T
HERE was one peculiarity in all the books on Grandfather Iden's shelves, they were all very finely bound in the best style of hand-art, and they all bore somewhere or other a little design of an ancient Roman lamp.
Hand-art is a term I have invented for the workmanship of good taste—it is not the sculptor's art, nor the painter's—not the art of the mind, but the art of the hand. Some furniture and cabinet work, for instance, some pottery, book-binding like this, are the products of hand-art.
"Do you see the Lamp?" asked the old man, when Amaryllis had stared sufficiently at the backs of the books.
"Yes, I can see the Lamp."
"House of Flamma," said old Iden.
"House of Flamma," repeated Amaryllis, hastily, eager to show that she understood all about it. She feared lest he should enter into the history of the House of Flamma and of his connection with it; she had heard it all over and over again; hermother was a Flamma; she had herself some of the restless Flamma blood in her. When anything annoyed her or made her indignant her foot used to tap the floor, and her neck flush rosy, and her face grow dusky like the night. Then, striving to control herself, she would say to herself, "Iwillnot be a Flamma."
Except her dear mother and one other, Amaryllis detested and despised the whole tribe of the Flammas, the nervous, excitable, passionate, fidgetty, tipsy, idle, good-for-nothing lot; she hated them all, the very name and mention of them; she sided with her father as an Iden against her mother's family, the Flammas. True they were almost all flecked with talent like white foam on a black horse, a spot or two of genius, and the rest black guilt or folly. She hated them; she would not be a Flamma.
How should she at sixteen understand the wear and tear of life, the pressure of circumstances, the heavy weight of difficulties—there was something to be said even for the miserable fidgetty Flammas, but naturally sixteen judged by appearances. Shut up in narrow grooves and working day after day, year after year, in a contracted way, by degrees their constitutional nervousness became the chief characteristic of their existence. It was Intellect overcome—over-burdened—with two generations of petty cares; Genius dulled and damped till it went to the quart pot.
Sixteen could scarcely understand this. Amaryllisdetested the very name; she would not be a Flamma.
But she was a Flamma for all that; a Flamma in fire of spirit, in strength of indignation, in natural capacity; she drew, for instance, with the greatest ease in pencil or pen-and-ink, drew to the life; she could write a letter in sketches.
Her indignation sometimes at the wrongfulness of certain things seemed to fill her with a consuming fire. Her partizanship for her father made her sometimes inwardly rage for the lightning, that she might utterly erase the opposer. Her contempt of sycophancy, and bold independence led her constantly into trouble.
Flamma means a flame.
Yet she was gentleness itself too; see her at the bookshelves patiently endeavouring to please the tiresome old man.
"Open that drawer," said he, as she came to it.
Amaryllis did so, and said that the coins and medals in it were very interesting, as they really were. The smoke caught her in the throat, and seemed to stop the air as she breathed from reaching her chest. So much accustomed to the open air, she felt stifled.
Then he asked her to read to him aloud, that he might hear how she enunciated her words. The book he gave her was an early copy of Addison, the page a pale yellow, the type old-fount, the edges rough, but where in a trim modern volume will you find language like his and ideas set forth withsuch transparent lucidity? How easy to write like that!—so simple, merely a letter to an intimate friend; but try!
Trim modern volumes are so very hard to read, especially those that come to us from New York, thick volumes of several hundred pages, printed on the thinnest paper in hard, unpleasant type. You cannot read them; youworkthrough them.
The French have retained a little of the old style of book in their paper bound franc novels, the rough paper, thick black type, rough edges are pleasant to touch and look at—they feel as if they were done by hand, not turned out hurriedly smooth and trim by machinery.
Docile to the last degree with him, Amaryllis tried her utmost to read well, and she succeeded, so far as the choking smoke would let her. By grunting between his continuous fits of coughing the old man signified his approval.
Amaryllis would have been respectful to any of the aged, but she had a motive here; she wanted to please him for her father's sake. For many years there had been an increasing estrangement between the younger and the elder Iden; an estrangement which no one could have explained, for it could hardly be due to money matters if Grandfather Iden was really so rich. The son was his father's tenant—the farm belonged to Grandfather Iden—and perhaps the rent was not paid regularly. Still that could not have much mattered—a mere trifle to a man of old Iden's wealth. There wassomething behind, no one knew what; possibly they scarcely knew themselves, for it is a fact that people frequently fall into a quarrel without remembering the beginning.
