“Nous vous mettrons a couvert,
Repondit le pot de fer
Si quelque matiere dure
Vous menace d’aventure,
Entre deux je passerai,
Et du coup vous sauverai.
........
Le pot de terre en souffre!”—LA FONTAINE.
[“We, replied the Iron Pot, will shield you: should any hard
substance menace you with danger, I’ll intervene, and save you
from the shock.
......... The Earthen Pot was the sufferer!]
“SIDNEY, come here, sir! What have you been at? you have torn your frill into tatters! How did you do this? Come sir, no lies.”
“Indeed, ma’am, it was not my fault. I just put my head out of the window to see the coach go by, and a nail caught me here.”
“Why, you little plague! you have scratched yourself—you are always in mischief. What business had you to look after the coach?”
“I don’t know,” said Sidney, hanging his head ruefully. “La, mother!” cried the youngest of the cousins, a square-built, ruddy, coarse-featured urchin, about Sidney’s age, “La, mother, he never see a coach in the street when we are at play but he runs arter it.”
“After, not arter,” said Mr. Roger Morton, taking the pipe from his mouth.
“Why do you go after the coaches, Sidney?” said Mrs. Morton; “it is very naughty; you will be run over some day.”
“Yes, ma’am,” said Sidney, who during the whole colloquy had been trembling from head to foot.
“‘Yes ma’am,’ and ‘no, ma’am:’ you have no more manners than a cobbler’s boy.”
“Don’t tease the child, my dear; he is crying,” said Mr. Morton, more authoritatively than usual. “Come here, my man!” and the worthy uncle took him in his lap and held his glass of brandy-and-water to his lips; Sidney, too frightened to refuse, sipped hurriedly, keeping his large eyes fixed on his aunt, as children do when they fear a cuff.
“You spoil the boy more than do your own flesh and blood,” said Mrs. Morton, greatly displeased.
Here Tom, the youngest-born before described, put his mouth to his mother’s ear, and whispered loud enough to be heard by all: “He runs arter the coach ‘cause he thinks his ma may be in it. Who’s home-sick, I should like to know? Ba! Baa!”
The boy pointed his finger over his mother’s shoulder, and the other children burst into a loud giggle.
“Leave the room, all of you,—leave the room!” said Mr. Morton, rising angrily and stamping his foot.
The children, who were in great awe of their father, huddled and hustled each other to the door; but Tom, who went last, bold in his mother’s favour, popped his head through the doorway, and cried, “Good-bye, little home-sick!”
A sudden slap in the face from his father changed his chuckle into a very different kind of music, and a loud indignant sob was heard without for some moments after the door was closed.
“If that’s the way you behave to your children, Mr. Morton, I vow you sha’n’t have any more if I can help it. Don’t come near me—don’t touch me!” and Mrs. Morton assumed the resentful air of offended beauty.
“Pshaw!” growled the spouse, and he reseated himself and resumed his pipe. There was a dead silence. Sidney crouched near his uncle, looking very pale. Mrs. Morton, who was knitting, knitted away with the excited energy of nervous irritation.
“Ring the bell, Sidney,” said Mr. Morton. The boy obeyed—the parlour-maid entered. “Take Master Sidney to his room; keep the boys away from him, and give him a large slice of bread and jam, Martha.”
“Jam, indeed!—treacle,” said Mrs. Morton.
“Jam, Martha,” repeated the uncle, authoritatively. “Treacle!” reiterated the aunt.
“Jam, I say!”
“Treacle, you hear: and for that matter, Martha has no jam to give!”
The husband had nothing more to say.
“Good night, Sidney; there’s a good boy, go and kiss your aunt and make your bow; and I say, my lad, don’t mind those plagues. I’ll talk to them to-morrow, that I will; no one shall be unkind to you in my house.”
Sidney muttered something, and went timidly up to Mrs. Morton. His look so gentle and subdued; his eyes full of tears; his pretty mouth which, though silent, pleaded so eloquently; his willingness to forgive, and his wish to be forgiven, might have melted many a heart harder, perhaps, than Mrs. Morton’s. But there reigned what are worse than hardness,—prejudice and wounded vanity—maternal vanity. His contrast to her own rough, coarse children grated on her, and set the teeth of her mind on edge.
“There, child, don’t tread on my gown: you are so awkward: say your prayers, and don’t throw off the counterpane! I don’t like slovenly boys.”
Sidney put his finger in his mouth, drooped, and vanished.
