Juliana Horatia Ewing

“ Overtheway; tell me what you like, please."
"You are a good child," said the little old lady, "a very good child, my dear. I do remember so much about that house, that I fall into day-dreams when I look at it. It brings back the memories of a great deal of pleasure and a great deal of pain. But it is one advantage of being old, little Ida, that Time softens the painful remembrances, and leaves us the happy ones, which grow clearer every day." ”

“ Alas, my grown-up friends! Does the moral belong to childhood alone? Have manhood and womanhood no passionate, foolish longings, for which we blind ourselves to obvious truth, and of which the vanity does not lessen the disappointment? Do we not still toil after rosebuds, to find feuilles-mortes?"
No voice answered Mrs. Overtheway's fanciful questions. The hyacinth nodded fragrantly on its stalk, and Ida nodded in her chair. She was fast asleep—happily asleep—with a smile upon her face.
[68]
The shadows nodded gently on the walls, and like a shadow the little old lady stole quietly away. ”

“ What became of his cat?"
"Dead—dead—dead!" said the little old lady; "Ida, my child, I will answer no more questions."
"One more, please," said Ida! "where is that dear, dear Fatima?"
"No, my child, no! Nothing more about her. Dear, dear Fatima, indeed! And yet I will just tell you that she married, and that her husband (older even than I am, and very deaf) is living still. He and I are very fond of each other, though, having been a handsome man he is sensitive about his personal appearance, and will not use a trumpet, which I consider weak. But we get on very well. ”

“ Nevertheless, Ida took out the carved fans and workboxes, the beads, and handkerchiefs, and feathers, the dainty foreign treasures the sailor-father had sent to her from time to time; dusted them, kissed them, and told them that the Captain was coming home. But the letter she wore in her pocket by day, and kept under her pillow by night.
"Why don't you put your letter into one of your boxes, like a tidy young lady, Miss Ida?" said Nurse. "You'll wear it all to bits doing as you do."
"It will last till the ship comes home," said Miss Ida. ”

“ The thing in itself was a mere folly; the people concerned in it have been dead for many years, and yet at the present time I should find considerable difficulty in seeing the merits of a person who should dress in satin of that peculiar hue.
"What was it?" asked Ida.
"It was not amber satin, and it was not snuff-coloured satin; it was one of the shades of brown known by the name of feuille-morte, or dead-leaf colour. It is pretty in itself, and yet I dislike it."
"How funny," said Ida, wriggling in the arm-chair with satisfaction. "Do tell me about it." ”

“ She believed her friend to be old, immeasurably old, indefinitely old; and had a secret faith that she had never been otherwise. She felt sure that she wore a cap indoors, and that it was a nicer one than Nurse's; that she had real tea, with sugar and cream, instead of milk-and-water, and hot toast rather than bread-and-treacle for tea; that she helped herself at meals, and went to bed according to her own pleasure and convenience; was—perhaps on these very grounds—utterly happy, and had always been so.
"I am only a little girl," said Ida, as she pressed her face sadly to the cold window-pane. ”

“ I was very fond of the good ladies; not less so now than I had been as a child, when their home-made buns and faded albums made an evening festive, and were looked forward to as a treat. They were good women, severe to themselves and charitable to others, who cultivated the grace of humility almost in excess. One little weakness, however, in their otherwise estimable characters had at times disturbed the even course of our friendship. I hardly know what to call it. It was not want of candour. More truthful women do not exist than they were, and I believe they never wilfully deceived anyone. ”

“ It grew dark, and then steps came outside the door, and a fumbling with the lock which made Ida nervous.
"Do come in, Nursey!" she cried.
[23]
The door opened, and someone spoke; but the voice was not the voice of Nurse. It was a sweet, clear, gentle voice; musical, though no longer young; such a voice as one seldom hears and never forgets, which came out of the darkness, saying:
"It is not Nurse, my dear; she is making the tea, and gave me leave to come up alone. I am Mrs. Overtheway." ”

“ Cecilia, in travelling gear, taking off an old bonnet, begging for a cup of tea, and complaining in soft accents that butter was a halfpenny a pound dearer in Bath than at home, seemed to have no connection with that Cecilia into the trimmings of whose dresses bank-notes had recklessly dissolved. The major, an almost middle-aged man, of roughish exterior, in plain clothes, pulling his moustache over a letter that had arrived for him, dispelled our visions of manly beauty and military pomp even more effectually. ”

