Page:Comin' Thro' the Rye (1898).djvu/83

Rh three whole days? For once in my life I enjoy the honour of lying in my bed while the others are all scurrying down to prayers. I eat my breakfast in a slatternly way with a book before me, I dawdle through the morning reading Shakespeare, for oh, blessed oversight! papa forgot to set me any tasks. I pass my afternoon in imaginary conversation with two blackbirds and a linnet, enjoying with a certain complacency the knowledge that all the others, Jack included, are expiating their sins in the burning sun at the governor's heels, over shingle, rock, and sand. But by the time night falls I am heartily sick of my own society. I am longing to be in the midst of the chaff and noise and bustle of my brothers and sisters. If papa wants a recipe for making me ripe for Bedlam, he has only to shut me up alone for a fortnight. Somehow the days drag away and I am released, free to go down the stairs or up as my spirit wills. Below I find things very crooked indeed; he is in a state of chronic ill-temper. Alice looks alarmed; she is red one moment, pale the next; and the very day of my re-admittance to the family bosom disaster marks us for its own. We are awaiting the announcement of dinner, and the governor is looking out of the window, prepared to quarrel with anything, from the thrush singing yonder, to the baker's boy with the bread, when a smart dog-cart drives slowly past, in which are seated two graceless, handsome, wide-awake Oxonians, who stare deliberately in at every window in search of Alice's blooming face. Papa turns round, and I think he is black, he can put two and two together as well as any other man, and he knows.

"Go to your room, miss," he says to Alice. "So this is the care you take of my daughters?" he asks Amberley.

Poor Alice, poorer Amberley, poorest mother: We have one of our extra, double-distilled, most virulent rows. It is not worth writing down: no one would believe it if I did. Let it suffice that out of all the windy talk and abuse, one abiding resolve