Crowded Out! and Other Sketches

by S. Frances Harrison

“No. But I guessed. It is sure to have been a woman, Dacre.”

“Well, I don't mind when I tell you. Nothing of all that time is anything to me now. Shall I tell you now?”

“If you please, dearest Dacre. For I must be close to you when I listen to that, and must not have you see me, for I know I shall cry.”

“Dearest child! Well then, it shall be now, for you could scarcely be closer to me than you are now? And if you cry, as you must try not to do, you shall be allowed to cry here upon my breast and I will not look. I can hardly see you as it is, it is so dark. Let me think, how I shall begin. You know Joseph—our poor Joseph—is my only brother and I never had any sisters. My father—you know this too—is an English country gentleman living in one of the most beautiful seats in England. If I were to describe the old place to you, you would want to go, and I could not spare you, so I will only say—well, you have seen those photographs?”

“Yes, dearest Dacre.”

“They only give you a faint idea of what it is. It is Tudor you know—do you know what Tudor is, Mrs. Foxley—and all red brick, weathered all colors, and terraced, with lots of little windows and some big ones with stained glass in them, and urns on the terrace, and a rookery, and an old avenue of poplars, haunted too, and so on, and so on—there's no end to it, Mildred! Yes, it's a fine old place, without doubt Well, that is where I was born. I don't remember my mother. I wish I did. She died when Joseph was born, he is just four years younger than I am. Our youth was passed there—at the Manor, of course, and we had the usual small college education not extending to a university career that gentleman's sons have in England, you know. I didn't make many friends at school, and where we lived, there was no one to visit, and we had very few relations. It is quite unusual I believe for two boys to grow up as we did, in comparative isolation. My father was a kind of Dombey—you know Dombey, Mildred—wrapped up in his old place and the associations of his youth and in his family pride. The Foxleys are better born I believe than half of the aristocracy; we go back to the Conquest on my father's side—a thing which he never permits himself to forget for an instant. Well, Milly, it was a dull life for two lively, affectionate lads like Joseph and me, wasn't it, and had it not been for all this, child, nature, you know, and the trees and the streams and the out-door sports I love so well, I could never have got on at all. Then when I was nineteen—just your age, love—came a change. I, being the elder and heir to the estate was sent off to town—I mean, London, my dear—and the Continent, with a tutor. Joseph—well, I believe I have never fully understood what became of Joseph during the four years I was away, but I suppose he amused himself. He has a knack of doing that I never had, except when I am in the country. Well, this tutor wasn't a bad sort of a fellow and at first we got on splendidly, living in town in chambers, going to the plays and the opera, and dining all over, just wherever I liked or he knew, and excursions oat of London, you know—oh! jolly enough for a little while! Then we went across to Paris—”

“Yes, dearest Dacre?”

Mr. Foxley stopped a moment to lift his wife's face closer to his own. He kissed it—a long long kiss that entranced them both to the degree of forgetting the story.

“If you would rather not go on—” said Mildred.

“Oh! I must now. Well, we did Paris, and then the other capitals and Nice—Nice was just then coming into vogue, and ran down into Italy—I remember I liked Genoa so much—and then we came back to Paris, for Harfleur—that was the tutor's name, and it doesn't sound like a real one, does it—preferred Paris to any other European town and of course so did I. About this time, his true character began to show itself. He went out frequently without me, smoked quite freely, would order in wine and get me to drink with him, and was very much given to calling me fresh, green, and all that you know. I began to think he was right. I was past twenty-one, and I had never even had a glimpse into the inside of life. Women, now and all that kind of thing—I was positively ignorant of—but to be sure, one quickly learns in Paris.”