THESE TWAIN. Bennett ArnoldЧитать онлайн книгу.
of course, I quite agree. I like it. But folks are so funny.”
After a momentary pause, Mr. Peartree said uncertainly:
“And there’s a little boy?”
Said Clara:
“Yes, the one you’ve seen.”
Said Auntie Hamps:
“Poor little thing! I do feel so sorry for him—when he grows up—”
“You needn’t, Auntie,” said Maggie curtly, expressing her attitude to George in that mild curtness.
“Of course,” said Clara quickly. “We never let it make any difference. In fact our Bert and he are rather friends, aren’t they, Albert?”
At this moment George himself opened the door of the dining-room, letting out a faint buzz of talk and clink of vessels. His mouth was not empty.
Precipitately Edwin plunged into the breakfast-room.
“Hello! You people!” he murmured. “Well, Mr. Peartree.”
There they were—all of them, including the parson—grouped together, lusciously bathing in the fluid of scandal.
Clara turned, and without the least constraint said sweetly:
“Oh, Edwin! There you are! I was just telling Mr. Peartree about you and Hilda, you know. We thought it would be better.”
“You see,” said Auntie Hamps impressively, “Mr. Peartree will be about the town tomorrow, and a word from him—”
Mr. Peartree tried unsuccessfully to look as if he was nobody in particular.
“That’s all right,” said Edwin. “Perhaps the door might as well be shut.” He thought, as many a man has thought: “My relations take the cake!”
Clara occupied the only easy chair in the room. Mrs. Hamps and the parson were seated. Maggie stood. Albert Benbow, ever uxorious, was perched sideways on the arm of his wife’s chair. Clara, centre of the conclave and of all conclaves in which she took part, was the mother of five children,—and nearing thirty-five years of age. Maternity had ruined her once slim figure, but neither she nor Albert seemed to mind that,—they seemed rather to be proud of her unshapeliness. Her face was unspoiled. She was pretty and had a marvellously fair complexion. In her face Edwin could still always plainly see the pert, charming, malicious girl of fourteen who loathed Auntie Hamps and was rude to her behind her back. But Clara and Auntie Hamps were fast friends nowadays. Clara’s brood had united them. They thought alike on all topics. Clara had accepted Auntie Hamps’s code practically entire; but on the other hand she had dominated Auntie Hamps. The respect which Auntie Hamps showed for Clara and for Edwin, and in a slightly less degree for Maggie, was a strange phenomenon in the old age of that grandiose and vivacious pillar of Wesleyanism and the conventions.
Edwin did not like Clara; he objected to her domesticity, her motherliness, her luxuriant fruitfulness, the intonations of her voice, her intense self-satisfaction and her remarkable duplicity; and perhaps more than anything to her smug provinciality. He did not positively dislike his brother-in-law, but he objected to him for his uxoriousness, his cheerful assurance of Clara’s perfection, his contented and conceited ignorance of all intellectual matters, his incorrigible vulgarity of a small manufacturer who displays everywhere the stigmata of petty commerce, and his ingenuous love of office. As for Maggie, the plump spinster of forty, Edwin respected her when he thought of her, but reproached her for social gawkiness and taciturnity. As for Auntie Hamps, he could not respect, but he was forced to admire, her gorgeous and sustained hypocrisy, in which no flaw had ever been found, and which victimised even herself; he was always invigorated by her ageless energy and the sight of her handsome, erect, valiant figure.
Edwin’s absence had stopped the natural free course of conversation. But there were at least three people in the room whom nothing could abash: Mrs. Hamps, Clara, and Mr. Peartree.
Mr. Peartree, sitting up with his hands on his baggy knees, said:
“Everything seems to have turned out very well in the end, Mr. Clayhanger—very well, indeed.” His features showed less of the tedium of life.
“Eh, yes! Eh, yes!” breathed Auntie Hamps in ecstasy.
Edwin, diffident and ill-pleased, was about to suggest that the family might advantageously separate, when George came after him into the room.
“Oh!” cried George.
“Well, little jockey!” Clara began instantly to him with an exaggerated sweetness that Edwin thought must nauseate the child, “would you like Bert to come up and play with you one of these afternoons?”
George stared at her, and slowly flushed.
“Yes,” said George. “Only—”
“Only what?”
“Supposing I was doing something else when he came?”
Without waiting for possible developments George turned to leave the room again.
“You’re a caution, you are!” said Albert Benbow; and to the adults: “Hates to be disturbed, I suppose.”
“That’s it,” said Edwin responsively, as brother-in-law to brother-in-law. But he felt that he, with a few months’ experience of another’s child, appreciated the exquisite strange sensibility of children infinitely better than Albert were he fifty times a father.
“What is a caution, Uncle Albert?” asked George, peeping back from the door.
Auntie Hamps good-humouredly warned the child of the danger of being impertinent to his elders:
“George! George!”
“A caution is a caution to snakes,” said Albert. “Shoo!” Making a noise like a rocket, he feinted to pursue the boy with violence.
Mr. Peartree laughed rather loudly, and rather like a human being, at the word “snakes.” Albert Benbow’s flashes of humour, indeed, seemed to surprise him, if only for an instant, out of his attitudinarianism.
Clara smiled, flattered by the power of her husband to reveal the humanity of the parson.
“Albert’s so good with children,” she said. “He always knows exactly...” She stopped, leaving what he knew exactly to the listeners’ imagination.
Uncle Albert and George could be heard scuffling in the hall.
Auntie Hamps rose with a gentle sigh, saying:
“I suppose we ought to join the others.”
Her social sense, which was pretty well developed, had at last prevailed.
The sisters Maggie and Clara, one in light and the other in dark green, walked out of the room. Maggie’s face had already stiffened into mute constraint, and Clara’s into self-importance, at the prospect of meeting the general company.
iii
Auntie Hamps held back, and Edwin at once perceived from the conspiratorial glance in her splendid eyes that in suggesting a move she had intended to deceive her fellow-conspirator in life, Clara. But Auntie Hamps could not live without chicane. And she was happiest when she had superimposed chicane upon chicane in complex folds.
She put a ringed hand softly but arrestingly upon Edwin’s arm, and pushed the door to. Alone with her and the parson, Edwin felt himself to be at bay, and he drew back before an unknown menace.
“Edwin, dear,” said she, “Mr. Peartree has something to suggest to you. I was going to say ‘a favour to ask,’ but I won’t put it like that. I’m sure my nephew will look upon it as a privilege. You know how much Mr. Peartree has at heart the District Additional Chapels Fund—”
Edwin did not know how much; but