"I must tell you all,children,that you've got a new little sister.""A new sister!"screamed Mary.
Helen said:"Oh,Miss Jones!"
Jeremy said:"What did she come for just now,when Mother is ill?""God wanted her to come,dear,"said Miss Jones."You must all be very kind to her,and do all you can--"She was interrupted by a torrent of questions from the two girls.
What was she like?What was her name?Could she walk?Where did she come from?Did Father and Mother find her in Drymouth?And so on.
Jeremy was silent.At last he said:"We don't want any more girls here.""Better than having another boy,"said Helen.
But he would not take up the challenge.He sat on his favourite seat on the window-ledge,dragged up a reluctant Hamlet to sit with him,and gazed out down into the garden that was misty now in the evening golden light,the trees and the soil black beneath the gold,the rooks slowly swinging across the sty above the farther side of the road.Hamlet wriggled.He always detested that he should be cuddled,and he would press first with one leg,then with another,against Jeremy's coat;then he would lie dead for a moment,suddenly springing,with his head up,in the hope that the surprise would free him;then he would turn into a snake,twisting his body under Jeremy's arm,and dropping with a flop on to the floor.All these manoeuvres to-day availed him nothing;Jeremy held his neck in a vice,and dug his fingers well into the skin.Hamlet whined,then lay still,and,in the midst of indignant reflections against the imbecile tyrannies of man,fell,to his own surprise,asleep.
Jeremy sat there whilst the dusk fell and all the beautiful lights were drawn from the sky and the rooks went to bed.Rose came to draw the curtains,and then he left his window-seat,dragged out his toy village and pretended to play with it.He looked at his sisters.
They seemed quite tranquil.Helen was sewing,and Mary deep in "The Pillars of the House."The clock ticked.Hamlet,lost in sleep,snored and sputtered;the whole world pursued its ordinary way.Only in himself something was changed;he was unhappy,and he could not account for his unhappiness.It should have been because his mother was ill,and yet she had been ill before,and he had been only disturbed for a moment.After all,grown-up people always got well.
There had been Aunt Amy,who had had measles,and the wife of the Dean,who had had something,and even the Bishop once.But now he was frightened.There was some perception,coming to him now for the first time in his life,that this world was not absolutely stable--that people left it,people came into it,that there was change and danger and something stronger.Gradually this perception was approaching him as though it had been some dark figure who had entered the house,and now,with muffled step and veiled face,was slowly climbing the stairs towards him.He only knew that his mother could not go;she could not go.She was part of his life,and she would always be so.Why,now,when he thought of it,he could do nothing without his mother;every day he must tell her what he had done and what he was going to do,must show her what he had acquired and must explain to her what he had lost,must go to her when he was hurt and when he was frightened and when he was glad.And of all these things he had never even thought until now.
As he sat there the house seemed to grow ever quieter and quieter about him.He felt as though he would have liked to have gone to the schoolroom door and listened.It was terrible imagining the house behind the door--quite silent--so that the clocks had stopped,and no one walked upon the stairs and no one laughed down in the pantry.
He wished that they would make more noise in the schoolroom.He upset the church and the orchard and Mrs.Noah.
But the silence after the noise was worse than ever.
Soon Miss Jones took the two girls away to her room to fit on some clothes,an operation which Helen adored and Mary hated.Jeremy was left alone,and he was,at once,terribly frightened.He knew that it was of no use to be frightened,and he tried to go on with his game,putting the church with the apple trees around it and the Noah family all sleeping under the trees,but at every moment something compelled him to raise his head and see that no one was there,and he felt so small and so lonely that he would like to have hidden under something.
Then when he thought of his mother all alone and the house so quiet around her and no one able to go to her he felt so miserable that he turned round from his village and stared desolately into the fireplace.The thought of his new sister came to him,but was dismissed impatiently.He did not want a new sister--Mary and Helen were trouble enough as it was--and he felt,with an old weary air,that it was time,indeed,that he was off to school.Nothing was the same.Always new people.Never any peace.
He was startled by the sound of the opening door,and,turning,saw his father.His father and he were never very easy together.Mr.Cole had very little time for the individual,being engaged in saving souls in the mass,and his cheery,good-tempered Christianity had a strange,startling fashion of proving unavailing before some single human case.
He did not understand children except when they were placed in masses before him.His own children,having been named,on their arrival,"Gifts from God,"had kept much of that incorporeal atmosphere throughout their growing years.