Amaryllis was very anxious to please the old man for her father's sake; her dear father, whom she loved so much. Tradesmen were for ever worrying him for petty sums of money; it made her furious with indignation to see and hear it.
So she read her very best, and swallowed the choking smoke patiently.
Among the yellow pages, pressed flat, and still as fresh as if gathered yesterday, Amaryllis found bright petals and coloured autumn leaves. For it was one of the old man's ways to carry home such of these that pleased him and to place them in his books. This he had done for half a century, and many of the flower petals and leaves in the grey old works of bygone authors had been there a generation. It is wonderful how long they will endure left undisturbed and pressed in this way; the paper they used in old books seems to have been softer, without the hard surface of our present paper, more like blotting paper, and so keeps them better. Before the repulsion between father and son became so marked, Amaryllis had often been with her grandfather in the garden and round the meadows at Coombe Oaks, and seen him gather the yellow tulips, the broad-petalled roses, and in autumn the bright scarlet bramble leaves. The brown leaves of the Spanish chestnut, too, pleasedhim; anything with richness of colour. The old and grey, and withered man gathered the brightest of petals for his old and grey, and forgotten books.
Now the sight of these leaves and petals between the yellow pages softened her heart towards him; he was a tyrant, but he was very, very old, they were like flowers on a living tomb.
In a little while Grandfather Iden got up, and going to a drawer in one of the bookcases, took from it some scraps of memoranda; he thrust these between her face and the book, and told her to read them instead.
"These are your writing."
"Go on," said the old man, smiling, grunting, and coughing, all at once.
"In 1840," read Amaryllis, "there were only two houses in Black Jack Street." "Onlytwohouses!" she interposed, artfully.
"Two," said the grandfather.
"One in 1802," went on Amaryllis, "while in 1775 the site was covered with furze." "How it has changed!" she said. He nodded, and coughed, and smiled; his great grey hat rocked on his head and seemed about to extinguish him.
"There's a note at the bottom in pencil, grandpa. It says, 'A hundred voters in this street, 1884.'"
"Ah!" said the old man, an ah! so deep it fetched his very heart up in coughing. When he finished, Amaryllis read on—
"In 1802 there were only ten voters in the town."
"Ah!" His excitement caused such violent coughing Amaryllis became alarmed, but it did him no harm. The more he coughed and choked the livelier he seemed. The thought of politics roused him like a trumpet—it went straight to his ancient heart.
"Read that again," he said. "How many voters now?"
"A hundred voters in this street, 1884."
"We've got them all"—coughing—"all in my lord's houses, everyone; vote Conservative, one and all. What is it?" as some one knocked. Dinner was ready, to Amaryllis's relief.
"Perhaps you would like to dine with me?" asked the grandfather, shuffling up his papers. "There—there," as she hesitated, "you would like to dine with young people, of course—of course."
O
LD Grandfather Iden always dined alone in the parlour, with his housekeeper to wait on him; they were just bringing in his food. The family and visitors had their meals in a separate and much more comfortable apartment in another part of the house, which was large. Sometimes, as a great favour and special mark of approval, the old Pacha would invite you to eat with him.
Amaryllis, though anxious to please him, hesitated, not only because of the smoke, but because she knew he always had pork for dinner.
The rich juices of roast pork sustained his dry and withered frame—it was a sort of Burgundy of flesh to him. As the good wine of Burgundy fills the blood with iron and strengthens the body, so the rich juice of the pork seemed to supply the oil necessary to keep the sinews supple and to prevent the cartilages from stiffening.
The scientific people say that it is the ossification of the cartilages—the stiffening of the firmer tissues—that in time interferes with the processesof life. The hinges rust, as if your tricycle had been left out in the rain for a week—and the delicate watchwork of the human frame will not run.
If suppleness could only be maintained there is no reason why it should not continue to work for a much longer period, for a hundred and fifty, two hundred years—as long as you fancy. But nothing has yet been devised to keep up the suppleness.
Grandfather Iden found the elixir of life in roast pork. The jokers of Woolhorton—there are always jokers, very clever they think themselves—considered the reason it suited him so well was because of the pig-like obstinacy of his disposition.
