Читать книгу Uncle Piper of Piper's Hill - Tasma - Страница 7

Table of Contents

"My generous brother is of gentle kind." --POPE

WHEN Margaret declared that her sister should have been born in a palace, she might have added the proviso that the palace should be under an Eastern sky, and that it should be provided, moreover, with the silken hangings, the arabesques, the perfumes, the gold-fretted lattice-work so wrought into our imagination by Eastern tales. The house of Devonshire can show, as history has already attested, more than one princely vagrant among its ancestors, whose wanderings among the Moors and Turks three centuries ago may have had a remote share in tinging Sara's blood with an infusion of the lymph of an Eastern odalisque. Another trait that savoured of Orientalism was the pleasure with which she listened to anything conveyed in the form of a story. There was the secret, in the first instance, of her rapt attention on deck when Mr. Lydiat had recounted to the children, through the best part of a tropical afternoon, how Joseph rose to greatness among the swarthy Egyptians, and justified the somewhat egotistical dreams of his boyhood. For Sara was given to dreaming too. And what pleasant dreams she fostered, what dimly outlined shapes of all that is costliest and loveliest floated through her brain as she lay on her berth with half-closed eyes, the green-hued light playing about her bare shoulders, her body gently swayed by the dip of the vessel when the wind blew stronger. Ah me! Whero is the physiognomist whose discernment has not been set at naught by a quality altogether superficial? Here was Mr. Lydiat convinced that you might have looked into Sara's mind as into a crystal, and seen your sublimest inspirations reflected, with the lustre of her own purity upon them besides--and all, I firmly believe, because she had well-cut eyes--whereas, no one would have been more disconcerted than Sara herself had the dreams in which she did the fullest justice to her own power, and applied it to the most thoroughly practical purposes, been rendered public and handed down, like Joseph's dreams, to posterity.

But now the time for dreaming was drawing to a close. The future, that is so plastic in our hands until the time approaches when it becomes a reality too solid to be kneaded, was stretched before her in the guise of the Australian shore she could already discern in the distance. Margaret was folding away the shirt-fronts with reassuring words, and actually talking as if the maltreated linen would be washed, starched, and ironed within a week; and all the time that she was reassuring her mother, she continued to ply her with questions.

"Three hardly touched! I think, mamma, you took alarm at this one, and it's so frayed it's hardly worth washing. Besides, I know papa will go back to his old extravagances now. Two white shirts every day! I wonder whether Uncle Piper wears white shirts. I've got a sort of idea that everybody in Australia, except the natives, goes about in top-boots and a red shirt. How long is it exactly, mother dear, since you last saw Uncle Piper?"

"Oh, my dear!" said Mrs. Cavendish, glancing at the berth where Sara was lying in luxurious languor, "it's many a long day. It was before I married your pa, so you can tell! I was only a slip of a girl, as you might say--not so stout as Sara there!"

Sara lay immovable, but her eyes flashed as she raised her lids. It was evident that the odalisque was wroth. Indeed, if anything roused Sara's ire, it was the suggestion that the word "stout" could fittingly be applied to what in French would graciously be termed "opulence" of her form--the more so, that she had an uneasy dread of its becoming strictly appropriate.

"Did he go away before you were engaged to papa?" persisted Margaret.

"Stop a bit," said Mrs. Cavendish, narrowing her eyes in the effort at recollection, like short-sighted people who aim at bringing a distant object within range of their vision. "Was I keeping company with your pa at the time?" A charming colour rose to her still unwrinkled cheek as she spoke. "No," triumphantly. "I hadn't so much as met your pa. That's why your Uncle Piper never saw him."

"But I suppose you wrote and told him as soon as you were engaged. He was like a sort of guardian, wasn't he?"

"He was father, mother, and brother all in one!" said Mrs. Cavendish warmly. "I wouldn't hurt your pa's feelings by saying so, but there's brothers and brothers. It didn't take me long to find that much out. Why--after we were married--your pa had an invite to go over and stop at his brother's for a couple of days. He was to stay over the Sunday, I remember, and he was to bring me along with him, and, oh dear, what a preparation and a drilling I did have, to be sure! Well, my dear, I'd as lief have been with strangers. Your pa bid me mind and remember I was to call his brother 'My lord!'; Fancy that to a brother! And I wasn't to forget the bishop's house was a 'palace.' A pretty palace, to my mind! There was plenty of show for anybody who's taken with that sort of thing, but not much else, and the quality of the meat such as I wouldn't like to set before my brother, if I were twenty bishops."

"What did Uncle Piper say when he heard you were married?" asked Sara, from her berth, to whom her mother's impressions of the hollowness of episcopal magnificence were not new enough to be interesting.

"He sent me a letter like a brother who was fond of you might be expected to write to a person," replied Mrs. Cavendish, the slight confusion of persons apparent in her answer resulting from the strength of her sentiment. "He couldn't be sending me money, you see, for he hadn't begun the butchering just yet."

