Part 19 (1/2)
Miss Bennett had a bright, cordial manner. She explained that she thought there was a circulating library in every town. When she was visiting in Quebec her friends had got a novel for her at two cents a day. And then she said Princ.i.p.al Trenholme bought a good many books, and he had once told her mother that he would lend them any they chose, but they had never had time to go and look over them. ”It has,” she added, ”been such an advantage to Ch.e.l.laston to have a gentleman so clever as he at the college.”
”Has it?” said Sophia, willing to hear more. ”Is he very clever?”
”Oh,” cried the other, ”from Oxford, you know;” and she said it in much the tone she might have said ”from heaven.”
”Is it long,” asked Sophia, ”since you have been in England?”
Miss Bennett said she had never been ”home,” but she longed, above all things, to go.
She had, it seemed, been born in Canada, and her parents had no possessions in the mother-country, and yet she always called it ”home.”
This was evidently a tradition.
Sophia, who had come from England a little tired of the conditions there, and eager for a change, felt the pathetic sameness of the discontent wrought by surfeit and by famine.
”Yet,” said she, ”it is a relief to the mind to feel that one lives in a country where no worthy person is starving, and where every one has a good chance in life if he will but avail himself of it. It seems to make me breathe more freely to know that in all this great country there is none of that necessary poverty that we have in big English towns.”
Little answer was made to this, and Sophia went on to talk of what interested her in English politics; but found that of the politics, as well as of the social condition, of the country she adored, Miss Bennett was largely ignorant. Her interest in such matters appeared to sum itself up in a serene belief that Disraeli, then prominent, was the one prop of the English Const.i.tution, and as adequate to his position as Atlas beneath the world. Now, Sophia cherished many a Radical opinion of her own, and she would have enjoyed discussion; but it would have been as difficult to aim a remark at the present front of her new acquaintance as it would be for a marksman to show his skill with a cloud of vapour as a target. Sophia tried Canadian politics, owning her ignorance and expressing her desire to understand what she had read in the newspapers since her arrival; but Miss Bennett was not sure that there was anything that ”could exactly be called politics” in Canada, except that there was a Liberal party who ”wanted to ruin the country by free trade.”
Sophia ceased to take the initiative. She still endeavoured to respect the understanding of a girl of whom she had heard that when her father's fortunes were at a low ebb she had retrieved them by good management and personal industry--a girl, too, who through years of toil had preserved sprightliness and perfect gentility. What though this gentility was somewhat cramped by that undue importance given to trifles which is often the result of a remote life; it was still a very lovely thing, a jewel s.h.i.+ning all the more purely for its iron setting of honest labour.
Sophia fought with the scorn that was thrusting itself into her heart as she listened when Miss Bennett now talked in a charming way about the public characters and incidents which interested her.
”I wish for your sake, Miss Rexford,” she said, ”that some of the Royal family would come out again. The only time that there is any real advantage in being in a colony is when some of them come out; for here, you know, they take notice of every one.”
”One would still be on the general level then,” said Sophia, smiling.
”Well, I don't know. It makes one feel distinguished, you know, in spite of that. Now, when the Prince was out, he stopped here for a night, and we had a ball. It was simply delightful! He danced with us all--I mean with all who could claim to be ladies, and indeed with some who could not; but how could _he_ discriminate? There was a man called Blake, who kept a butcher's shop here then--you may have noticed we haven't such a thing as a butcher's shop in the village now, Miss Rexford?”
”Indeed I have. It seems so odd.”
”Blake had a handsome daughter; and when we had a ball for the Prince, didn't he buy her a fine dress, and take her to it! She really looked very handsome.”
”I hope the Prince danced with her,” laughed Sophia. Her good spirits were rising, in spite of herself, under the influence of the liveliness with which Miss Bennett's mind had darted, birdlike, into its own element.
”_Yes_, he did. Wasn't it good-natured of him! I believe his aide-de-camp told him who she was; but he was so gracious; he said she should not go away mortified. I never spoke to her myself; but I've no doubt she was unable to open her mouth without betraying her origin; but perhaps on that occasion she had the grace to keep silent, and she danced fairly well.”
”Was her head turned by the honour?” asked Sophia, led by the other's tone to expect a sequel to the tale.
”Poor girl! The end was sadder than that. She caught a violent cold, from wearing a dress cut low when she wasn't accustomed to it, and she died in a week. When we heard of it I was glad that he _had_ danced with her; but some were cruel enough to say that it served Blake right for his presumption. He was so broken-hearted he left the place. The dress she wore that night was a green silk, and he had her buried in it; and some one told the Prince, and he sent some flowers. Wasn't it sweet of him! They were buried with her too. It was quite romantic.”
”More romantic to have such a swan-like death than to live on as a butcher's daughter,” said Sophia, and sarcasm was only a small ingredient in the speech.
”We were quite grieved about it,” said Miss Bennett, sincerely.
Sophia also felt sorry, but it was not her way to say so. She was more interested in remarking upon the singular method of getting butcher's meat then in vogue at Ch.e.l.laston. A Frenchman, a butcher in a small way, drove from door to door with his stock, cutting and weighing his joints in an open box-sleigh. To see the frozen meat thus manipulated in the midst of the snow had struck Sophia as one of the most novel features of their present way of life. Miss Bennett, however, could hardly be expected to feel its picturesqueness. Her parents did not fancy this vendor's meat, and at present they usually killed their own. Her father, she said, had grown quite dexterous in the art.
”Really!” cried Sophia. This was an item of real interest, for it suggested to her for the first time the idea that a gentleman could slaughter an ox. She was not shocked; it was simply a new idea, which she would have liked to enlarge on; but good-breeding forbade, for Miss Bennett preferred to chat about the visit of the Prince, and she continued to do so in a manner so lively that Sophia found it no dull hearing.