindful of James’s experience.
‘Mother meant a verbal report,’ said Honor, causing her parents to smile.
‘You will soon be able to go to school,’ said Eleanor, to her son. ‘You won’t always have a governess.’
‘James sometimes has Miss Mitford. I could always have her.’
‘Do you mean you want to learn with Honor?’
‘No,’ said Gavin, true to his principle that real feeling should be hidden.
‘Good night, Mother,’ said Nevill, approaching Eleanor with small, quick steps.
‘Good night, my little boy. So you are a horse again.’
‘Puff, puff, puff,’ said Nevill, in correction of her idea.
‘He has passed to the age of machinery,’ said Fulbert.
‘Is that age three?’ said Gavin.
‘Father means to a different date,’ said Honor.
‘The boy may be right that he can be educated at home,’ said Fulbert.
Eleanor made a mute sign against such reference to Honor, which she believed to be lost upon her daughter, though the point at issue was the latter’s intelligence.
‘I don’t feel I have a great deal in common with Mother,’ said Honor, as the door closed upon her parents.
Mullet looked at her in reproof and respect.
‘In common?’ said Gavin.
‘You have had enough education for tonight. There must be something left for the governess to teach you,’ said Hatton, producing mirth in Mullet. ‘Now I am taking Nevill to bed. You must not stay up too long.’
‘Will you tell us about when you were a child, while you do Honor’s hair?’ said Gavin to Mullet.
‘Yes, I will give you the last chapter of my childhood,’ said Mullet, entering on an evidently accustomed and congenial task, with her eyes and hands on Honor’s head. ‘For I don’t think I was ever a real child after that. You know we lived in a house something like this; a little smaller and more compact perhaps, but much on the same line. And I was once left behind with the servants when my father was abroad. Not with a grandpa and a grandma and a mother; just with servants, just with the household staff. And I found myself alone in the schoolroom, with all the servants downstairs. I was often by myself for hours, as I had no equal in the house, and I preferred my own company to that of inferiors. Well, there I was sitting, in my shabby, velvet dress, swinging my feet in their shabby, velvet shoes; my things were good when they came, but I was really rather neglected; and there came a ring at the bell, and my father was in the house. “And what is this?” he said, when he had hastened to my place of refuge. “How comes it that I find my daughter alone and unattended?” The servants had come running up when they heard his ring, when his peremptory ring echoed through the house. “Here is my daughter, my heiress, left to languish in solitude! In quarters more befitting a dog,” he went on, looking round the rather battered schoolroom, and saying almost more than he meant in the strength of his feelings. “Cast aside like a piece of flotsam and jetsam,” he continued, clenching his teeth and his hands in a way he had. “When I left her, as I thought, to retainers faithful to the charge of my motherless child. Enough,” he said. “No longer will I depend on those whose hearts do not beat with the spirit of trusty service. People with the souls of menials,” he went on, lifting his arm with one of his rare gestures, “away from the walls which will shelter my child while there is breath within me.” And there he stood with bent head, waiting for the servants to pass, almost bowing to them in the way a gentleman would, feeling the wrench of parting with people who had served him all his life.’ Mullet’s voice changed and became open and matter-of-fact. ‘And there we both were, left alone in that great house, with no one to look after us, and very little idea of looking after ourselves. It was a good thing in a way, as the crash had to come, and I think Father felt it less than he would have in cold blood. He was a man whose hot blood was often a help to him.’ Mullet gave a sigh and moved her brows. ‘But I think his death was really caused by our fall from our rightful place.’
‘So then you were left an orphan,’ said Gavin.
‘Yes, then came the change which split my life into halves.’
‘Would your father have liked you to be a nurse?’
‘Well, in one sense he had the gentleman’s respect for useful work. In another it would have broken his heart,’ said Mullet, hardly taking an exaggerated view, considering her parent’s reaction to milder vicissitudes.
‘What happened to the house?’ said Honor.
‘It was sold to pay debts. My father was in debt, as a man in his place would be.’
‘He really ought not to have kept all those servants.’
‘Well, no, he ought not. But he could hardly change from the way his family had always lived.’
‘Were they all paid?’
‘If a farthing to a dependent had been owing, Miss Honor, I could never have held up my head,’ said Mullet, straightening her neck to render further words unnecessary.
‘You told us you had a maid of your own. But you didn’t have one then.’
‘My last nurse was on the way to a maid. But I was quite without one on that day when my father came home; absolutely without,’ said Mullet, with evident attention to accuracy. ‘I was entirely at the mercy of all those servants downstairs.’
‘Is Grandpa in debt?’ said Gavin.
‘Now if you talk about what I tell you, I shall only tell you the tales I tell to Nevill.’
‘You ought to say Master Nevill.’
‘Well, so I ought in these days. But the old days drag me back when I talk about them. Now remember these things are between ourselves.’