“ I fancied myself in the bare, spacious hall, at which I had peeped; I seemed to hear a light laugh, and to see the beautiful face of Mrs. Moss look over the banisters; to hear a rustle, and the scraping of the stiff brocade, as the pink rosebuds shimmered, and the green satin shoes peeped out, and tap, tap, tap, the high pink heels resounded from the shallow stairs.
"I had dreamed this day-dream many times over before the carriage stopped with a shake, and Aunt Harriet roused me, asking if I were asleep. In another minute or so we were in the hall, and here I met with my first disappointment. ”

“ Sometimes I thought of the full-grown man whose intelligent face, and the faintly foreign accent of whose voice were now familiar in our home—the busy merchant, the polite and agreeable gentleman. And then I thought of the Ivan I seemed to have known so much better so long ago! The pale boy wandering by the water—reading in the swing—dead by that other river—buried beneath the lilies. ”

“ Very silly, indeed, my dear. And how one remembers one's follies! At the end of half a century, I [49] recall my reflection in that old nursery mirror more clearly than I remember how I looked in the glass before which I put on my bonnet this evening to come to tea with you: the weird, startled glance of my eyes, which, in their most prominent stage of weariness, gazed at me out of the shadows of the looking glass, the tumbled tufts of hair, the ghostly effect of my white night-dress. As to my nose, I could absolutely see nothing of its shape ”

“ Moss and I became great friends. I put aside my dream among the 'vain fancies' of life, and took very kindly to the manor in its new aspect. Even the stuffed footman became familiar, and learnt to welcome me with a smile. The real Mrs. Moss was a more agreeable person than I have, I fear, represented her. She had failed to grasp solid happiness in life, because she had chosen with the cowardice of an inferior mind; but she had borne disappointment with dignity, and submitted to heavy sorrows with patience; and a greater nature could not have done more. ”

“ To be very ill is not pleasant; but the slow process of getting back strength is often less pleasant still. One afternoon Ida knelt in her old place at the window. She was up, but might not go out, and this was a great grief. The day had been provokingly fine, and even now, though the sun was setting, it seemed inclined to make a fresh start, so bright was the rejuvenated glow with which it shone upon the opposite houses, and threw a mystic glory over Mrs. Overtheway's white [22] steps and green railings. Oh! how Ida had wished to go out that afternoon! ”

“ I well remember the visit of condolence on which I accompanied my mother, the bitter grief of the sisters, and the slow dropping of Miss Mary's tears on to her black dress. Wonderful indeed is love! The most talented and charming companion in the world could not have filled to them the place of the helpless, uninteresting invalid who had passed away. ”

“ By the time that my father and mother returned, I had come to the conclusion that the bank of a river was, of all situations, the most desirable for one's home, and had built endless bowers in the air like that in which the anglers are seated in the picture entitled 'The Farewell;' and had imagined myself in a tall hat and a stiff-bustled dress cooking fish for my favourite brothers after the recipes in Walton and Cotton's 'Complete Angler.'
"They came back with disappointment on their faces. They had not got a house, but my mother had got a headache, and we sat down to tea a dispirited party. ”

“ To touch anything at such a moment is a trial. We groped down the passage; I felt the handle of the first door, and turned that of the second, and in we went. The window-blind of this room was drawn up, and the moonlight streamed over everything. A nest of white drapery covered one chair, a muslin dress lay like a sick ghost over a second, some little black satin shoes and web-like stockings were on the floor, a gold watch and one or two feminine ornaments lay on the table ”

“ I wish I had a pug with a wrinkled black snout, don't you, Nursey?"
"I'm sure I don't, Miss Ida. My father kept all sorts of pigs, and we used to have one with a black snout and black spots, but it was as ugly as ugly could be; and I never could fancy the bacon would be fit to eat. You must have been dreaming, I'm sure; the old lady would never tell you about such rubbish, I know."
"It's pugs, not pigs, Nursey; and they're dogs, you know," said Ida, laughing. "How funny you are! ”

