Читать книгу Beau Ideal - Percival Christopher Wren - Страница 20

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It was a dead hand that released Mary and me from the irksome dependence of our captivity. I do not know whether the hand provided “the means to do ill deeds” in providing us with the opportunity to leave our Father and our home, but it certainly gave us the power to choose our paths in life, and we promptly chose the one that led straightest out into the world of men.

The said hand was that of a Bad Old Man, a meretricious ornament of the city of San Francisco, a gay dog, a buck, a lover of Life, who was, alas, my Father’s cousin, once his partner, and known to us from our earliest days as Uncle Joe. He had all our Father’s strength of will and character; his ability, grit and forcefulness; his uncanny business skill and his marked individuality. But he had none of his fervid piety; none of his Old Testamental patriarchal self-importance; none of his self-righteous domineering violence; and, I fear, but little of his moral integrity, virtue, and highly-conscious rectitude.

In spite of this latter lamentable truth, we children loved him, as our Mother had loved him—and as Father hated him. He corrupted us with treats, gifts, sympathy, and support; he took our part when, as so frequently happened, we were in disgrace; and he endeavoured to sow in our young breasts the seeds of revolt and rebellion against what he considered harshness and oppression.

For some reason I was his favourite. I amused him intensely, and he apparently saw in me merits and virtues which were hidden from other eyes. And the misspelling of a word in a letter that I wrote to him, changed my life and Mary’s life, the lives of my Father and of Janey, and indeed of very many other people—for it was the cause of his leaving me a very large sum of money indeed, the money that was my ransom from bondage—and Mary’s ransom too.

It had been my innocent and disinterested custom to Write a letter to Uncle Joe, upon the occasion of his birthday. On one of these anniversaries, I, being some seven or eight years of age—and having just discovered the expression “hoary old age”—wrote my annual letter and concluded by wishing him eventual safe arrival at such penultimate years. But having acquired the phrase by ear and not by eye, I misspelt a word.

The hoary sinner was delighted beyond measure, roared with laughter, shouted with joyous amusement, and swore then and there that he would make me his heir and leave me every last red cent of which he died possessed! He then rushed forth brandishing the letter, in search of all to whom he might impart the jest, and for days and weeks the bars of San Francisco’s clubs, restaurants, saloons and hostelries echoed with laughter and my Uncle’s shame.

Such conduct gives the measure of the wickedness of the man who had been a thorn in the side of my Father—until the day on which the latter felt that he could prosper without him, that Mammon of Unrighteousness, and cast him forth; the man who had been our dear, dear friend; the man to whom Mary and I owed our salvation.

And at this critical moment he died—and he left me all his money.

Of course, what was mine was Mary’s, and at the earliest moment we fared forth together, “to seek our fortunes”—though not in the material sense, and to see the World.

A drop of regret in the cup of our joy was the fact that we found it utterly and completely impossible to induce Janey to come with us. She would not “leave Father”—the simple truth being that she lacked the courage to tell him that she was going with us, the courage to let us tell him that she was going with us, the courage even to slip away with us, or to run away and join us after our departure.

There was nothing for it but to leave her at home, though with the most urgent entreaties to join us at any time that she could induce Father to permit her to come, or pluck up sufficient courage to come unpermitted....

Our idea was, of course, to make straight for Paris—the name of which place, Mary declared, was but an abbreviation of the word “Paradise”—and after sating ourselves with its wonders, make the grand tour of Europe. After that we were going to settle down in Paris, and I was going to obtain employment at our Embassy, for I had no liking for the profession of rich-man’s-son and idler. Mary was going to keep house for me—but I doubted that it would be my house that she would keep for very long, and so I think did she.... Anyhow, that was roughly our programme, and, after what seemed an age of delay, we set forth, without the paternal blessing, to see how far we should carry out the scheme.