Anything more contrary to common sense than for an old man of ninety to feed on pork it would be hard to discover—so his friends said.
"Pork," said the physician, had down from London to see him on one occasion, "pork is the first on the list of indigestible articles of food. It takes from six to eight hours for the gastric apparatus to reduce its fibres. The stomach becomes overloaded—acidity is the result; nightmares, pains, and innumerable ills are the consequence. The very worst thing Mr. Iden could eat."
"Hum," growled the family doctor, a native of Woolhorton, when he heard of this. "Hum!" low in his throat, like an irate bulldog. If in the least excited, like most other country folk, he used the provincial pronunciation. "Hum! A' have lived twenty years on pork. Let'n yet it!"
Grandfather Iden intended to eat it, and dideat it six days out of seven, not, of course, roast pork every dinner; sometimes boiled pork; sometimes he baked it himself in the great oven. Now and then he varied it with pig-meat—good old country meat, let me tell you, pig-meat—such as spare-rib, griskin, blade-bone, and that mysterious morsel, the "mouse." The chine he always sent over for Iden junior, who was a chine eater—a true Homeric diner—and to make it even, Iden junior sent in the best apples for sauce from his favourite russet trees. It was about the only amenity that survived between father and son.
The pig-meat used to be delicious in the old house at home, before we all went astray along the different paths of life; fresh from the pigs fed and killed on the premises, nutty, and juicy to the palate. Much of it is best done on a gridiron—here's heresy! A gridiron is flat blasphemy to the modern school of scientific cookery. Scientific fiddlestick! Nothing like a gridiron to set your lips watering.
But the "mouse,"—what was the "mouse?" The London butchers can't tell me. It was a titbit. I suppose it still exists in pigs; but London folk are so ignorant.
Grandfather Iden ate pig in every shape and form, that is, he mumbled the juice out of it, and never complained of indigestion.
He was up at five o'clock every morning of his life, pottering about the great oven with his baker's man. In summer if it was fine he went out at sixfor a walk in the Pines—the promenade of Woolhorton.
"If you wants to get well," old Dr. Butler used to say, "you go for a walk in the marning afore the aair have been braathed auver."
Before the air has been breathed over—inspired and re-inspired by human crowds, while it retains the sweetness of the morning, like water fresh from the spring; that was when it possessed its value, according to bluff, gruff, rule-of-thumb old Butler. Depend upon it, there is something in his dictum, too.
Amaryllis hesitated at the thought of the pork, for he often had it underdone, so the old gentleman dismissed her in his most gracious manner to dine with the rest.
She went down the corridor and took the seat placed for her. There was a posy of primroses beside her napkin—posies of primroses all round the table.
This raging old Tory of ninety years would give a shilling for the earliest primrose the boys could find for him in the woods. Some one got him a peacock's feather which had fallen from Beaconsfield's favourites—a real Beaconsfield peacock-feather—which he had set in the centre of a splendid screen of feathers that cost him twenty guineas. The screen was upstairs in the great drawing-room near a bow window which overlooked the fair.
People, you see, took pains to get him feathers and anything he fancied, on account of the twentythousand spade guineas in the iron box under the bed.
His daughters, elderly, uninteresting married folk, begged him not to keep a peacock's feather in the house—it would certainly bring misfortune. The superstition was so firmly rooted in their minds that they actually argued with him—arguedwith Grandfather Iden!—pointing out to him the fearful risk he was running. He puffed and coughed, and grew red in the face—the great grey hat shook and tottered with anger; not for all the Powers of Darkness would he have given up that feather.
The chairs round the large table were arranged in accordance with the age of the occupants. There were twenty-one grandchildren, and a number of aunts, uncles, and so on; a vague crowd that does not concern us. The eldest sat at the head of the table, the next in age followed, and so all round the dishes. This arrangement placed Amaryllis rather low down—a long way from the top and fountain of honour—and highly displeased her. She despised and disliked the whole vague crowd of her relations, yet being there, she felt that she ought to have had a position above them all. Her father—Iden, junior—was old Iden's only son and natural heir; therefore her father's chair ought to have been at the top of the table, and hers ought to have been next to his.