“Now, Mrs. M.,” said Mr. Morton, abruptly, and knocking out the ashes of his pipe; “now Mrs. M., one word for all: I have told you that I promised poor Catherine to be a father to that child, and it goes to my heart to see him so snubbed. Why you dislike him I can’t guess for the life of me. I never saw a sweeter-tempered child.”
“Go on, sir, go on: make your personal reflections on your own lawful wife. They don’t hurt me—oh no, not at all! Sweet-tempered, indeed; I suppose your own children are not sweet-tempered?”
“That’s neither here nor there,” said Mr. Morton: “my own children are such as God made them, and I am very well satisfied.”
“Indeed you may be proud of such a family; and to think of the pains I have taken with them, and how I have saved you in nurses, and the bad times I have had; and now, to find their noses put out of joint by that little mischief-making interloper—it is too bad of you, Mr. Morton; you will break my heart—that you will!”
Mrs. Morton put her handkerchief to her eyes and sobbed. The husband was moved: he got up and attempted to take her hand. “Indeed, Margaret, I did not mean to vex you.”
“And I who have been such a fa—fai—faithful wi—wi—wife, and brought you such a deal of mon—mon—money, and always stud—stud—studied your interests; many’s the time when you have been fast asleep that I have sat up half the night—men—men—mending the house linen; and you have not been the same man, Roger, since that boy came!”
“Well, well” said the good man, quite overcome, and fairly taking her round the waist and kissing her; “no words between us; it makes life quite unpleasant. If it pains you to have Sidney here, I will put him to some school in the town, where they’ll be kind to him. Only, if you would, Margaret, for my sake—old girl! come, now! there’s a darling!—just be more tender with him. You see he frets so after his mother. Think how little Tom would fret if he was away from you! Poor little Tom!”
“La! Mr. Morton, you are such a man!—there’s no resisting your ways! You know how to come over me, don’t you?”
And Mrs. Morton smiled benignly, as she escaped from his conjugal arms and smoothed her cap.
Peace thus restored, Mr. Morton refilled his pipe, and the good lady, after a pause, resumed, in a very mild, conciliatory tone:
“I’ll tell you what it is, Roger, that vexes me with that there child. He is so deceitful, and he does tell such fibs!”
“Fibs! that is a very bad fault,” said Mr. Morton, gravely. “That must be corrected.”
“It was but the other day that I saw him break a pane of glass in the shop; and when I taxed him with it, he denied it;—and with such a face! I can’t abide storytelling.”
“Let me know the next story he tells; I’ll cure him,” said Mr. Morton, sternly. “You now how I broke Tom of it. Spare the rod, and spoil the child. And where I promised to be kind to the boy, of course I did not mean that I was not to take care of his morals, and see that he grew up an honest man. Tell truth and shame the devil—that’s my motto.”
“Spoke like yourself, Roger,” said Mrs. Morton, with great animation. “But you see he has not had the advantage of such a father as you. I wonder your sister don’t write to you. Some people make a great fuss about their feelings; but out of sight out of mind.”
“I hope she is not ill. Poor Catherine! she looked in a very bad way when she was here,” said Morton; and he turned uneasily to the fireplace and sighed.
Here the servant entered with the supper-tray, and the conversation fell upon other topics.
Mrs. Roger Morton’s charge against Sidney was, alas! too true. He had acquired, under that roof, a terrible habit of telling stories. He had never incurred that vice with his mother, because then and there he had nothing to fear; now, he had everything to fear;—the grim aunt—even the quiet, kind, cold, austere uncle—the apprentices—the strange servants—and, oh! more than all, those hardeyed, loud-laughing tormentors, the boys of his own age! Naturally timid, severity made him actually a coward; and when the nerves tremble, a lie sounds as surely as, when I vibrate that wire, the bell at the end of it will ring. Beware of the man who has been roughly treated as a child.
