Part 19 (1/2)
”I hope, my dear, that the entertainment will come up to your expectations,” observed Aunt Charlotte, equably.
”Sure to,” said Austin, beginning to rummage about. ”What are these?
Old exercise-books, as I live! Oh, do look here; isn't this wonderful?
Here's a translation: 'Horace, Liber I, Satire 5.' How brown the ink is. _Aricia a little town on the way to Appia received me coming from the magnificent city of Rome with poor accommodation. Heliodorus by far the most learned orator of the Greeks accompanied me. We came to the market-place of Appius filled with sailors and insolent brokers._--Were they stockbrokers, I wonder? Oh, auntie, these are exercises done by my grandfather when he was a little boy. Poor little grandfather; what pains he seems to have taken over it, and how beautifully it's written.
I hope he got a lot of marks; do you think he did? _The sailor, soaked in poor wine, and the pa.s.senger, earnestly celebrate their absent mistresses._ Poor things! They don't seem to have had a very enjoyable excursion. However, I can't read it all through. Oh--here are a lot of letters. Not very interesting. All about contracts and sales, and silly things like that. Here's a funny book, though. Do look, auntie. It must have been printed centuries ago by the look of it. I wonder what it's all about. _A Sequel to the Antidote to the Miseries of Human Life, containing a Further Account of Mrs Placid and her daughter Rachel. By the Author of the Antidote._ What _does_ it all mean? 'Squire Bustle'--'Miss Finakin'--'Uncle Jeremiah'--used people to read books like this when grandfather was a little boy? It looks quite charming, but I think we'll put it by for the present. What's this? Oh, a daguerreotype, I suppose--an extraordinary-looking, smirking old person in a great bonnet with large roses all round her face, and tied with huge ribbons under her chin. Dear auntie, why don't you wear bonnets like that? You _would_ look so sweet! Pamphlets--tracts--oh dear, these are all dreadfully dry. What a mixture it all is, to be sure. The things seem to have been shot in anyhow. Hullo--an alb.u.m.
_Now_ we shall see. This is evidently of much later date than the other treasures, though it is at the bottom of them all.”
He dragged out an old, soiled, photographic alb.u.m bound in purple morocco, and all falling to pieces. It proved to contain family portraits, none of them particularly attractive in themselves, but interesting enough to Austin. He turned over the pages one by one, slowly. Aunt Charlotte glanced curiously at them over her spectacles from where she sat.
”I don't think I remember ever seeing that alb.u.m,” she said. ”I wonder whom it can have belonged to. Ah! I expect it must have been your father's. Yes--there's a photograph of your Uncle Ernest, when he was just of age. You never saw him, he went to Australia before you were born. Those ladies I don't know. What a string of them there are, to be sure. I suppose they were----”
”There she is!” cried Austin, suddenly bringing his hand down upon the page. ”That's my mother. I told you I should know her, didn't I?”
Aunt Charlotte jumped. ”The very photograph!” she exclaimed. ”I had no idea there was a copy in existence. But how in the wide world did you recognise it?”
Austin continued examining it for some seconds without replying. ”I don't think it quite does her justice,” he said at last, thoughtfully.
”The position isn't well arranged. It makes the chin too small.”
”Quite true!” a.s.sented Aunt Charlotte. ”It's the way she's holding her head.” Then, with another start: ”But how can you know that?”
”Because I saw her only the other day,” said Austin.
For a moment Aunt Charlotte thought he was wool-gathering. He spoke in such a perfectly calm, natural tone, that he might have been referring to someone who lived in the next street. But a glance at his face convinced her that he meant exactly what he said.
”Austin!” she exclaimed. ”What can you be thinking about?”
”It's perfectly true,” he a.s.sured her. ”I saw her a few weeks ago in the garden. She stood and looked at me over the gate, and then suddenly disappeared.”
”And you really believe it?” cried Aunt Charlotte in amaze.
”I don't believe it, I know it,” he answered, laying down the photograph. ”I saw her as distinctly as I see you now. It was that day we had been having tea at the vicarage, when we met the man who wanted to set fire to some bishop or other. Ask Lubin; he'll remember it fast enough.”