Instead of which, as her father was not the eldest, his seat was some distance from the top, and hers again, was a long way from his.
All the other chairs were full, but her father's chair was empty.
The vague crowd were so immensely eager to pay their despicable court to the Spade-Guinea Man, not one of them stopped away; the old, the young, the lame, the paralytic, all found means to creep in to Grandfather Iden's annual dinner. His only son and natural heir was alone absent. How eagerly poor Amaryllis glanced from time to time at that empty chair, hoping against hope that her dear father would come in at the Psalms, or even at the sermon, and disappoint the venomous, avaricious hearts of the enemies around her.
For well she knew how delighted they were to see his chair empty, as a visible sign and token of the gulf between father and son, and well she knew how diligently each laboured to deepen the misunderstanding and set fuel to the flame of the quarrel. If the son were disinherited, consider the enormous profit to the rest of them!
Grandfather Iden made no secret of the fact that he had not signed a will. It was believed that several rough drafts had been sketched out for him, but, in his own words—and he was no teller of falsehoods—he had not decided on his will. If only they could persuade him to make his will they might feel safe of something; but suppose he went off pop, all in a moment, as these extraordinarily healthy old people are said to do, and the most of his estate in land! Consider what a contingency—almostall of it would go to his own son. Awful thing!
Amaryllis was aware how they all stared at her and quizzed her over and over; her hair, her face, her form, but most of all her dress. They were so poor at home she had not had a new dress this twelvemonth past; it was true her dress was decent and comfortable, and she really looked very nice in it to any man's eye; but a girl does not want a comfortable dress, she wants something in the style of the day, and just sufficiently advanced to make the women's eyes turn green with envy. It is not the men's eyes; it is the women's eyes.
Amaryllis sat up very quiet and unconcerned, trying with all her might to make them feel she was the Heiress, not only an only son's only daughter, but the only son's only offspring—doubly the Heiress of Grandfather Iden.
The old folk, curious in such matters, had prophesied so soon as she was born that there would be no more children at Coombe Oaks, and so it fell out. For it had been noticed in the course of generations, that in the direct line of Iden when the first child was a daughter there were none to follow. And further, that there never was but one Miss Iden at a time.
If the Direct Line had a daughter first, they never had any more children; consequently that daughter was the only Miss Iden.
If the Direct Line had a son, they never had a second son, though they might have daughters;but then, in order that there should still be only one Miss Iden, it always happened that the first died, or was married early, before the second came into existence.
Such was the tradition of the Iden family; they had a long pedigree, the Idens, reaching farther back than the genealogies of many a peer, and it had been observed that this was the rule of their descent.
Amaryllis was the only Miss Iden, and the heiress, through her father, of the Spade-Guinea Man. She tried to make them feel that she knew it and felt it; that she was the Iden of the Idens. Her proud face—it was a very proud face naturally—darkened a little, and grew still more disdainful in its utter scorn and loathing of the vague crowd of enemies.
T
O one, as it were, in the gallery, it was a delight to see her; her sweet cheeks, fresh as the dawn, reddening with suppressed indignation; her young brow bent; her eyes cast down—don't you think for a moment she would deign to look at them—pride in her heart, and resolute determination to fight for her dear father and mother.
But she felt as she sat so unconcerned that there was a crack in her boot unmended, and it seemed as if everyone could see it though under the solid table. She had not had a really sound pair of boots for many, many months; they could not afford her a new pair at home, and the stupid shoemaker, "Established 1697," was such a time repairing her others.
She would not look at them, but she knew that they were all dressed better than she was; there were some of them very poor, and very vulgar, too, but they were all dressed better than her, and without a doubt had sound boots on their feet.
The cottagers in Coombe hamlet always hadsound boots; she never had; nor, indeed, her mother. Her father had a pair, being compelled by the character of his work in the fields to take care of himself so far, though he wore a ragged coat. But neither mother nor daughter ever had a whole pair of boots—whole and sound as the very cottagers had.
If Amaryllis had sat there with naked feet she would have been prouder than ever, and that is why I always loved her so; she was not to be put down by circumstances, she was above external things.
