Sir Robert's Fortune. Маргарет Олифант
not come to be scolded either, for I have not done any thing wrong.”
“We’ll come to that presently. Sit down, sit down,” he said with impatience. Lily placed herself on the chair he pushed toward her, and then there was a moment’s silence. Sir Robert was an old man (in Lily’s opinion) and she was a young girl, but they were antagonists not badly matched, and he had a certain respect for the pluck and firmness of this little person who was not afraid of him. They were indeed so evenly matched that there ensued a little pause as they both looked at each other in the milky-white daylight, full of mist and cold, which filled the great windows. Sir Robert had a fire, though fires had been given up in the house. It burned with a little red point, sultry and smouldering, as fires have a way of doing in summer. The room was large and sombre, with pale green walls hung with some full-length portraits, the furniture all large, heavy, and dark. A white bust of himself stood stern upon a black pedestal in a corner—so white that amid all the sober lines of the room it caught the eye constantly. And Sir Robert was not a handsome man. His features were blunt and his air homely; his head was not adapted for marble. In that hard material it looked frowning, severe, and merciless. The bust had lived in this room longer than Sir Robert had done, and Lily had derived her first impressions of him from its unyielding face. The irregularities of the real countenance leaned to humor and a shrewdness which was not unkindly; but there was no relenting in the marble head.
“Well,” he said at last, “now we’ve met to have it out, Lily. You take me at my word, and it is best so. How old are you now?”
“I don’t see,” said Lily breathlessly, “what that can have to do with it, uncle! but I’m twenty-two—or at least I shall be on the 20th of August, and that is not far away.”
“No, it is not far away. Twenty-two—and I am—well, sixty-two, we may say, with allowances. That is a great difference between people that meet to discuss an important question—on quite an equal footing, Lily, as you suppose.”
“I never pretended—to be your equal, uncle!”
“No, I don’t suppose so—not in words, not in experience, and such like—but in intention and all that, and in knowing what suits yourself.”
Lily made no reply, but she looked at him—silent, not yielding, tapping her foot unconsciously on the carpet, nervous, yet firm, not disposed to give way a jot, though she recognized a certain truth in what he said.
“This gives you, you must see, a certain advantage to begin with,” said Sir Robert, “for you are firmly fixed upon one thing, whatever I say or any one, and determined not to budge from your position; whereas I am quite willing to hear reason, if there is any reason to show.”
“Uncle!” Lily said, and then closed her lips and returned to her silence. It was hard for her to keep silent with her disposition, and yet she suddenly perceived, with one of those flashes of understanding which sometimes came to her, that silence could not be controverted, whereas words under Sir Robert’s skilful attack would probably topple over at once, like a house of cards.
“Well?” he said. While she, poor child, was panting and breathless, he was quite cool and collected. At present he rather enjoyed the sight of the little thing’s tricks and devices, and was amused to watch how far her natural skill, and that intuitive cunning which such a man believes every woman to possess, would carry her. He was a little provoked that she did not follow that impetuous exclamation “Uncle!” with any thing more.
“Well,” he repeated, wooing her, as he hoped, to destruction, “what more? Unless you state your case how am I to find out whether there is any justice in it or not?”
“Uncle,” said Lily, “I did not come to state my case, which would not become me. I came because you objected to me, to hear what you wanted me to do.”
“By Jove!” said Sir Robert, with a laugh; and then he added, “To be so young you are a very cool hand, my dear.”
“How am I a cool hand? I am not cool at all. I am very anxious. It does not matter much to you, Uncle Robert, what you do with me; but,” said Lily, tears springing to her eyes, “it will matter a great deal to me.”
“You little–” He could not find an epithet that suited, so left the adjective by itself, in sheer disability to express himself. He would have said hussy had he been an Englishman. He was tempted to say cutty, being a Scot—innocent epithets enough, both, but sufficient to make that little– flare up. “You mean,” he said, “I suppose, that you have nothing to do with it, and that the whole affair is in my hands.”
“Yes, uncle, I think it is,” said Lily very sedately.
He looked at her again with another ejaculation on his lips, and then he laughed.
“Well, my dear,” he said, “if that is the case, we can make short work of it—as you are in such a submissive frame of mind and have no will or intentions on your own part.”
Here Lily’s impatient spirit got the better of the hasty impulse of policy which she had taken up by sudden inspiration. “I never said that!” she cried.
“Then you will be so good as to explain to me what you did say, or rather what you meant, which is more important still,” Sir Robert said.
“I meant—just what I have always meant,” said Lily, drawing back her chair a little and fixing her eyes upon her foot, which beat the floor with a nervous movement.
“And what is that?” he asked.
Lily drew back a little more, her foot ceased to tap, her hands clasped each other. She looked up into his face with half-reproachful eyes full of meaning. “Oh, Uncle Robert, you know!”
Sir Robert jumped up from his chair, and then sat down again. Demonstrations of wrath were of no use. He felt inclined to cry, “You little cutty!” again, but did not. He puffed out a quick breath, which was a sign of great impatience, yet self-repression. “You mean, I suppose, that things are exactly as they were—that you mean to pay no attention to my representations, that you choose your own will above mine—notwithstanding that I have complete power over you, and can do with you what I will?”
“Nobody can do that,” said Lily, only half aloud. “I am not a doll,” she said, “Uncle Robert. You have the power—so that I don’t like to disobey you.”
“But do it all the same!” he cried.
“Not if I can help it. I would like to do it. I would like to be independent. It seems dreadful that one should be obliged to do, not what one wishes, but what another person wills. But you have the power–”
“Of the ways and means,” he said; “I have the purse-strings in my hand.”
It was Lily’s turn now to start to her feet. “Oh, how mean of you, how base of you!” she said. “You, a great man and a soldier, and me only a girl. To threaten me with your purse-strings! As if I cared for your purse-strings. Give it all away from me; give it all—that’s what I should like best. I will go away with Beenie, and we’ll sew, or do something else for our living. I’m very fond of poultry—I could be a henwife; or there are many other things that I could do. Give it all away! Tie them up tight. I just hate your money and your purse-strings. I wish they were all at the bottom of the sea!”
“You would find things very different if they were, I can tell you,” he said, with a snort.
“Oh, yes, very different. I would be free. I would take my own way. I would have nobody to tyrannize over me. Oh, uncle! forgive me! forgive me! I did not mean to say that! If you were poor, I would take care of you. I would remember you were next to my father, and I would do any thing you could say.”
He kept his eyes fixed on her as she stood thus, defiant yet compunctious, before him. “I don’t doubt for a moment you would do every thing that was most senseless and imprudent,” he said.
Then Lily dropped into her chair and cried a little—partly that she could not help it, partly that it was a weapon of war like another—and gained a little time. But Sir Robert was not moved by her crying; she had not, indeed, expected that he would be.
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