Bab Bab 33 · 第33章

. Next day Miss Pontifex returned to town, with her thoughts full of her

nephew and how she could best be of use to him.

It appeared to her that to do him any real service she must devote

herself almost entirely to him; she must in fact give up living in

London, at any rate for a long time, and live at Roughborough where she

could see him continually. This was a serious undertaking; she had

lived in London for the last twelve years, and naturally disliked the

prospect of a small country town such as Roughborough. Was it a prudent

thing to attempt so much? Must not people take their chances in this

world? Can anyone do much for anyone else unless by making a will in

his favour and dying then and there? Should not each look after his own

happiness, and will not the world be best carried on if everyone minds

his own business and leaves other people to mind theirs? Life is not a

donkey race in which everyone is to ride his neighbour’s donkey and the

last is to win, and the psalmist long since formulated a common

experience when he declared that no man may deliver his brother nor

make agreement unto God for him, for it cost more to redeem their

souls, so that he must let that alone for ever.

All these excellent reasons for letting her nephew alone occurred to

her, and many more, but against them there pleaded a woman’s love for

children, and her desire to find someone among the younger branches of

her own family to whom she could become warmly attached, and whom she

could attach warmly to herself.

Over and above this she wanted someone to leave her money to; she was

not going to leave it to people about whom she knew very little, merely

because they happened to be sons and daughters of brothers and sisters

whom she had never liked. She knew the power and value of money

exceedingly well, and how many lovable people suffer and die yearly for

the want of it; she was little likely to leave it without being

satisfied that her legatees were square, lovable, and more or less hard

up. She wanted those to have it who would be most likely to use it

genially and sensibly, and whom it would thus be likely to make most

happy; if she could find one such among her nephews and nieces, so much

the better; it was worth taking a great deal of pains to see whether

she could or could not; but if she failed, she must find an heir who

was not related to her by blood.

“Of course,” she had said to me, more than once, “I shall make a mess

of it. I shall choose some nice-looking, well-dressed screw, with

gentlemanly manners which will take me in, and he will go and paint

Academy pictures, or write for the _Times_, or do something just as

horrid the moment the breath is out of my body.”

As yet, however, she had made no will at all, and this was one of the

few things that troubled her. I believe she would have left most of her

money to me if I had not stopped her. My father left me abundantly well

off, and my mode of life has been always simple, so that I have never

known uneasiness about money; moreover I was especially anxious that

there should be no occasion given for ill-natured talk; she knew well,

therefore, that her leaving her money to me would be of all things the

most likely to weaken the ties that existed between us, provided that I

was aware of it, but I did not mind her talking about whom she should

make her heir, so long as it was well understood that I was not to be

the person.

Ernest had satisfied her as having enough in him to tempt her strongly

to take him up, but it was not till after many days’ reflection that

she gravitated towards actually doing so, with all the break in her

daily ways that this would entail. At least, she said it took her some

days, and certainly it appeared to do so, but from the moment she had

begun to broach the subject, I had guessed how things were going to

end.

It was now arranged she should take a house at Roughborough, and go and

live there for a couple of years. As a compromise, however, to meet

some of my objections, it was also arranged that she should keep her

rooms in Gower Street, and come to town for a week once in each month;

of course, also, she would leave Roughborough for the greater part of

the holidays. After two years, the thing was to come to an end, unless

it proved a great success. She should by that time, at any rate, have

made up her mind what the boy’s character was, and would then act as

circumstances might determine.

The pretext she put forward ostensibly was that her doctor said she

ought to be a year or two in the country after so many years of London

life, and had recommended Roughborough on account of the purity of its

air, and its easy access to and from London—for by this time the

railway had reached it. She was anxious not to give her brother and

sister any right to complain, if on seeing more of her nephew she found

she could not get on with him, and she was also anxious not to raise

false hopes of any kind in the boy’s own mind.

Having settled how everything was to be, she wrote to Theobald and said

she meant to take a house in Roughborough from the Michaelmas then

approaching, and mentioned, as though casually, that one of the

attractions of the place would be that her nephew was at school there

and she should hope to see more of him than she had done hitherto.

