Читать книгу The Athelings - Маргарет Олифант - Страница 14

Killiecrankie Lodge held a dignified position in this genteel locality: it stood at the end of the road, looking down and superintending Bellevue. Three square houses, all duly walled and gardened, made the apex and conclusion of this suburban retirement. The right-hand one was called Buena Vista House; the left-hand one was Green View Cottage, and in the centre stood the lodge of Killiecrankie. The lodge was not so jealously private as its neighbours: in the upper part of the door in the wall was an open iron railing, through which the curious passenger might gain a beatific glimpse of Miss Willsie’s wallflowers, and of the clean white steps by which you ascended to the house-door. The corresponding loopholes at the outer entrance of Green View and Buena Vista were carefully boarded; so the house of Mr Foggo had the sole distinction of an open eye.

Within the wall was a paved path leading to the house, with a square bit of lawn on either side, each containing in its centre a very small round flower-plot and a minute fir-tree. These were the pine forests of the Islingtonian Killiecrankie; but there were better things within the brief enclosure. The borders round about on every side were full of wallflowers—double wallflower, streaked wallflower, yellow wallflower, brown wallflower—every variety under the sun. This was the sole remarkable instance of taste displayed by Miss Willsie; but it gave a delicate tone of fragrance to the whole atmosphere of Bellevue.

This is a great day at Killiecrankie Lodge. It is the end of April now, and already the days are long, and the sun himself stays up till after tea, and throws a slanting golden beam over the daylight table. Miss Willsie, herself presiding, is slightly heated. She says, “Bless me, it’s like July!” as she sets down upon the tray her heavy silver teapot. Miss Willsie is not half as tall as her brother, but makes up the difference in another direction. She is stout, though she is so restlessly active. Her face is full of wavering little lines and dimples, though she is an old lady; and there are the funniest indentations possible in her round chin and cheeks. You would fancy a laugh was always hiding in those crevices. Alas! Hannah knows better. You should see how Miss Willsie can frown!

But the old lady is in grand costume to-night; she has her brown satin dress on, her immense cairngorm brooch, her overwhelming blue turban. This sublime head-dress has an effect of awe upon the company; no one was prepared for such a degree of grandeur, and the visitors consequently are not quite at their ease. These visitors are rather numerous for a Bellevue tea-party. There is Mr Richards from Buena Vista, Mrs Tavistock from Woburn Lodge, and Mr Gray, the other Scotch inhabitant, from Gowanbrae; and there is likewise Mr Foggo Silas Endicott, Miss Willsie’s American nephew, and her Scotch nephew, Harry Oswald; and besides all this worshipful company, there are all the Athelings—all except Bell and Beau, left, with many cautions, in the hands of Susan, over whom, in fear and self-reproach, trembles already the heart of Mamma.

“So he would not hear of it—he was not blate!” said Miss Willsie. “My brother never had the like in his office—that I tell you; and there’s no good mother at home to do as much for Harry. Chairles, lad, you’ll find out better some time. If there’s one thing I do not like, it’s a wilful boy!”

“But I can scarcely call him wilful either,” said Mrs Atheling, hastily. “He is very reasonable, Miss Willsie; he gives his meaning—it is not out of opposition. He has always a good reason for what he does—he is a very reasonable boy.”

“And if there’s one thing I object to,” said Miss Willsie, “it’s the assurance of these monkeys with their reasons. When we were young, we were ill bairns, doubtless, like other folk; but if I had dared to make my excuses, pity me! There is Harry, now, will set up his face to me as grand as a Lord of Session; and Marian this very last night making her argument about these two spoiled babies of yours, as if she knew better than me! Misbehaviour’s natural to youth. I can put up with that, but I cannot away with their reasons. Such things are not for me.”

“Very true—so true, Miss Willsie,” said Mrs Tavistock, who was a sentimental and sighing widow. “There is my niece, quite an example. I am sadly nervous, you know; and that rude girl will ‘prove’ to me, as she calls it, that no thief could get into the house, though I know they try the back-kitchen window every night.”

