Ten Degrees Backward. Ellen Thorneycroft Fowler
may be lasting, but it isn't love. The charm of love is its divine folly."
"What a ridiculous idea! Supposing my divine folly, as you call it, had led me into marrying Francis Wildacre, where should I have been now, I should like to know? A widow with two tiresome young people to look after."
"But you are yearning to help Blathwayte to look after them, so why shouldn't you have helped Wildacre to look after them? I don't see where the difference comes in. And, besides, they mightn't have been there."
"I don't see any necessity to go into that," said Annabel, doing the heavy sister to perfection.
"Nor do I. But it was you who went into it, if you remember, not I. You dragged those young people into the discussion, so to speak, by the hair of their heads."
Annabel carried the war into the enemy's camp. "And where should you have been if I had married Francis Wildacre, I should like to know?" she asked triumphantly.
"Exactly where I am now. There was no talk of my marrying Wildacre."
"And all alone, with no one to look after you!"
"Pardon me, my dear Annabel, but you are confusing dates. I should have been all right now, because you would be a widow, and would be living here with me, and with a young niece and nephew to whom I should be devoted. Where I should have come short would have been in the intervening twenty years between your supposititious marriage with Wildacre and the present time."
Like all typical elder sisters, Annabel loved to be poked fun at by a younger brother. That she never saw the point of my feeble jokes in nowise lessened her admiration of them; her faith in their excellence was a perfect faith, being in truth the evidence of things not seen.
"I think you'd have made a very nice uncle, Reggie. I've noticed that good brothers make good uncles, just as good sons make good husbands. I think it is very interesting to notice little things like that."
"And instructive," I added; "you've forgotten the instructiveness."
"And instructive, too, of course. All interesting things are more or less instructive."
"But not invariably in the most elevating kinds of knowledge," I murmured.
"And besides being such a kind uncle, you'd have had a very good personal influence on young people." Annabel was very keen on what she called "personal influence"—a force which I myself consider is grossly over-rated. "For though you are sometimes very silly on the surface, Reggie, you have plenty of good sound sense underneath."
"You flatter me," I murmured.
"No, I don't; I never flatter people" (she never did). "But I think it encourages them to be told their good points sometimes. And now I come to think of it, you will not be wasted as an uncle altogether: you can behave as an uncle to these Wildacre children after all."
"Certainly; they will provide an admirable outlet for my avuncular energies." But I was pleased at the idea all the same. The role of an uncle had always had its attractiveness for me; it possessed a good deal of the charm of fatherhood with none of its soul-crushing responsibility. I felt I could never have started a son in life; but I should have enjoyed to take a nephew to the Zoo. Therefore this suggestion of Annabel's, that in the Wildacre children I should find a ready-made niece and nephew, filled me with distinct pleasure.
"I must go and see Cutler about them at once," said Annabel, rising from the breakfast-table (Cutler was our gardener); "I'm sure they are not nearly as advanced as they were this time last year."
"About what? The Wildacres, do you mean?"
"The forget-me-nots, of course. How stupid you are!"
"But, my dear girl, you have never mentioned the forget-me-nots," I replied in self-defence.
"But I was thinking about them all the time. They seem to me very backward in that big bed on the lawn; I am sure he has not planted them half thickly enough. It is very annoying, as I do so love a mass of blue in contrast to the wallflowers. I'm really dreadfully disappointed about this bed, it is usually so lovely, and extremely angry with Cutler. I don't know what to do about it. What should you do, Reggie?"
"I should knock Cutler down, and tell him that as he has made his bed so he must lie on it."
"Oh, Reggie, how ridiculous you are! As if people nowadays ever knocked their servants down as they used to do when they were slaves!"
"I really think your distress is premature," I said in a consoling voice; "it is early yet for forget-me-nots. They'll be all right when they begin to flower. The green sheet looks inadequate, I admit; but when it puts on its blue counterpane, that bed will be a dream."
But Annabel refused to be comforted. "The plants aren't sufficiently close together. I'm going into the garden to see about them at once, and that iniquitous charge for sweet peas. But that is the worst of leaving bills so long unpaid, it tempts tradespeople to put prices on."
"Then why not pay sooner?"
"I always pay at once—the minute the bills come in. Do you think papa's daughter could ever sleep upon an unpaid bill? It is the tradespeople who won't send them in—just in order to run them up; but there is no throwing dust in my eyes! And if Arthur wants a little womanly advice about how to deal with them, especially the girl, he can always have it from me, and you can tell him so the next time you see him."
And before I could frame a suitable reply to this varied and voluminous remark, Annabel was out on the lawn and making a bee-line for the inadequate forget-me-nots.
As for myself, a sort of subconscious sex-sympathy caused me to shrink from hearing Annabel deliver her soul to Cutler with regard to these and the sweet peas; so I wended my way upstairs to the nursery of our childhood, where our old nurse, Ponting—called by the other servants Miss Ponting and by Annabel and me Ponty—still held sway, as she had done ever since Annabel was a baby.
Ponty came from the Midlands, and was what is known in her class of life as "a character." She had a great flow of language, unchecked by any pedantic tendency to verify her quotations, and she boasted an inexhaustible supply of legendary acquaintances, who served as modern instances to point her morals and adorn her tales. She was a connoisseur in, or rather a collector of, what she called "judgments," and (according to Ponty) her native place—an obscure village in the Midlands, Poppenhall by name—was a modern Sodom and Gomorrah. Possibly the inhabitants of Poppenhall—like the eight upon whom the tower of Siloam fell—were no worse than the majority of their contemporaries; but (again according to Ponty) they seemed to have been specially selected as warnings and examples to the rest of the world. For instance, our childhood was enlivened by the story of a boy at Poppenhall who swallowed a cherry-stone which grew into a cherry-tree in his inside, until finally the youth was choked by the cherries which clustered in his throat: this was to prevent any swallowing of cherry-stones on our part. And there was an equally improving legend of a Poppenhall girl who drank water out of the village stream, and thereby swallowed an eft which developed into an internal monster, whose head was always popping in and out of her mouth, thus spoiling both her conversation and her appearance: this was to prevent any consumption by my sister and myself of unfiltered and so unhallowed water.
"Well, Master Reggie," began Ponty, as soon as I entered the nursery (I was always Master Reggie to Ponty, just as I was always a boy to Annabel), "this is a piece of news I hear about the rector's adopting two children! It fairly took my breath away when Miss Annabel told me about it."
"I thought it would," I answered, sitting down on one of the comfortable chintz-covered chairs.
"It did; and I said to Miss Annabel, says I, 'No good can come of it, a flying in the face of Providence like that!' I'm surprised at the rector, and him a clergyman too," continued Ponty, as if the majority of rectors were not in Holy Orders.
"Come, come, Ponty," I exclaimed, "you are carrying matters a little too far. I see no flying in the face of Providence in the thing at all. Quite the contrary."
"That