AN UNDERGRADUATE'S AUNT
By F. ANSTEY
Author of "Vice Versa," etc.
Frederick Flushington belonged to a small college, and in doing so conferred upon it one of the few distinctions it could boast—namely, that of possessing the very bashfulest man in the whole university. But his college did not treat him with any excess of adulation on that account, probably from a prudent fear of rubbing the bloom off his modesty; they allowed him to blush unseen—which was the condition in which he preferred to blush.
He felt himself oppressed by a paucity of ideas and a difficulty in knowing which way to look in the presence of his fellow-men, which made him never so happy as when he had fastened his outer door and secured himself from all possibility of intrusion; though it was almost an unnecessary precaution, for nobody ever thought of coming to see Flushington.
In appearance he was a man of middle height, with a long scraggy neck and a large head, which gave him the air of being much shorter than he really was; he had little, weak eyes, a nose and mouth of no particular shape, and very smooth hair of no definite color. He had a timid, deprecating air, which seemed due to the consciousness that he was an uninteresting anomaly, and he certainly was as impervious to the ordinary influence of his surroundings as any undergraduate well could be. He lived a colorless, aimless life in his little rooms under the roof, reading every morning from nine till two with a superstitiously mechanical regularity, though very often his books completely failed to convey any ideas whatever to his brain, which was not a particularly powerful organ.
If the afternoon was fine he generally sought out his one friend, who was a few degrees less shy than himself, and they took a monosyllabic walk together; or if it was wet, he read the papers at the Union, and in the evening after hall he studied "general literature" (a graceful term for novels) or laboriously spelt out a sonata upon his piano—a habit which did not increase his popularity.
Fortunately for Flushington, he had no gyp, or his life might have been made a positive burden to him, and with his bedmaker he was rather a favorite as "a gentleman what gave no trouble"—meaning that, when he observed his sherry unaccountably sinking, like the water in a lock when the sluices are up, Flushington was too delicate to refer to the phenomenon.
He was sitting one afternoon over his modest lunch of bread and butter, potted meat and lemonade, when all at once he heard a sound of unusual voices and a strange flutter of dresses coming up the winding stone staircase outside, and was instantly seized with a cold dread.
There was no particular reason for being alarmed, although there were certainly ladies mounting the steps. Probably they were friends of the man opposite, who was always having his people up; but still Flushington had that odd presentiment which nervous people have sometimes that something unpleasant is on its way to them, and he half rose from his chair to shut his outer oak.
It was too late; the dresses were rustling now in his very passage; there was a pause, a few faint, smothered laughs and little feminine coughs—then two taps at the door.
"Come in," cried Flushington, faintly; he wished he had been reading anything but the work by M. Zola, which was propped up in front of him. It is your mild man, who frequently has a taste for seeing the less reputable side of life in this second-hand way, and Flushington would toil manfully through the voluminous pages, hunting up every third word in the dictionary; with a sense of injury when, as was often the case, it was not to be found. Still, there was a sort of intellectual orgie about it which had strong fascinations for him, while he knew enough of the language to be aware when the incidents approached the improper, though he was not always able to see quite clearly in what this impropriety consisted.
The door opened, and his heart seemed to stop, and all the blood rushed violently to his head as a large lady came sweeping in, her face rippling with a broad smile of affection.
She horrified Flushington, who knew nobody with the least claim to smile at him so expansively as that; he drank lemonade to conceal his confusion.
"You know me, my dear Fred?" she said, easily. "Of course not—how should you? I'm—for goodness sake, my dear boy, don't look so terribly frightened! I'm your aunt—your aunt Amelia, come over from Australia!"
The shock was a severe one to Flushington, who had not even known he possessed such a relative; he could only say, "Oh?" which he felt even then was scarcely a warm greeting to give an aunt from the Antipodes.
"Oh, but," she added, cheerily, "that's not all; I've another surprise for you: the dear girls would insist on coming up, too, to see their grand college cousin; they're just outside. I'll call them in—shall I?"
In another second Flushington's small room was overrun by a horde of female relatives, while he looked on gasping.
They were pretty girls, too, many of them; but that was all the more dreadful to him: he did not mind the plainer ones half so much; a combination of beauty and intellect reduced him to a condition of absolute imbecility.
He was once caught and introduced to a charming young lady from Newnham, and all he could do was to back feebly into a corner and murmur "Thank you," repeatedly.
He was very little better than that then as his aunt singled out one girl after another. "We won't have any formal nonsense between cousins," she said; "you know them all by name already, I dare say. This is Milly; that's Jane; here's Flora, and Kitty, and Margaret; and that's my little Thomasina over there by the book-case."
Poor Flushington ducked blindly in the direction of each, and then to them all collectively: he had not presence of mind to offer them chairs or cake, or anything; and besides, there was not nearly enough of anything for all of them.
Meanwhile, his aunt had spread herself comfortably out in his armchair, and was untying her bonnet-strings and beaming at him until he was ready to expire with confusion. "I do think," she observed at last, "that when an old aunt all the way from Australia takes the trouble to come and see you like this, you might spare her just one kiss!"