“If there’s one thing I’m against,” said Miss Willsie, solemnly, “it’s that foolish fright about thieves—thieves! Bless me, what would the ragamuffins do here? A man may be a robber, but that’s no to say he’s an idiot; and a wise man would never put his life or his freedom in jeopardy for what he could get in Bellevue.”

Mrs Tavistock was no match for Miss Willsie, so she prudently abstained from a rejoinder. A large old china basin full of wallflowers stood under a grim portrait, and between a couple of huge old silver candlesticks upon the mantelpiece; Miss Willsie’s ancient tea-service, at present glittering upon the table, was valuable and massive silver: nowhere else in Bellevue was there so much “plate” as in Killiecrankie Lodge; and this was perfectly well known to the nervous widow. “I am sure I wonder at your courage, Miss Willsie; but then you have a gentleman in the house, which makes a great difference,” said Mrs Tavistock, woefully. Mrs Tavistock was one of those proper and conscientious ladies who make a profession of their widowhood, and are perpetually executing a moral suttee to the edification of all beholders. “I was never nervous before. Ah, nobody knows what a difference it makes to me!”

“Young folk are a troublesome handful. Where are the girls—what are they doing with Harry?” said Miss Willsie. “Harry’s a lad for any kind of antics, but you’ll no see Foggo demeaning himself. Foggo writes poems and letters to the papers: they tell me that in his own country he’s a very rising young man.”

“He looks intellectual. What a pleasure, Miss Willsie, to you!” said the widow, with delightful sympathy.

“If there’s one thing I like worse than another, it’s your writing young men,” said Miss Willsie, vehemently. “I lighted on a paper this very day, that the young leasing-maker had gotten from America, and what do you think I saw therein, but just a long account—everything about us—of my brother and me. My brother Robert Foggo, as decent a man as there is in the three kingdoms—and me! What do you think of that, Mrs Atheling?—even Harry in it, and the wallflowers! If it had not been for my brother, he never should have set foot in this house again.”

“Oh dear, how interesting!” said the widow. Mrs Tavistock turned her eyes to the other end of the room almost with excitement. She had not the least objection, for her own part, in the full pomp of sables and sentiment, to figure at full length in the Mississippi Gazette.

“And what was it for?” said Mrs Atheling, innocently; “for I thought it was only remarkable people that even the Americans put in the papers. Was it simply to annoy you?”

“Me!—do you think a lad like yon could trouble me?” exclaimed Miss Willsie. “He says, ‘All the scenes through which he has passed will be interesting to his readers.’ That’s in a grand note he sent me this morning—the impertinent boy! My poor Harry, though he’s often in mischief, and my brother thinks him unsteady—I would not give his little finger for half-a-dozen lads like yon.”

“But Harry is doing well now, Miss Willsie?” said Mrs Atheling. There was a faint emphasis on the now which proved that Harry had not always done well.

“Ay,” said Miss Willsie, drily; “and so Chairles has settled to his business—that’s aye a comfort. If there’s one thing that troubles me, it is to see young folk growing up in idleness; I pity them, now, that are genteel and have daughters. What are you going to do, Mrs Atheling, with these girls of yours?”

Mrs Atheling’s eyes sought them out with fond yet not untroubled observation. There was Marian’s beautiful head before the other window, looking as if it had arrested and detained the sunbeams, long ago departed in the west; and there was Agnes, graceful, animated, and intelligent, watching, with an affectionate and only half-conscious admiration, her sister’s beauty. Their mother smiled to herself and sighed. Even her anxiety, looking at them thus, was but another name for delight.

“Agnes,” said Marian at the other window, half whispering, half aloud—“Agnes! Harry says Mr Endicott has published a book.”

