The Heavenly Twins (Victorian Feminist Novel). Grand Sarah

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СКАЧАТЬ did they, curiously enough. They made a point of keeping their word, but in their own way, and this one was kept in due course. The time they chose was when a certain Grand Duke was staying in the house. They had quite captivated him, and he expressed a wish to hear them sing.

      "Shall we?" said Diavolo,

      "We will," said Angelica, "Not because he's a prince, but because we promised Evadne an anthem, and we might as well do it now," she added with true British independence.

      The prince chuckled.

      "What shall it be?" said Diavolo, settling himself at the piano. He always played the accompaniments.

      "Papa, I think," said Angelica.

      "What is 'Papa'?" Lady Adeline asked anxiously.

      "Very nice, or you wouldn't have married him," answered Angelica. "Go on,

       Diavolo. If you sing flat, I'll slap you."

      "If you're impertinent, miss, I'll put you out," Diavolo retorted.

      "Go on," said Evadne sharply, fearing a fight.

      But to everybody's intense relief the prince laughed, and then the twins' distinguished manners appeared in a new and agreeable light.

      "Papa—Papa—Papa,"—they sang—"Papa says—that we—that we—that we are little devils! and so we are—we are—we are and ever shall be—world without end."

      "I am a chip," Diavolo trilled exquisitely; "I am a chip."

      "Thou art a chip—Thou art a chip," Angelica responded.

      "We are both chips," they concluded harmoniously—"chips of the old—old block! And as it was in the beginning is now and ever shall be, world without end. Amen!"

      "You sang that last phrase flat you—pulp!" cried Angelica.

      "I can't both sing and play," Diavolo protested.

      "You'll say you can't eat and breathe next," she retorted, giving his hair a tug.

      "What did you do that for?" he demanded.

      "Just to waken you up," she answered.

      "Are they always like this?" the prince asked, much edified.

      "This is nothing," groaned Mr. Hamilton-Wells.

      "Nothing if it is not genius," the prince suggested gracefully.

      "The ineffectual genius of the nineteenth century I fancy, which betrays itself by strange incongruities and contrasts of a violent kind, but is otherwise unproductive," Mrs. Orton Beg whispered to Mr. Frayling incautiously.

      Lady Adeline looked up: "I could not help hearing," she said.

      "Oh, Adeline, I am sorry!" Mrs. Orton Beg exclaimed.

      "I thank you," said Lady Adeline, sighing. "Courtly phrases are pleasant plums, even to latter-day palates which are losing all taste for such dainties; but they are not nourishing. I would rather know my children to be merely naughty, and spend my time in trying to make them good, than falsely flatter myself that there is anything great in them, and indulge them on that plea, until I had thoroughly confirmed them in faults which I ought to have been rigorously repressing."

      "You're right there," said Mr. Frayling; "but all the same, you'll be able to make a good deal of that boy, or I'm much mistaken. And as for Angelica, why, when she is at the head of an establishment of her own she will require all her smartness. But teach her housekeeping, Lady Adeline; that is the thing for her."

      Evadne was sitting near her father, not taking part in the conversation, but attending to it; and Lady Adeline, happening to look at her at this moment, saw something which gave her "pause to ponder." Evadne's face recalled somewhat the type of old Egypt, Egypt with an intellect added. Her eyes were long and apparently narrow, but not so in reality—a trick she had of holding them half shut habitually gave a false impression of their size, and veiled the penetration of their glance also, which was exceptionally keen. In moments of emotion, however, she would open them to the full unexpectedly, and then the effect was startling and peculiar; and it was one of these transient flashes which surprised Lady Adeline when Mr. Frayling made that last remark. It was a mere gleam, but it revealed Evadne to Lady Adeline as a flash of lightning might have revealed a familiar landscape on a dark night. She saw what she expected to see, but all transformed, and she saw something beyond, which she did not expect, and could neither comprehend nor forget. So far she had only thought of Evadne as a nice, quiet little thing with nothing particular in her; from that evening, however, she suspended her opinion, suspecting something, but waiting to know more. Evadne was then in her eighteenth year, but not yet out.

CHAPTER VII.

       Table of Contents

      Mrs. Orton Beg was a sister of Mrs. Frayling's and an oracle to Evadne. Mrs. Frayling was fair, plump, sweet, yielding, commonplace, prolific; Mrs. Orton Beg was a barren widow, slender, sincere, silent, firm, and tender. Mrs. Frayling, for lack of insight, was unsympathetic, Mrs. Orton Beg was just the opposite; and she and Evadne understood each other, and were silent together in the most companionable way in the world.

      When Evadne went to her own room on the evening made memorable by the twins' famous anthem, she was haunted by that word "ineffectual," which Mrs. Orton Beg had used. "Ineffectual genius"—there was something familiar as well as high sounding in the epithet; it recalled an idea with which she was already acquainted; what was it? She opened her "Commonplace Book," and sat with her pen in her hand, cogitating comfortably. She had no need to weary her fresh young brain with an irritating pursuit of what she wanted; she had only to wait, and it would recur to her. And presently it came. Her countenance brightened. She bent over the book and wrote a few lines, read them when she had blotted them, and was satisfied.

      "I have it," she wrote. "Shelley = genius of the nineteenth century—'Beautiful and ineffectual angel, beating in the void his luminous wings in vain.'—Matthew Arnold."

      When she had done this she took up a book, went to the fire, settled herself in an easy-chair, and began to read. The book was "Ruth," by Mrs. Gaskell, and she was just finishing it. When she had done so she went back to the table, and copied out the following paragraph:

      "The daily life into which people are born, and into which they are absorbed before they are aware, forms chains which only one in a hundred has moral strength enough to despise, and to break when the right time comes—when an inward necessity for independent action arises, which is superior to all outward conventionalities."

      She stopped here, and pushed the volume away from her. It was the only passage in it which she cared to remember.

      She had lost the confidence of the child by this time, and become humbly doubtful of her own opinion; and instead of summing up "Ruth" boldly, as she would have done the year before, she paused now a moment to reflect before she wrote with diffidence:

      "The principal impression this book has made upon me is that Mrs. Gaskell must have been a very lovable woman."

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