PRESENTLY Amaryllis wandered indoors, and was met in the hall by her
mother.
"What has he been talking to you about?" she said, angrily. "Don't
listen to him. He will never do any good. Just look at his coat; it's a
disgrace, a positive disgrace. Telling you about the old people? What's
the use of talking of people who have been dead all this time? Why
doesn't he do something himself? Don't listen to his rubbish--wasting
his time there with potatoes, it is enough to make one wild! Why doesn't
he go in to market and buy and sell cattle, and turn over money in that
way? Not he! he'd rather muddle with a few paltry potatoes, as if it
mattered an atom how they were stuck in the ground."
Not liking to hear her father abused, Amaryllis went upstairs, and when
she was alone lifted her skirt and looked at the ankles which
great-uncle Richard had admired. Other girls had told her they were
thick, and she was ashamed of them.
Instead of the slender things which seem as if a sudden strain would
snap them, and are nothing but mere bone, she had a pair of well-shaped
ankles, justly proportioned to what would soon be a fine form; strong,
but neither thick, nor coarse, nor heavy, ankles that would carry her
many a mile without weariness, that ended good legs with plenty of flesh
on them. The stupidity of calling such coarse or heavy! They were really
ideal ankles, such as a sculptor would carve. Yet these ill-instructed
girls called them coarse! It was not their fault, it was the lack of
instruction; as they did not know what was physically perfect, of course
they could not recognize it.
Let every girl who has such ankles be proud of them, for they will prove
a blessing to her for the whole of her life.
Amaryllis could not get her hair smooth, though she brushed it for some
time; it would not lie close, so much had the east wind dried it. She
opened a drawer, and took out a little bottle of macassar, and held it
in her hand, balancing probabilities. Would her father see it if she
used it, or might he, perhaps, fail to notice? She dared not leave the
bottle on the dressing-table, for if he had chanced to pass through the
room he would certainly have thrown it out of window, so bitter was his
antagonism to all oils and perfumes, scents, pomades, and other
resources of the hairdresser, which he held defiled the hair and ruined
it, to the deception of woman and the disgust of man. Not one drop of
scent did Amaryllis dare to sprinkle on her handkerchief, not one drop
of oil did she dare put on her beautiful hair unless surreptitiously,
and then she could not go near him, for he was certain to detect it and
scorch her with withering satire.
Yet, however satirized, feminine faith in perfumes and oils and so forth
is like a perennial spring, and never fails.
Such splendid hair as Amaryllis possessed needed no dressing--nothing
could possibly improve it, and the chances therefore were that whatever
she used would injure--yet in her heart she yearned to rub it with oil.
But the more she considered the more probable it seemed that her father
would detect her; she had better wait till he went out for the afternoon
somewhere, an event that seldom occurred, for Iden was one of those who
preferred working at home to rambling abroad. He was, indeed, too
attached to his home work. So she returned the bottle to the drawer, and
hid it under some stockings.
Immediately afterwards it was dinner-time. At all meals the rule was
that there must be no talking, but at dinner the law was so strict that
even to ask for anything, as a piece of bread, or to say so much as
"Give me the salt, please," was a deadly sin. There must be absolute
silence while the master ate. The least infringement was visited with a
severe glance from his keen and brilliant blue eyes--there are no eyes
so stern as blue eyes when angry--or else he uttered a deep sigh like a
grunt, and sat rigidly upright for a moment. For he usually stooped,
and to sit upright showed annoyance. No laws of the Medes and Persians
were ever obeyed as was this law of silence in that house.
Anything that disturbed the absolute calm of the dinner hour was worse
than sacrilege; anything that threatened to disturb it was watched
intently by that repressive eye. No one must come in or go out of the
room; if anyone knocked at the door (there are no bells in old country
houses) there was a frown immediately, it necessitated someone answering
it, and then Mrs. Iden or Amaryllis had to leave the table, to go out
and open and shut the sitting-room door as they went, and again as they
returned. Amaryllis dreaded a knock at the door, it was so awful to have
to stir once they had sat down to dinner, and the servant was certain
not to know what reply to give. Sometimes it happened--and this was very
terrible--that the master himself had to go, some one wanted him about
some hay or a horse and cart, and no one could tell what to do but the
master. A dinner broken up in this way was a very serious matter indeed.
