第46章 ETHELBERTA'S HOUSE(2)

'Don't be so silly, Sol,' said Ethelberta, laughing.

'Ah, that's all very well,' said Sol, with an unbelieving smile;'but if we bain't company for you out of doors, you bain't company for we within--not that I find fault with ye or mind it, and shan't take anything for painting your house, nor will Dan neither, any more for that--no, not a penny; in fact, we are glad to do it for 'ee. At the same time, you keep to your class, and we'll keep to ours. And so, good afternoon, Berta, when you like to go, and the same to you, Mr. Julian. Dan, is that your mind?'

'I can but own it,' said Dan.

The two brothers then turned their backs upon their visitors, and went on working, and Ethelberta and her lover left the room. 'My brothers, you perceive,' said she, 'represent the respectable British workman in his entirety, and a touchy individual he is, Iassure you, on points of dignity, after imbibing a few town ideas from his leaders. They are painfully off-hand with me, absolutely refusing to be intimate, from a mistaken notion that I am ashamed of their dress and manners; which, of course, is absurd.'

'Which, of course, is absurd,' said Christopher.

'Of course it is absurd!' she repeated with warmth, and looking keenly at him. But, finding no harm in his face, she continued as before: 'Yet, all the time, they will do anything under the sun that they think will advance my interests. In our hearts we are one. All they ask me to do is to leave them to themselves, and therefore I do so. Now, would you like to see some more of your acquaintance?'

She introduced him to a large attic; where he found himself in the society of two or three persons considerably below the middle height, whose manners were of that gushing kind sometimes called Continental, their ages ranging from five years to eight. These were the youngest children, presided over by Emmeline, as professor of letters, capital and small.

'I am giving them the rudiments of education here,' said Ethelberta;'but I foresee several difficulties in the way of keeping them here, which I must get over as best I can. One trouble is, that they don't get enough air and exercise.'

'Is Mrs. Chickerel living here as well?' Christopher ventured to inquire, when they were downstairs again.

'Yes; but confined to her room as usual, I regret to say. Two more sisters of mine, whom you have never seen at all, are also here.

They are older than any of the rest of us, and had, broadly speaking, no education at all, poor girls. The eldest, Gwendoline, is my cook, and Cornelia is my housemaid. I suffer much sadness, and almost misery sometimes, in reflecting that here are we, ten brothers and sisters, born of one father and mother, who might have mixed together and shared all in the same scenes, and been properly happy, if it were not for the strange accidents that have split us up into sections as you see, cutting me off from them without the compensation of joining me to any others. They are all true as steel in keeping the secret of our kin, certainly; but that brings little joy, though some satisfaction perhaps.'

'You might be less despondent, I think. The tale-telling has been one of the successes of the season.'

'Yes, I might; but I may observe that you scarcely set the example of blitheness.'

'Ah--that's not because I don't recognize the pleasure of being here. It is from a more general cause: simply an underfeeling Ihave that at the most propitious moment the distance to the possibility of sorrow is so short that a man's spirits must not rise higher than mere cheerfulness out of bare respect to his insight.

"As long as skies are blue, and fields are green, Evening must usher night, night urge the morrow, Month follow month with woe, and year wake year to sorrow."'

Ethelberta bowed uncertainly; the remark might refer to her past conduct or it might not. 'My great cause of uneasiness is the children,' she presently said, as a new page of matter. 'It is my duty, at all risk and all sacrifice of sentiment, to educate and provide for them. The grown-up ones, older than myself, I cannot help much, but the little ones I can. I keep my two French lodgers for the sake of them.'

'The lodgers, of course, don't know the relationship between yourself and the rest of the people in the house?'

'O no!--nor will they ever. My mother is supposed to let the ground and first floors to me--a strange lady--as she does the second and third floors to them. Still, I may be discovered.'

'Well--if you are?'

'Let me be. Life is a battle, they say; but it is only so in the sense that a game of chess is a battle--there is no seriousness in it; it may be put an end to at any inconvenient moment by owning yourself beaten, with a careless "Ha-ha!" and sweeping your pieces into the box. Experimentally, I care to succeed in society; but at the bottom of my heart, I don't care.'

'For that very reason you are likely to do it. My idea is, make ambition your business and indifference your relaxation, and you will fail; but make indifference your business and ambition your relaxation, and you will succeed. So impish are the ways of the gods.'

'I hope that you at any rate will succeed,' she said, at the end of a silence.

'I never can--if success means getting what one wants.'

'Why should you not get that?'

'It has been forbidden to me.'

Her complexion changed just enough to show that she knew what he meant. 'If you were as bold as you are subtle, you would take a more cheerful view of the matter,' she said, with a look signifying innermost things.

'I will instantly! Shall I test the truth of my cheerful view by a word of question?'

'I deny that you are capable of taking that view, and until you prove that you are, no question is allowed,' she said, laughing, and still warmer in the face and neck. 'Nothing but melancholy, gentle melancholy, now as in old times when there was nothing to cause it.'

'Ah--you only tease.'

'You will not throw aside that bitter medicine of distrust, for the world. You have grown so used to it, that you take it as food, as some invalids do their mixtures.'