But as time went on, and the dinner was nearly over—she had scarcely eaten anything—and as she glanced from time to time at her father's empty chair, and knew that he would not come, and that his defection would revive the old quarrel which might so easily have been mended, the Flamma blood began to rise and grow hotter and hotter, and the foot with the worn boot on it began to tap the floor.
The Flamma blood would have liked to have swept the whole company over a precipice into the Red Sea as the herd of swine in old time. It was either the Red Sea or somewhere; geography is of no consequence.
Spain's an island nearMorocco, betwixt Egypt and Tangier.
The Flamma blood would have liked to have seen them all poisoned and dying on their seats.
The Flamma blood would have been glad to stick a knife into each of them—only it would not havetouched them with the longest hop-pole in Kent, so utter was its loathing of the crew gloating over that empty chair.
And for once Amaryllis did not check it, and did not say to herself, "Iwillnot be a Flamma."
Towards the end of the tedious banquet the word was passed round that everyone was to sit still, as Grandfather Iden was coming to look at his descendants.
There was not the least fear of any of them stirring, for they well knew his custom—to walk round, and speak a few words to everyone in turn, and to put a new golden sovereign into their hands. Thirty-two sovereigns it was in all—one for each—but the thirty-third was always a spade-guinea, which was presented to the individual who had best pleased him during the year.
A genial sort of custom, no doubt, but fancy the emulation and the heart-burning over the spade-guinea! For the fortunate winner usually considered himself the nearest to the Will.
Amaryllis' cheeks began to burn at the thought that she should have to take his horrible money. A hideous old monster he was to her at that moment—not that he had done anything to her personally—but he left her dear father to be worried out of his life by petty tradesmen, and her dear mother to go without a pair of decent boots, while he made this pompous distribution among these wretches. The hideous old monster!
Out in the town the boys behind his back gavehim endless nicknames: Granfer Iden, Floury Iden, My Lord Lardy-Cake, Marquis Iden, His Greasy Grace; and, indeed, with his whims and humours, and patronage, his caprices and ways of going on, if he had but had a patent of nobility, Grandfather Iden would have made a wonderfully good duke.
By-and-by in comes the old Pacha, still wearing his great grey tottery hat, and proceeds from chair to chair, tapping folk on the shoulder, saying a gracious word or two, and dropping his new golden sovereigns in their eager palms. There was a loud hum of conversation as he went round; they all tried to appear so immensely happy to see him.
Amaryllis did not exactly watch him, but of course knew what he was about, when suddenly there was a dead silence. Thirty-two people suddenly stopped talking as if the pneumaticbrakehad been applied to their lips by a sixty-ton locomotive.
Dead, ominous silence. You could almost hear the cat licking his paw under the table.
Amaryllis looked, and saw the old man leaning with both hands on the back of his son's empty chair.
He seemed to cling to it as if it was a spar floating on the barren ocean of life and death into which his withered old body was sinking.
Perhaps he really would have clung like that to his son had but his son come to him, and borne a little, and for a little while, with his ways.
A sorrowful thing to see—the old man of ninety clinging to the back of his son's empty chair. His great grey tottery hat seemed about to tumble on the floor—his back bowed a little more—and he groaned deeply, three times.
We can see, being out of the play and spectators merely, that there was a human cry for help in the old man's groan—his heart yearned for his son's strong arm to lean on.
The crowd of relations were in doubt as to whether they should rejoice, whether the groan was a sign of indignation, of anger too deep ever to be forgotten, or whether they should be alarmed at the possibility of reconciliation.
The Flamma blood was up too much in Amaryllis for her to feel pity for him as she would have done in any other mood; she hated him all the more; he was rich, the five-shilling fare was nothing to him, he could hire a fly from the "Lamb Inn," and drive over and make friends with her father in half an hour. Groaning there—the hideous old monster! and her mother without a decent pair of boots.
In a moment or two Grandfather Iden recovered himself, and continued the distribution, and by-and-by Amaryllis felt him approach her chair. She did not even turn to look at him, so he took her hand, and placed two coins in it, saying in his most gracious way that the sovereign was for her father, and the guinea—the spade-guinea—for herself. She muttered something—she knew not what—shecould but just restrain herself from throwing the money on the floor.
It was known in a moment that Amaryllis had the guinea. Conceive the horror, the hatred, the dread of the crowd of sycophants! That the Heiress Apparent should be the favourite!