Sara's eyes opened wide with disdain.

"Mamma," she exclaimed, with the first inflexion that spoke of animation in her voice, "do you want to turn me against Uncle Piper before I see him, and make me hate to hear his name? Because, unless you do, you won't allude to that disgusting part of his life again!"

"Why, my dear," answered Mrs. Cavendish, unruffled, "I might have remembered that you took after your pa, if I'd thought of it. You see, I was brought up to think no manner of work a disgrace. Never mind how you soil your hands, so long as you keep your heart clean."

"I think with you, mother, in my heart," said Margaret, patting the shirt--fronts pensively; "but I'm not so brave as you. I'd far rather Uncle Piper had never kept a butcher's shop. It's not that I don't respect butchers--as butchers--but to be on visiting terms with them seems such a different thing. And it's such a long time since Uncle Piper kept a shop of any sort. I'd rather forget about it if I could. I dare say it's cowardly, but I can't help it!"

"I'm sure, my dear," said her mother, "I don't want to rake it up against your wishes. But I believe it was the butche--it was that, I should say--that brought him his money. For after he had been two years at it he gave us a lift that was the saving, as I might say, of your pa."

"How was it, mamma?"

"Well, we'd been married close upon two years, and your pa had a little work in the post-office. It always went against me to see him work. I'd have waited on him hand and foot, to save him from it; but folks must live, and I didn't see the way to make both ends meet. You were on the road then, Margaret; and what with joy at thinking of what was coming, and grief that I had to look twice before I could lay out as much as a penny in a little frilling for your caps, I was nearly out of my mind. And then there was your pa to be kept in the dark. I made sure he was fretting his life away, and one day there wasn't actually enough to eat in the house! So he went to his brother, the 'bishop'"--Mrs. Cavendish could always point the delivery of this word by a finely ironical intonation--"and he got the loan of fifteen pounds; but I know where our silver teapot went the very same day, and my time drawing near as well. I was so down-hearted, it came to my thinking whether it wasn't selfish to be rejoicing over bringing a helpless little body into such a cold world. And if I should die and leave it! I could have broken down then." Margaret detected a tremor in her mother's voice, and caressed her head furtively as she passed by with the shirt-fronts. "But it wouldn't do to lose heart, and while I was thinking it over comes a knock at the door, and the postman gives me in a letter all covered with postmarks. No sooner did I open it, with my hands all shaking, as you may guess, than out drops a draft for a hundred and fifty pounds!"

"How you must have jumped!" said Sara, the odalisque part of her too much interested in the story to allow her to sulk any longer at the former offence to her susceptibilities.

"I didn't feel like jumping, so much as like going down on my knees," said poor Mrs. Cavendish. "To think a bit o' paper like that can make the whole world different! I never cried for joy but that once in my life."

"And what did the letter say?" asked Margaret.

"Well, it was all a surprise from the beginning. Your Uncle Piper made the butche--I mean, he was getting along finely; but what gave me the biggest start of all was to hear that he'd got married. And his wife was the same way as me. I'd wrote your uncle word about myself some time back, and here was his answer. He was feathering his nest for the little one that was to come, that was what he said; but he had it in his mind that my little one should have as fine a christening cup as his, so he sent me the hundred and fifty in that sort of way, you see. . He didn't know we were more in the way of wanting bread than christening cups!"

"So I am about the same age as my cousin George, mamma; is that it?" asked Margaret.

"That's it," said her mother; "turned seven-and-twenty last Michaelmas."

"Poor old Maggie!" thought Sara, in the superb insolence of her nineteen years--an age apt to look incredulously upon the power of attractions verging upon thirty. "She's much too good to be considered on the shelf, and she's never had an offer!"

"Seven-and-twenty!" repeated Margaret, the ready flush spreading itself over her face. There was nothing unmaidenly in the involuntary regret expressed in her tone. She did not even translate such regrets as a more self-absorbed person would have translated them, or perceive that they were the inevitable consequence of finding the few years which mark an ordinary woman's period of power slipping away without any of the tribute which seems of right to belong to them.

"Your cousin's a bit older than you, though," remarked Mrs. Cavendish, hopefully. "He takes after his poor mother, your Uncle Piper says--an ailing body, from what I can make out. She never had but the one child all the years they were married."

"And when did she die?" asked Sara, to whom this picture of her cousin George did not present itself in a romantic light. A puny little fellow she could imagine him to have been, playing around the blue block on the sanded floor of his father's shop. It was many years ago, it was true, since the shop and all its associations had been swept away. Yet she had no doubt that her cousin could still remember how he had watched his father chopping the meat in one of those shocking blouses that butchers seem to affect by way of bringing into relief the universal red of their surroundings.

"She died the same year your pa was down with the fever," said Mrs. Cavendish, accustomed to make a sort of ready-reckoner of domestic visitations of all kinds. "It's a good ten or eleven years back. Your uncle took it to heart sadly"--

"But he married again very soon," suggested Margaret.

