The Pillars of the House, V1

'It has capabilities,' said Edgar.

'But the moral!' said Wilmet.

'What! Not the lesson against dealing with conjurors? demanded Edgar. 'I'll undertake to arm your pupils against spirit-rapping for ever.'

'In that point of view-' said Wilmet doubtfully.

'In that point of view,' said Felix, laughing, 'it has my vote.'

'I don't like deception to succeed,' said Wilmet; 'but at least there's none of the worst sort of nonsense.'

Lance leapt up and performed a pas seul, insisting that Bill Harewood must come and be a robber; and Edgar and Cherry instantly had their heads together as playwrights and managers.

'Never mind, Wilmet,' said Felix at their bedroom doors that night. 'Remember, Father never was a man for all work and no play.'

'I don't mind play, but I don't know what this may lead to;' then, as Felix laughed merrily at the repetition, she followed him into his room, saying, 'I mean, I have no trust in Edgar's discretion, or Lance's either, and all sorts of things may be put into the children's heads.'

'You can't keep children's heads a blank,' said Felix, 'and Edgar's good taste ought to be trusted in his own home, for his own sisters. Even you might stretch a few points to keep him happy and occupied with Cherry. Besides, I believe we do live a duller life than can be really good for any one. It can't be right to shut up all these young things all their holidays without any pleasure.'

'I thought,' said Wilmet, her eyes growing moist, 'it was pleasure enough to be all at home together.'

'So it is, to staid old fogies like you and me,' said Felix, kissing her; 'but the young ones want a lark now and then, and I confess I should be immensely disappointed if this fun didn't come off. No, no, W. W., I can't have you an old cat; you are much too young and pretty.'

The levity of this conclusion shocked Wilmet beyond remonstrance. Was Felix falling from his height of superiority, or was her strictness wearisome?

Meantime, Geraldine's brain was ringing with doggrel rhymes, and whirling with stage contrivances, in the delight of doing something with Edgar, whether versifying or drawing; and as Felix said, to keep him happy at home for Christmas was no small gain, even though it brought a painful realisation that their feast was not his feast.

Geraldine suffered in silence, for a word from her was always put down by some tender jest, avowing as much inferiority in goodness as superiority in intellect. As to Clement, Edgar's sport was to startle him with jokes, dilemmas, and irreverences, and then to decline discussion on the ground that he never argued with sisters, and that Clement would understand when he went to Cambridge. Otherwise, the subject was avoided at home, but Edgar consorted a good deal with Mr. Ryder, calling him the only person in the town, except Cherry, who knew the use of a tongue, and one day, when Felix was assisting his old master in a search through old newspapers in the reading- room, Mr. Ryder said, 'By-the-by, your brother Edgar has a good deal more of the talk of the day than you can be prepared for.'

'I am afraid so, sir,' said Felix; 'but he does not put it forth much at home.'

'So I hoped. It would have startled your father a good deal; but I believe myself acting in the spirit of his wishes in letting him talk out his crudities.'

'Thank you, sir,' said Felix, not quite knowing how to take this.

'It is a phase to be passed through,' said Mr. Ryder. 'Indeed, a good deal of it is fashion and vanity.'

'Mr. Audley thinks so,' replied Felix. 'He said he thought poor Edgar did not think enough to have real doubt, but that he considered other people's a dispensation from attending to the subject at all.'

'Exactly,' said Mr. Ryder, 'except so far as repeating what he has caught up seems to him knowing, and according to the spirit of the time, fit to dazzle us down here. Whatever may deepen him will probably change all that-I do not say into what you or your father would wish; but what is jargon now will pass away into something more real, for better or-'

'For worse?' asked Felix anxiously, as he paused.

'I do not say so,' returned Mr. Ryder. 'Perhaps what I chiefly wished at this moment was to clear myself in your eyes of treachery to your father.'

'No, sir, that I never could suspect.'

But the conversation might well leave heaviness behind it. Was it come to Edgar's views being such as to startle Mr. Ryder! who, for that matter, had of late shown much less laxity of opinion than in his younger and more argumentative days; and there was little comfort in supposing that these were not real honest doubts at all, only apologies for general carelessness and irreligion.

Yet with even this trouble in the recess of the heart, this was the merriest winter the Underwood household had known since their father's time.

Edgar chose to frame the play upon the Italian form of the story, where the impostor is a starveling poet, nicknamed Signor Topo, or Master Ratton, because his poverty had brought him to live in a hay- loft. This character he assumed, and no doubt it fitted him better than either the English cobbler or the German doctor; besides, as he said, sham court costume is always the easiest to contrive: but Cherry was by no means prepared to find the Rat- like poet the secret admirer of a daughter of the Serene Highness who owned the jewel.

'Such a monstrous interpolation,' quoth Geraldine.

'Interpolations are the beauty of the thing. It would be as flat as a pancake without.'

'And Wilmet won't like it.'

'Wilmet must be brought to the level of ordinary human nature.'

'I don't feel as if this were using her well. You know she expressly consented to this 'because there was no nonsense in it.''

'I.e. if it had been Cinderella, it would have been improper; if the Sleeping Beauty, highly scandalous. Eh, Cherie?'

'You know I think Mettie does carry her scruples pretty far,' said Geraldine, trying not to laugh, 'but I won't be a party to cheating her; and if this young princess is to come in, she must be told of it.'

'Or she will take out her Gorgon's head in the midst, and petrify her subjects! Maybe it will be safest to prepare her. You see, such discipline reigns here, that a poor Bohemian like me doesn't know where to be.'

Accordingly, Edgar said in his airy way, 'O Mettie, by-the-by, we have put in a part for little Miss Knevett.'

'Indeed! I thought it was to be all among ourselves. Have you spoken to her?'

'Of course; and she is in the ecstatic state of preparation of spangles and coronets.'

'I wish you had spoken before. It would be hard to disappoint her now. What is she to be?'

'Nothing less than heroine. There must be some sort of conventional catastrophe, or the whole concern falls flat.'

'I don't see why it should not fall flat,' said Wilmet, with a sober air that drove Cherry into an uncontrollable convulsion of laughter; 'it would amuse the children just as well.'

'The children of six, maybe,' said Edgar gravely, 'but hardly the children of sixteen. Have you no mercy on them, my venerable sister?'

Wilmet had arrived at such a pass of resignation as to perceive that 'a fuss' on her part might be more mischievous than any 'nonsense' in which Edgar was likely to indulge in public, especially with Geraldine as his coadjutor. She tried to obtain some reassurance that there was 'nothing more silly than needful in this play of yours.'

'No, indeed. There is just a little mock courtship; but as that is the case with nine-tenths of the stories in the world, I don't think you gain much by turning it out.'

'I did hope for once in a way we ourselves might be quit of it.'

'It is hard on you,' said Cherry, smiling; 'but it would make a great uproar to disturb all now.'

'At any rate, I have found the old receipt for tea-cakes,' responded Wilmet, whose mind was almost as much preoccupied with the entertainment of the body as her sister's with that of the mind.

She had relented so far as to invite two little girls and their widowed mother, from whom there was no danger of reciprocities, Lance had prevailed to have Will Harewood as one of the robbers; and the Miss Pearsons were coming to behold their niece; besides which, Stella having imparted the great secret to Mr. Froggatt, Felix found the good old gentleman and his wife burning to have an invitation. Thus the party would be the largest Wilmet had ever contemplated; and the mysteries of tea and supper were so congenial to her housewifely soul, that she did not