UNCLE JASPER.
ByALICE KING.
“I
shan’t, won’t, and can’t like Uncle Jasper; it’s quite impossible, I know, for me to do it; if he had any other name I might perhaps try; but Jasper, Jasper, just fancy liking anyone with such a name! He’s quite certain, with a name like that, to keep the windows tight shut in July, and insist on my wearing a fur cape in April, and eating oatmeal porridge for breakfast, and no butter and marmalade; and he’ll be always dressed in a hideous, flaring red dressing-gown, and he’s sure to have a wig, and he’ll never take a walk with me after sunset, because of some horrid old whim about catching cold. No, it’s not to be supposed that I can even tolerate Uncle Jasper; and as for going and living with him, and leaving our bright, jolly life here, it’s quite out of the question.”
The speaker was myself. At that time I was a girl of fourteen, with brown eyes, and little feet that danced in unison; with a slight figure which, in its restless activity, brings to my mind now, as I look back, the ceaseless motion of the pampas grass when the breeze touches it ever so softly; with thick, frizzy, rebellious, dark hair, that utterly refused to accommodate itself to any known fashion of hairdressing whatsoever; with a broad, intelligent brow, which sometimes wrote the word “wilfulness” much too legibly upon itself in certain wrinkles and lines, if contradiction or any kind of supposed indignity stirred up my spirit within me, as was much too often the case; with a little red mouth, which was occasionally much too resolute a mouth for a young lady who had not travelled on very far in her teens.
Both my parents had died when I was quite a little child; they had lived in India, and I had known very little of their love or care. I had no near relations in England to take me under their protection; I had spent my whole life at school, going for my holidays to the houses of different schoolfellows. I was the heiress to a small fortune of my own, which was managed by an old gentleman in the city who had been left my guardian, and who never came to visit me more than twice a year, when he paid a state call at my school, and sat with me and the head schoolmistress in the grand, chill drawing-room—into which no one ever entered save on the most solemn occasions—for two terrible hours, inquiring into my health, my studies, and my expenses, at the end of which periods I always felt as if I had been for a voyage at sea on the top of an iceberg.
Now the one thing wanting in my young life was love. I was a clever girl, and took generally a lion’s share of the prizes in the school for every kind of learning and accomplishment. I was endowed with a fair proportion of good looks, and I had quite as much money allowed me by my guardian as any girl of my age could reasonably desire. I could not say that I wished especially for anything which was not within the reach of my attainment in the circumstances in which I was placed; still, I had a vague consciousness that I did want something, and this something was love. As has been said, I had no near relations, and I was not one of those girls who seem to carry about with them a fairy machine for manufacturing affection wherever they go. My religion was at that time more of a dead form than a living spirit, warming and colouring my whole life; and thus I was wanting in the highest power of all for waking and creating love in those around us.
The two ladies who kept our school and the under-governesses were all, in a certain way, proud of me for my cleverness and good looks. But none of them tried to make their way into my heart. They were all somewhat indolent women, and as I did them credit in their school, they gave me my way far more than was good for me, and so fostered the wilfulness which was one of the worst features of my character. My schoolfellows, most of them, liked me to a certain extent; my lively chatter—for I had always a nimble tongue—made me a pleasant companion and an agreeable visitor. At the same time, however, they were all a little afraid of me, on account of the reputation I had for superior mental gifts, and not one among them ever endeavoured to be intimate with me. They went so far in their acquaintance with me—that is, as far as a thick rind of proud reserve which surrounded the inner recesses of my thoughts and feelings would allow; and when they reached this point they were content to remain without the barrier.
Things went on in this way with me till a new girl, called Lily Greenwood, came to our school. Lily was not either as clever or as pretty as I was; but there was a charm about her which I had not—the charm of a sweet, sympathetic nature, which the high, pure atmosphere of a Christian home had developed early into blossoms of rare beauty. In a month everyone in the school loved Lily. Even the girls with the prickliest tempers, who were always saying “won’t” and “shan’t,” said “will” and “shall” to Lily; and the girls with the dullest brains, who could never be either pulled or driven through the German declensions, brightened up at her magic spells, and grew quite starlike in their gleams and twinkles of intelligence; and the greedy girls got to share their most cherished dainties with her, because she set them such an example of entire, smiling, gracious unselfishness; and the very cat, who used to spit and grumble if but the skirts of our dresses touched her, came to sit on Lily’s knee, and rejoiced in being stroked by her hand.
Among the rest, I fell gradually under the witchery practised by Lily. She seemed to know by instinct that love was what I wanted, and she came and wove a web of sunbeams around me, till at length I was caught in it. I began to open my heart to her, and to let her come in, as I had never done to anyone before; and I began, too, to feel real warm affection for her. Still, I did not let Lily’s influence work upon me for good as much as it ought to have done; my pride forbade it, and I continued in most things my old wilful self.
