Chapter XI Loaves and Fishes
I am no quaker at my food. I confess I am not indifferent to the kinds of it.—CHARLES LAMB.
On the following Sabbath day Edmund was a-missing directly it was time to get ready for church. He was to be found neither in house nor garden, and Miss Esperance came to the sorrowful conclusion that the Bethune temperament had again asserted itself, and that Edmund had, of deliberate purpose, effaced himself so that he should not be made to go to church. She was not on this occasion in the least perturbed by the fact that the small boy was lost. She had no fears as to his safety, but she was most grievously upset by this deliberate flying in the face of authority, and set off for church, looking very grave and almost stern, with only Montagu in attendance.
Mr. Wycherly had shut himself in his room during the hunt for Edmund. He had a nervous dread of scenes of any kind, and when either of the little boys was punished he suffered horribly. He fully recognised the necessity for occasional correction, especially in the case of a small boy so chock-full of original sin as Edmund. But none the less did he undergo much mental anguish on the occasions when such punishment took place. He could not altogether approve of certain of the methods of Miss Esperance, although he reverenced her far too much to indulge in any conscious criticism.
Remote had always been marked out from other houses by the immense tranquillity of its chief inmates, to whom fret and fuss were unknown. People were never scolded at Remote, unless by Elsa, when she was quite sure Miss Esperance was out of hearing.
When Montagu and Edmund were naughty they were punished by Miss Esperance, who always, and manifestly, suffered much more than the delinquents.
A favourite mode of correction in days when Miss Esperance was young was the substitution of bread and water for whatever meal happened to come nearest the time of the offence: and for the little boys poignancy was added to this dismal diet by the knowledge that their aunt tasted nothing else at her own meal during such times of abstinence for them. From such punishment, all suspicion of revenge—which, in the chastened one, so often nullifies the desired result—was entirely eliminated; and the children quite understood that they were being corrected for the good of their souls, and not because their aunt required a vent for her annoyance at their misdeeds.
Sunday dinner, however—the day on which by his own request Mr. Wycherly took his mid-day meal with Miss Esperance and the children—had hitherto been exempt from any such punitive mortification of the carnal appetites. Indeed, Mr. Wycherly had imbued it with a certain Elizabethan flavour of festivity and cheerfulness, and here, greatly to his surprise, he was warmly seconded by Elsa, who grudged no extra cooking to make the Sabbath-day dinner particularly appetising. From the time that Mr. Wycherly had asserted his right to throw his all into the common lot, things had been easier at Remote, and old Elsa did not forget his enthusiastic eagerness to further her endeavours that her mistress should have a peaceful and proper breakfast.
Therefore when it became the established custom for Mr. Wycherly to carve the joint on Sundays, she was ever ready to fall in with any small plans he might make for the benefit of the little boys.
And now Edmund had been naughty on the Sabbath, and Mr. Wycherly knew what to expect.
Bread, watered by his tears, for Edmund. Bread, seasoned only by sorrowful reflection, for Miss Esperance.
Banishment for hungry Edmund if he cried aloud, and there were ducks for dinner, large fat ducks sent by Lady Alicia. Mr. Wycherly could smell the stuffing even now. Who would believe that the smell of sage and onions could bear so mournful a message?
The Greek characters of the Philebus he held in his hand danced before his eyes. He could not give his mind to the philosophy of beauty or the theory of pleasure. The doctrine of æsthetical, moral, and intellectual harmonies, pleasing as it was to him on ordinary occasions, failed to hold him just then, when all his mental vision was concentrated on a chubby, tearful figure whose misdeeds would debar him from duck for dinner.
Mr. Wycherly laid down his “Plato” and began to pace the room restlessly, finally taking up his stand at the window looking out on the garden. Where was that boy? Where had the monkey hidden himself? He was not with Mause, for Mr. Wycherly could see the old dog lying in a patch of sunshine on the little plot of grass.
He went back to his bookshelf for comfort: he wanted something human, something warm and faulty and sympathetic, and his eye lighted on “Tristram Shandy.” “Tristram Shandy” was tight in the shelf—squeezed in between the “Phædo” and Hooker’s “Ecclesiastical Polity”—Mr. Wycherly was nervous and agitated, and he must have pulled it out clumsily, for it fell to the ground with a thump.
As he stooped to recover it he caught sight of a plump brown leg protruding from beneath his sofa. He went down on his knees to look more closely, and there, cuddled up under the sofa, his curly head pillowed on his arm, lay Edmund, fast asleep. Edmund possessed a Wellingtonian capacity for falling asleep whenever he kept still. He had hidden under the sofa in Mr. Wycherly’s room just before that gentleman took refuge there from the grieved annoyance of Miss Esperance at her grand-nephew’s defection. Mr. Wycherly had shut his door, and no one dreamt of disturbing him to look there for the missing one.
Here was a pretty kettle of fish!
Although Mr. Wycherly knew that Miss Esperance would exonerate him from any actual participation in Edmund’s truancy, he was assuredly accessory after the fact, and what was to be done?