Yet more. Half-an-hour later, just after they had all got upstairs into the great drawing-room, and some were officiously and reverently admiring the peacock-feather in the screen, and some looking out of the bow window at the fair, there came a message for Amaryllis to put on her hat and go for a walk with her grandfather.
There was not one among all the crowd in the drawing-room who had ever been invited to accompany Iden Pacha.
Three days ago at home, if anyone had told Amaryllis that she would be singled out in this way, first to receive the Iden medal—the spade-guinea stamp of approval—and then, above all things, to be honoured by walking out with this "almighty" grandfather, how delighted she would have been at the thought of the triumph!
But now it was just the reverse. Triumph over these people—pah! a triumph over rats and flies or some such creatures. She actually felt lowered in her own esteem by being noticed at all among them. Honoured by this old horror—she revolted at it.Hehonour her with his approval—she hated him.
The other day a travelling piano was wheeledthrough Coombe and set up a tune in that lonesome spot. Though it was but a mechanical piece of music, with the cogs as it were of the mechanism well marked by the thump, thump, it seemed to cheer the place—till she went out to the gate to look at the Italian woman who danced about while the grinding was done, and saw that she had a sound pair of boots on. That very morning her mother in crossing the road had set the Flamma rheumatism shooting in her bones, for the dampness of the mud came through the crack in her boot.
This miserable old Iden Pacha thought to honour her while he let her mother walk about with her stocking on the wet ground!
The Flamma blood was up in her veins—what did she care for guineas!
As she was putting her hat on in the bedroom before the glass she looked round to see that no one was watching, and then stooped down and put the spade-guinea in the dust of the floor under the dressing-table. She would have none of his hateful money. The sovereign she took care of because it was for her father, and he might buy something useful with it; he wanted a few shillings badly enough.
So the spade-guinea remained in the dust of the floor for a week or two, till it pleased the housemaid to move the dressing-table to brush away the accumulation, when she found the shining one in the fluff.
Being over thirty, she held her tongue, theguinea henceforward travelled down the stream of Time fast enough though silently, but she took the first opportunity of examining the iron box under the Pacha's bed, thinking perhaps there might be a chink in it. And it was curious how for some time afterwards a fit of extraordinary industry prevailed in the house; there was not a table, a chair, or any piece of furniture that was not chivvied about under pretence of polishing. She actually had a day's holiday and a cast-off gown given to her as a reward for her labours.
A
MARYLLIS did not look back as she walked beside her grandfather slowly up the street, or she would have seen the company of relations watching them from the bow-window.
Iden went straight through the crowd without any hesitation on account of his age—angry as she was, Amaryllis feared several times lest the clumsy people should over-turn him, and tried her best to shield him. But he had a knack of keeping on his feet—the sort of knack you learn by skating—and did not totter much more than usual, despite the press.
The world gets on with very little amusement somehow. Here were two or three thousand people packed in the street, and all they had to enliven their festive gathering was the same old toys their fathers' fathers' fathers had set before them.
Rows of booths for the display of "fairings," gingerbread, nuts, cakes, brandy-balls, and sugar-plums stood in the gutter each side.
The "fairings" were sweet biscuits—they have been made every fair this hundred years.
The nuts were dry and hard, just as Spanish nuts always are. The gingerbread was moulded in the same old shapes of clumsy horses outlined with gilt.
There was the same old trumpeting and tootling, tom-tomming, and roaring of showmen's voices. The same old roundabouts, only now they were driven by steam, and short, quick whistles announced that the whirligig caravan was travelling round the world. The fat woman, the strong man, the smashers tapping the "claret," the "Pelican of the Wilderness," that mystic and melancholy bird, the rifle galleries, the popping for nuts—behold these are they our fathers have seen.
There is nothing new under the sun—not even at Epsom. The first time I saw the wonderful crowd of the Derby Day—perhaps the largest crowd in the world—I could scarcely believe my eyes, for I found on passing through it that the hundreds of thousands of people there had nothing more to amuse them than they would have found at an ordinary country fair. Swings, roundabouts, cockshies at cocoa-nuts, rootletum, tootletum, and beer. That was all. No new amusement whatsoever: a very humdrum sort of world, my masters!