With a slight start and a slight blush Agnes turned round. Mr Foggo S. Endicott was tall, very thin, had an extremely lofty mien, and a pair of spectacles. He was eight-and-twenty, whiskerless, sallow, and by no means handsome: he held his thin head very high, and delivered his sentiments into the air when he spoke, but rarely bent from his altitude to address any one in particular. But he heard the whisper in a moment: in his very elbows, as you stood behind him, you could see the sudden consciousness. He perceived, though he did not look at her, the eager, bright, blushing, half-reverential glance of Agnes, and, conscious to his very finger-points, raised his thin head to its fullest elevation, and pretended not to hear.

Agnes blushed: it was with sudden interest, curiosity, reverence, made more personal and exciting by her own venture. Nothing had been heard yet of this venture, though it was nearly a month since Charlie took it to Mr Burlington, and the young genius looked with humble and earnest attention upon one who really had been permitted to make his utterance to the ear of all the world. He had published a book; he was a real genuine printed author. The lips of Agnes parted with a quick breath of eagerness; she looked up at him with a blush on her cheek, and a light in her eye. A thrill of wonder and excitement came over her: would people by-and-by regard herself in the same light?

“Oh, Mr Endicott!—is it poems?” said Agnes, shyly, and with a deepening colour. The simple girl was almost as much embarrassed asking him about his book, as if she had been asking about the Transatlantic lady of this Yankee young gentleman’s love.

“Oh!” said Mr Endicott, discovering suddenly that she addressed him—“yes. Did you speak to me?—poems?—ah! some little fugitive matters, to be sure. One has no right to refuse to publish, when everybody comes to know that one does such things.”

“Refuse?—no, indeed; I think not,” said Agnes, in spite of herself feeling very much humbled, and speaking very low. This was so elevated a view of the matter, and her own was so commonplace a one, that the poor girl was completely crestfallen. She so anxious to get into print; and this bonâ fide author, doubtless so very much her superior, explaining how he submitted, and could not help himself! Agnes was entirely put down.

“Yes, really one ought not to keep everything for one’s own private enjoyment,” said the magnanimous Mr Endicott, speaking very high up into the air with his cadenced voice. “I do not approve of too much reserve on the part of an author myself.”

“And what are they about, Mr Endicott?” asked Marian, with respect, but by no means so reverentially as Agnes. Mr Endicott actually looked at Marian; perhaps it was because of her very prosaic and improper question, perhaps for the sake of the beautiful face.

“About!” said the poet, with benignant disdain. “No, I don’t approve of narrative poetry; it’s after the time. My sonnets are experiences. I live them before I write them; that is the true secret of poetry in our enlightened days.”

Agnes listened, much impressed and cast down. She was far too simple to perceive how much superior her natural bright impulse, spontaneous and effusive, was to this sublime concentration. Agnes all her life long had never lived a sonnet; but she was so sincere and single-minded herself, that, at the first moment of hearing it, she received all this nonsense with unhesitating faith. For she had not yet learned to believe in the possibility of anybody, save villains in books, saying anything which they did not thoroughly hold as true.

So Agnes retired a little from the conversation. The young genius began to take herself to task, and was much humiliated by the contrast. Why had she written that famous story, now lying storm-stayed in the hands of Mr Burlington? Partly to please herself—partly to please Mamma—partly because she could not help it. There was no grand motive in the whole matter. Agnes looked with reverence at Mr Endicott, and sat down in a corner. She would have been completely conquered if the sublime American had been content to hold his peace.

But this was the last thing which occurred to Mr Endicott. He continued his utterances, and the discouraged girl began to smile. She was no judge of character, but she began to be able to distinguish nonsense when she heard it. This was very grand nonsense on the first time of hearing, and Agnes and Marian, we are obliged to confess, were somewhat annoyed when Mamma made a movement of departure. They kept very early hours in Bellevue, and before ten o’clock all Miss Willsie’s guests had said good-night to Killiecrankie Lodge.