United States or Ecuador ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Yes, Mrs. Strathsay lived for nought but the making of great matches for her girls; the grandees of the Provinces to-day sat down at her board and to-morrow were to pay her tribute, scot and lot; four great weddings she meant should one by one light up her hearth and leave it lonely with the ashes there. But of them all she counted on the last, the best, the noblest for Alice, that was I.
'Twas but a brief bit of the great eternities; and then I found my fingers playing I knew not how, and heard the dancers' feet falling to the tune of I knew not what. Strathsay had due regard of decency, forbye she deemed it but a bad lookout for her girls, if the one of them danced on her good-man's grave.
He faced about and slid through us all, ere Angus could lay hand on him, his eye on Mary Strathsay.
Where had flown the old Strathsay red from my cheek, where that smooth polish of brow, where I, who had aye been the flower of the race, the pride of the name, could not now bide to brook my own glance in the glass. But the worst of it all would be, I thought, not recking the worse to come, when the girls flocked back.
Mrs. Strathsay sat in her broad bower-window, looking down the harbor. A brave great window it was, and I mind me how many a dark summer's night, we two leaned over its edge and watched the soft flow of the River of the Cross, where its shadowy tide came up and lapped the stone foundations of that old house by the water-side, I and Angus.
"I'd not stand in your shoes for much, Alice Strathsay!" she cried, "that's certain. My mother's in a rare passion, and here's Sir Angus home!" "Sir Who?" said Effie puzzled; "it was just Mr. Ingestre two years ago." "Well, it's been Sir Angus a twelvemonth now and more, ever since old Sir Brenton went, and he went with a stroke."
"No use, child," sighed my mother 'twixt her teeth, and not meaning for me to hear. "So would I, Ailie," said Mary Strathsay, quickly. "There's much in fine fibres and soft shades that gives one the womanly idea. You're the best shape among us all, my light lissomeness, and your gowns shall fit it rarely. Nay, Margray, let Alice have the pink." "Be still, Mary Strathsay!" said my mother.
And all those hours for seldom were the moments when, against my will I was compelled to gladness I became more and more alone; for Effie being the soul of the festivities, since Mary Strathsay oftenest stood cold and proudly by, wax-white and like a statue on the wall, and all the world looking on at what they deemed to be no less than Angus's courtship, I saw little of her except I rose on my arm to watch her smiling sleep deep in the night.
"I doubt will Sir Angus bide here," said Margray at length; for though all his boyhood she had called him by every diminutive his name could bear, the title was a sweet morsel in her unaccustomed mouth, and she kept rolling it now under her tongue. "Mrs. Strathsay besought him, but his traps and his man were at the inn.
And I just let the wondering wean slip to the grass, and I threw my arms about her and cried, "Oh, mother, mother, forgive me, and love me just a little!" It was but a breathing; then I remembered the child at my feet, and raised him, and smiled back on Mrs. Strathsay, and went on with a lighter heart to set my chests and drawers straight.
Word Of The Day