Sir William Read Free Page A

Therefore he encloses money—with an adjuration not to spend it—seals the letter, and settles back to wait. He is content to wait. Indeed, poor man, he will wait his life away, patient, sly, cunning, bland, adroit, not entirely deficient in charm, but doomed always to sit at the wrong mouseholes, for the right ones have been taken up already by larger, quicker, more aggressive cats. Still, in his small way he does know how to manage a catnip mouse, and how is he to know that this time he has a catamount by the tail instead? She scarcely knows it herself.
    *
    She is disconsolate in Wales, where she is about to receive his letter; or rather, since it is better in this world to put all pain behind us, and since the only way to do this is to modulate present events to the past tense, endure, and hope for pleasure presently, Wales was where she was.
    Indiscretion had brought her there. It was not her fault. In a world which preferred the huffy distinction of immobility, a trait imported from the imagined French, she had had the vulgarity to be born vivacious. As the country daughter of a village blacksmith, and hence trite, she could not help but be. The world was alive to her, not merely a charade, for she had seen it in color; and after you have seen the world in color, the gray ground of the English water-color school does not suffice.
    Wales, however, was damned cold. The Reverend Gilpin in his works upon the Picturesque, admired that countrysidebut spent his winters in a comfortable parsonage, whereas Emily was imbedded in what could scarcely be called a crofter’s cot. Icicles bayoneted the eaves, and the thatch was slimy with hoarfrost, which gave it the mucous glitter of elvers in a pail. The chimney smoked. Indeed, it had smoked the owners, so that Granny Morgan looked like some Frisian curiosity, freshly extracted from a Danish bog.
    Had it been any other season, Emily could have gone for pensive strolls in the ivied ruins of the nearby abbey, to be caught up and rescued by a passing nobleman; but paper shoes, which were what she had fled in, cannot withstand the snow. Therefore she had no choice but to sit indoors and wonder which answer she would get to her letter, yes or no; for if one were bad, the other would be worse. Why this misfortune had befallen her, she did not know, for she had meant no harm. She never did.
    *
    She had only tried to better her situation, first by taking one with the family of a fat-faced physician named Dr. Budd, and then in other ways. Dr. Budd’s house was near Blackfriars Bridge, and Emily had not been happy there, and what was worse, it was the time of the Gordon Riots, which had frightened her.
    “Nonsense, my girl, so long as you stay indoors you’ll not come to harm,” said the cook; but a rock came through one pane of the kitchen window, smash, and something very like a gunny sack smacked into the areaway, but was human, and had its bones cracked, and bled and died.
    There was nowhere to run but up to the attics to hide. There is nothing for anyone of common sense to do but that, in any age, with the devil right behind you; but still, if you can get to the top first, by the time he gets up he’s winded himself—he’s just like you are—so he has to behave himself after that. He hasn’t the breath for his original intentions. He can only marvel that he made it to the top at all.
    If anything, the Budds were worse than the riots, what with the starched-cambric rustle of intrigue belowstairs,and such sounds as she overheard of the same thing going on with a silken swoop above, among the quality. So what with the giggles and buckteeth of the second parlormaid, a most superior person, and the gravelly eyes of Dr. Budd’s lady, who always had a plump arm to interfere—and Lord, how the wicked man did pinch—Emily soon came to regard herself, without complacence, as a pretty creature, though not, though never, with him.
    With, as it happened—but she could not quite remember