Flushington dared not refuse; he tottered up and kissed her somewhere about the face, after which he did not know which way to look, he was so terribly afraid that he might have to go through the same ceremony with his cousins, which he simply could not have survived.
Happily for him, they did not appear to expect it and he balanced a chair on its hind legs and, resting one knee upon it, waited patiently for them to begin a conversation; he could not have uttered a single word.
The aunt came to his rescue: "You don't ask after your Uncle Samuel, who used to send you the beetles?" she said, reprovingly.
"No," said Flushington, who had forgotten Uncle Samuel and his beetles, too; "no, how is Uncle Samuel—quite well, I hope?"
"Only tolerably so, thank you, Fred; you see, he never got over his great loss."
"No," said Flushington desperately, "of course not; it was a—a large sum of money to lose at once."
"I was not referring to money," said she, with a slight touch of stoniness in her manner; "I was alluding to the death of your Cousin John."
Flushington had felt himself getting on rather well just before that, but this awkward mistake—for he could not recollect having heard of Cousin John before—threw him off his balance again; he collapsed into silence once more, inwardly resolving to be lured into no more questions concerning relatives.
His ignorance seemed to have aroused pathetic sentiments in his aunt. "I ought to have known," she said, shaking her head, "they'd soon forget us in the old country; here's my own sister's son, and he doesn't remember his cousin's death! Well, well, now we're here, we must see if we can't know one another a little better. Fred, you must take the girls and me everywhere and show us everything, like a good nephew, you know."
Flushington had a horrible mental vision of himself careering about all Cambridge, followed by a long procession of female relatives—a fearful possibility to so shy a man. "Shall you be here long?" he asked.
"Only a week or so; we're at the 'Bull,' very near you, you see; and I'm afraid you think us very bold beggars, Fred, but we're going to ask you to give us something to eat. I've set my heart, so have the girls (haven't you, dears?), on lunching once with a college student in his own room."
"There's nothing so extraordinary in it, I assure you," protested Flushington, "and—and I'm afraid there's very little for you to eat. The kitchen and buttery are closed" (he said this at a venture, as he felt absolutely unequal to facing the college cook and ordering lunch from that tremendous personage; he would rather order it from his own tutor, even). "But, if you don't mind potted ham, there's a little at the bottom of this tin, and there's some bread and an inch of butter, and marmalade, and a few biscuits. And there was some sherry this morning."
The girls all professed themselves very hungry and contented with anything; so they sat around the table, and poor Flushington served out meagre rations of all the provisions he could find, even to his figs and French plums; but there was not nearly enough to go round, and they lunched with evident disillusionment, thinking that the college luxury of which they had heard so much had been greatly exaggerated.
During luncheon the aunt began to study Flushington's features attentively. "There's a strong look of poor, dear Simon about him when he smiles," she said, looking at him through her gold double glasses. "There, did you catch it, girls? Just his mother's profile (turn your face a leetle more towards the window, so as to get the light on your nose). Don't you see the likeness to your aunt's portrait, girls?"
And Flushington had to sit still with all the girls' charming eyes fixed critically upon his crimson countenance; he longed to be able to slide down under the table and evade them, but of course he was obliged to remain above.
"He's got dear Caroline's nose!" the aunt went on triumphantly; and the cousins agreed that he certainly had Caroline's nose, which made Flushington feel vaguely that he ought at least to offer to return it.
Presently one of the girls whispered to her mother, who laughed indulgently. "What do you think this silly child wants me to ask you now, Fred?" she said. "She says she would so like to see what you look like with your college cap and gown on. Will you put them on, just to please her?"
So Flushington had to put them on and walk slowly up and down the room in them, feeling all the time what a dismal spectacle he was making of himself, while the girls were plainly disappointed, and remarked that somehow they had thought the academical costume more becoming.
Then began a hotly-maintained catechism upon his studies, his amusements, his friends and his mode of life generally, which he met with uneasy shiftings and short, timid answers that they did not appear to think altogether satisfactory.
Indeed, the aunt, who by this time felt the potted ham beginning to disagree with her, asked him, with something of severity in her tone, whether he went to church regularly; and he said that he didn't go to church, but was always regular at chapel.
On this she observed coldly that she was sorry to hear her nephew was a Dissenter; and Flushington was much too shy to attempt to explain the misunderstanding; he sat quiet and felt miserable, while there was another uncomfortable pause.
The cousins were whispering together and laughing over little private jokes, and he, after the manner of sensitive men, of course imagined they were laughing at him—and perhaps he was not very far wrong on this occasion. So he was growing hotter and hotter every second, inwardly cursing his whole race and wishing that his father had been a foundling—when there came another tap at the door.
"Why, that must be poor old Sophy!" said his aunt. "Fred, you remember old Sophy—no, you can't; you were only a baby when she came to live with us, but she'll remember you. She begged so hard to be taken, and so we told her she might come on here slowly after us."
