Page:What Will He Do With It? - Routledge - Volume 1.djvu/202

 Tasso, Dante, Metastasio; amongst English authors, Addison, Johnson, Blair (his lectures as well as sermons); elementary works on such sciences as admit female neophytes into their porticos, if not into their penetralia,—botany, chemistry, astronomy. Prim as soldiers on parade stood the books,—not a gap in their ranks,—evidently never now displaced for recreation; well bound, yet faded, dusty; relics of a bygone life. Some of them might perhaps have been prizes at school, or birthday gifts from proud relations. There, too, on the table, near the spirit-case, lay open a once handsome workbox,—no silks now on the skeleton reels; discoloured, but not by use, in its nest of tarnished silk slept the golden thimble. There, too, in the corner, near a music-stand piled high with musical compositions of various schools and graduated complexity from "lessons for beginners" to the most arduous gamut of a German oratorio, slunk pathetically a poor lute-harp, the strings long since broken. There, too, by the window, hung a wire bird-cage, the bird long since dead. In a word, round the woman gazing on Jasper Losely, as he complacently drank his brandy, grouped the forlorn tokens of an early state,—the lost golden age of happy girlish studies, of harmless girlish tastes.

"Basta, eno'," said Mr. Losely, pushing aside the glass which he had twice filled and twice drained, "to business. Let me see the child: I feel up to it now."

A darker shade fell over Arabella Crane's face, as she said, "The child! she is not here! I have disposed of her long ago."

"Eh!--disposed of her! what do you mean?"

"Do you ask as if you feared I had put her out of the world? No! Well, then,—you come to England to see the child? You miss—you love, the child of that—of that—" She paused, checked herself, and added in an altered voice, "of that honest, high-minded gentlewoman whose memory must be so dear to me,—you love that child; very natural, Jasper."

"Love her! a child I have scarcely seen since she was born! do talk common-sense. No. But have I not told you that she ought to be money's worth to me; ay, and she shall be yet, despite that proud man's disdainful insolence."

"That proud man! what, you have ventured to address him—visit him—since your return to England?"

"Of course. That's what brought me over. I imagined the man would rejoice at what I told him, open his pursestrings,