Disclosing the Educational Influence exerted by the Essex Coast, and other Matters, including Reasons for Joy
Sit down here by the fire—no, in the easy chair,” said Ermyntrude, with a note of solicitude in her kindly voice. “Mamma won’t be home for half an hour yet, and I want a nice, quiet, serious talk with you. Oh, it’s going to be extremely serious, and you must begin by playing that you are at least one hundred and fifty years old.”
“That won’t be so difficult,” I replied, not without the implication of injury. “It will only be adding a few decades to the venerableness that I seem always to possess in your eyes.”
“Oh!” said Ermie, and looked at me inquiringly for a moment. Then she seated herself, and gazed with much steadiness into the fire. I waited for the nice, serious talk to begin—and waited a long time.
“Well, my dear child,” I broke in upon the silence at last, “I hoped to have been the very first to come and tell your mother how deeply glad I was to see you all back again in Fernbank. But that wretched rheumatism of mine—at my age, you know———”
I was watching narrowly for even the faintest sign of deprecation. She did not stir an eyelash.
“Yes,” she suddenly began, still intently gazing into the fire; “papa has got his money all back, and more. That is, it isn’t the same money, but somebody else’s—I’m sure I don’t know whose. Sometimes I feel sorry for those other people, whoever they are, who have had to give it up to us. Then, other times, I am so glad simply to be in again where it’s warm that I don’t care.”
“The firelight suits your face, Ermie,” I said, noting with the pleasure appropriate to my position as the oldest friend of the family, how sweetly the soft radiance played upward upon the fair young rounded throat and chin, and tipped the little nostrils with rosy light.
“Fortunately,” she went on, as if I had not spoken, “some Americans took the house furnished in September for three months—I think, poor souls, that they believed it was the London season—and so we never had to break up, and we were able to get back again in time for Uncle Dudley to plant all his bulbs. They seem to have been very quiet people. Mamma had a kind of notion that they would practise with bucking horses on the tennis-lawn, and shoot at bottles and clay pigeons here in the drawing-room. The only thing we could find that they did was to paste thick paper over the ventilator in the dining-room. And yet a policeman told our man that they slept with their bedroom windows open all night. Curious, isn’t it?”
“I like to have one of these ‘nice, quiet, serious talks’ with you, Ermie,” I said.
Even at this she did not lift her eyes from the grate. “Oh, don’t be impatient—it will be serious enough,” she warned me. “They say, you know, that drowning people see, in a single instant of time, whole years of events, whole books full of things. Well, I’ve been under water for six months, and—and—I’ve noticed a good deal.”
“Ah! is there a submarine observation station at Clacton-on-Sea? Now you speak of it, I have heard of queer fish being studied there.”
“None queerer than we, my dear friend, you may be sure. Mamma was right in choosing the place. We never once saw a soul we knew. Of course, it is the dullest and commonest thing on earth—but it exactly fitted us during that awful period. We were going at first to Cromer, but mamma learned that that was the chosen resort of dissolute theatrical people—it seems there has been a poem written in which it is called ‘Poppy land,’ which mamma saw at once must be a cover for opium-eating and all sorts of dissipation. So we went to Clacton instead. But what I was going to say is this—I did a great deal of thinking all through those six months. I don’t say that I am any wiser than I was, because, for that matter, I am very much less sure about things than I was before. But I was simply a blank contented fool then. Now it’s different to the extent that I’ve stirred up all sorts of questions and problems buzzing and barking about me, and I don’t know the answers to them, and I can’t get clear of them, and they’re driving me out of my head—and there you are. That’s what I wanted to talk with you about.”
I shifted my feet on the fender, and nodded with as sensible an expression as I could muster.
“That’s why I said you must pretend to yourself that you are very old—quite a fatherly person, capable of giving a girl advice—sympathetic advice. In the first place—of course you know that the engagement with that Hon. Knobbeleigh Jones has been off for ages. Don’t interrupt me! It isn’t worth speaking of except for one point. His father, Lord Skillyduff, was the principal rogue in the combination which plundered papa of his money. Having got the Grundy money they had no use for the Grundy girl. Now, he justified his rascality by pleading that he had to make provision for his daughters, and everybody said he was a good father. Papa goes in again through some other opening, and after a long fight brings out a fresh fortune, which he has taken away from somebody else—and I heard him tell mamma that he was doing it for the sake of his daughters. People will say he is a good father—I know I do.”
“None better in this world,” I assented cordially.
“Well, don’t you see,” Ermyntrude went on, “that puts daughters in the light of a doubtful blessing. Papa’s whole worry and struggle was for us—for me. I was the load on his back. I don’t like to be a load. While we were prosperous, there was only one way for me to get down—that is by marriage. When we became poor, there was another way—that I should earn my own living. But this papa wouldn’t listen to. He quite swore about it—vowed he would rather work his fingers to the bone; rather do anything, no matter what it was, or what people thought of him for doing it, than that ............