She is very young — is she not?”
“Past fifty, I think.”
“Hélas! She’s vary old, then. Is she rich?”
“I don’t know. She has a place in Derbyshire.”
“Derbyshire — that is one of your English counties, is it not?”
“Oh yes, Madame,” I answered, laughing. “I have said it to you twice since you came;” and I gabbled through the chief towns and rivers as catalogued in my geography.
“Bah! to be sure — of course, cheaile. And is she your relation?”
“Papa’s first cousin.”
“Won’t you present-a me, pray? — I would so like!”
Madame had fallen into the English way of liking people with titles, as perhaps foreigners would if titles implied the sort of power they do generally with us.
“Certainly, Madame.”
“You will not forget?”
“Oh no.”
Madame reminded me twice, in the course of the evening, of my promise. She was very eager on this point. But it is a world of disappointment, influenza, and rheumatics; and next morning Madame was prostrate in her bed, and careless of all things but flannel and James’s powder.
Madame was désolée; but she could not raise her head. She only murmured a question.
“For ‘ow long time, dear, will Lady Knollys remain?”
“A very few days, I believe.”
“Hélas! ‘ow onlucky! maybe to-morrow I shall be better. Ouah! my ear. The laudanum, dear cheaile!”
And so our conversation for that time ended, and Madame buried her head in her old red cashmere shawl.
Chapter 9.
Monica Knollys
PUNCTUALLY LADY KNOLLYS arrived. She was accompanied by her nephew, Captain Oakley.
They arrived a little before dinner; just in time to get to their rooms and dress. But Mary Quince enlivened my toilet with eloquent descriptions of the youthful Captain whom she had met in the gallery, on his way to his room, with the servant, and told me how he stopped to let her pass, and how “he smiled so ‘ansom.”
I was very young then, you know, and more childish even than my years; but this talk of Mary Quince’s interested me, I must confess, considerably. I was painting all sort of portraits of this heroic soldier, while affecting, I am afraid, a hypocritical indifference to her narration, and I know I was very nervous and painstaking about my toilet that evening. When I went down to the drawing-room, Lady Knollys was there, talking volubly to my father as I entered — a woman not really old, but such as very young people fancy aged — energetic, bright, saucy, dressed handsomely in purple satin, with a good deal of lace, and a rich point — I know not how to call it — not a cap, a sort of head-dress — light and simple, but grand withal, over her greyish, silken hair.
Rather tall, by no means stout, on the whole a good firm figure with something kindly in her look. She got up, quite like a young person, and coming quickly to meet me with a smile —
“My young cousin!” she cried, and kissed me on both cheeks. “You know who I am? Your cousin Monica — Monica Knollys — and very glad, dear, to see you, though she has not set eyes on you since you were no longer than that paper-knife. Now come here to the lamp, for I must look at you. Who is she like? Let me see. Like your poor mother, I think, my dear; but you’ve the Aylmer nose — yes — not a bad nose either, and, come! very good eyes, upon my life — yes, certainly something of her poor mother — not a bit like you, Austin.”
My father gave her a look as near a smile as I had seen there for a long time, shrewd, cynical, but kindly too, and said he —
“So much the better, Monica, eh?”
“It was not for me to say — but you know, Austin, you always were an ugly creature. How shocked and indignant the little girl looks! You must not be vexed, you loyal little woman, with Cousin Monica for telling the truth. Papa was and will be ugly all his days. Come, Austin, dear, tell her — is not it so?”
“What! depose against myself! That’s not English law, Monica.”
“Well, maybe not; but if the child won’t believe her own eyes, how is she to believe me? She has long, pretty hands — you have — and very nice feet too. How old is she?”
“How old, child?” said my father to me, transferring the question.
She recurred again to my eyes.
“That is the true grey — large, deep, soft — very peculiar. Yes, dear, very pretty — long lashes, and such bright tints! You’ll be in the Book of Beauty, my dear, when you come out, and have all the poet people writing verses to the tip of your nose — and a very pretty little nose it is!”
I must mention here how striking was the change in my father’s spirit while talking and listening to his odd and voluble old Cousin Monica. Reflected from bygone associations, there had come a glimmer of something, not gaiety, indeed, but like an appreciation of gaiety. The gloom and inflexibility were gone, and there was an evident encouragement and enjoyment of the incessant sallies of his bustling visitor.
How morbid must have been the tendencies of his habitual solitude, I think, appeared from the evident thawing and brightening that accompanied even this transient gleam of human society. I was not a companion — more childish than most girls of my age, and trained in all his whimsical ways, never to interrupt a silence, or force his thoughts by unexpected question or remark out of their monotonous or painful channel.
I was as much surprised at the good-humour with which he submitted to his cousin’s saucy talk; and, indeed, just then those black-panelled and pictured walls, and that quaint, misshapen room, seemed to have exchanged their stern and awful character for something wonderfully pleasanter to me, notwithstanding the unpleasantness of the personal criticism to which the plain-spoken lady chose to subject me.
Just at that moment Captain Oakley joined us. He was my first actual vision of that awful and distant world of fashion, of whose splendours I had already read something in the three-volumed gospel of the circulating library.
Handsome, elegant, with features almost feminine, and soft, wavy, black hair, whiskers and moustache, he was altogether such a knight as I had never beheld, or even fancied, at Knowl — a hero of another species, and from the region of the demigods. I did not then perceive that coldness of the eye, and cruel curl of the voluptuous lip — only a suspicion, yet enough to indicate the profligate man, and savouring of death unto death.
But I was young, and had not yet the direful knowledge of good and evil that comes with years; and he was so very handsome, and talked in a way that was so new to me, and was so much more charming than the well-bred converse of the humdrum county families with whom I had occasionally sojourned for a week at a time.
It came out incidentally that his leave of absence was to expire the day after to-morrow. A Lilliputian pang of disappointment followed this announcement. Already I was sorry to lose him. So soon we begin to make a property of what pleases us.
I was shy, but not awkward. I was flattered by the attention of this amusing, perhaps rather fascinating, young man of the world; and he plainly addressed himself with diligence to amuse and please me. I dare say there was more effort than I fancied in bringing his talk down to my humble level, and interesting me and making me laugh about people whom I had never heard of before, than I then suspected.
Cousin Knollys meanwhile was talking to papa. It was just the conversation that suited a man so silent as habit had made him, for her frolic