Ten Degrees Backward

by Ellen Thorneycroft Fowler

"And I always think it is so tiresome," my sister went on, "of people to say he was the same as Bacon. If he had been, people would have known it at the time, and would not have had to wait two or three hundred years to find it out. It seems to me a most absurd idea. What should you think if two or three hundred years hence people said that Bernard Shaw and Mr. Gladstone were the same?"

"I should say they were mistaken," I answered.

Here Frank put in his oar, and said that Bernard Shaw was his especial idol, and that therefore such an accusation on the part of posterity would cause him the keenest pain. "I simply adore Bernard Shaw," he added.

"And papa simply adored Mr. Gladstone," said Annabel; "so that naturally I do not wish to say a word against either of them. All I say is that it would be a mistake to mix them up."

The meeting unanimously agreeing with her, we passed on to the subject in chief.

"Which play shall we select?" asked Blathwayte.

"We can do either As You Like It, or A Midsummer Night's Dream," replied Frank. "Fay and I have acted in both. We used to do a lot of that sort of thing in Father's time, ever since we were quite little. Mother's sister, Aunt Gertrude, was an actress before she married, you know, as Mother was, only Mother was a dancer, and she and Mother used to teach us to dance and act from our cradles."

I had heard a good deal of this aunt from both Fay and Frank, and I freely admit I was decidedly jealous both of her and of what she represented. She was an actress who had married an Australian squatter, and she had had more to do with the upbringing of the twins than their own mother had. She had been a second mother to them both before and after their own mother's death, as the Wildacres frequently stayed with her and her husband on that far-off Australian sheep-farm. I gathered that Wildacre had put the little money he possessed into his brother-in-law's farm, and it had repaid him handsomely. When he came to England to complete his children's education (and, incidentally, his own life), the wrench of parting from their aunt had been as great a sorrow to the twins as their mother's death. But I could read between the lines that his wife's people belonged to a much lower social stratum than he did himself, and that he felt it his duty to his children to launch them on the world in the position to which by right they belonged. Therefore he took them from Mr. and Mrs. Sherard, their maternal aunt and uncle, and left them to the guardianship of his old college-chum, Arthur Blathwayte.

I knew that it had been—and still was, as far as Frank was concerned—the fixed intention of the twins to return to Australia to see their beloved aunt as soon as they came of age and could do as they liked; but marriage had modified this decision on the part of Fay; she still, however, cherished a hope of visiting her maternal relations some time, though I cannot say that the letters of Mrs. Sherard to her niece induced me to share this hope.

That Mrs. Sherard was still a handsome woman, her photograph testified; but the refined beauty which Mrs. Wildacre had not been permitted to survive had developed—in the case of her sister—into something not far removed from coarseness.