The next finest crowd is the crowd on August bank-holiday all along the Brighton beach, and there it is just the same. Nothing for the folk but Punch, brass bands, and somersaulters—dull old stories in my grandmother's time.
Xerxes offered a reward to anyone who could invent him a fresh pleasure—the multitude of theDerby Day and Brighton beach should do the same. But indeed they do, for an immense fortune would certainly be the reward of such a discoverer. One gets tired of pitching sticks at cocoa-nuts all one's time.
However, at Woolhorton nobody but the very rawest and crudest folk cared for the shows, all they did care was to alternately stand stock still and then shove. First they shoved as far as the "Lion" and had some beer, then they shoved back to the "Lamb" and had some beer, then they stood stock still in the street and blocked those who were shoving. Several thousand people were thus happily occupied, and the Lion and the Lamb laid down together peacefully that day.
Amaryllis and old Iden had in like manner to shove, for there was no other way to get through, no one thought of moving, or giving any passage, if you wanted to progress you must shoulder them aside. As Grandfather Iden could not shove very hard they were frequently compelled to wait till the groups opened, and thus it happened that Amaryllis found herself once face to face with Jack Duck.
He kind of sniggered in a foolish way at Amaryllis, and touched his hat to Iden. "You ain't a been over to Coombe lately, Mr. Iden," he said.
"No," replied the old man sharply, and went on.
Jack could hardly have struck a note more discordant to Amaryllis. The father had not been to visit his son for more than a year—she did not want unpleasant memories stirred up.
Again in another group a sturdy labourer touched his hat and asked her if her father was at fair, as he was looking out for a job. Old Iden started and grunted like a snorting horse.
Amaryllis, though put out, stayed to speak kindly to him, for she knew he was always in difficulties. Bill Nye was that contradiction a strong man without work. He wanted to engage for mowing. Bill Nye was a mower at Coombe, and his father, Bill Nye, before him, many a long year before he was discovered in California.
When she overtook Iden he was struggling to pass the stream of the Orinoco, which set strongly at that moment out of the "Lamb" towards the "Lion." Strong men pushed out from the "Lamb" archway like a river into the sea, thrusting their way into the general crowd, and this mighty current cast back the tottering figure of old Iden as the swollen Orinoco swung the crank old Spanish caravels that tried to breast it.
It was as much as Amaryllis and he together could do to hold their ground at the edge of the current. While they were thus battling she chanced to look up.
A large window was open over the archway, and at this window a fellow was staring down at her. He stood in his shirt-sleeves with a billiard-cue in his hand waiting his turn to play. It was the same young fellow, gentleman if you like, whose pale face had so displeased her that morning as he rode under when she watched the folk go by tofair. He was certainly the most advanced in civilization of all who had passed Plum Corner, and yet there was something in that pale and rather delicate face which was not in the coarse lineaments of the "varmers" and "drauvers" and "pig-dealers" who had gone by under the wall. Something that insulted her.
The face at the window was appraising her.
It was reckoning her up—so much for eyes, so much for hair, so much for figure, and as this went on the fingers were filling a pipe from an elastic tobacco-pouch. There was no romance, no poetry in that calculation—no rapture or pure admiration of beauty; there was a billiard-cue and a tobacco-pouch, and a glass of spirits and water, and an atmosphere of smoke, and a sound of clicking ivory balls at the back of the thought. His thumb was white where he had chalked it to make a better bridge for the cue. His face was white; for he had chalked it with dissipation. His physical body was whitened—chalked—a whited sepulchre; his moral nature likewise chalked.
At the back of his thought lay not the high esteem of the poet-thinker for beauty, but the cynical blackguardism of the XIXth century.
The cynicism that deliberately reckons up things a Shakespeare would admire at their lowest possible sale value. A slow whiff of smoke from a corner of the sneering mouth, an air of intense knowingness, as much as to say, "You may depend upon me—I've been behind the scenes. All this isgot up, you know; stage effect in front, pasteboard at the rear; nothing in it."
In the sensuality of Nero there may still be found some trace of a higher nature; "What an artist the world has lost!" he exclaimed, dying.
The empress Theodora craved for the applause of the theatre to which she exposed her beauty.
