bantams?’
Leonard looked as if this were the most convincing proof of Ethel’s wisdom, and proceeded. ‘Well, she is descended from a real King Charles, that Charles II. brought from France, and gave to Mrs. Jane Lane; and they have kept up the breed ever since.’
‘So that Mab will have the longest pedigree in Stoneborough; and we must all respect her!’ said Ethel, stroking the black head.
‘I am only surprised at Leonard’s forgetting his place,’ said Aubrey. ‘Walking before her majesty, indeed!’
‘Oh, attendants do come first sometimes.’
‘Then it should be backwards! I have a mind to try lying on the beach tomorrow, looking interesting, to see what will descend upon me!’
‘A great yellow mongrel,’ said Ethel, ‘as always befalls imitators in the path of the hero.’
‘What? You mean that it was all the work of Leonard’s beaux yeux?’
Leonard gave a sort of growl, intimating that Aubrey was exciting his displeasure; and Ethel was glad to be at home, and break off the conversation; but in a few minutes Aubrey knocked at her door, and edging himself in, mysteriously said, ‘Such fun! So it was your beaux yeux, not Leonard’s, that made the conquest!’
‘I suppose she was touched with what I said of poor Leonard’s circumstances, and the pleasure the creature gave him.’
‘That is as prosy as Mary, Ethel. At any rate, the woman told Leonard yours was the most irresistibly attractive countenance she ever saw, short of beauty; and that’s not the best of it, for he is absolutely angry.
‘No wonder,’ laughed Ethel.
‘No, but it’s about the beauty! He can’t conceive a face more beautiful than yours.’
‘Except the gargoyle on the church tower,’ said Ethel, gaping into as complete a model of that worthy as flesh and blood could perpetrate.
‘But he means it,’ persisted Aubrey, fixing his eyes critically on his sister’s features, but disturbed by the contortions into which she threw them. ‘Now don’t, don’t. I never saw any fellow with a hundredth part of your gift for making faces,’ he added, between the unwilling paroxysms of mirth at each fresh grimace; but I want to judge of you; and—oh! that solemn one is worse than all; it is like Julius Caesar, if he had ever been photographed!—but really, when one comes to think about it, you are not so very ugly after all; and are much better looking than Flora, whom we were taught to believe in.’
‘Poor Flora! You were no judge in her blooming days, before wear and tear came.’
‘And made her like our Scotch grandfather.’
‘But Blanche! your own Blanche, Aubrey? She might have extended Leonard’s ideas of beauty.’
‘Blanche has a pretty little visage of her own; but it’s not so well worth looking at as yours,’ said Aubrey. ‘One has seen to the end of it at once; and it won’t light up. Hers is just the May blossom; and yours the—the—I know— the orchis! I have read of a woman with an orchidaceous face!’
Teeth, tongue, lips, eyes, and nose were at once made to serve in hitting off an indescribable likeness to an orchis blossom, which was rapturously applauded, till Ethel, relaxing the strain and permitting herself to laugh triumphantly at her own achievement, said, ‘There! I do pride myself on being of a high order of the grotesque.’
‘It is not the grotesque that he means.’ said Aubrey, ‘he is very cracked indeed. He declares that when you came and sat by him the day before yesterday, you were perfectly lovely.’
‘Oh, then I understand, and it is no matter,’ said Ethel.
CHAPTER V
They stwons, they stwons, they stwons, they stwons. —Scouring of the White Horse
‘So’ (wrote Ethel in her daily letter to her father) ‘mine is at present a maternal mission to Leonard, and it is highly gratifying. I subscribe to all your praise of him, and repent of my ungracious murmurs at his society. You had the virtue, and I have the reward (the usual course of this world), for his revival is a very fresh and pleasant spectacle, burning hot with enthusiasm. Whatever we do, he overdoes, till I recollect how Wilkes said he had never been a Wilkite. Three days ago, a portentous-looking ammonite attracted his attention; and whereas he started from the notion that earth was dirt, and stones were stones, the same all over the world, he has since so far outstripped his instructors, that as I write this he is drawing a plan of the strata, with the inhabitants dramatically arranged, Aubrey suggesting tragic scenes and uncomplimentary likenesses. His talent for drawing shows that Averil’s was worth culture. If our geology alarm Richard, tell him that I think it safer to get it over young, and to face apparent discrepancies with revelation, rather than leave them to be discovered afterwards as if they had been timidly kept out of sight. And whether Hugh Miller’s theory be right or wrong, his grand fervid language leaves the conviction that undoubting confidence in revelation consists with the clearest and most scientific mind.’
‘June 30th.—I consider my boys as returned to their normal relations. I descended on them as they were sparring like lion-cubs at play, Leonard desisted in confusion at my beholding such savage doings, but cool and easy, not having turned a hair; Aubrey, panting, done up, railing at him as first cousin to Hercules, all as a delicate boast to me of his friend’s recovered strength. Aubrey’s forte is certainly veneration. His first class of human beings is a large one, though quizzing is his ordinary form of adoration. For instance, he teases Mab and her devoted slave some degrees more than the victim can bear, and then relieves his feelings in my room by asseverations that the friendship with Leonard will be on the May and Spencer pattern. The sea is the elixir of life to both; Leonard looks quite himself again, “only more so,” and Aubrey has a glow never seen since his full moon visage waned, and not all tan, though we are on the high road to be coffee-berries. Aubrey daily entertains me with heroic tales of diving and floating, till I tell them they will become enamoured of some “lady of honour who lives in the sea,” grow fishes’ tails, and come home no more. And really, as the time wanes, I feel that such a coast is Elysium—above all, the boating. The lazy charm, the fresh purity of air, the sights and sounds, the soft summer wave when one holds one’s hand over the tide, the excitement of sea-weed catching, and the nonsense we all talk, are so delicious and such new sensations, (except the nonsense, which loses by your absence, O learned doctor!) that I fully perceive how pleasures untried cannot even be conceived. But ere the lotos food has entirely depraved my memory, I give you warning to come and fetch us home, now that the boys are in full repair. Come yourself, and be feasted on shrimps and mackerel, and take one sail to the mouth of the bay. I won’t say who shall bring you; it would be fun to have Daisy, and Mary ought to have a holiday, but then Richard would take better care of you, and Tom would keep you in the best order. Could you not all come? only if you don’t yourself, I won’t promise not to take up with a merman.’
