My uncle sate on one side the fireplace, my mother on the other; and
I, at a small table between them, prepared to note down the results of
their conference; for they had met in high council, to assess their
joint fortunes--determine what should be brought into the common stock,
and set apart for the civil list, and what should be laid aside as
a sinking fund. Now my mother, true woman as she was, had a womanly
love of show in her own quiet way--of making "a genteel figure" in the
eyes of the neighbourhood--of seeing that sixpence not only went as
far as sixpence ought to go, but that, in the going, it should emit
mild but imposing splendour--not, indeed, a gaudy flash--a startling
Borealian coruscation, which is scarcely within the modest and placid
idiosyncrasies of sixpence--but a gleam of gentle and benign light,
just to show where a sixpence had been, and allow you time to say,
"Behold," before
"The jaws of darkness did devour it up."
Thus, as I once before took occasion to apprise the reader, we had
always held a very respectable position in the neighbourhood round
our square brick house; been as sociable as my father's habits would
permit; given our little tea-parties, and our occasional dinners,
and, without attempting to vie with our richer associates, there had
always been so exquisite a neatness, so notable a house-keeping, so
thoughtful a disposition, in short, of all the properties indigenous
to a well-spent sixpence, in my mother's management, that there was
not an old maid within seven miles of us who did not pronounce our
tea-parties to be perfect; and the great Mrs Rollick, who gave forty
guineas a-year to a professed cook and housekeeper, used regularly,
whenever we dined at Rollick Hall, to call across the table to my
mother, (who therewith blushed up to her ears,) to apologise for the
strawberry jelly. It is true that when, on returning home, my mother
adverted to that flattering and delicate compliment, in a tone that
revealed the self-conceit of the human heart, my father--whether to
sober his Kitty's vanity into a proper and Christian mortification of
spirit, or from that strange shrewdness which belonged to him--would
remark that Mrs Rollick was of a querulous nature; that the compliment
was meant not to please my mother, but to spite the professed cook and
housekeeper, to whom the butler would be sure to repeat the invidious
apology.
In settling at the tower, and assuming the head of its establishment,
my mother was naturally anxious that, poor battered invalid though the
tower was, it should still put its best leg foremost. Sundry cards,
despite the thinness of the neighbourhood, had been left at the door;
various invitations, which my uncle had hitherto declined, had greeted
his occupation of the ancestral ruin, and had become more numerous
since the news of our arrival had gone abroad; so that my mother saw
before her a very suitable field for her hospitable accomplishments--a
reasonable ground for her ambition that the tower should hold up its
head, as became a tower that held the head of the family.
But not to wrong thee, O dear mother, as thou sittest there, opposite
the grim captain, so fair and so neat,--with thine apron as white,
and thy hair as trim and as sheen, and thy morning cap, with its
ribbons of blue, as coquettishly arranged as if thou hadst a fear that
the least negligence on thy part might lose thee the heart of thine
Austin--not to wrong thee by setting down to frivolous motives alone
thy feminine visions of the social amenities of life, I know that thine
heart, in its provident tenderness, was quite as much interested as
ever thy vanities could be, in the hospitable thoughts on which thou
wert intent. For, first and foremost, it was the wish of thy soul that
thine Austin might, as little as possible, be reminded of the change
in his fortunes,--might miss as little as possible those interruptions
to his abstracted scholarly moods, at which, it is true, he used to
fret and to pshaw and to cry Papæ! but which nevertheless always did
him good, and freshened up the stream of his thoughts. And, next, it
was the conviction of thine understanding that a little society, and
boon companionship, and the proud pleasure of showing his ruins, and
presiding at the hall of his forefathers, would take Roland out of
those gloomy reveries into which he still fell at times. And, thirdly,
for us young people, ought not Blanche to find companions in children
of her own sex and age? Already in those large black eyes there was
something melancholy and brooding, as there is in the eyes of all
children who live only with their elders; and for Pisistratus, with his
altered prospects, and the one great gnawing memory at his heart--which
he tried to conceal from himself, but which a mother (and a mother
who had loved) saw at a glance--what could be better than such union
and interchange with the world around us, small as that world might
be, which woman, sweet binder and blender of all social links, might
artfully effect?--So that thou didst not go like the awful Florentine,
"Sopra lor vanita che par persona,
'over thin shadows that mocked the substance of real forms,' but rather
it was the real forms that appeared as shadows or _vanita_.
What a digression!--can I never tell my story in a plain
straightforward way? Certainly I was born under the Cancer, and all my
movements are circumlocutory, sideways, and crab-like.