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It was only, and her voice faltered a little, 'the associations with Robin Redbreast. We have been so happy there: I shouldn't like strangers to have it. 'Strangers are not going to have it, Colonel Mildmay replied. 'But it is not left to the Harpers. They did not wish it. They have no special liking for that neighbourhood, and it suits them far better to make their headquarters farther south.
And through all the little girl's fun and merriment there ran the consciousness of the trust reposed in her by the Harpers. She was full of intense interest in their family history; it was really quite like a story in a book, she kept saying to herself, and she felt bursting with eagerness to relate it all to Jacinth.
You think my words wander all ways, like the steps of a drunken man. And it is very true I walk your fields like those harpers who on the eve of battles, come to play before the tents. And the soldiers say, as they listen: ''Tis some poor simpletons come playing the tunes we heard long ago in our mountains. I am this harper that roams between the hosts in battle array of hostile armies.
There was disappointment, strong disappointment that her wonderful schemes for bringing the Harpers and their old relative together threatened thus to be nipped in the bud; there was disappointment, too, that she was not to have the pleasure and importance of relating the story 'just like one in a book' to her sister; and yet there was considerable relief, born of her recently aroused misgiving as to how Jacinth would look upon her confidences with Margaret.
In the spring, when the old people get the coughs which give them a few shakes and their lives drop in pieces like the ashes of a burned thread which have kept the threadlike shape until they were stirred, in the hot summer noons, when the strong man comes in from the fields, like the son of the Shunamite, crying, "My head, my head," in the dying autumn days, when youth and maiden lie fever-stricken in many a household, still-faced, dull-eyed, dark-flushed, dry-lipped, low-muttering in their daylight dreams, their fingers moving singly like those of slumbering harpers, in the dead winter, when the white plague of the North has caged its wasted victims, shuddering as they think of the frozen soil which must be quarried like rock to receive them, if their perpetual convalescence should happen to be interfered with by any untoward accident, at every season, the narrow sulky rolled round freighted with unmeasured burdens of joy and woe.
Mrs Mildmay, on the contrary, and, so far as she understood it all, Frances, felt uneasy and perplexed. Mrs Mildmay was sorry for the Harpers to lay themselves open to the slightest appearance of disrespect or unpunctuality, and at the same time she had attacks of fear that Lady Myrtle's letter had hurt and wounded her relatives so deeply that they had decided to ignore it.
And Agatha went back to the drawing-room with her sisters-in-law. Alone! The word she had repudiated rose up like a spirit, everywhere, all over the house. Not a room but what seemed empty, strange. Fast and busily the Miss Harpers talked yet all around was, oh! such silence.
But after he became connected with the editorial staff of Harpers Magazine the contributions he made to his journal were only occasional and what may be called accidental. When 1870 came, forty years of Warner's life had gone by, and nearly twenty years since he had left college.
Nast drew a grotesque cartoon of me, distorting my suggestion for the assembling of 100,000 citizens, which was both offensive and libellous. Being on friendly terms with the Harpers, I made my displeasure so resonant in Franklin Square Nast himself having no personal ill will toward me that a curious and pleasing opportunity which came to pass was taken to make amends.
The one unclouded certainty was that the hatred had grown until even in this land of vendetta its levy of violent deaths had been appalling beyond those of other enmities. Yet, paradoxically enough, the Harpers in the later feud stages had followed a man named Thornton and the Doanes had fought at the behest of a Rowlett.
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