THE PARISH TRILOGY - Annals of a Quiet Neighbourhood, The Seaboard Parish & The Vicar's Daughter. George MacDonald
Читать онлайн книгу.
by a gentle slope, which certainly was long and winding, but had occasioned no feeling in my mind that I had reached any considerable height. And I had come up that one beautiful staircase; no more; and yet now, when I looked from this window, I found myself on the edge of a precipice—not a very deep one, certainly, yet with all the effect of many a deeper. For below the house on this side lay a great hollow, with steep sides, up which, as far as they could reach, the trees were climbing. The sides were not all so steep as the one on which the house stood, but they were all rocky and steep, with here and there slopes of green grass. And down in the bottom, in the centre of the hollow, lay a pool of water. I knew it only by its slaty shimmer through the fading green of the tree-tops between me and it.
"There!" again exclaimed Miss Gladwyn; "isn't that beautiful? But you haven't seen the most beautiful thing yet. Grannie, where's—ah! there she is! There's auntie! Don't you see her down there, by the side of the pond? That pond is a hundred feet deep. If auntie were to fall in she would be drowned before you could jump down to get her out. Can you swim?"
Before I had time to answer, she was off again.
"Don't you see auntie down there?"
"No, I don't see her. I have been trying very hard, but I can't."
"Well, I daresay you can't. Nobody, I think, has got eyes but myself. Do you see a big stone by the edge of the pond, with another stone on the top of it, like a big potato with a little one grown out of it?"
"No."
"Well, auntie is under the trees on the opposite side from that stone. Do you see her yet?"
"No."
"Then you must come down with me, and I will introduce you to her. She's much the prettiest thing here. Much prettier than grannie."
Here she looked over her shoulder at grannie, who, instead of being angry, as, from what I had seen on our former interview, I feared she would be, only said, without even looking up from the little blue-boarded book she was again reading—
"You are a saucy child."
Whereupon Miss Gladwyn laughed merrily.
"Come along," she said, and, seizing me by the hand, led me out of the room, down a back-staircase, across a piece of grass, and then down a stair in the face of the rock, towards the pond below. The stair went in zigzags, and, although rough, was protected by an iron balustrade, without which, indeed, it would have been very dangerous.
"Isn't your grandmamma afraid to let you run up and down here, Miss Gladwyn?" I said.
"Me!" she exclaimed, apparently in the utmost surprise. "That WOULD be fun! For, you know, if she tried to hinder me—but she knows it's no use; I taught her that long ago—let me see, how long: oh! I don't know—I should think it must be ten years at least. I ran away, and they thought I had drowned myself in the pond. And I saw them, all the time, poking with a long stick in the pond, which, if I had been drowned there, never could have brought me up, for it is a hundred feet deep, I am sure. How I hurt my sides trying to keep from screaming with laughter! I fancied I heard one say to the other, 'We must wait till she swells and floats?'"
"Dear me! what a peculiar child!" I said to myself.
And yet somehow, whatever she said—even when she was most rude to her grandmother—she was never offensive. No one could have helped feeling all the time that she was a little lady.—I thought I would venture a question with her. I stood still at a turn of the zigzag, and looked down into the hollow, still a good way below us, where I could now distinguish the form, on the opposite side of the pond, of a woman seated at the foot of a tree, and stooping forward over a book.
"May I ask you a question, Miss Gladwyn?"
"Yes, twenty, if you like; but I won't answer one of them till you give up calling me Miss Gladwyn. We can't be friends, you know, so long as you do that."
"What am I to call you, then? I never heard you called by any other name than Pet, and that would hardly do, would it?"
"Oh, just fancy if you called me Pet before grannie! That's grannie's name for me, and nobody dares to use it but grannie—not even auntie; for, between you and me, auntie is afraid of grannie; I can't think why. I never was afraid of anybody—except, yes, a little afraid of old Sarah. She used to be my nurse, you know; and grandmamma and everybody is afraid of her, and that's just why I never do one thing she wants me to do. It would never do to give in to being afraid of her, you know.—There's auntie, you see, down there, just where I told you before."
"Oh yes! I see her now.—What does your aunt call you, then?"
"Why, what you must call me—my own name, of course."
"What is that?"
"Judy."
She said it in a tone which seemed to indicate surprise that I should not know her name—perhaps read it off her face, as one ought to know a flower's name by looking at it. But she added instantly, glancing up in my face most comically—
"I wish yours was Punch."
"Why, Judy?"
"It would be such fun, you know."
"Well, it would be odd, I must confess. What is your aunt's name?"
"Oh, such a funny name!—much funnier than Judy: Ethelwyn. It sounds as if it ought to mean something, doesn't it?"
"Yes. It is an Anglo-Saxon word, without doubt."
"What does it mean?"
"I'm not sure about that. I will try to find out when I go home—if you would like to know."
"Yes, that I should. I should like to know everything about auntie Ethelwyn. Isn't it pretty?"
"So pretty that I should like to know something more about Aunt Ethelwyn. What is her other name?"
"Why, Ethelwyn Oldcastle, to be sure. What else could it be?"
"Why, you know, for anything I knew, Judy, it might have been Gladwyn. She might have been your father's sister."
"Might she? I never thought of that. Oh, I suppose that is because I never think about my father. And now I do think of it, I wonder why nobody ever mentions him to me, or my mother either. But I often think auntie must be thinking about my mother. Something in her eyes, when they are sadder than usual, seems to remind me of my mother."
"You remember your mother, then?"
"No, I don't think I ever saw her. But I've answered plenty of questions, haven't I? I assure you, if you want to get me on to the Catechism, I don't know a word of it. Come along."
I laughed.
"What!" she said, pulling me by the hand, "you a clergyman, and laugh at the Catechism! I didn't know that."
"I'm not laughing at the Catechism, Judy. I'm only laughing at the idea of putting Catechism questions to you."
"You KNOW I didn't mean it," she said, with some indignation.
"I know now," I answered. "But you haven't let me put the only question I wanted to put."
"What is it?"
"How old are you?"
"Twelve. Come along."
And away we went down the rest of the stair.
When we reached the bottom, a winding path led us through the trees to the side of the pond, along which we passed to get to the other side.
And then all at once the thought struck me—why was it that I had never seen this auntie, with the lovely name, at church? Was she going to turn out another strange parishioner?
There she sat, intent on her book. As we drew near she looked up and rose, but did not come forward.
"Aunt Winnie, here's Mr. Walton," said Judy.
I lifted my hat and held out my hand. Before our hands met, however, a tremendous splash reached my ears from the pond. I started