That day they had a leg of mutton--a special occasion--a joint to be
looked on reverently. Mr. Iden had walked into the town to choose it
himself some days previously, and brought it home on foot in a flag
basket. The butcher would have sent it, and if not, there were men on
the farm who could have fetched it, but it was much too important to be
left to a second person. No one could do it right but Mr. Iden himself.
There was a good deal of reason in this personal care of the meat, for
it is a certain fact that unless you do look after such things yourself,
and that persistently, too, you never get it first-rate. For this cause
people in grand villas scarcely ever have anything worth eating on their
tables. Their household expenses reach thousands yearly, and yet they
rarely have anything eatable, and their dinner-tables can never show
meat, vegetables, or fruit equal to Mr. Iden's. The meat was dark brown,
as mutton should be, for if it is the least bit white it is sure to be
poor; the grain was short, and ate like bread and butter, firm, and yet
almost crumbling to the touch; it was full of juicy red gravy, and cut
pleasantly, the knife went through it nicely; you can tell good meat
directly you touch it with the knife. It was cooked to a turn, and had
been done at a wood fire on a hearth; no oven taste, no taint of coal
gas or carbon; the pure flame of wood had browned it. Such emanations as
there may be from burning logs are odorous of the woodland, of the
sunshine, of the fields and fresh air; the wood simply gives out as it
burns the sweetness it has imbibed through its leaves from the
atmosphere which floats above grass and flowers. Essences of this order,
if they do penetrate the fibres of the meat, add to its flavour a
delicate aroma. Grass-fed meat, cooked at a wood fire, for me.
Wonderful it is that wealthy people can endure to have their meat
cooked over coal or in a shut-up iron box, where it kills itself with
its own steam, which ought to escape. But then wealthy villa people do
do odd things. _Les Misérables_ who have to write like myself must put
up with anything and be thankful for permission to exist; but people
with mighty incomes from tea, or crockery-ware, or mud, or bricks and
mortar--why on earth these happy and favoured mortals do not live like
the gods passes understanding.
Parisian people use charcoal: perhaps Paris will convert some of you who
will not listen to a farmer.
Mr. Iden had himself grown the potatoes that were placed before him.
They were white, floury, without a drop of water in the whole dish of
them. They were equal to the finest bread--far, far superior to the
bread with which the immense city of London permits itself to be
poisoned. (It is not much better, for it destroys the digestion.) This,
too, with wheat at thirty shillings the quarter, a price which is in
itself one of the most wonderful things of the age. The finest bread
ought to be cheap.
"They be forty-folds," said Mr. Iden, helping himself to half a dozen.
"Look at the gravy go up into um like tea up a knob of sugar."
The gravy was drawn up among the dry, floury particles of the potatoes
as if they had formed capillary tubes.
"Forty-folds," he repeated; "they comes forty to one. It be an amazing
theng how thengs do that; forty grows for one. Thaay be an old-fashioned
potato; you won't find many of thaay, not true forty-folds. Mine comes
true, 'cause I saves um every year a' purpose. Better take more than
that (to Amaryllis)--you haven't got but two" (to Mrs. Iden).
What he ate other people at his table must eat, and the largest quantity
possible. No one else must speak, hardly to say "Yes" or "No," but the
master could talk, talk, talk without end. The only talking that might
be done by others was in praise of the edibles on the table by Iden so
carefully provided. You might admire the potatoes or the mutton, but you
must not talk on any other subject. Nor was it safe even to do that,
because if you said, "What capital potatoes!" you were immediately
helped to another plateful, and had to finish them, want them or not. If
you praised the mutton several thick slices were placed on your plate,
and woe to you if you left a particle. It was no use to try and cover
over what you could not manage with knife and fork; it was sure to be
seen. "What bean't you going to yet (eat) up that there juicy bit, you?"
Amaryllis and Mrs. Iden, warned by previous experience, discreetly
refrained from admiring either mutton or potatoes.
[Illustration]