Читать книгу The Days of My Life: An Autobiography - Mrs. Oliphant - Страница 5

But when I went to lay aside my bonnet, I found a room prepared for me, prettier, if that were possible, than the pretty chamber at Cottiswoode, where Alice had tended me all my life. The white draperies were so white, and full, and soft—the pretty chintz hangings were so fresh with their new bands of ribbons, and there was so much care and tenderness in the hands which had restored my old room perfect and unbroken, yet made it brighter than ever, that I clung to Alice with an April face where the tears had somehow lost their bitterness, and the smile its pride. Now and then in my life, I have found out suddenly, in a moment, of how little importance external things were to me. The conviction came upon my mind at this instant, like a sunbeam. What did it matter to me standing here in my triumphant youthfulness, with my father to be loved and cared for, and Alice to love and care for me—what did it matter who lost or who won such outside and external matters as houses and lands? I threw off my mantle upon the kind arm of Alice, and danced away to make tea for my father. In proportion to the depth of my sadness at leaving Cottiswoode, was the height of my exhilaration now to find another home. We had expected this to be a very dreary evening—instead of that I had seldom been so happy, so vivacious, so daring, in my girl’s talk; and there sat my father, his face brightening in the firelight, smiling at my boldness, my enthusiasms, my denunciations, my girlish superlative emotion. When tea was over, he fell into a fit of musing, and was not to be disturbed, I knew—and then I examined the room with its wainscot pannels, its carved mantel-shelf, and its pannel pictures, hard flat portraits, which had no pretension to the roundness or the breadth of life, but were as level as the Cambridgeshire flats, and almost as much like each other. And then I went to the further window, and coiled myself up upon the bench within the curtains, to solace myself with my own thoughts. The garden lay dark beneath, with shadowy bare trees here and there, lifting up their branches to the sky, and some fantastic little green-house, or summer-house, half way down, showing a dull glimmer of glass under the boughs. But insensibly my eyes turned from the garden and the darkness, to count the scattered lights in the windows of this dark building, which marked its embrasures upon the sky at my right hand. A light in a window is a strange lure to imagination—I watched them with interest and pleasure—they were unknown, yet they were neighbors—and it was pleasant from hearing the wind without, and seeing the dark, to turn upon the glimmering tapers with a certain friendly warmth and satisfaction, as though some one had said good-night.

And so we were settled to our new beginning, and our new home.