“I hope he won’t hit his head when he wakes up,” Mr. Wycherly thought concernedly. “What a beautiful child he is!” and he knelt on where he was gazing admiringly at the slumbering cupid.
Stronger and stronger grew the savour of sage and onions throughout the little house. It penetrated even to Mause in the garden, and she arose from her patch of sunshine and sniffed inquisitively.
Mr. Wycherly grew stiff with kneeling, and rose to his feet. At the same moment Edmund rolled over and hit his leg against the edge of the sofa. It woke him, and the instant Edmund awoke he was wide awake. “Dearie, are you zere?” he demanded. He could see Mr. Wycherly’s legs, and no more, from where he was lying. In another minute he was sitting on Mr. Wycherly’s knee while that elderly scholar cudgelled his brains for some form of remonstrance which would bring home to this very youthful delinquent the impropriety of his conduct.
“Dearie,” Edmund exclaimed with disarming sweetness, “aren’t you glad I’m here wiv you?” Here he rubbed his soft face against Mr. Wycherly’s. “What a good smell! isn’t it? I’m so hungry: is there a bikkit about?”
Mr. Wycherly steeled his heart: “You know, sonnie,” he said very gravely, “that you ought not to be here at all; you ought to be with your dear aunt in church.”
Edmund looked at Mr. Wycherly in reproachful surprise. “In church?” he echoed, as though such a possibility had occurred to him for the first time that morning.
“In church,” Mr. Wycherly repeated. “Your dear aunt expected you to go there with her and with Montagu, and she was very sad that she had to go without you. It was not right of you to hide, sonnie. It was neither kind nor polite nor straightforward.”
“You doesn’t go,” Edmund argued, staring gloomily at Mr. Wycherly. “Why mus’ I?”
“You must go because your dear aunt wishes it,” Mr. Wycherly replied, ignoring the first part of Edmund’s remark.
“Would you go if see wissed it?”
“I would. But you see, for me it is different. I was brought up in a different kind of church, and I am no longer a little boy. Miss Esperance has never asked me to go to church with her.”
“Why hasn’t see ast you?”
“Because, as I tell you, I was brought up in a different church.”
“Why can’t I be brought up in your church? Then we needn’t neither of us never go,” Edmund suggested, smiling radiantly, as though he had solved the difficulty.
Mr. Wycherly sighed deeply. “But I did go,” he exclaimed. “I always went when I was a little boy, every Sunday, and afterward at Oxford I went nearly every day as well.”
Edmund’s face fell. He desired to belong to no church that required daily attendance. Mr. Wycherly’s looks were so serious that the little boy began to be anxious.
“What will Aunt Esp’ance do, do you sink?”
“I fear she will feel compelled to punish you.”
“Bed?” Edmund inquired uneasily.
“No, I fear, I very greatly fear it will be dinner——”
Mr. Wycherly felt the little figure stiffen in his arms, as without a word Edmund laid his head down on his old friend’s shoulder. The child lay quite still, and glancing down at him Mr. Wycherly saw how the red mouth drooped at the corners, and the blue eyes were screwed up tight to keep back the tears. No such dread contingency had crossed Edmund’s mind till this moment, and it swept over him with devastating force. Not to share in the Sunday dinner, that cheerful meal, when Mr. Wycherly made jokes and Aunt Esperance sat beaming in her Sunday silks; when hungry little boys were never refused two, even three, helpings of everything. It was a dreadful dispensation.
Edmund gave a short, smothered sob and buried his face in Mr. Wycherly’s neck.
“Perhaps,” the grave voice went on, and Edmund opened one tearful eye, as though the gloom of his outlook were pierced by some ray of hope, “perhaps if you went to your aunt and told her how sorry you are, and that you promise on your honour as a gentleman you will never try to get out of going to church again—perhaps she might forgive you this once. If you can tell her this and mean it, my son, every word, I think that she may be induced to forgive you—just this once.”
The green gate creaked, there was a rush of feet on the staircase as Montagu made straight for Mr. Wycherly’s room.
“Here you are,” he exclaimed. “I thought you’d be here somehow—what’s the matter?”
Mr. Wycherly put Edmund gently from off his knee, and rose from his chair.
“Wait here with Montagu, sonnie,” he said. “I will see Miss Esperance first,” and he left the room, carefully shutting the door behind him.
“Is Aunt Esp’ance very sorry?” Edmund asked anxiously. He did not ask if she were angry, for that she had never been with him.
“I don’t think she’s as sorry as she was at first,” Montagu said consolingly. “We met Mrs. Gloag as we were coming out and Aunt Esperance told how you’d hidden, and Mrs. Gloag laughed, and after that I don’t think she was so sorry.”
The door was opened and Mr. Wycherly came back. “Go to your aunt in her room, Edmund,” he said, “and remember what I told you.”
Edmund trotted off obediently.
A few minutes later Robina rang the dinner bell. Edmund and his aunt descended the curly staircase together, hand in hand.
“I told her I was sorry,” he announced to Mr. Wycherly, who was waiting at the dining-room door that Miss Esperance might pass in first. “I’m going to church zis afternoon. I’m going,” he added gleefully, “becos’ zere’s ducks for dinner.”