Disclosing the Educational Influence exerted by the Essex Coast, and other Matters, including Reasons for Joy
Sit down here by the fire—no, in the easy chair,” said Ermyntrude, with a note of solicitude in her kindly voice. “Mamma won’t be home for half an hour yet, and I want a nice, quiet, serious talk with you. Oh, it’s going to be extremely serious, and you must begin by playing that you are at least one hundred and fifty years old.”
“That won’t be so difficult,” I replied, not without the implication of injury. “It will only be adding a few decades to the venerableness that I seem always to possess in your eyes.”
“Oh!” said Ermie, and looked at me inquiringly for a moment. Then she seated herself, and gazed with much steadiness into the fire. I waited for the nice, serious talk to begin—and waited a long time.
“Well, my dear child,” I broke in upon the silence at last, “I hoped to have been the very first to come and tell your mother how deeply glad I was to see you all back again in Fernbank. But that wretched rheumatism of mine—at my age, you know———”
I was watching narrowly for even the faintest sign of deprecation. She did not stir an eyelash.
“Yes,” she suddenly began, still intently gazing into the fire; “papa has got his money all back, and more. That is, it isn’t the same money, but somebody else’s—I’m sure I don’t know whose. Sometimes I feel sorry for those other people, whoever they are, who have had to give it up to us. Then, other times, I am so glad simply to be in again where it’s warm that I don’t care.”
“The firelight suits your face, Ermie,” I said, noting with the pleasure appropriate to my position as the oldest friend of the family, how sweetly the soft radiance played upward upon the fair young rounded throat and chin, and tipped the little nostrils with rosy light.
“Fortunately,” she went on, as if I had not spoken, “some Americans took the house furnished in September for three months—I think, poor souls, that they believed it was the London season—and so we never had to break up, and we were able to get back again in time for Uncle Dudley to plant all his bulbs. They seem to have been very quiet people. Mamma had a kind of notion that they would practise with bucking horses on the tennis-lawn, and shoot at bottles and clay pigeons here in the drawing-room. The only thing we could find that they did was to paste thick paper over the ventilator in the dining-room. And yet a policeman told our man that they slept with their bedroom windows open all night. Curious, isn’t it?”
“I like to have one of these ‘nice, quiet, serious talks’ with you, Ermie,” I said.