The Slowcoach | Page 5

Avory said she could not spare them. Instead they were visited every day except Saturdays by Mr. Crawley and Miss Bingham, who taught them the things that one is supposed to know--Mr. Crawley taking the boys in the old billiard room, and Miss Bingham the girls in the morning room. At some of the lessons--such as history --they all joined. The classes were attended also by the Rotherams, the doctor's children, who lived at "Fir Grove," and Horace Campbell, the only son of the vicar. So it was a kind of school, after all.
Horace Campbell had always intended to be a cowboy when he grew up, but a visit to a play called "Raffles" was now rather inclining him to gentlemanly burglary. William Rotheram, like Gregory, leaned towards flying; but Jack Rotheram voted steadily for the sea, and talked of little but Osborne.
Mary Rotheram played with a bat almost as straight as "Plum" Warner's, and she knew most of the old Somersetshire songs-- "Mowing the Barley," and "Lord Rendal," and "Seventeen come Sunday"--by heart, and sang them beautifully. Gregory, who used to revel in Sankey's hymns as sung by Eliza Pollard, the parlourmaid, now thought that the Somerset music was the only real kind. Mary Rotheram had a snub nose and quantities of freckle and a very nice nature.
"The Gables" had a large garden, with a shrubbery of evergreens in it and a cedar. It was not at all a garden-party garden, because there was a well-worn cricketpitch right in the middle of the lawn, and Gregory had a railway system where the best flowers ought to be; but it was a garden full of fun, and old Kink, the gardener, managed to get a great many vegetables out of it, too, although not so many as Collins thought he ought to.
Collins was the cook, a fat, smiling, hot lady of about fifty, who had been with Mrs. Avory ever since she married. Collins understood children thoroughly, and made cakes that were rather wet underneath. Her Yorkshire pudding (for Sunday's dinner) was famous, and her horse radish sauce was so perfect that it brought tears to the eyes.
Collins collected picture postcards and adored the family. She had never been cross to any of them, but her way with the butcher's boy and the grocer's boy and the fishmonger's boy was terrible.
She snapped their heads off (so to speak) every morning, and old Kink spent quite a lot of his time in rubbing from off the backdoor the awful things they wrote about her in chalk.
The parlourmaid was Eliza Pollard, who had red hair and a kind heart, but was continually falling out with her last young man and getting another. She told Hester all about it. Hester had a special knack of being told about the servants' young men, for she knew also all about those of Eliza Pollard's predecessors.
The housemaid was Jane Masters, who helped Eliza Pollard to make the beds. Jane Masters did not hold with fickleness in love--in fact, she couldn't abide it--and therefore she was steadily true to a young man called 'Erb, who looked after the lift at the Stores, and was a particular friend of Gregory's in consequence. No man who had charge of a lift could fail to be admired by Gregory.
Finally--and very likely she ought to have come first--was Runcie, or Mrs. Runciman, who had not only been the nurse of all the Avories, but of Mrs. Avory before them, when Mrs. Avory was a slip of a girl named Janet Easton. Runcie was then quite young herself, and why she was suddenly called Mrs. no one ever quite knew, for she had never married. And now she was getting on for sixty, and had not much to do except sympathize with the Avories and reprove the servants. She had a nice sitting room of her own, where she sat comfortably every afternoon when such work as she did was done, and received visits from her pets, as she called the children (none of whom, however, was quite so dear to her as their mother), and listened to their adventures.
On those evenings on which he came to "The Gables" Mr. Lenox always looked in on her for a little gossip; and this was called his "runcible spoon"--the joke being that Mr. Lenox and Runcie were engaged to be married.
And now you know the Avory family root and branch.
CHAPTER 2
: THE SOUND OF MYSTERIOUS WHEELS
One day in late June the Avories and the Rotherams and Horace Campbell were sitting at tea under the cedar talking about a great tragedy that had befallen. For Mrs. Avory had just heard that Mrs. Dudeney--their regular landlady at Sea View, in the Isle of Wight, where they had lodgings every summer for years and years, and where