And then an old person in a black bonnet came feebly in, and was considerably affected when she saw Flushington. "To think," she quavered, "to think as my dim old eyes should see the child I've nursed on my lap growed out into a college gentleman!" And she hugged Flushington and wept on his shoulder till he was almost cataleptic with confusion.
But as she grew calmer she became more critical; she confessed to a certain feeling of disappointment with Flushington; he had not filled out, she said, "so fine as he'd promised to fill out." And when she asked if he recollected how he wouldn't be washed unless they put his little wooden horse on the washstand, and what a business it was to make him swallow his castor-oil, it made Flushington feel like a fool.
This was quite bad enough, but at last the girls began to go round his rooms, exclaiming at everything, admiring his pipe and umbrella racks, his buffalo horns and his quaint wooden kettle-holder, until they happened to come upon his French novel; and, being unsophisticated colonial girls with a healthy ignorance of such literature, they wanted Flushington to tell them what it was all about.
His presence of mind had gone long before, and this demand threw him into a violent perspiration; he could not invent, and he was painfully racking his brains to find some portion of the tale which would bear repetition—when there was another knock at the door.
At this Flushington was perfectly dumb with horror; he prepared himself blankly for another aunt with a fresh relay of female cousins, or more old family servants who had washed him in his infancy, and he sat there cowering.
But when the door opened a tall, fair-haired, good-looking young fellow, who from his costume had evidently just come up from the tennis-court, came bursting in impulsively.
"Oh, I say!" he began, "have you heard—have you seen? Oh, beg pardon, didn't see, you know!" he added, as he noticed the extraordinary fact that Flushington had people up.
"Oh, let me introduce you," said Flushington, with a vague idea that this was the proper thing to do. "Mr. Lushington, Mrs.—no, I don't know her name—my aunt—my cousins."
The young man, who had just been about to retire, bowed and stared with a sudden surprise. "Do you know," he said slowly to the other, "I rather think that's my aunt!"
"I—I'm afraid not," whispered Flushington; "she seems quite sure she's mine."
"Well, I've got an aunt and cousins I've never seen before coming up to-day," said the new-comer, "and yours is uncommonly like the portrait of mine."
"If they belong to you, do take them away!" said Flushington feebly; "I don't think I can keep up much longer."
"What are you whispering about, Fred?" cried the aunt. "Is it something we are not to know?"
"He says he thinks there's been a mistake, and you're not my aunt," explained Flushington.
"Oh, does he?" she said, drawing herself up indignantly. "And what does he know about it? I didn't catch his name—who is he?"
"Fred Lushington," he said; "that's my name."
"And who are you, if he's Fred Lushington?" she inquired, turning upon the unfortunate owner of the rooms.
"I'm Frederick Flushington," he stammered; "I'm sorry—but I can't help it!"
"Then you're not my nephew at all, sir!" cried the aunt.
"Thank you very much," said Flushington gratefully.
"You see," her real nephew was explaining to her, "there isn't much light on the staircase, and you must have thought his name over the door was 'F. Lushington,' so in you went, you know! The porter told me you'd been asking for me, so I looked in here to see whether you had been heard of, and here you are."
"But why didn't he tell me?" she said, for she was naturally annoyed to find that she had been pouring out all her pent-up affection over a perfect stranger, and she even had a dim idea that she had put herself in rather a ridiculous position, which of course made her feel very angry with Flushington. "Why couldn't he explain before matters had gone on so far?"
"How was I to know?" pleaded Flushington. "I dare say I have aunts in Australia, and you said you were one of them."
"But you asked after Uncle Samuel?" she said accusingly. "You must have had some object—I cannot say what—in encouraging my mistake; oh, I'm sure of it!"
"You told me to ask after him," said the unhappy Flushington; "I thought it was all right. What else was I to do?"
The cousins were whispering and laughing together all this time and regarding their new cousin with shy admiration, very different from the manner in which they had looked at poor Flushington; and the old nurse, too, was overjoyed and declared that she felt sure from the first that her Master Frederick had not turned out so undersized as him—meaning Flushington.
"Yes, yes," said Lushington hastily, "quite a mistake on both sides. Quite sure Flushington isn't the man to go and intercept any fellow's aunt."
"I wouldn't have done it for worlds, if I had known!" he protested very sincerely.
"Well," she said, a little mollified, "I am very sorry we've all disturbed you like this, Mr.—Mr. Flushington" (the unlucky man said something about not minding it now); "and now, Fred, perhaps you will show us the way to the right rooms?"
"Come along, then!" said he; "I'll run down and tell them to send up some lunch" (they did not explain that they had lunched already). "You come, too, Flushington, and then after lunch you and I will row the ladies up to Byron's Pool?"
"Yes, do come, Mr. Flushington," the ladies said kindly.
But Flushington wriggled out of it. To begin with, he did not consider he knew his neighbor sufficiently well; besides, he had had enough of female society for one day.
Indeed, long after that, he would be careful in fastening his door about luncheon-time, and if he saw any person in Cambridge who looked as if she might by any possibility turn out to be a relation, he would flee down a back street.