This time Aunt Charlotte fairly collapsed. It was no longer any use flouting Austin's statements; they were too calm, too collected, to be disposed of by mere derision. There could be no doubt that he firmly believed he had seen something or somebody, and whatever might be the explanation of that belief it had enabled him not only to recognise his mother's photograph but to criticise, and criticise correctly, a certain defect in the portrait. She could not deny that what he said was true. ”Can such things really be?” she uttered under her breath.
”Dear auntie, they _are_,” said Austin. ”I've been conscious of it for months, and lately I've had the proof. Indeed, I've had more than one. There are people all round us, only it isn't given to everybody to see them. And it isn't really very astonis.h.i.+ng that it should be so, when one comes to think of it.”
From that day forward Aunt Charlotte watched Austin with a sense of something akin to awe. Certainly he was different from other folk.
With all his love of life, his keen interest in his surroundings, and his wealth of boyish spirits, he seemed a being apart--a being who lived not only in this world but on the boundary between this world and another. As an orthodox Christian woman of course she believed in that other--”another and a better world,” as she was accustomed to call it. But that that world was actually around her, hemming her in, within reach of her fingertips so to speak, that was quite a new idea.
It gave her the creeps, and she strove to put it out of her head as much as possible. But ere many weeks elapsed, it was forced upon her in a very painful way, and she could no longer ignore the feeling which stole over her from time to time that not only was the boundary between the two worlds a very narrow one, but that her poor Austin would not be long before he crossed it altogether.
For there was no doubt that he was beginning to fade. He got paler and thinner by degrees, and one day she found him in a dead faint upon the floor. The slight uneasiness in his hip had increased to actual pain, and the pain had spread to his back. In an agony of apprehension she summoned the doctor, and the doctor with hollow professional cheerfulness said that that sort of thing wouldn't do at all, and that Master Austin must make up his mind to lie up a bit. And so he was put to bed, and people smiled ghastly smiles which were far more heartrending than sobs, and talked about taking him away to some beautiful warm southern climate where he would soon grow strong and well again. Austin only said that he was very comfortable where he was, and that he wouldn't think of being taken away, because he knew how dreadfully poor Aunt Charlotte suffered at sea, and travelling was a sad nuisance after all. And indeed it would have been impossible to move him, for his sufferings were occasionally very great. Sometimes he would writhe in strange agonies all night long, till they used to wonder how he would live through it; but when morning came he scarcely ever remembered anything at all, and in answer to enquiries always said that he had had a very good night indeed, thank you. Once or twice he seemed to have a dim recollection of something--some ”bustle and fluff,” as he expressed it--during his troubled sleep; and then he would ask anxiously whether he really had been giving them any bother, and a.s.sure them that he was so very sorry, and hoped they would forgive him for having been so stupid. At which Aunt Charlotte had to smile and joke as heroically as she knew how.
There were some days, however, when he was quite free from pain, and then he was as bright and cheerful as ever. He lay in his white bed surrounded by the books he loved, which he read intermittently; and every now and then, when Aunt Charlotte thought he was strong enough, a visitor would be admitted. Roger St Aubyn, now back from Italy, often dropped in to sit with him, and these were golden hours to Austin, who listened delightedly to his friend's absorbing descriptions of the beautiful places he had been to and the wonderful old legends that were attached to them. Then nothing would content him but that Lubin must come up occasionally and tell him how the garden was looking, and what he thought of the prospects for next summer, and answer all sorts of searching questions as to the operations in which he had been engaged since Austin had been a prisoner. Austin enjoyed these colloquies with Lubin; the very sight of him, he said, was like having a glimpse of the garden. But somehow Lubin's eyes always looked rather red and misty when he came out of the room, and it was noticed that he went about his work in a very half-hearted and listless manner.
One day, however, a visitor called whose presence was not so sympathetic. This was Mr Sheepshanks, the vicar. Of course he was quite right to call--indeed it would have been an unpardonable omission had he not done so; at the same time his little furtive movements and professional air of solemnity got on Austin's nerves, and produced a sense of irritation that was certainly not conducive to his well-being. At last the point was reached to which the vicar had been gradually leading up, and he suggested that, now that it had pleased Providence to stretch Austin on a couch of pain, it was advisable that he should think about making his peace with G.o.d.
”Make my peace with G.o.d?” repeated Austin, opening his eyes. ”What about? We haven't quarrelled!”
”My dear young friend, that is scarcely the way for a creature to speak of its relations with its Creator,” said the vicar, gravely shocked.