NURSE BUNDLE FINDS A VOCATION—RAGGED ROBIN'S WIFE—MRS. BUNDLE'S IDEAS ON HUSBANDS AND PUBLIC-HOUSES I was very happy under Mr. Clerke's sway, and yet I was glad to go to school.
 
The tutor himself, who had been "on the foundation" at Eton, had helped to fill me with anticipations of public-school life. It was decided that I also should go to Eton, but as an oppidan, and becoming already a partisan of my own part of the school, I often now disputed conclusions or questioned facts in my tutor's school anecdotes, which commonly tended to the sole glorification of the "collegers."
 
I must not omit to mention an interview that about this period took place between my father and Mrs. Bundle. It was one morning just after the Eton matter had been settled, that my nurse presented herself in my father's library, her face fatter and redder than usual from being swollen and inflamed by weeping.
 
"Well?" said my father, looking up pleasantly from his accounts. But he added hastily, "Why, bless me, Mrs. Bundle, what is the matter?"
 
"Asking your pardon for troubling you, sir," Nurse Bundle began in a choky voice, "but as you[165] made no mention of it yourself, sir, your kindness being what it is, and the young gentleman as good as gone to school, and me eating the bread of idleness ever since that tutor come, I wished to know, sir, when you thought of giving me notice."
 
"Give you notice to do what?" asked my father.
 
"To leave your service, sir," said Mrs. Bundle, steadily. "There's no nurse wanted in this establishment now, sir."
 
My father laid one hand on Mrs. Bundle's shoulder, and with the other he drew forward a miniature of my mother which always hung on a standing frame on the writing-table.
 
"It is like yourself to be so scrupulous," he said; "but you will never again speak of leaving us, Mrs. Bundle. Please, for her sake," added my father, his own voice faltering as he looked towards the miniature. As for Nurse Bundle, her tears utterly forbade her to get out a word.
 
"If you have too much to do," my father went on, "let a young girl be got to relieve you of any work that troubles you; or, if you very much wish for a home to yourself, I have no right to refuse that, though I wish you could be happy under my roof, and I will see about one of those cottages near the gate. But you will not desert me—and Reginald—after so many years."
 
"The day I do leave will be the breaking of my heart," sobbed Nurse Bundle, "and if there was any ways in which I could be useful—but take wages for nothing, I could not, sir."
 
"Mrs. Bundle," said my father, "if your wages were a matter of any importance to me, if I could not afford even to pay you for your work, I should still ask you to share my home, with such comforts[166] as I had to offer, and to help me so far as you could, for the sake of the past. I must always be under an obligation to you which I can never repay," added my father, in his rather elaborate style. "And as to being useful, well, ahem, if you will kindly continue to superintend and repair my linen and Master Reginald's ——"
 
"Why, bless your innocence, sir, and meaning no disrespect," said Mrs. Bundle, "but there ain't no mending in your linen. There was some darning in the tutor's socks, but you give away half-a-dozen pair last Monday, sir, as hadn't a darn in 'em no bigger than a pea."
 
I think it was the allusion to "giving away" that suggested an idea to my father in his perplexity for employing Nurse Bundle.
 
"Stay," he exclaimed, "Mrs. Bundle, there is a way in which you could be of the greatest service to me. I often feel that the loss of a lady at the head of my household must be especially felt among the poor people around us—additionally so, as Mr. Andrewes is not married, and there is no lady either at the Rectory or here to visit the sick and encourage the mothers and children. I fear that when I do anything for them it is often in a wrong way, or for wrong objects."
 
"Well, sir," said Mrs. Bundle, an old grievance rushing to her mind, "I had thought myself of making so bold as to speak to you about that there Tommy Masden as you give half-crowns to, as tells you one big lie on the top of another, and his father drinks every penny he earns, and his mother at the back-door all along for scraps, and throwed the Christmas soup to the pig, and said they wasn't come to the workus yet; and a coat as good as new of yours, sir, hanging out of the door[167] of the pawnshop, and giving me such a turn I thought my legs would never have carried me home, till I found you'd given it to that Tommy, who won't do a hand's turn for sixpence, but begs at every house in the parish every week as comes round, and tells everybody, as he tells yourself, sir, that he never gets nothing from nobody."
 
"Well, well," said my father, laughing, "you see how I want somebody to look out the real cases of distress and deserving poverty. Of course, I must speak to Mr. Andrewes first, Mrs. Bundle, but I am sure he will be as glad as myself that you should do what we have neither of us a wife to undertake."
 
I know Nurse Bundle was only too glad to reconcile her honest conscience to staying at Dacrefield; and I think the allusion to the lack of a lady head to our household decided her at all risks to remove that reason for a second Mrs. Dacre. Moreover, the duties proposed for her suited her tastes to a shade.
 
Mr. Andrewes was delighted. And thus it came about that, though my father would have been horrified at the idea of employing a Sister of Mercy, and though Bible-woman and district visitor were names not familiar in our simple parochial machinery, Mrs. Bundle did the work of all three to the great benefit of our poor neighbours.
 
Not, however, to the satisfaction of those who had hitherto leant most upon the charity of the Hall. A certain picturesquely tattered man, living at some distance from the village, who was in the habit of waylaying my father at certain points on the estate, with well-timed agricultural remarks and a cunning affectation of half-wittedness and good-[168]humour, got henceforward no half-crowns for his pains.
 
"Mrs. Bundle has knocked off all my pensioners," my father would laughingly complain. But he was quite willing that the half-crowns should now be taken direct to the man's wife and children, instead of passing from his hands to the public-house. "Though really the good woman—for I understand she is a most excellent person—is singularly hard-favoured," my father added, "and looks more as if she thrashed old Ragged Robin than as if he beat her, as I hear he does."
 
"Nothing inside, and the poker outside, makes a many women as they've no wish to sit for their picter," said Mrs. Bundle, severely, in reply to some remark of mine, reflecting, like my father's, on the said woman's appearance. "And when a woman has children, and their father brings home nothing but kicks and bad language, in all reason if it isn't the death or the ruin of her, it makes her as she 'asn't much time ............