"And did you enlighten her on the point?" I ventured to ask.

Mrs. Fyne moved her shoulders with a philosophical acceptance of all the

necessities which ought not to be. Something had to be said, she

murmured. She had told the girl enough to make her come to the right

conclusion by herself.

"And she did?"

"Yes. Of course. She isn't a goose," retorted Mrs. Fyne tartly.

"Then her education is completed," I remarked with some bitterness.

"Don't you think she ought to be given a chance?"

Mrs. Fyne understood my meaning.

"Not this one," she snapped in a quite feminine way. "It's all very well

for you to plead, but I--"

"I do not plead. I simply asked. It seemed natural to ask what you

thought."

"It's what I feel that matters. And I can't help my feelings. You may

guess," she added in a softer tone, "that my feelings are mostly

concerned with my brother. We were very fond of each other. The

difference of our ages was not very great. I suppose you know he is a

little younger than I am. He was a sensitive boy. He had the habit of

brooding. It is no use concealing from you that neither of us was happy

at home. You have heard, no doubt . . . Yes? Well, I was made still

more unhappy and hurt--I don't mind telling you that. He made his way to

some distant relations of our mother's people who I believe were not

known to my father at all. I don't wish to judge their action."

I interrupted Mrs. Fyne here. I had heard. Fyne was not very

communicative in general, but he was proud of his father-in-law--"Carleon

Anthony, the poet, you know." Proud of his celebrity without approving

of his character. It was on that account, I strongly suspect, that he

seized with avidity upon the theory of poetical genius being allied to

madness, which he got hold of in some idiotic book everybody was reading

a few years ago. It struck him as being truth itself--illuminating like

the sun. He adopted it devoutly. He bored me with it sometimes. Once,

just to shut him up, I asked quietly if this theory which he regarded as

so incontrovertible did not cause him some uneasiness about his wife and

the dear girls? He transfixed me with a pitying stare and requested me

in his deep solemn voice to remember the "well-established fact" that

genius was not transmissible.

I said only "Oh! Isn't it?" and he thought he had silenced me by an

unanswerable argument. But he continued to talk of his glorious father-

in-law, and it was in the course of that conversation that he told me

how, when the Liverpool relations of the poet's late wife naturally

addressed themselves to him in considerable concern, suggesting a

friendly consultation as to the boy's future, the incensed (but always

refined) poet wrote in answer a letter of mere polished badinage which

offended mortally the Liverpool people. This witty outbreak of what was

in fact mortification and rage appeared to them so heartless that they

simply kept the boy. They let him go to sea not because he was in their

way but because he begged hard to be allowed to go.




readonlinefreebook.com Copyright 2016 - 2024