She would reply, mournfully:
“In bed. Poor little Esmeralda has a tummy-ache this morning.”
This, too, was part of the rite. The words were always the same.
Never a doll escaped assassination, and nobody, I believe, found out what happened to them. My sister hated dolls with a vindictive, unreasoning hatred. And I, of course, was only too pleased to smash anything I was bidden to smash; and still am.
Dear Cousin Annie—this one happened to be no relation at all—turned up in this country at odd intervals, as did the rest of those stark grand-aunts and female cousins, to our infinite annoyance. There were scores of them, and all of a kind; musty and sententious to the last degree. The present generation has no idea, not the faintest idea, of what a grand-aunt used to look like in those days. Dear Cousin Annie was a gaunt, tottering, gray-haired anatomy, who reeked of Macassar oil, and wore massive jet beads round her neck and a tremulous drop of rose-water at the end of her nose—just the kind of person whom a little boy would love to kiss.
“What is my name, dear?” she asked, over and over again, with a sickly smile.
You were expected to answer:
“Dear—Cousin—Annie.”
It was no use whatever saying, “Don’t know.” We tried it often, but the question was only repeated with greater persistence, and a sicklier smile than ever.
Her husband had been a physician and was even more aged than she; he exhaled an air of unbelievable eld. It occurred to me, years afterwards, that there was something pre-Victorian and Waterlooish about those white whiskers. He drank sherry-wine, and dishes of tea. Nevertheless, one could have learnt much from him had one been a little older, for he was a character, an original. Later on, in Edinburgh, I got to know him well; he was then ninety-two, and no longer communicative. An antiquarian of the old school, he had filled his head with queer knowledge upon every subject, and his house with queer objects of every kind. Judging by his pamphlets and letters to newspapers, he seems to have taken, and rightly taken, all learning to his province. I still possess a few of these things; who can tell how many he produced altogether? “Protestantism in Austria” begins thus: “I am desirous of calling the attention of your readers to this subject, which is not generally understood in Britain.” It was written here, as well as a rather incoherent “Notice of a flood at Frastanz in the autumn of 1846.”[37] He gave me another paper written by his own father, who was Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons and died in 1818: “Mistresses and Servants.” How good it reads!