Six to Sixteen: A Story for Girls

by Juliana Horatia Ewing

He had a white Persian cat of an artistic temperament, which followed him in his walks, dozed on the back of his arm-chair, and condescended to share his tea when it reached a certain moderate temperature. It never was betrayed into excitement, except when there was fish for dinner. My great-grandfather’s fasts were feasts for Thomas the cat.

I can very clearly remember the sight of my great-grandfather pacing slowly up and down the tiny garden at The Vine, his hands behind him, and followed sedately by Thomas. Now and then he would stop to gaze, with infinite contentment in his eyes, at the delicate blue-grey mist behind the leafless trees (which in that spring sunshine were, no doubt, of much more complex and beautiful colour to him than mere brown), or drinking in the blue of the scillas in the border with a sigh of satisfaction. When he paused, Thomas would pause; as he feasted his eyes, Thomas would rub his head against his master’s legs, and stretch his own. When Elspeth had cooked the fish, and my great-grandmother had made the tea and arranged the flowers on the table, they would come in together and condescend to their breakfasts, with the same air about them both of having no responsibility in life but to find out sunny spots and to enjoy themselves.

My great-grandfather’s most charming paintings were sketches of flowers. Ordinary stiff flower-paintings are of all paintings the most uninteresting, I think; but his were of a very different kind. Each sketch was a sort of idyll. Indeed, he would tell me stories of each as he showed them.

Long as my great-grandfather had lived, he was never a robust man, and Elspeth’s chief ideas on the subject of his sketches bore reference to the colds he had caught, and the illnesses he had induced, by sitting in the east winds or lying on damp grass to do this or that sketch.

“That’ll be the one the master did before he was laid by with the rheumatics,” Elspeth said, when I described one of my favourites to her. It was a spring sketch. My great-grandfather had lain face downwards on the lawn to do it. This was to bring his eyes on a level with the subject of his painting, which was this: a crocus of the exquisite shades of lilac to be seen in some varieties, just full-blown, standing up in its first beauty and freshness from its fringe of narrow silver-striped leaves. The portrait was not an opaque and polished-looking painting on smooth cardboard, but a sketch—indefinite at the outer edges of the whole subject—on water-colour paper of moderate roughness. The throat and part of the cup of the flower stood out from some shadow at the roots of a plant beyond; a shadow of infinite gradation, and quite without the blackness common to patches of shade as seen by untrained eyes. From the level of my great-grandfather’s view, as he lay in the grass, the border looked a mere strip; close behind it was a hedge dividing the garden from a field. Just by the crocus there was a gap in the hedge, which in the sketch was indicated rather than drawn. And round the corner of the bare thorn branches from the hedge-bank in the field there peeped a celandine and a daisy. They were not nearly such finished portraits as that of the crocus. A few telling strokes of colour made them, and gave them a life and pertness that were clever enough. Beneath the sketch was written, “La Demoiselle. Des enfants du village la regardent.”

My great-grandfather translated this for me, and used to show me how the “little peasants,” Marguerite and Celandine, were peeping in at the pretty young lady in her mauve dress striped with violet.

But every sketch had its story, and often its moral; not, as a rule, a very original one. In one, a lovely study of ivy crept over a rotten branch upon the ground. A crimson toadstool relieved the heavy green, and suggested that the year was drawing to a close. Beneath it was written, “Charity.” “Thus,” said my great-grandfather, “one covers up and hides the defects of one he loves.”

A study of gaudy summer tulips stood—as may be guessed—for Pride.

“Pride,” said my great-grandfather, “is a sin; a mortal sin, dear child. Moreover, it is foolish, and also vulgar—the pride of fine clothes, money, equipages, and the like. What is called pride of birth—the dignity of an ancient name—this, indeed, is another thing. It is not petty, not personal; it seems to me more like patriotism—the pride of country.”

I did my best to describe to Elspeth both the sketch and my great-grandfather’s commentary.