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Updated: June 19, 2025
Tales of a Wayside Inn. Longfellow During the interview Erica had braced herself up to endure, but when it was over her strength all at once evaporated. She dragged herself upstairs somehow, and had just reached her room, when Mrs. Fane-Smith met her. She was preoccupied with her own anxieties, or Erica's exhaustion could not have escaped her notice.
Mrs. Fane-Smith went with her into her bedroom to see that she had all she wanted. Though the September evening was mild, a fire blazed in the grate, much to Erica's astonishment. Not on the most freezing of winter nights had she ever enjoyed such a luxury. Her aunt explained that the room looked north, and, besides, she thought a fire was cheerful and home-like.
"I am sorry you have asked me," said Mrs. Fane-Smith, "but, perhaps, since you are no longer a child, you had better know. It is a sad story, however, Rose, and I should not have chosen to tell it to you today of all days." "But I want to hear, mamma," said Rose, decidedly. "Please begin. Who is this Mr. Raeburn?" "He is my brother," said Mrs. Fane-Smith, with a little quiver in her voice.
Her likes and dislikes were always characterized by Highland intensity, and something in her aunt's husband seemed to rub her the wrong way. Mr. Fane-Smith was a retired Indian judge, a man much respected in the religious world, and in his way a really good man; but undoubtedly his sympathies were narrow and his creed hard.
Fane-Smith came over from Greyshot, horrified to hear that the man who he had once treated with scant justice and actual discourtesy was lying on his death bed, a victim to religious fanaticism. Spite of his very hard words to her, Erica had always respected Mr. Fane-Smith, and she was glad that he had come at the last.
Fane-Smith, "that under such strange circumstances you would have seen how necessary it was to forsake all. Think of St. Matthew, for instance; he rose up at once, forsook all, and followed Him." "Yes," said Erica. "And what was the very first thing he was impelled to do by way of 'following? Why, to make a great feast and have in all his old friends, all the despised publicans."
Cuthbert," she said laughingly. "I know you are artistic, and so I intend you to take down that charming niece of Mrs. Fane-Smith's. I assure you she is like a Burne-Jones angel!" Mr. Cuthbert smiled a quietly superior smile, and coolly surveyed Erica as she came in. Dinner was announced almost immediately, and it was not until Mrs. Fane-Smith had been taken down that Lady Caroline brought Mr.
Erica turned the heel of her sock and responded as well as she could, her sensitiveness recoiling almost as much from the labored and therefore oppressive kindness, as from the irritating and narrow censure which Mr. Fane-Smith dealt out to the world. Family prayers followed.
If her mother erred by thinking too much of what people said, perhaps Rose erred in exactly the opposite way; at any rate, she managed to call down upon her silly but innocent little head an immense amount of blame from the mothers and elderly ladies. "A glorious moonlight night," said Captain Golightly. "What do you say, Miss Fane-Smith? Shall we take a turn in the garden?
He could understand the perplexities of her present position, suddenly confronted with the world of wealth and fashion and conventional religion, and fresh from a circle where, whatever the errors held and promulgated, the life was so desperately earnest, often so nobly self-denying. He knew that Mr. Fane-Smith, good man as he was, must have been about the severest of trials to a new-born faith.
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