THE ATHELINGS
OR
THE THREE GIFTS
BY MARGARET OLIPHANT
“I’ the cave wherein they bow, their thoughts do hit
The roofs of palaces; and nature prompts them,
In simple and low things, to prince it much
Beyond the trick of others.”
CYMBELINE
IN THREE VOLUMES
VOL. I.
WILLIAM BLACKWOOD AND SONS
EDINBURGH AND LONDON
MDCCCLVII
ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED IN BLACKWOOD’S MAGAZINE.
THE ATHELINGS
BOOK I.--BELLEVUE
THE ATHELINGS.
BOOK I.--CHAPTER I.
IN THE STREET.
One of them is very pretty--you can see that at a glance: under the
simple bonnet, and through the thin little veil, which throws no cloud
upon its beauty, shines the sweetest girl’s face imaginable. It is only
eighteen years old, and not at all of the heroical cast, but it
brightens like a passing sunbeam through all the sombre line of
passengers, and along the dull background of this ordinary street. There
is no resisting that sweet unconscious influence: people smile when they
pass her, unawares; it is a natural homage paid involuntarily to the
young, sweet, innocent loveliness, unconscious of its own power. People
have smiled upon her all her days; she thinks it is because everybody is
amiable, and seeks no further for a cause.
The other one is not very pretty; she is twenty: she is taller, paler,
not so bright of natural expression, yet as far from being commonplace
as can be conceived. They are dressed entirely alike, thriftily dressed
in brown merino, with little cloaks exact to the same pattern, and
bonnets, of which every bow of ribbon outside, and every little pink
rosebud within, is a complete fac-simile of its sister bud and bow. They
have little paper-parcels in their hands each of them; they are about
the same height, and not much different in age; and to see these twin
figures, so entirely resembling each other, passing along at the same
inconsistent youthful pace, now rapid and now lingering, you would
scarcely be prepared for the characteristic difference in their looks
and in their minds.
It is a spring afternoon, cheery but cold, and lamps and shop-windows
are already beginning to shine through the ruddy twilight. This is a
suburban street, with shops here and there, and sombre lines of houses
between. The houses are all graced with “front gardens,” strips of
ground enriched with a few smoky evergreens, and flower-plots ignorant
of flowers; and the shops are of a highly miscellaneous character,
adapted to the wants of the locality. Vast London roars and travails far
away to the west and to the south. This is Islington, a mercantile and
clerkish suburb. The people on the omnibuses--and all the omnibuses are
top-heavy with outside passengers--are people from the City; and at this
time in the afternoon, as a general principle, everybody is going home.
The two sisters, by a common consent, come to a sudden pause: it is
before a toy-shop; and it is easy to discover by the discussion which
follows that there are certain smaller people who form an important part
of the household at home.
“Take this, Agnes,” says the beautiful sister; “see how pretty! and they
could both play with this; but only Bell would care for the doll.”
“It is Bell’s turn,” said Agnes; “Beau had the last one. This we could
dress ourselves, for I know mamma has a piece over of their last new
frocks. The blue eyes are the best. Stand at the door, Marian, and look
for my father, till I buy it; but tell me first which they will like
best.”
This was not an easy question. The sisters made a long and anxious
survey of the window, varied by occasional glances behind them “to see
if papa was coming,” and concluded by a rapid decision on Agnes’s part
in favour of one of the ugliest of the dolls. But still Papa did not
come; and the girls were proceeding on their way with the doll, a soft
and shapeless parcel, added to their former burdens, when a rapid step
came up behind them, and a clumsy boy plunged upon the shoulder of the
elder.
“Oh, Charlie!” exclaimed Agnes in an aggrieved but undoubting tone. She
did not need to look round. This big young brother was unmistakable in
his salutations.
“I say, my father’s past,” said Charlie. “Won’t he be pleased to find
you two girls out? What do you wander about so late for? it’s getting
dark. I call that foolish, when you might be out, if you pleased, all
the day.”
“My boy, you do not know anything about it,” said the elder sister with
dignity; “and you shall go by yourself if you do not walk quietly.
There! people are looking at us; they never looked at us till you came.”
“Charlie is so handsome,” said Marian laughing, as they all turned a
corner, and, emancipated from the public observation, ran along the
quiet street, a straggling group, one now pressing before, and now
lagging behind. This big boy, however, so far from being handsome, was
strikingly the opposite. He had large, loose, ill-compacted limbs, like
most young animals of a large growth, and a face which might be called
clever, powerful, or good-humoured, but certainly was, without any
dispute, ugly. He was of dark complexion, had natural furrows in his
brow, and a mouth, wide with fun and happy temper at the present moment,
which could close with indomitable obstinacy when occasion served. No
fashion could have made Charlie Atheling fashionable; but his plain
apparel looked so much plainer and coarser than his sisters’, that it
had neither neatness nor grace to redeem its homeliness. He was
seventeen, tall, _big_, and somewhat clumsy, as unlike as possible to
the girls, who had a degree of natural and simple gracefulness not very
common in their sphere. Charlie’s masculine development was unequivocal;
he was a thorough _boy_ now, and would be a manful man.
