An Act in a Backwater. E. F. Benson
Читать онлайн книгу.
stood looking from one to the other, with his head a little on one side, like a dog who has done its trick. Unlike Jeannie and his brother, he was fair, with blue eyes and an extraordinarily pleasant face.
“Well, them’s my sentiments,” he said. “Your turn, Jeannie.”
“I know it is,” said Jeannie. “And what’s to happen to me, Arthur?” she demanded.
Arthur groaned slightly.
“I’ve done all that can be expected of me,” he said. “My turn is over.”
Jeannie jumped up.
“Oh, I know,” she said. “I’ll come and keep house for you in Wroxton, Arthur, and Harry shall come down to stay with us from Saturday till Monday, and we’ll go up to stay with him from—from Monday till Saturday.”
“A lot of beer shall I brew,” remarked Arthur. “Why, you could swim in it.”
“I don’t much see you living at Wroxton, Jeannie,” said Harry.
“Why not? I should enjoy it. I really should. And we’ll give high teas to the Canons.”
“I think you’d loathe it before a month was out,” repeated Harry.
“Indeed I shouldn’t.”
“We’re all so terribly unselfish, and that’s what is the matter with us,” said Arthur. “First Harry wants to let us all live with him, and then I want to live in that funny little town in order to attend to my work, and then Jeannie wants to live with me. Aunt Em, give us a contribution, and try, oh, try to be selfish; I’m sure you can.”
“Well, I think Jeannie is right,” said Miss Fortescue. “You would hate not living in London, Harry, and I think the best thing you can do is to have a flat there, quite small, so that one or two of us could very kindly come to stay with you, and let Jeannie and Arthur live in Wroxton. Then shut Morton up, or let it. You’d better let it, if possible. It’s only for a year or two, till you’ve paid these iniquitous Radical taxes. And then when you open it again you can order your beer from Arthur.”
Arthur gave a sigh of relief.
“Well, that’s settled,” he said. “Jeannie, let’s go into Wroxton this afternoon and see the householders or the house-agents. Oh, Aunt Em, what is going to happen to you?”
“You are all so unselfish,” said Miss Fortescue, “that I thought one of you might have considered that. But I was wrong.”
A general shout went up of “Come and live with me,” and the meeting was adjourned for the time being.
Miss Fortescue, who has hitherto been distinguished from the Aveshams generally by the fact of her not being at all good-looking, had her compensations. She was, in the first place, exceedingly musical, and had about as much wits as two generations of Aveshams put together. She was a woman of very pronounced opinions, and though you might accidentally hit upon a subject on which she had neither opinion nor knowledge, she would be happy to pronounce an opinion on it offhand with such conviction as to lead you to suppose she knew something about it. If you could induce her to argue about the said subject, though you might suspect that she knew nothing whatever of it, yet you would find it difficult to bring her ignorance home to her. She would glean facts from her opponent as she went along, and use them against him with telling effect. But it was next to impossible to make her argue; if you disagreed with her she would raise her eyes to the ceiling as if commending you and your benighted condition to the hands of Providence. Like most clever people, she was sublimely inconsistent, and though she genuinely abhorred the idea of the death of any living creature, she would eat flesh meals without any qualms whatever. This may be partly accounted for by the fact that she hated fads as much as the death of innocent animals, and it was her dislike of vegetarians rather than of a vegetable diet which led to so sturdy an inconsistency. The same contradictions appeared in her views about horses and dogs, and she would rather walk to the station, though hating bodily exercise, than have out a horse which was bursting with condition and make it pull her. The same misplaced tenderness applied to her treatment of dogs, and her own pug was an object-lesson of unwholesome overfeeding.
Miss Fortescue on this particular morning had been glad, by her last ungenerous speech, to shift the responsibility of her future on to other shoulders, or, at any rate, to delay her own decision. She wanted, in the main, to determine what she wanted to do, and she could not quite make up her mind. She had lived with the Aveshams since her sister’s death some eight years ago, and they all took it for granted (herself included) that she would continue to go on living with them. For herself, she would have much preferred to have gone on living at Morton, but she saw and admitted at once the reasonableness of Arthur’s view. Her own income, with the exception of a hundred a year for dress and travelling (she dressed with notable cheapness, and never travelled), she was prepared to give into the household coffers of whatever branch of the family she decided to live with, and as Jeannie and Arthur had only six hundred a year between them, the extra five hundred she could give constituted an additional reason for joining them. As far as the advantages of town and country were to be considered, she had no great choice, for she felt no thrill in the stir and noise of streets, and the sweet silence of the country could not appreciably add to her habitual tranquility. She hardly ever went out unless she was obliged, and on those occasions she took short walks very slowly, and it was something of a mystery, even to those who knew her best, as to what she did with the hours. She would always disappear soon after breakfast, and if asked at lunch what she had been doing, she would say, “Working.” Then, if pressed further as to what her work had been, she would only raise her eyes to the ceiling, and the incident would close. This raising of the eyes had long been a danger-signal to the Aveshams. It implied that Miss Fortescue was unwilling to say more on this particular subject, and any further questions would only evoke severe remarks on their inquisitiveness.
Jeannie and Arthur rode into Wroxton that afternoon and made the house-agent an unhappy man. The house they required had to be near the brewery, and also at the top of the hill, which, to begin with, was impossible, as the brewery was at the very bottom of the town. Then it had to have a good smoking-room, two nice sitting-rooms—one for Jeannie and one for Miss Fortescue, in case she decided to join them—a drawing-room and a dining-room (the size of these was really important), and four excellent bed-rooms away from the street. To be away from the street implied a garden, which must be private, sunny, and extensive. That red brick should be the material of the house was desirable, but not absolutely essential. The offices, Miss Fortescue insisted, should be really good, for they made all the difference to servants, whom one was bound to consider before one’s self. A small stable only, but well-aired and dry, was required, and the rent of the whole must be exceedingly low.
The only point which presented no difficulty were the offices. Jeannie and Arthur were both quite vague as to what offices meant, but in the half dozen houses they saw that afternoon there was always some other radical defect. In one they found that an apartment described as a sitting-room was more probably intended to be a house-maid’s cupboard; in another they disgraced themselves by thinking that the kitchen was the scullery. A third case was more complicated, for Jeannie remembered about a still-room, and had to explain to an antiquated caretaker what a still-room was. What made the afternoon more bewildering was that they both fell in love with every house they saw, and thought it would do excellently with a little alteration. Then came the question of rents: they had hoped to find something for about a hundred and twenty pounds a year, and the only consolation, as Arthur said, was that at corresponding prices, if Morton was let, it ought to bring to Harry an income of about fifty thousand a year, which certainly seemed a satisfactory sum.
“Why, if it would let for that,” he exclaimed, with a sudden splendid thought, “we should be rich enough to live in it ourselves, and not let it at all!” But the mention of Morton roused the house-agent to rather greater interest in his impracticable clients. It appeared that there were other houses which might also be had, and, if the gentleman would give his card, he had no doubt that the owner of 8 Bolton Street would let them look at it. He had long been thinking of letting it, though it was not