Clever Woman of the Family eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 674 pages of information about Clever Woman of the Family.

Clever Woman of the Family eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 674 pages of information about Clever Woman of the Family.

“Poor Ailie,” said Ermine, “she never will receive kindness without having that unlucky story out!  It is just one of the things that get so cruelly exaggerated by consequences.  It was one moment’s petulance that might have caused a fright and been forgotten ever after, but for those chemicals.  Ah!  I see, she said nothing about them, because they were Edward’s.  They were some parcels for his experiments, gun cotton and the like, which were lying in the window till he had time to take them upstairs.  We had all been so long threatened with being blown up by his experiments that we had grown callous and careless, and it served us right!” she added, stroking the child’s face as it looked at her, earnest to glean fresh fragments of the terrible half-known tale of the past.  “Yes, Rosie, when you go and keep house for papa on the top of the Oural Mountains, or wherever it may be, you are to remember that if Aunt Ermine had not been in a foolish, inattentive mood, and had taken his dangerous goods out of the way, she might have been trotting to church now like other people.  But poor Ailie has always helped herself to the whole blame, and if every childish fit of temper were the root of such qualities, what a world we should have here!”

“Ah! no wonder she is devoted to you.”

“The child was not fifteen, had never known cross or care, but from that moment she never was out of my room if it was possible to be in; and when nurse after nurse was fairly worn out, because I could not help being so distressing, there was always that poor child, always handy and helpful, growing to be the chief dependence, and looking so piteously imploring whatever was tried, that it really helped me to go through with it.  Poor Ailie,” she added with an odd turn of playfulness, “I always fancied those frowns of anxiety made her eyebrows grow together.  And ever since we came here, we know how she has worked away for her old cinder and her small Rosebud, don’t we?” she added, playfully squeezing the child’s cheeks up into a more budding look, hiding deeper and more overcoming feelings by the sportive action.  And as her sister came back, she looked up and shook her head at her, saying,—­

“You gossiping Ailie, to go ripping up old grievances.  I am going to ask Miss Curtis not to let the story go any farther, now you have relieved your mind of it.”

“I did tell Lady Temple,” said Alison; “I never think it right not to let people know what sort of person they have to teach their children.”

And Grace, on feeling her way, discovered that Lady Temple had been told the bare fact in Miss Williams’s reserved and business-like manner, but with nothing of the affair that had led to it.  She merely looked on it in the manner fully expressed by—­“Ah, poor thing; how sad for her!” as a shocking secret, never to be talked of or thought about.  And that voluntary detailed relation from Alison could only be regarded as drawn forth by Grace’s

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Clever Woman of the Family from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.