A Modern Chronicle — Complete - Winston Churchill

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the marrying kind,” she added, with the superior knowledge of eighteen.

      “I'm waiting for you, Honora,” he announced.

      “You know I love you, Peter,”—so she tempered her reply, for Honora's feelings were tender. What man, even Peter, would not have married her if he could? Of course he was in earnest, despite his bantering tone, “but I never could—marry you.”

      “Not even if I were to offer you a house like Mr. Dwyer's?” he said. A remark which betrayed—although not to her—his knowledge of certain earthly strains in his goddess.

      The colours faded from the water, and it blackened.

      As they walked on side by side in the twilight, a consciousness of repressed masculine force, of reserve power, which she had never before felt about Peter Erwin, invaded her; and she was seized with a strange uneasiness. Ridiculous was the thought (which she lost no time in rejecting) that pointed out the true road to happiness in marrying such a man as he. In the gathering darkness she slipped her hand through his arm.

      “I wish I could marry you, Peter,” she said.

      He was fain to take what comfort he could from this expression of good-will. If he was not the Prince Charming of her dreams, she would have liked him to be. A little reflection on his part ought to have shown him the absurdity of the Prince Charming having been there all the time, and in ready-made clothes. And he, too, may have had dreams. We are not concerned with them.

      … … … … … … … … . …

      If we listen to the still, small voice of realism, intense longing is always followed by disappointment. Nothing should have happened that summer, and Providence should not have come disguised as the postman. It was a sultry day in early September-which is to say that it was comparatively cool—a blue day, with occasional great drops of rain spattering on the brick walk. And Honora was reclining on the hall sofa, reading about Mr. Ibbetson and his duchess, when she perceived the postman's grey uniform and smiling face on the far side of the screen door. He greeted her cordially, and gave her a single letter for Aunt Mary, and she carried it unsuspectingly upstairs.

      “It's from Cousin Eleanor,” Honora volunteered.

      Aunt Mary laid down her sewing, smoothed the ruffles of her sacque, adjusted her spectacles, opened the envelope, and began to read. Presently the letter fell to her lap, and she wiped her glasses and glanced at Honora, who was deep in her book once more. And in Honora's brain, as she read, was ringing the refrain of the prisoner:

      “Orleans, Beaugency!

       Notre Dame de Clery!

       Vendome! Vendome!

       Quel chagrin, quel ennui

       De compter toute la nuit

       Les heures, les heures!”.

      The verse appealed to Honora strangely; just as it had appealed to Ibbetson. Was she not, too, a prisoner. And how often, during the summer days and nights, had she listened to the chimes of the Pilgrim Church near by?

      “One, two, three, four!

       One, two, three, four!”

      After Uncle Tom had watered his flowers that evening, Aunt Mary followed him upstairs and locked the door of their room behind her. Silently she put the letter in his hand. Here is one paragraph of it:

      “I have never asked to take the child from you in the summer,

       because she has always been in perfect health, and I know how lonely

       you would have been without her, my dear Mary. But it seems to me

       that a winter at Sutcliffe, with my girls, would do her a world of

       good just now. I need not point out to you that Honora is, to say

       the least, remarkably good looking, and that she has developed very

       rapidly. And she has, in spite of the strict training you have

       given her, certain ideas and ambitions which seem to me, I am sorry

       to say, more or less prevalent among young American women these

       days. You know it is only because I love her that I am so frank.

       Miss Turner's influence will, in my opinion, do much to counteract

       these tendencies.”

      Uncle Tom folded the letter, and handed it back to his wife.

      “I feel that we ought not to refuse, Tom. And I am afraid Eleanor is right.”

      “Well, Mary, we've had her for seventeen years. We ought to be willing to spare her for—how many months?”

      “Nine,” said Aunt Mary, promptly. She had counted them. “And Eleanor says she will be home for two weeks at Christmas. Seventeen years! It seems only yesterday when we brought her home, Tom. It was just about this time of day, and she was asleep in your arms, and Bridget opened the door for us.” Aunt Mary looked out of the window. “And do you remember how she used to play under the maple there, with her dolls?”

      Uncle Tom produced a very large handkerchief, and blew his nose.

      “There, there, Mary,” he said, “nine months, and two weeks out at Christmas. Nine months in eighteen years.”

      “I suppose we ought to be very thankful,” said Aunt Mary. “But, Tom, the time is coming soon—”

      “Tut tut,” exclaimed Uncle Tom. He turned, and his eyes beheld a work of art. Nothing less than a porcelain plate, hung in brackets on the wall, decorated by Honora at the age of ten with wild roses, and presented with much ceremony on an anniversary morning. He pretended not to notice it, but Aunt Mary's eyes were too quick. She seized a photograph on her bureau, a photograph of Honora in a little white frock with a red sash.

      “It was the year that was taken, Tom.”

      He nodded. The scene at the breakfast table came back to him, and the sight of Catherine standing respectfully in the hall, and of Honora, in the red sash, making the courtesy the old woman had taught her.

      Honora recalled afterwards that Uncle Tom joked even more than usual that evening at dinner. But it was Aunt Mary who asked her, at length, how she would like to go to boarding-school. Such was the matter-of-fact manner in which the portentous news was announced.

      “To boarding-school, Aunt Mary?”

      Her aunt poured out her uncle's after-dinner coffee.

      “I've spilled some, my dear. Get another saucer for your uncle.”

      Honora went mechanically to the china closet, her heart thumping. She did not stop to reflect that it was the rarest of occurrences for Aunt Mary to spill the coffee.

      “Your Cousin Eleanor has invited you to go this winter with Edith and Mary to Sutcliffe.”

      Sutcliffe! No need to tell Honora what Sutcliffe was—her cousins had talked of little else during the past winter; and shown, if the truth be told, just a little commiseration for Honora. Sutcliffe was not only a famous girls' school, Sutcliffe was the world—that world which, since her earliest remembrances, she had been longing to see and know. In a desperate attempt to realize what had happened to her, she found herself staring hard at the open china closet, at Aunt Mary's best gold dinner set resting on the pink lace paper that had been changed only last week. That dinner set, somehow, was always an augury of festival—when, on the rare occasions Aunt Mary entertained, the little dining room was transformed by it and the Leffingwell silver into a glorified and altogether unrecognizable state, in which any miracle seemed possible.

      Honora pushed back her chair.

      Her lips were parted.

      “Oh, Aunt Mary, is it really true that I am going?” she said.

      “Why,” said Uncle Tom, “what zeal for learning!”

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