Some few months before my story begins it had been discovered by the doctors that my chest was delicate, and that it would be beneficial for my health to spend the winter in a warmer climate. My guardian, who was always very eager to atone for his want of affection for me by most scrupulous care for my temporal well-being, at once decided that I should go to the South of France in November, and remain there till April, and came to my schoolmistress to arrange with her as to how the plan could be carried out. It was settled that Miss Dolly, the younger of our schoolmistress’s sisters, who kept the school jointly with her, should occupy, with me, a villa near Cannes, and that I should have one companion of my own age to keep me from being dull. Great was my joy when I heard that this companion was to be Lily. She was not very strong, and her father, who had lately lost his wife (on which account Lily had been sent to school), thought it a good opportunity of getting needful change for her without having to go with her himself, and leave his business as a merchant for a while.
The plan had proved a great success, as far as Lily and I were concerned. Our bodily strength increased in the warm, sweet, southern air; we learned to talk French like natives; we rejoiced in long rambles through the vineyards and among the bands of flowers which soon began to appear in the land as the fair vanguard of spring; but it cannot be said that it was exactly a season of joy and repose for Miss Dolly.
Miss Dolly was one of the mildest, most characterless single ladies that ever put on a cap. When she went into office at the Villa Chantilly, it was, of course, intended that she should rule her pupils; but the fable could not long be kept standing on its feet; it quickly appeared that her pupils, or at least one of her pupils, and that one myself, ruled her entirely. I insisted on all the furniture in the house making the strangest migrations from room to room about twenty times in succession, to suit my fancy; I vexed poor Miss Dolly’s soul by causing the cooks to give warning, one after another, because I would not be satisfied without going down daily into the kitchen to enter into an exhaustive study of the way to make omelettes; I made raids into the garden to gather flowers when I ought to have been practising my scales; I put on a bland air of submission when Miss Dolly made a supreme decree that we were never to be out after the dew began to fall; and then, while she slumbered in her armchair (with Rollin’s History, which she had been reading out loud, in her lap), coolly stepped out through the window on to the turf in the moonlight. Lily endeavoured, it is true, to strengthen Miss Dolly’s hands as far as she could, but at the same time I saw, plainly enough that smiles would now and then, in spite of herself, come creeping round her mouth as she watched my proceedings. The result of all this was, as might be naturally expected, that I grew more wilful than ever, and fonder of my own way in everything.
Such was the state of things in the Villa Chantilly when, one morning early in March, there arrived from Miss Dolly’s elder sister in England a letter which seemed likely to change the whole course of my future. It told how there had come to the school a gentleman making anxious inquiries about me, Beatrice Warmington, and how this gentleman was my uncle, Mr. Jasper Rosebury. I had never heard of such a relation, and at first I simply refused to believe in his existence. A few more sentences of the letter, however, proved most indisputably that Mr. Rosebury had married my mother’s elder sister, that she had died young, before my mother was married herself, and that he had then gone to Australia, where he had remained ever since. I had, of course, never even heard his name; for when my parents were alive I was too young to understand anything about ourfamily history, and my guardian had probably never thought it worth while to trouble himself to make known to me the facts concerning my aunt’s early marriage and death. Besides, Jasper Rosebury had not been heard of for some years, even by his own relations.
The letter, moreover, informed us that my Uncle Jasper was about to come to the villa, and take me away from school and all school authority for good, to live with him. It was against this plan that I was raising up such energetic objections. I did not wish to leave my bright, enjoyable life at the villa; I did not wish to have an old gentleman, such as my imagination represented my uncle, for a constant companion; and, most of all, I did not wish to be separated from Lily. Besides all this, I had taken a whimsical but most resolute dislike to my uncle, simply because I had a prejudice against his Christian name, Jasper.
The scene grew more and more disturbed round the breakfast-table that morning in the Villa Chantilly. Miss Dolly remonstrated, coaxed, cried, made a faint attempt at scolding, and then cried again. As for myself, I did nothing but repeat over and over a most flat and unequivocal refusal ever to live with Uncle Jasper. He would be here to-morrow, Miss Dolly sobbed. Then let him be here; that made no difference to me. I would not go with him.
“Oh, Beatrice!” here put in Lily’s sweet, low voice—she had been making attempts from time to time to still the storm—“if it was only my dear mother’s brother, whom she used to tell me so much about, come back, how happy—”
But here I broke in upon her with, “I wish, Lily, that you and Miss Dolly were tied up in a bag with all the old rusty, musty uncles and aunts going, then, I should think, you’d both have a jolly time of it.”
After that I flounced out of the room, banging the door after me.
It was all very well to flounce and bang, but I knew well enough in my inmost soul that no flouncing and banging could change the fact that Uncle Jasper would be here to-morrow. I meditated and meditated upon this certainty, until out of it, and out of my resolute, headstrong wilfulness, there grew up a firm determination—I would run away.
(To be continued.)