“Yes, and what music that was; I never heard any with such imagination before. You have a turn that way, Angela; you should try to put it into words, it would make a poem.”
“I complain like the old man, that you set a difficult subject,” she said; “but I will try, if you will promise not to laugh at the result.”
“If you succeed on paper only half so well as he did on the violin, your verses will be worth listening to, and I certainly shall not laugh.”
CHAPTER XXV.
On the following day the somewhat curious religious conversation between Arthur and Angela—a conversation which, begun on Arthur’s part out of curiosity, had ended on both sides very much in earnest— the weather broke up and the grand old English climate reasserted its treacherous supremacy. From summer weather the inhabitants of the county of Marlshire suddenly found themselves plunged into a spell of cold that was by contrast almost Arctic. Storms of sleet drove against the window-panes, and there was even a very damaging night-frost, while that dreadful scourge, which nobody in his senses except Kingsley can ever have liked, the east wind, literally pervaded the whole place, and went whistling through the surrounding trees and ruins in a way calculated to make even a Laplander shiver.
Under these cheerless circumstances our pair of companions—for as yet they were, ostensibly at any rate, nothing more—gave up their outdoor excursions and took to rambling over the disused rooms in the old house, and hunting up many a record, some of them valuable and curious enough, of long-forgotten Caresfoots, and even of the old priors before them; a splendidly illuminated missal being amongst the latter prizes. When this amusement was exhausted, they sat together over the fire in the nursery, and Angela translated to him from her favourite classical authors, especially Homer, with an ease and fluency of expression that, to Arthur, was little short of miraculous. Or, when they got tired of that, he read to her from standard writers, which, elaborate as her education had been, in certain respects, she had scarcely yet even opened, notably Shakespeare and Milton. Needless to say, herself imbued with a strong poetic feeling, these immortal writers were a source of intense delight to her.
“How is it that Mr. Fraser never gave you Shakespeare to read?” asked Arthur one day, as he shut up the volume, having come to the end of “Hamlet.”
“He said that I should be better able to appreciate it when my mind had been prepared to do so by the help of a classical and mathematical education, and that it would be ‘a mistake to cloy my mental palate with sweets before I had learnt to appreciate their flavours.’”
“There is some sense in that,” remarked Arthur. “By the way, how are the verses you promised to write me getting on? Have you done them yet?”
“I have done something,” she answered, modestly, “but I really do not think that they are worth producing. It is very tiresome of you to have remembered about them.”