"It's my opinion," said her mother, oracularly, "he was worked upon to marry again. I've never had much opinion of widows myself. When I heard how your Uncle Piper had found a real lady to do his housekeeping, I said to your pa, I said, 'We all know what that'll come to;' and sure enough, before the year was out, he writes me word he's married."

"What was the widow's name?" inquired Sara.

"I don't rightly remember just now; your Uncle Piper was pretty close about it at the time. She didn't keep her new name long, anyhow, the poor thing! Married and dead, all in ten months!"

"And she left a child, didn't she, mother?" asked Margaret.

"Yes; she left a child to your uncle. She had one, besides, to her first husband."

"Shall we see that one?" said Sara, in a tone that did not promise much cordiality. "She's no sort of connection of ours, I'm glad to say. Is she grown up?"

"She might be two or three and twenty, I should say," said Mrs. Cavendish, with another contraction of her eyes, induced by the effort of making a calculation to which no family affliction could be affixed as a guide. "Now just to show you what a good heart your Uncle Piper's got! It's my belief he's provided altogether for that girl, and I don't think he took to her from the first, somehow. He was very short in his letters about her all along. 'Right enough outside,' he said, 'but a queer lot within.' Those were his very words, just as he wrote them down."

"Right enough outside!" echoed Sara, the idea of possible rivalry never once having intruded itself as an unpleasant possibility before. "What could he mean, mamma? Why, she was a child, wasn't she? She couldn't have been more than eleven or twelve when Uncle Piper first saw her. How could he tell what she would be like?"

"He hasn't said much about her since, anyway," replied Mrs. Cavendish; "nor yet about his own little girl!"

"Another relation!" exclaimed Sara, disconsolately; "I'd forgotten all about that child. Uncle Piper--and two cousins--and that other strange girl. I wish we hadn't come."

She turned round on the pillow and prepared herself for a doze, as if nothing short of instant sleep could fortify her against the crushing discovery of the number of her kin in the antipodes. She would have found it difficult, nevertheless, precisely to define her discontent. Uncle Piper, perhaps, in consideration of his wealth and of his good age--the most graceful accompaniment to wealth possible to a parvenu uncle--was supportable. And her cousin George--though she could not divest herself of the unpleasant impression she had conceived of a full-grown sickly man, inured during his infancy to a discriminating taste in butcher's meat--as the only son of the parvenu uncle, was worth some share of cousinly regard. But further she would not go.

The presence of that interloper, whose "fair outside" had been so remarkable at an age when a girl's appearance is rarely noticeable, was clearly uncalled for; and the juvenile cousin, the legacy of Uncle Piper's second wife, was a disagreeable and tangible reminder of Sara's own connection with the interloper. She established the relationship with painful exactitude as she closed her eyes, reminding herself that the interloper's half-sister was her own cousin. It was hateful, looked at in any light. And Margaret had no comprehension! She would "cousinise" with them all, Sara knew--as though Uncle Piper had never weighed out steaks and chops, and the Cavendish crest did not belong to the house of Devonshire. An indistinct vision of the place she should rightly have occupied began to shape itself to her vagrant imagination. She could hear her mother saying, in a voice that seemed to come from the other end of the ship, "Your pa'll miss his rubber, I'm afraid!" Then she fell to regretting, after a sleepy fashion, that her father or her other uncle, the bishop, had not thought of emigrating, instead of Uncle Piper, when gold was found in Australia. Before she could find any satisfactory reason for this almost culpable oversight on their parts she fell into a doze, and, carrying out in her dreams--

"Which are the children of an idle brain. Begot of nothing but vain fantasy,"--

the ideas, too vague to be defined, that had just assailed her, fancied that the little ship presented itself to her as a type of the great world without. Only Captain Chuck, who, without conscious disloyalty to a substantial spouse in London, was foolishly helpless under a glance from Sara's eyes, became in her dreams the Lord High Admiral. And Father O'Donnell, whose proselytising zeal it was, perhaps, that made him so eager to lose his "Bon jour, Philippine," to the younger Miss Cavendish, as an excuse for presenting her with costly miniatures of saints and martyrs, became converted into the Pope. As for the grave-eyed and reverend Mr. Lydiat, the plum-coloured vest made way for the pontificals of an archbishop. I don't know that Sara shared the primateship with him in her dream. She was a princess now, and the Lord High Admiral, the Pope, and the Primate were just as amenable as the skipper, the parish priest, and the curate; and through them Sara was conscious of holding sway over millions of souls. It was more of a yielding to fancies suggested by the universality of her power than of a dream that Sara experienced, and I for one am not prepared to say how much might have been inspiration and how much folly, seeing that that part of man's nature to which Sara's charm appealed is much the same in the loftiest and the lowliest, and if chance had brought her into contact with the head of an empire, instead of the head of a small merchant-ship, she might have swayed the destiny of a nation.