Fiction > Serialisations > London, 1896-1897 - St. Ives > Volume 10

ST. IVES. 317
'"Alas, mademoiselle!" said I, "I am no very perfect craftsman. This is
supposed to be a house, and you see the chimneys are awry. You may call this
a box if you are \ery indulgent ; but see where my tool slipped ! Ves, I am
afraid you may go from one to ancjther, and find a flaw in everything. Failures
for Sale should be on my signboard. 1 do not keep a shop ; I keep a Humorous
Museum."' I cast a smiling glance about my display and then at her, and instantly
became grave. " Strange, is it not," I added, " that a grown man and a soldier
should be engaged upon such trash, and a sad heart produce an\thing so funny
to look at ? "
An unpleasant voice summoned her at this moment by the name of Flora, and
she made a hasty purchase and rejoined her party.
A few days after she came again. But I must first tell you how she came to
be so frequent. Her aunt was one of those terrible British old maids, of which
the world has heard much ; and having nothing whatever to do and a word or two
of French, she had taken what she called an interest in the French prisotiers. " A
big, bustling, bold old lady, she flounced about our market-place with insufferable
airs of patronage and condescension. She bought, indeed, with liberality, but her
manner of studying us through a quizzing glass, and playing cicerone to her
followers, acquitted us of any gratitude. She had a tail behind her of heavy,
obsequious old gentlemen, or dull, giggling misses, to whom she appeared to be an
oracle. "This one can really carve prettily : is he not a quiz with his big whiskers? ''
she would say. " And this one," indicating myself with her gold eye-glass, " is, I
assure you, quite an oddity." The oddity, you may be certain, ground his teeth.
She had a way of standing in our midst, nodding around, and addressing us in
what she imagined to be French : " Bienne, hommes I ca va bienne ? " I took the
freedom to reply in the same lingo : " Bienne, fenune ! ca va couci-amci tout d'meme,
la bourgeoise ! " And at that, when we had all laughed with a little more heartiness
than was entirely civil, " 1 told you he was quite an oddity ! " says she in triumph.
Needless to say, these passages were before 1 had remarked the niece.
The aunt came on the day in question with a following rather more than
usually large, which she manoeuvred to and fro about the market and lectured to
at rather more than usual length, and with rather less than her accustomed tact.
I kept my eyes down, but they were ever fixed in the same direction, quite in
vain. The aunt came and went, and pulled us out, and showed us off, like caged
monkeys ; but the niece kept herself on the outskirts of the crowd and on the
opposite side of the courtyard, and departed at last as she had come, without a
sign. Closely as I had watched her, I could not say her eyes had ever rested on
me for an instant ; and my heart was overwhelmed with bitterness and blackness.
I tore out her detested image ; 1 felt I was done with her for ever ; I laughed at
myself savagely, because I had thought to please ; when I lay down at night, sleep
forsook me, and I lay, and rolled, and gloated on her charms, and cursed her
insensibility, for half the night. How trivial I thought her ! and how trivial her
sex ! A man might be an angel or an Apollo, and a mustard-coloured coat would
wholly blind them to his merits. I was a prisoner, a slave, a contemned and
despicable being, the butt of her sniggering countrymen. I would take the lesson :
no proud daughter of my foes should have the chance to mock at me again ; none
in the future should have the chance to think I had looked at her with admiration.
You cannot imagine any one of a more resolute and independent spirit, or whose
bosom was more wholly mailed with patriotic arrogance, than I. Before I dropped
asleep, I had remembered all the infamies of Britain, and debited them in an
overwhelming column to Flora.