It was not a reasonable peculiarity of my uncle that he resented, with a good deal of playful acrimony, my poor cousin’s want of education, for which, if he were not to blame, certainly neither was she.
“You see her, poor thing, a result of all the combined disadvantage of want of refined education, refined companionship, and, I fear, naturally, of refined tastes; but a sojourn at a good French conventual school will do wonders, and I hope to manage by-and-by. In the meantime we jest at our misfortunes, and love one another, I hope, cordially.”
He extended his thin, white hand with a chilly smile towards Milly, who bounced up, and took it with a frightened look; and he repeated, holding her hand rather slightly I thought, “Yes, I hope, very cordially,” and then turning again to me, he put it over the arm of his chair, and let it go, as a man might drop something he did not want from a carriage window.
Having made this apology for poor Milly, who was plainly bewildered, he passed on, to her and my relief, to other topics, every now and then expressing his fears that I was fatigued, and his anxiety that I should partake of some supper or tea; but these solicitudes somehow seemed to escape his remembrance almost as soon as uttered; and he maintained the conversation, which soon degenerated into a close, and to me a painful examination, respecting my dear father’s illness and its symptoms, upon which I could give no information, and his habits, upon which I could.
Perhaps he fancied that there might be some family predisposition to the organic disease of which his brother died, and that his questions were directed rather to the prolonging of his own life than to the better understanding of my dear father’s death.
How little was there left to this old man to make life desirable, and yet how keenly, I afterwards found, he clung to it. Have we not all of us seen those to whom life was not only undesirable, but positively painful — a mere series of bodily torments, yet hold to it with a desperate and pitiable tenacity — old children or young, it is all the same.
See how a sleepy child will put off the inevitable departure for bed. The little creature’s eyes blink and stare, and it needs constant jogging to prevent his nodding off into the slumber which nature craves. His waking is a pain; he is quite worn out, and peevish, and stupid, and vows he is not sleepy, even to the moment when his mother takes him in her arms, and carries him, in a sweet slumber, to the nursery. So it is with us old children of earth and the great sleep of death, and nature our kind mother. Just so reluctantly we part with consciousness, the picture is, even to the last, so interesting; the bird in the hand, though sick and moulting, so inestimably better than all the brilliant tenants of the bush. We sit up, yawning, and blinking, and stupid, the whole scene swimming before us, and the stories and music humming off into the sound of distant winds and waters. It is not time yet; we are not fatigued; we are good for another hour still, and so protesting against bed, we falter and drop into the dreamless sleep which nature assigns to fatigue and satiety.
He then spoke a little eulogy of his brother, very polished, and, indeed, in a kind of way, eloquent. He possessed in a high degree that accomplishment, too little cultivated, I think, by the present generation, of expressing himself with perfect precision and fluency. There was, too, a good deal of slight illustrative quotation, and a sprinkling of French flowers, over the conversation, which gave to it a character at once elegant and artificial. It was all easy, light, and pointed, and being quite new to me, had a wonderful fascination.
He then told me that Bartram was the temple of liberty, that the health of a whole life was founded in a few years of youth, air, and exercise, and that accomplishments, at least, if not education, should wait upon health. Therefore, while at Bartram, I should dispose of my time quite as I pleased, and the more I plundered the garden and gipsied in the woodlands, the better.
Then he told me what a miserable invalid he was, and how the doctors interfered with his frugal tastes. A glass of beer and a mutton chop — his ideal of a dinner — he dared not touch. They made him drink light wines, which he detested, and live upon those artificial abominations all liking for which vanishes with youth.
There stood on a side-table, in its silver coaster, a long-necked Rhenish bottle, and beside it a thin pink glass, and he quivered his fingers in a peevish way toward them.
But unless he found himself better very soon, he would take his case into his own hands, and try the dietary to which nature pointed.
He waved his fingers toward his bookcases, and told me his books were altogether at my service during my stay; but this promise ended, I must confess, disappointingly. At last, remarking that I must be fatigued, he rose, and kissed me with a solemn tenderness, placed his hand upon what I now perceived to be a large Bible, with two broad silk markers, red and gold, folded in it — the one, I might conjecture, indicating the place in the Old, the other in the New Testament. It stood on the small table that supported the waxlights, with a handsome cut bottle of eau-de-cologne, his gold and jewelled pencil-case, and his chased repeater, chain and seals, beside it. There certainly were no indications of poverty in Uncle Silas’s room; and he said impressively —
“Remember that book; in it your father placed his trust, in it he found his reward, in it lives my only hope; consult it, my beloved niece, day and night, as the oracle of life.”
Then he laid his thin hand on my head, and blessed me, and then kissed my forehead.
“No-a!” exclaimed Cousin Milly’s lusty voice. I had quite forgotten her presence, and looked at her with a little start. She was seated on a very high old-fashioned chair; she had palpably been asleep; her round eyes were blinking and staring glassily at us; and her white legs and navvy boots were dangling in the air.
“Have you anything to remark about Noah?” enquired her father, with a polite inclination and an ironical interest.
“No-a!” she repeated in the same blunt accents; “I didn’t snore; did I? No-a.”
The old man smiled and shrugged a little at me — it was the smile of disgust.
“Good night, my dear Maud;” and turning to her, he said, with a peculiar gentle sharpness, “Had not you better wake, my dear, and try whether your cousin would like some supper?”
So he accompanied us to the door, outside which we found L’Amour’s candle awaiting us.
“I’m awful afraid of the Governor, I am. Did I snore that time?”
“No, dear; at least, I did not hear it,” I said, unable to repress a smile.
“Well, if I didn’t, I was awful near it,” she said, reflectively.
We found poor Mary Quince dozing over the fire; but we soon had tea and other good things, of which Milly partook with a wonderful appetite.
“I was in a qualm about it,” said Milly, who by this time was quite herself again. “When he spies me a-napping, maybe he don’t fetch me a prod with his pencil-case over the head. Odd! girl, it is sore.”
When I contrasted the refined and fluent old gentleman whom I had just left, with this amazing specimen of young ladyhood, I grew sceptical almost as to the possibility of her being his child.
I was to learn, however, how little she had, I won’t say of his society, but even of his presence — that she had no domestic companion of the least pretensions to education — that she ran wild about the place — never, except in church, so much as saw a person of that rank to which she was born — and that the little she knew of reading and writing had been picked up, in desultory half-hours, from a person who did not care a pin about her manners of decorum, and perhaps rather enjoyed her grotesqueness — and that no one who was willing to take the least trouble about her was competent to make her a particle more refined than I saw her — the wonder ceased. We don’t know how little is heritable, and how much simply training, until we encounter some such spectacle as that of my poor cousin Milly.
When I lay down in my bed and reviewed the day, it seemed like a month of wonders. Uncle Silas was always before me; the voice so silvery for an old man — so preternaturally soft; the