“Charlie, boy, have you been thinking?” asked Agnes suddenly, as the
three once more relapsed into a sober pace, and pursued their homeward
way together. There was the faintest quiver of ridicule in the elder
sister’s voice, and Marian looked up for the answer with a smile. The
young gentleman gave some portentous hitches of his broad shoulders,
twisted his brow into ominous puckers, set his teeth--and at last burst
out with indignation and unrestrained vehemence--
“Have I been thinking?--to be sure! but I can’t make anything of it, if
I think for ever.”
“You are worse than a woman, Charlie,” said the pretty Marian; “you
never can make up your mind.”
“Stuff!” cried the big boy loudly; “it isn’t making up my mind, it’s
thinking what will do. You girls know nothing about it. I can’t see that
one thing’s better than another, for my part. One man succeeds and
another man’s a failure, and yet the one’s as good a fellow and as
clever to work as the other. I don’t know what it means.”
“So I suppose you will end with being misanthropical and doing nothing,”
said Agnes; “and all Charlie Atheling’s big intentions will burst, like
Beau’s soap-bubbles. I would not have that.”
“I won’t have that, and so you know very well,” said Charlie, who was by
no means indisposed for a quarrel. “You are always aggravating, you
girls--as if you knew anything about it! I’ll tell you what; I don’t
mind how it is, but I’m a man to be something, as sure as I live.”
“You are not a man at all, poor little Charlie--you are only a boy,”
said Marian.
“And we are none of us so sure to live that we should swear by it,” said
Agnes. “If you are to be something, you should speak better sense than
that.”
“Oh, a nice pair of tutors you are!” cried Master Charlie. “I’m bigger
than the two of you put together--and I’m a man. You may be as envious
as you like, but you cannot alter that.”
Now, though the girls laughed, and with great contempt scouted the idea
of being envious, it is not to be denied that some small morsel of envy
concerning masculine privileges lay in the elder sister’s heart. It was
said at home that Agnes was clever--this was her distinction in the
family; and Agnes, having a far-away perception of the fact, greatly
longed for some share of those wonderful imaginary advantages which
“opened all the world,” as she herself said, to a man’s ambition; she
coloured a little with involuntary excitement, while Marian’s sweet and
merry laughter still rang in her ear. Marian could afford to laugh--for
this beautiful child was neither clever nor ambitious, and had, in all
circumstances, the sweetest faculty of content.
“Well, Charlie, a man can do anything,” said Agnes; “_we_ are obliged to
put up with trifles. If I were a man, I should be content with nothing
less than the greatest--I know that!”
“Stuff!” answered the big boy once more; “you may romance about it as
you like, but I know better. Who is to care whether you are content or
not? You must be only what you can, if you were the greatest hero in the
world.”
“I do not know, for my part, what you are talking of,” said Marian. “Is
this all about what you are going to do, Charlie, and because you cannot
make up your mind whether you will be a clerk in papa’s office, or go to
old Mr Foggo’s to learn to be a lawyer? I don’t see what heroes have to
do with it either one way or other. You ought to go to your business
quietly, and be content. Why should _you_ be better than papa?”
The question was unanswerable. Charlie hitched his great shoulders, and
made marvellous faces, but replied nothing. Agnes went on steadily in a
temporary abstraction; Marian ran on in advance. The street was only
half-built--one of those quietest of surburban streets which are to be
found only in the outskirts of great towns. The solitary little houses,
some quite apart, some in pairs--detached and semi-detached, according
to the proper description--stood in genteel retirement within low walls
and miniature shrubberies. There was nothing ever to be seen in this
stillest of inhabited places--therefore it was called Bellevue: and the
inhabitants veiled their parlour windows behind walls and boarded
railings, lest their privacy should be invaded by the vulgar vision of
butcher, or baker, or green-grocer’s boy. Other eyes than those of the
aforesaid professional people never disturbed the composure of Laurel
Cottage and Myrtle Cottage, Elmtree Lodge and Halcyon House--wherefore
the last new house had a higher wall and a closer railing than any of
its predecessors; and it was edifying to observe everybody’s virtuous
resolution to see nothing where there was visibly nothing to see.
At the end of this closed-up and secluded place, one light, shining from
an unshuttered window, made a gleam of cheerfulness through the
respectable gloom. Here you could see shadows large and small moving
upon the white blind--could see the candles shifted about, and the
sudden reddening of the stirred fire. A wayfarer, when by chance there
was one, could scarcely fail to pause with a momentary sentiment of
neighbourship and kindness opposite this shining window. It was the only
evidence in the darkness of warm and busy human life. This was the home
of the three young Athelings--as yet the centre and boundary of all
their pleasures, and almost all their desires.