“ One needs sometimes to get away from the world around, 'from the noise and from the hurryings of this life,' and to hear, read, see, or do something to remind one that there is a standard which is not of drawing-rooms; that petty troubles are the pilgrimage of the soul; that great and happy lives have been lived here by those who have had but little; and that satisfying bliss is not here, but hereafter.
"We went downstairs slowly, hand in hand.
"'I wonder what mother is doing?' said Fatima. ”

“ For one thing, the dear ladies were older, and fidgety, foolish little weaknesses of this kind sometimes increase with years. Then I was older also, and if they had doubted their own powers of entertainment when I was a child, they would still less believe that I could enjoy their society now that I was a 'young lady.' Whereas the truth was, that though my taste for buns and my reverence for smooth pencil drawings in impossible perspective had certainly diminished, my real enjoyment of a quiet evening with my old friends was greater than before. ”

“ But in a little house just out of Plymouth, that, God above knows, I can see this moment as clearly as I see you, there's a girl that has either forgotten me, or is breaking as good a heart as ever beat in woman's breast for the man that should have been her husband, and that's fast bound here upon a rock with sea-birds. ”

“ One evening—some months after my ramble round the manor—the maids went out to tea, and I lay in peaceful silence watching the shadows which crept noiselessly about the room as the fire blazed, and wishing Sarah and her colleagues nothing less than a month of uninterrupted tea-parties. I was almost asleep when Aunt Harriet came into the room. She brought a candle, put up my screen (the red screen again!) , and went to the work-table. ”

“ I clearly remember the feeling of lying with my face against the horsehair sofa in the little dining-room, feebly repeating, 'You shouldn't, you know. You shouldn't!' amid my tears, my hair being softly stroked the while by the two sisters, who comforted me, and blamed themselves with a depth of self-abasement that almost made me laugh. It had hardly seemed possible that their customary humility could go lower. The affair was wound up with a good deal of kissing, and tea, and there were no more suspicions for a long time. ”

“ There have been lilies on the grave of the true Ivan for half that time, and will be, perhaps, for yet a little while, till I also am laid beneath them.
"So ends the story, my dear," the little old lady added, after a pause.
"I should like to know what became of the old landlord, please," Ida said.
"If you will ask an old woman like me the further history of the people she knew in her youth," said Mrs. Overtheway, smiling, "you must expect to hear of deaths. Of course he is dead many a long year since. ”

“ The book I chose would look very dull in your eyes, I dare say, my dear Ida; you who live in an age of bright, smart story-books, with clear type, coloured pictures, and gorgeous outsides. You don't know what small, mean, inartistic 'cuts' enlivened your grandmother's nursery library, that is, when the books were illustrated at all. ”

“ The tea, the cream, the brown bread and butter, the fresh eggs, and the honey—all were of the very best—even the waiting-maid was pretty, and had something of the old lady's smile.
When she had finished her duties by taking away the things, and putting the tea-table into a corner, the two friends drew up to the fire.
"You look better for tea, my child," said the little old lady. "Do you eat enough at home?"
"As much as I can," said Ida, "but I am more hungry when somebody else has tea with me. There very seldom was anybody till you came though. ”

“ Overtheway, "reminds me of something that happened in my youth, and it is true, though, do you know, it is a ghost story."
Ida danced in her chair.
"That is just what I should like!" she exclaimed. "Nurse has a ghost story, belonging to a farm-house, which she tells the housemaid, but she says she can't tell me till I am older, and I should so like to hear a ghost story, if it isn't too horrid."
"This ghost story isn't too horrid, I think," laughed the little old lady, "and if you will let me think a few minutes, and then forgive my prosy way of telling it, you shall have it at once." ”

“ My father humoured me, and we drew near to the laurustinus hedge, and looked over into the gay little garden. As we looked, we became [153] conscious of what appeared like a heap or bundle of clothing near one of the beds, which, on lifting itself up, proved to be a tall slender lady of middle age, who, with her dress tucked neatly round her, a big print hood on her head, and a trowel in her hand, was busily administering such tender little attentions as mothers will lavish on their children, and garden lovers on their flowers. She was not alone in the garden, as we soon perceived. ”