Theobald and Christina knew how dearly Alethea loved London, and

thought it very odd that she should want to go and live at

Roughborough, but they did not suspect that she was going there solely

on her nephew’s account, much less that she had thought of making

Ernest her heir. If they had guessed this, they would have been so

jealous that I half believe they would have asked her to go and live

somewhere else. Alethea however, was two or three years younger than

Theobald; she was still some years short of fifty, and might very well

live to eighty-five or ninety; her money, therefore, was not worth

taking much trouble about, and her brother and sister-in-law had

dismissed it, so to speak, from their minds with costs, assuming,

however, that if anything did happen to her while they were still

alive, the money would, as a matter of course, come to them.

The prospect of Alethea seeing much of Ernest was a serious matter.

Christina smelt mischief from afar, as indeed she often did. Alethea

was worldly—as worldly, that is to say, as a sister of Theobald’s could

be. In her letter to Theobald she had said she knew how much of his and

Christina’s thoughts were taken up with anxiety for the boy’s welfare.

Alethea had thought this handsome enough, but Christina had wanted

something better and stronger. “How can she know how much we think of

our darling?” she had exclaimed, when Theobald showed her his sister’s

letter. “I think, my dear, Alethea would understand these things better

if she had children of her own.” The least that would have satisfied

Christina was to have been told that there never yet had been any

parents comparable to Theobald and herself. She did not feel easy that

an alliance of some kind would not grow up between aunt and nephew, and

neither she nor Theobald wanted Ernest to have any allies. Joey and

Charlotte were quite as many allies as were good for him. After all,

however, if Alethea chose to go and live at Roughborough, they could

not well stop her, and must make the best of it.

In a few weeks’ time Alethea did choose to go and live at Roughborough.

A house was found with a field and a nice little garden which suited

her very well. “At any rate,” she said to herself, “I will have fresh

eggs and flowers.” She even considered the question of keeping a cow,

but in the end decided not to do so. She furnished her house throughout

anew, taking nothing whatever from her establishment in Gower Street,

and by Michaelmas—for the house was empty when she took it—she was

settled comfortably, and had begun to make herself at home.

One of Miss Pontifex’s first moves was to ask a dozen of the smartest

and most gentlemanly boys to breakfast with her. From her seat in

church she could see the faces of the upper-form boys, and soon made up

her mind which of them it would be best to cultivate. Miss Pontifex,

sitting opposite the boys in church, and reckoning them up with her

keen eyes from under her veil by all a woman’s criteria, came to a

truer conclusion about the greater number of those she scrutinized than

even Dr Skinner had done. She fell in love with one boy from seeing him

put on his gloves.

Miss Pontifex, as I have said, got hold of some of these youngsters

through Ernest, and fed them well. No boy can resist being fed well by

a good-natured and still handsome woman. Boys are very like nice dogs

in this respect—give them a bone and they will like you at once.

Alethea employed every other little artifice which she thought likely

to win their allegiance to herself, and through this their countenance

for her nephew. She found the football club in a slight money

difficulty and at once gave half a sovereign towards its removal. The

boys had no chance against her, she shot them down one after another as

easily as though they had been roosting pheasants. Nor did she escape

scathless herself, for, as she wrote to me, she quite lost her heart to

half a dozen of them. “How much nicer they are,” she said, “and how

much more they know than those who profess to teach them!”

I believe it has been lately maintained that it is the young and fair

who are the truly old and truly experienced, inasmuch as it is they who

alone have a living memory to guide them; “the whole charm,” it has

been said, “of youth lies in its advantage over age in respect of

experience, and when this has for some reason failed or been

misapplied, the charm is broken. When we say that we are getting old,

we should say rather that we are getting new or young, and are

suffering from inexperience; trying to do things which we have never

done before, and failing worse and worse, till in the end we are landed

in the utter impotence of death.”

Miss Pontifex died many a long year before the above passage was

written, but she had arrived independently at much the same conclusion.

She first, therefore, squared the boys. Dr Skinner was even more easily

dealt with. He and Mrs Skinner called, as a matter of course, as soon

as Miss Pontifex was settled. She fooled him to the top of his bent,

and obtained the promise of a MS. copy of one of his minor poems (for

Dr Skinner had the reputation of being quite one of our most facile and

elegant minor poets) on the occasion of his first visit. The other

masters and masters’ wives were not forgotten. Alethea laid herself out

to please, as indeed she did wherever she went, and if any woman lays

herself out to do this, she generally succeeds.