Ten Degrees Backward

by Ellen Thorneycroft Fowler

I will try to describe him, though to my mind the Wildacres always beggared description: they were so utterly unlike everybody else that there were no known standards by which to measure them. On that April afternoon when he first crossed my path, Frank Wildacre was eighteen, and looked both more and less. He was by no means tall, but so slenderly built that he seemed taller than he really was until one compared him with other men, and this smallness and slightness added to the boyishness of his appearance. His face was neither old nor young—or, rather, it was both. It possessed somehow the youthfulness of dawn and of springtime, and of all those things which have retained their undimmed youth through the march of the centuries. It was not so much that Frank Wildacre was young; everybody has been young at some time or another, and has got over it sooner or later: it was rather that he was youth itself.

I could not tell when first I saw him whether his face was beautiful or not: I cannot tell now; I only knew that it was wonderful, strange, glorious, unlike any other face in the world—save one: and that one I had not yet seen.

I perceived that his hair was dark and curly, and that his eyes were of that deep and mysterious grey which sometimes looks blue and sometimes black: also that he had that pale delicacy of skin and complexion which makes other people appear coarse and clumsy by contrast. Thus far even my short-sighted eyes could carry me. But it was not by their aid that I became conscious of that strange and subtle gift, possessed to such an extreme degree by Wildacre and his children, which for want of a better name men call charm. It was elusive, it was bewitching, it was indescribable; but all the same it was there.

It was not the usual human charm of ordinary attractive people. It was something far more magical and spell-weaving than that. In fact it was so unusual that there was almost something uncanny about it. It was the charm of fairies and of elves rather than of "golden boys and girls": it was a spell woven out of moonbeams and will-o'-the-wisp rather than out of breezes and the sunshine of a soft spring day. I never met any one with that peculiar kind of charm save Wildacre and his son and daughter, and his children—more especially the daughter—had it to a far greater extent than he. But it was that strange fascination of Wildacre's that induced Blathwayte to upset his whole scheme of existence in order to gratify Wildacre's whim, and it was that same attribute intensified in the twins that turned my world upside down and reduced its orderly routine to chaos.

Big, ugly Arthur—looking bigger and uglier than usual beside the ethereal boy—shook hands with us, and introduced his guest, and in a few moments the fairy changeling was sitting at the gate-legged table with us three ordinary mortals, drinking tea like any English schoolboy. But he was not like an English schoolboy in any other respect.

He was perfectly at ease with us at once, as indeed he was with everybody. There was no such word as shyness in Frank Wildacre's dictionary. But the funny thing was that—quite unconsciously to himself—he seemed to be bestowing a favour upon Annabel and me in condescending to drink tea with us, while (if the truth must be told) Annabel and I generally considered it rather an act of graciousness on our part to invite any one to tea at Restham Manor. I think it must have been the Winterford blood bubbling in our veins that produced this exclusive and archaic feeling, or it might have been merely a symptom of the general grooviness of single middle age.

Frank was delighted with Restham, and hastened to tell us so, thereby grappling Annabel to his soul with hoops of steel. Blathwayte had already told him the history and legends of the place; and he had assimilated these as if he had known them for years. And he not only assimilated them: he seemed to give them back again to us so enriched with the decoration of his fancy that we—who had been brought up on them—realised for the first time how beautiful they were.

"So Mr. Blathwayte has told you that we are situated on the Pilgrim's Road," said Annabel, after the conversation had flowed for some minutes like a river in spate.

"Of course he has," replied the boy, his delicate face aglow; "and that is one of the things that has made Restham so awfully interesting. But what makes it even more thrilling to me is that the road was a Roman road too, and so was trodden by Cæsar's legions before such things as pilgrims were ever invented. Do you know, Miss Kingsnorth, I'm not tremendously keen on pilgrims myself? They seem to have made themselves so unnecessarily uncomfortable, with peas in their shoes, and hair-shirts, and things of that kind. And they were so dirty, too, and seemed to think there was some sort of virtue in not having a bath when they needed one."

"And they were Papists also," added Annabel.