This low, cynical nineteenth century blackguardism thinks of nothing but lowness, and has no ideal. The milliner even has an ideal, she looks to colour, shape, effect; though but in dress, yet it is an ideal. There was no ideal in Ned Marks.
They called him from within to take his turn with the cue; he did not answer, he was so absorbed in his calculations. He was clever—in a way; he had quite sufficient penetration to see that this was no common girl. She was not beautiful—yet, she was not even pretty, and so plainly dressed; still there was something marked in her features. And she was with old Iden.
Amaryllis did not understand the meaning of his glance, but she felt that it was an insult. She looked down quickly, seized her grandfather's arm, and drew him out from the pavement into the street, yielding a little to the current and so hoping to presently pass it.
By this time, as Ned Marks did not answer, his companions had come to the window to discover what he was staring at. "Oho!" they laughed. "It's Miss Iden. Twenty thousand guineas in the iron box!"
Iden's great white hat, which always seemed to sit loosely on his head, was knocked aside by the elbow of a burly butcher struggling in the throng; Amaryllis replaced it upright, and leading him this way, and pushing him that, got at last to the opposite pavement, and so behind the row of booths, between them and the houses where there was less crush. Taking care of him, she forgot to look to her feet and stepped in the gutter where there was a puddle. The cold water came through the crack in her boot.
While these incidents were still further irritating her, the old Pacha kept mumbling and muttering to himself, nodding his head and smiling at each fresh mark of attention, for though he was so independent and fearless still he appreciated the trouble she took. The mumbling in his mouth was a sort of purring. Her dutiful spirit had stroked him up to a pleasant state of electric glow; she felt like a hound in a leash, ready to burst the bond that held her to his hand. Side by side, and arm in arm, neither of them understood the other; ninety and sixteen, a strange couple in the jostling fair.
Iden turned down a passage near the end of the street, and in an instant the roar of the crowd which had boomed all round them was shut off by high walls up which it rose and hummed over their heads in the air. They walked on broad stone flags notched here and there at the edges, for the rest worn smooth by footsteps (the grave drives such a trade) like Iden's doorstep, they were in fact tombstones,and the walled passage brought them to the porch of the Abbey church.
There he stopped, muttering and mumbling, and wiped his forehead with his vast silk handkerchief. They were no longer incommoded by a crowd, but now and then folk came by hastening to the fair; lads with favours in their coats, and blue ribbons in their hats, girls in bright dresses, chiefly crude colours, who seemed out of accord with the heavy weight as it were of the great Abbey, the ponderous walls, the quiet gloom of the narrow space, and the shadows that lurked behind the buttresses.
The aged man muttered and mumbled about the porch and took Amaryllis under it, making her look up at the groining, and note the spring of the arch, which formed a sort of carved crown over them. It was a fine old porch, deep and high, in some things reminding you of the porches that are to be seen in Spain; stone made to give a pleasant shade like trees, so cut and worked as to be soft to the eye.
He pointed out to her the touches that rendered it so dear to those who value art in stone. He knew them, every one, the history and the dates, and the three stags' heads on a shield; there were broad folios in the smoky room at home, filled with every detail, Iden himself had subscribed forty pounds to the cost of illustrating one of them. Every scholar who visited the Abbey church, called and begged to see the baker's old books.
Iden rubbed his old thumb in the grooves andwent outside and hoisted himself, as it were, up from his crooked S position to look at the three stags' heads on the shield on the wall; dim stags' heads that to you, or at least to me, might have been fishes, or Jove's thunderbolts, or anything.
Amaryllis was left standing alone a moment in the porch, the deep shadow within behind her, the curve of the arch over, a fine setting for a portrait. She stood the more upright because of the fire and temper suppressed in her.
Just outside the human letter S—crooked S—clad in sad white-grey miller's garments, its old hat almost falling backwards off its old grey head, gazed up and pointed with its oaken cudgel at the coat of arms. Seven hundred years—the weight of seven hundred years—hung over them both in that old Abbey.
Into that Past he was soon to disappear: she came out to the Future.
Thence he took her to an arched door, nail-studded, in the passage wall, and giving her the key, told her to open it, and stood watching her in triumph, as if it had been the door to some immense treasury. She turned the lock, and he pushed her before him hastily, as if they must snatch so grand an opportunity.