The Daltons; Or, Three Roads In Life. Volume I. Lever Charles James

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СКАЧАТЬ With all his knowledge of Lady Hester’s character, her caprices, her whims, and her insatiable passion for excitement, he was still astonished beyond measure at this step: not that the false air of benevolence or charity deceived him, he was too old a practitioner in medicine, and had seen far too much of the dark side of human nature, to be easily gulled, but his surprise arose from the novelty of her condescending to know, and even propitiate, the good graces of people whom she usually professed to regard as the least interesting of all classes of mankind. The “reduced lady or gentleman” had only presented themselves to Lady Hester’s mind by the medium of an occasional curiously worded advertisement in a morning paper, and were invariably associated with a subsequent police report, where the object of charity was sure to be confronted with half a dozen peers or members of parliament, whose sympathies he had put under contribution, to support a life of infamy or extravagance. “A begging impostor” rang in her mind as a phrase whose ingredient words could not be divorced, and she was thoroughly convinced that imposture and poverty were convertible terms. The very notion of any one having once been well off, and being now in embarrassment, was, to her deeming, most satisfactory evidence of past misconduct and present knavery. Grounsell had beard her hold forth on this theme more than once, “embroidering the sentiment” with an occasional sly allusion to himself and his own fortunes, so that he had often thought over the difficulty of serving the Daltons with Sir Stafford, by reflecting on the hostility any project would meet with from “my Lady,” and now accident, or something very like it, had done what all his ingenuity could not succeed in discovering.

      The announcement at first rendered him perfectly mute; he heard it without power to make the slightest observation; and it was only at the end of a lengthy description from the two sisters, that he exclaimed, in a kind of half soliloquy, “By Jove, it is so like her, after all!”

      “I ‘m sure of it,” said Nelly; “her manner was kindness and gentleness itself. You should have seen the tender way she took poor Hansells hand in her own, and how eagerly she asked us to translate for her the few stray words he uttered.”

      “Of course she did. I could swear to it all, now that my eyes are opened.”

      “And with what winning grace she spoke!” cried Kate. “How the least phrase came from her lips with a fascination that still haunts me!”

      “Just so, just so!” muttered Grounsell.

      “How such traits of benevolence ennoble high station!” said Nelly.

      “How easy to credit all that one hears of the charms of intercourse, where manner like hers prevails on every side!” cried Kate, enthusiastically.

      “How thoughtful in all her kindness!”

      “What elegance in every movement!”

      “With what inborn courtesy she accepted the little valueless attentions, which were all we could render her!”

      “How beautiful she looked, in all the disorder of a dress so unlike her own splendor! I could almost fancy that old straw chair to be a handsome fauteuil since she sat in it.”

      “How delightful it must be to be admitted to the freedom of daily intercourse with such a person, to live within the atmosphere of such goodness and such refinement!” And thus they went on ringing the changes upon every gift and grace, from the genial warmth of her heart, to the snowy whiteness of her dimpled hands; while Grouusell fidgeted in his chair, searched for his handkerchief, his spectacles, his snuff-box, dropped them all in turn, and gathered them up again, in a perfect fever of embarrassment and indecision.

      “And you see her every day, doctor?” said Nelly.

      “Yes, every day, madam,” said he, hastily, and not noticing nor thinking to whom he was replying.

      “And is she always as charming, always as fascinating?”

      “Pretty much the same, I think,” said he, with a grunt.

      “How delightful! And always in the same buoyancy of spirits?”

      “Very little changed in that respect,” said he, with another grunt.

      “We have often felt for poor Sir Stafford being taken ill away from his home, and obliged to put up with the miserable resources of a watering-place in winter; but I own, when I think of the companionship of Lady Hester, much of my compassion vanishes.”

      “He needs it all, then,” said Grounsell, as, thrusting his hands into the recesses of his pockets, he sat a perfect picture of struggling embarrassment.

      “Are his sufferings so very great?”

      Grounsell nodded abruptly, for now he was debating within himself what course to take; for while, on one side, he deemed it a point of honor not to divulge to strangers, as were the Daltons, any of the domestic circumstances of those with whom he lived, he felt, on the other, reluctant to suffer Lady Hester’s blandishments to pass for qualities more sterling and praiseworthy.

      “She asked the girls to go and see her,” said Dalton, now breaking silence for the first time; for although flattered in the main by what he heard of the fine lady’s manner towards his daughters, he was not without misgivings that what they interpreted as courtesy might just as probably be called condescension, against which his Irish pride of birth and blood most sturdily rebelled. “She asked them to go and see her, and it was running in my head if she mio’ht not have heard something of the family connection.”

      “Possibly!” asserted Grounsell, too deep in his own calculations to waste a thought on such a speculation.

      “My wife’s uncle, Joe Godfrey, married an Englishwoman. The sister was aunt to some rich city banker; and indeed, to tell the truth, his friends in Ireland never thought much of the connection but you see times are changed. They are up now, and we are down, the way of the world! It ‘s little I ever thought of claiming relationship with the like o’ them!”

      “But if it ‘s they who seek us, papa?” whispered Kate.

      “Ay, that alters the case, my dear; not but I’d as soon excuse the politeness. Here we are, living in a small way; till matters come round in Ireland, we can’t entertain them, not even give them a dinner-party.”

      “Oh, dearest papa,” broke in Nelly, “is not our poverty a blessing if it save us the humiliation of being absurd? Why should we think of such a thing? Why should we, with our straitened means and the habits narrow fortune teaches, presume even to a momentary equality with those so much above us.”

      “Faith, it’s true enough!” cried Dalton, his cheek flushed with anger. “We are changed, there’s no doubt of it; or it is not a Dalton would say the words you ‘ve just said. I never knew before that the best in the land wasn’t proud to come under our roof.”

      “When we had a roof,” said Nelly, firmly. “And if these ancestors had possessed a true and a higher pride, mayhap we might still have one. Had they felt shame to participate in schemes of extravagance and costly display, had they withheld encouragement from a ruinous mode of living, we might still be dwellers in our own home and our own country.”

      Dalton seemed thunderstruck at the boldness of a speech so unlike the gentle character of her who had uttered it. To have attributed any portion of the family calamities to their own misconduct to have laid the blame of their downfall to any score save that of English legislation, acts of parliament, grand-jury laws, failure of the potato crop, tithes, Terry alts, or smut in the wheat was a heresy he never, in his gloomiest moments, had imagined, and now he was to hear it from the lips of his own child.

      “Nelly СКАЧАТЬ