Old Mr. Tredgold. Маргарет Олифант
tables on which the hand could rest without carrying away a sharp impression of carved foliage or arabesques. There were no china vases standing six feet high, and there was a good deal of litter about such as is indispensable to the happiness of girls. Mr. Tredgold had a huge easy-chair placed near to a tall lamp, and the evening paper, only a few hours later than if he had been in London, in his hands. He was a little old man with no appearance to speak of—no features, no hair, and very little in the way of eyes. How he had managed to be the father of two vigorous young women nobody could understand; but vigorous young women are, however it has come about, one of the commonest productions of the age, a fashion like any other. Stella lay back in a deep chair near her father, and was at this moment, while he filled the air of the room with the crinkling of his paper as he folded back a leaf, lost in the utterance of a long yawn which opened her mouth to a preternatural size, and put her face, which was almost in a horizontal position thrown back and contemplating the ceiling, completely out of drawing, which was a pity, for it was a pretty face. Katherine showed no inclination to yawn—she was busy at a table doing something—something very useless and of the nature of trumpery I have no doubt; but it kept her from yawning at least.
“Well, my pet,” Mr. Tredgold said, putting his hand on the arm of Stella’s chair, “very tired, eh—tired of having nothing to do, and sitting with your old father one night?”
“Oh, I’ve got plenty to do,” said Stella, getting over the yawn, and smiling blandly upon the world; “and, as for one night I sit with you for ever, you ungrateful old dad.”
“What is in the wind now? What’s the next entertainment? You never mean to be quiet for two days together?” the old gentleman said.
“It is not our fault,” said Katherine. “The Courtnays have gone away, the Allens are going, and Lady Jane has not yet come back.”
“I declare,” cried Stella, “it’s humiliating that we should have to depend on anybody for company, whether they are summer people or winter people. What is Lady Jane to us? We are as good as any of them. It is you who give in directly, Kate, and think there is nothing to be done. I’ll have a picnic to-morrow, if it was only the people from the hotel; they are better than nobody, and so pleased to be asked. I shan’t spend another evening alone with papa.”
Papa was not displeased by this sally. He laughed and chuckled in his throat, and crinkled his newspaper more than ever. “What a little hussy!” he cried. “Did you ever know such a little hussy, Kate?”
Kate did not pay any attention at all to papa. She went on with her gum and scissors and her trumpery, which was intended for a bazaar somewhere. “The question is, Do you know the hotel people?” she said. “You would not think a picnic of five or six much fun.”
“Oh, five or six!” cried the other with a toss of her head; and she sprang up from her chair with an activity as great as her former listlessness, and rushed to a very fine ormolu table all rose colour and gold, at which she sat down, dashing off as many notes. “The Setons at the hotel will bring as many as that; they have officers and all kinds of people about,” she cried, flinging the words across her shoulder as she wrote.
“But we scarcely know them, Stella; and Mrs. Seton I don’t like,” said Katherine, with her gum-brush arrested in her hand.
“Papa, am I to ask the people I want, or is Kate to dictate in everything?” cried Stella, putting up another note.
“Let the child have her way, Katie, my dear; you know she has always had her way all her life.”
Katherine’s countenance was perhaps not so amiable as Stella’s, who was radiant with fun and expectation and contradiction. “I think I may sometimes have my way too,” she said. “They are not nice people; they may bring any kind of man, there is always a crowd of men about her. Papa, I think we are much safer, two girls like us, and you never going out with us, if we keep to people we know; that was always to be the condition when you consented that Stella should send our invitations without consulting you.”
“Yes, yes, my dear,” said the old gentleman, turning to his elder daughter, “that is quite true, quite true;” then he caught Stella’s eye, and added tremulously: “You must certainly have two or three people you know.”
“And what do you call Miss Mildmay?” cried Stella, “and Mrs. Shanks?—aren’t they people we know?”
“Oh, if she is asking them—the most excellent people and knowing everybody—I think—don’t you think, Katie?—that might do?”
“Of course it will do,” cried Stella gaily. “And old Shanks and old Mildmay are such fun; they always fight—and they hate all the people in the hotels; and only think of their two old faces when they see Mrs. Seton and all her men! It will be the best party we have had this whole year.”
Katherine’s ineffectual remonstrances were drowned in the tinkling as of a cracked bottle of Mr. Tredgold’s laugh. He liked to hear the old ladies called old cats and set to fight and spit at each other. It gave him an agreeable sense of contrast with his own happy conditions; petted and appealed to by the triumphant youth which belonged to him, and of which he was so proud. The inferiority of the “old things” was pleasant to the old man, who was older than they. The cackle of his laugh swept every objection away. And then I think Katherine would have liked to steal away outside and look at the view, and console herself with the sight of the Sliplin lights and all the twinkling villages along the coast; which, it will be seen, was no disinterested devotion to Nature, but only a result of the sensation of being out of it, and not having, which Stella had, her own way.
“Well, you needn’t come unless you like,” cried Stella with defiance, as they parted at the door between their respective rooms, a door which Katherine, I confess, shut with some energy on this particular evening, though it generally stood open night and day.
“I don’t think I will,” Katherine cried in her impatience; but she thought better of this before day.
CHAPTER II
Stella had always been the spoilt child of the Tredgold family. Her little selfishnesses and passions of desire to have her own way, and everything she might happen to want, had been so amusing that nobody had chidden or thought for a moment (as everybody thought with Katherine) of the bad effect upon her character and temper of having all these passions satisfied and getting everything she stormed or cried for. Aunt after aunt had passed in shadow, as it were, across the highly lighted circle of Mr. Tredgold’s home life, all of them breaking down at last in the impossibility of keeping pace with Stella, or satisfying her impetuous little spirit; and governess after governess in the same way had performed a sort of processional march through the house. Stella’s perpetual flow of mockery and mimicry had all the time kept her father in endless amusement. The mockery was not very clever, but he was easily pleased and thought it capital fun. There was so much inhumanity in his constitution, though he was a kind man in his way and very indulgent to those who belonged to him, that he had no objection to see his own old sister (though a good creature) outrageously mimicked in all her peculiarities, much less the sisters of his late wife. Little Stella, while still under the age of sixteen, had driven off all these ladies and kept her father in constant amusement. “The little hussy!” he said, “the little vixen!” and chuckled and laughed till it was feared he might choke some time, being afflicted with bronchitis, in those convulsions of delight. Katherine, who was the champion of the aunts, and wept as one after the other departed, amused him greatly too. “She is an old maid born!” he said, “and she sticks up for her kind, but Stella will have her pick, and marry a prince, and take off the old cats as long as she lives.”
“But if she lives,” said a severe governess who for some time kept the household in awe, “she will become old too, and probably be an old cat in the opinion of those that come after her.”
“No fear,” cried the foolish old man—“no fear.” In his opinion Stella would never be anything but pretty and young, and radiant with fun and fascination.
And since the period when the girls “came out” there had been nothing but a whirl of gaiety in the house. They did not come out in the legitimate way, by being presented