Читать книгу Joan and Peter - H. G. Wells - Страница 36

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Lady Charlotte Sydenham was one of those large, ignorant, ruthless, low-church, wealthy, and well-born ladies who did so much to make England what it was in the days before the Great War. She was educated with the utmost care by totally illiterate governesses who were ladies by birth, chiefly on the importance and privileges of her social position, the Anglican faith and Mrs. Strickland’s “Queens of England”; she had French from a guaranteed Protestant teacher and German from a North German instructress (Lutheran Protestant), who also taught her to play the piano with the force and precision of a crack regiment of cavalry. Subsequently she had improved her mind by reading memoirs and biographies of noble and distinguished people and by travel amidst obvious scenery and good foreign hotels. She had married at two-and-thirty when things were beginning to look rather doubtful for her.

Old Mr. Sydenham, who had made his money and undermined his health in India in the John Company days, had been fifty-four, and from the very outset she had been ever so much too much for him. At sixty-five he had petered out like an exhausted lode. She had already got an abject confidential maid into thorough training, and was fully prepared for widowhood. She hung out big black bonnets and expensive black clothes upon her projections, so as to look larger than ever, and took her place and even more than her place, very resolutely, among the leaders of the county Anglicans.

She had early mastered the simple arts of county family intercourse. Her style in contradiction was very good, her insults were frequently witty, she could pretend to love horses, there was no need for her to pretend to despise and hate tradesmen and working people, and she kept herself well-informed upon the domestic details of the large and spreading family of the “Dear Queen.” She was very good at taking down impertinent people, and most people struck her as impertinent; she could make a young man or a plain girl or a social inferior “feel small” quicker (and smaller) than almost any one in that part of Surrey. She was a woman without vices; her chief pleasure was to feel all right and important and the centre of things, and to that her maid as a sort of grand Vizieress, her well-disciplined little household and her choice of friends ministered. The early fear of “Romanists” in which she had been trained had been a little dispelled by the wider charities of maturity, but she held secularists and socialists in an ever-deepening abhorrence. They planned, she knew, to disturb the minds of the lower classes, upset her investments, behead the Dear Queen, and plunge the whole world into vice and rapine and Sabbath-breaking. She interested herself in such leisure as the care of her own health and comfort left her, in movements designed to circumvent and defeat the aims of these enemies of God and (all that was worth considering in) Man. She even countenanced quite indulgent charities if they seemed designed to take the wind out of the sails of socialism. She drove about the district in a one-horse carriage and delivered devastating calls.

Such was the lady whom Arthur had made one of the four guardians of his little son and niece. He had seen her twice; he had rather liked a short speech of five sentences she made at a Flower Show, and he had heard her being extremely rude to a curate. He believed her to be wealthy and trustworthy and very well suited to act as a counter influence to any extravagant tendencies there might be in Aunt Phœbe. Also she was Dolly’s cousin, and appointing her had seemed a sort of compensation for altering his will without Dolly’s knowledge. Besides, it had been very unlikely that she would ever act. And he had been in a hurry when he altered his will, and could not think of any one else.

Now Lady Charlotte was not by any means satisfied by her visit to The Ingle-Nook. The children looked unusually big for their years and disrespectful and out of hand. It was clear they had not taken to her. The nurse, too, had a sort of unbroken look in her eye that was unbecoming in a menial position. The aunts were odd persons; Phyllis was much too disposed to accentuate the father’s wishes, and Lady Charlotte had a most extraordinary and indecent feeling all the time she was talking to her that Aunt Phœbe wasn’t wearing stays. (Could the woman have forgotten them, or was it deliberate? It was like pretending to be clothed when you were really naked.)

Their conversation had been queer, most queer. They did not seem to realize that she was by way of being a leader in the county and accustomed to being listened to with deference. Nearly everything she said they had quietly contradicted or ignored. The way in which the children were whisked away from her presence was distinctly disrespectful. She had a right, it was her duty, to look at them well and question them clearly about their treatment, to see that they had proper treatment, and it was necessary that they should fully understand her importance in their lives. But those two oddly-dressed young women—youngish women, rather, for probably they were both over thirty—did not themselves seem to understand that she was naturally the Principal Guardian.

Phyllis had been constantly referring to the wishes of this Stubland person who had married George Sydenham’s Dolly. Apparently the woman supposed that those wishes were to override every rational consideration for the children’s welfare. After all, the boy was as much Dolly’s child as a Stubland, and as for the girl, except that the Stublands had been allowed to keep her, she wasn’t a Stubland at all. She wasn’t anything at all. She was pure Charity. There was not the slightest obligation upon Any one to do Anything for her. Making her out to be an equal with a legitimate child was just the subversive, wrong-headed sort of thing these glorified shoddy-makers, the Stublands, would do. But like to like. Their own genealogy probably wouldn’t bear scrutiny for six generations. She ought to be trained as a Maid. There were none too many trained Maids nowadays. But Arthur Stubland had actually settled money on her.

There was much to put right in this situation, a great occasion for a large, important lady to impress herself tremendously on a little group of people insultingly disposed to be unaware of her. The more she thought the matter over the more plainly she saw her duty before her. She did not talk to servants; no lady talks to servants; but it was her habit to think aloud during the ministrations of Unwin, her maid, and often Unwin would overhear and reply quite helpfully.

“It’s an odd job I’ve got with these two new Wards of mine,” she said.

“They put too much on you, m’lady,” said Unwin, pinning.

“I shall do what is Right. I shall see that what is Right is done.”

“You don’t spare yourself enough, m’lady.”

“I must go over again and again. Those women don’t like me. I disturb them. They’re up to no good.”

“It won’t be the first Dark Place, m’lady, you’ve thrown light into.”

The lady surveyed her reflection in the glass with a knowing expression. She knitted her brows, partly closed one eye, and nodded slowly as she spoke.

“There’s something queer about the boy’s religious instruction. It’s being kept back. Now why did they get embarrassed when I asked who were the godparents? I ought to have followed that up.”

“My godfathers and godmothers wherein I was made,” murmured Unwin, with the quiet satisfaction of the well-instructed.

“Properly it’s the business of the godparents. I have a right to know.”

“I suppose the poor boy has godparents, m’lady,” said Unwin, coming up from obscure duties with the skirt.

“But of course he has godparents!”

“Pardon me, m’lady, but not of course.”

“But what do you mean, Unwin?”

“I hardly like to say it, m’lady, of relations, ’owever distant, of ours. Still, m’lady——”

“Don’t Chew it about, Unwin.”

“Then I out with it, m’lady. ’Ave they been baptized, m’lady, either of them? ’Ave they been baptized?”