The day after the conference just narrated, Mr. Morton, who was subject to erysipelas, had taken a little cooling medicine. He breakfasted, therefore, later than usual—after the rest of the family; and at this meal pour lui soulager he ordered the luxury of a muffin. Now it so chanced that he had only finished half the muffin, and drunk one cup of tea, when he was called into the shop by a customer of great importance—a prosy old lady, who always gave her orders with remarkable precision, and who valued herself on a character for affability, which she maintained by never buying a penny riband without asking the shopman how all his family were, and talking news about every other family in the place. At the time Mr. Morton left the parlour, Sidney and Master Tom were therein, seated on two stools, and casting up division sums on their respective slates—a point of education to which Mr. Morton attended with great care. As soon as his father’s back was turned, Master Tom’s eyes wandered from the slate to the muffin, as it leered at him from the slop-basin. Never did Pythian sibyl, seated above the bubbling spring, utter more oracular eloquence to her priest, than did that muffin—at least the parts of it yet extant—utter to the fascinated senses of Master Tom. First he sighed; then he moved round on his stool; then he got up; then he peered at the muffin from a respectful distance; then he gradually approached, and walked round, and round, and round it—his eyes getting bigger and bigger; then he peeped through the glass-door into the shop, and saw his father busily engaged with the old lady; then he began to calculate and philosophise, perhaps his father had done breakfast; perhaps he would not come back at all; if he came back, he would not miss one corner of the muffin; and if he did miss it, why should Tom be supposed to have taken it? As he thus communed with himself, he drew nearer into the fatal vortex, and at last with a desperate plunge, he seized the triangular temptation,—
“And ere a man had power to say ‘Behold!’
The jaws of Thomas had devoured it up.”
Sidney, disturbed from his studies by the agitation of his companion, witnessed this proceeding with great and conscientious alarm. “O Tom!” said he, “what will your papa say?”
“Look at that!” said Tom, putting his fist under Sidney’s reluctant nose. “If father misses it, you’ll say the cat took it. If you don’t—my eye, what a wapping I’ll give you!”
Here Mr. Morton’s voice was heard wishing the lady “Good morning!” and Master Tom, thinking it better to leave the credit of the invention solely to Sidney, whispered, “Say I’m gone up stairs for my pocket-hanker,” and hastily absconded.
Mr. Morton, already in a very bad humour, partly at the effects of the cooling medicine, partly at the suspension of his breakfast, stalked into the parlour. His tea-the second cup already poured out, was cold. He turned towards the muffin, and missed the lost piece at a glance.
“Who has been at my muffin?” said he, in a voice that seemed to Sidney like the voice he had always supposed an ogre to possess. “Have you, Master Sidney?”
“N—n—no, sir; indeed, sir!”
“Then Tom has. Where is he?”
“Gone up stairs for his handkerchief, sir.”
“Did he take my muffin? Speak the truth!”
“No, sir; it was the—it was the—the cat, sir!”
“O you wicked, wicked boy!” cried Mrs. Morton, who had followed her husband into the parlour; “the cat kittened last night, and is locked up in the coal-cellar!”
“Come here, Master Sidney! No! first go down, Margaret, and see if the cat is in the cellar: it might have got out, Mrs. M.,” said Mr. Morton, just even in his wrath.
Mrs. Morton went, and there was a dead silence, except indeed in Sidney’s heart, which beat louder than a clock ticks. Mr. Morton, meanwhile, went to a little cupboard;—while still there, Mrs. Morton returned: the cat was in the cellar—the key turned on her—in no mood to eat muffins, poor thing!—she would not even lap her milk! like her mistress, she had had a very bad time!
“Now come here, sir,” said Mr. Morton, withdrawing himself from the cupboard, with a small horsewhip in his hand, “I will teach you how to speak the truth in future! Confess that you have told a lie!”
“Yes, sir, it was a lie! Pray—pray forgive me: but Tom made me!”
“What! when poor Tom is up-stairs? worse and worse!” said Mrs. Morton, lifting up her hands and eyes. “What a viper!”
“For shame, boy,—for shame! Take that—and that—and that—”
Writhing—shrinking, still more terrified than hurt, the poor child cowered beneath the lash.
“Mamma! mamma!” he cried at last, “Oh, why—why did you leave me?”
At these words Mr. Morton stayed his hand, the whip fell to the ground.
“Yet it is all for the boy’s good,” he muttered. “There, child, I hope this is the last time. There, you are not much hurt. Zounds, don’t cry so!”
“He will alarm the whole street,” said Mrs. Morton; “I never see such a child! Here, take this parcel to Mrs. Birnie’s—you know the house—only next street, and dry your eyes before you get there. Don’t go through the shop; this way out.”
She pushed the child, still sobbing with a vehemence that she could not comprehend, through the private passage into the street, and returned to her husband.
“You are convinced now, Mr. M.?”
“Pshaw! ma’am; don’t talk. But, to be sure, that’s how I cured Tom of fibbing.—The tea’s as cold as a stone!”
All books are sourced from Project Gutenberg