CHAPTER II

TREATS OF AN ECCENTRIC FAMILY

When the last caller had gone Laura slid back the folding doors which opened into the library and spoke to a little old gentleman, with a very bald head, who sat in a big armchair holding a flute in his wrinkled and trembling hand.  He had a simple, moonlike face, to which his baldness lent a deceptive appearance of intellect, and his expression was of such bland and smiling goodness that it was impossible to resent the tedious garrulity of his conversation.  In the midst of his shrivelled countenance his eyes looked like little round blue buttons which had been set there in order to keep his features from entirely slipping away.  He was the oldest member of the Wilde family, and he had lived in the house in Gramercy Park since it was built by his father some sixty years or more ago.

“Tired waiting, Uncle Percival?” asked Laura, raising her voice a little that it might penetrate his deafened hearing.

As he turned upon her his smile of perfect patience the old gentleman nodded his head quickly several times in succession.  “I waited to play until after the people went,” he responded in a voice that sounded like a cracked silver bell.  “Your Aunt Angela has a headache, so she couldn’t stand the noise.  I went out to get her some flowers and offered to sit with her, but this is one of her bad days, poor girl.”  He fell silent for a minute and then added, wistfully, “I’m wondering if you would like to hear ‘Ye Banks and Braes o’ Bonnie Doon’?  It used to be your mother’s favourite air.”

Though he was an inoffensively amiable and eagerly obliging old man, by some ironic contradiction of his intentions his life had become a series of blunders through which he endeavoured to add his share to the general happiness.  His soul was overflowing with humanity, and he spent sleepless nights evolving innocent pleasures for those about him, but his excess of goodness invariably resulted in producing petty annoyances if not serious inconveniences.  So his virtues had come to be regarded with timidity, and there was an ever present anxiety in the air as to what Uncle Percival was “doing” in his mind.  The fear of inopportune benefits was in its way as oppressive as the dread of unmerited misfortune.

Laura shook her head impatiently as she threw herself into a chair on the other side of the tall bronze lamp upon the writing table.  On the stem of an eccentric family tree she was felt to be the perfect flower of artistic impulses, and her enclosed life in the sombre old house had not succeeded in cultivating in her the slightest resemblance to an artificial variety.  She was obviously, inevitably, impulsively the original product, and Uncle Percival never realised this more hopelessly than in that unresponsive headshake of dismissal.  Laura could be kind, he knew, but she was kind, as she was a poet, when the mood prompted.