"But you went against nature in curling Miss Annabel's hair, and yet no judgment seems to have fallen upon you," said I, as I thought pertinently.
"That was quite different, Master Reggie." Like the rest of her kind, Ponty recognised the incalculable difference between her own case and the case of everybody else. "Although Miss Annabel's hair didn't curl what you might call naturally, like yours, it was very easy to curl, and it kept in something beautiful: and it seemed very hard for your poor mamma to have a boy whose curls had to be cut off and a girl who hadn't any. And then her ladyship's children were her ladyship's children, and not like ordinary common folk." Ponty's logic always roused my wonder and admiration.
While she was speaking, my wandering gaze fell upon two portraits hung on the nursery wall: a fat little girl with pink cheeks and blue eyes, and stiff curls like great yellow sausages, who was dressed in a white frock and a blue sash; and a thin, little, dark-eyed boy with pale cheeks and terrible brown ringlets, and who was disfigured still further by a green velvet suit and a ghastly lace collar. These caricatures were supposed to reproduce Annabel and myself in early youth; and in Ponty's eyes they represented the perfection of personal beauty as depicted by the highest form of human art.
But while I smiled—as I had often smiled before—at the hideousness of these pictures, a great wave of envy of the children whom they represented swept over me; an overwhelming longing to be once more the sheltered little boy in the frightful green suit, whose world was Annabel and whose Heaven was Ponty and his mother. Happy little boy, upon whose wrath the sun never went down, and who knew no sorrow so great that his mother could not cure it! I would gladly have changed places with him, even though the change involved the handicaps of long brown curls and a large lace collar.
CHAPTER XX
ISABEL, née CARNABY
Arthur and Annabel were married very quietly at Restham Church; and, after a short honeymoon, took up their abode at The Deanery of Lowchester—a beautiful old house which fulfilled my sister's most exorbitant dreams.
I did not appoint Arthur's successor: I felt I was too much out of touch with things spiritual to be competent to undertake so solemn a responsibility: so I gave the matter over into the Bishop's hands, and left the selection of a new rector to him.
With the simplicity which has always characterised my views regarding that other world which is known to us as the Kingdom of Heaven, I accepted the fact that as long as Frank Wildacre was unforgiven by me I had no right to expect help from on High in any of my undertakings. How could I claim the rights of citizenship if I did not conform to the rules of citizenship? The rule was there in black and white for everybody to read: "If ye forgive not men their trespasses neither will your Father forgive your trespasses." And how could I ask my Father in Heaven to fulfil His part of the contract, unless I were ready to fulfil mine?
And I was not ready: I was no readier than I had been when Frank Wildacre stole my wife away from me a year and a half ago. My anger against him was hotter and bitterer than it had ever been: time seemed to increase rather than to diminish its intensity. I advisedly say Frank, as my heart was gradually softening towards my darling. I still was set against making the first advances: but I felt that if she would only come back to me of her own free will, I was prepared to let bygones be bygones, and to take up the thread of our married life again exactly where she had broken it off. At least that is how I felt sometimes: at others I was plunged in despair by the thought that everything was over for ever between Fay and myself, and that I should never see her dear face again. But even in my more hopeful moods I recognised that it would be impossible for Fay and Annabel to live together again; and that it was, therefore, a good thing on the whole that Arthur had transplanted my sister from Restham to Lowchester.