Amaryllis at the Fair Part 10

Docile to the last degree with him, Amaryllis tried her utmost to read well, and she succeeded, so far as the choking smoke would let her. By grunting between his continuous fits of coughing the old man signified his approval.

Amaryllis would have been respectful to any of the aged, but she had a motive here; she wanted to please him for her father's sake. For many years there had been an increasing estrangement between the younger and the elder Iden; an estrangement which no one could have explained, for it could hardly be due to money matters if Grandfather Iden was really so rich. The son was his father's tenant--the farm belonged to Grandfather Iden--and perhaps the rent was not paid regularly. Still that could not have much mattered--a mere trifle to a man of old Iden's wealth. There was something behind, no one knew what; possibly they scarcely knew themselves, for it is a fact that people frequently fall into a quarrel without remembering the beginning.

Amaryllis was very anxious to please the old man for her father's sake; her dear father, whom she loved so much. Tradesmen were for ever worrying him for petty sums of money; it made her furious with indignation to see and hear it.

So she read her very best, and swallowed the choking smoke patiently.

Among the yellow pages, pressed flat, and still as fresh as if gathered yesterday, Amaryllis found bright petals and coloured autumn leaves. For it was one of the old man's ways to carry home such of these that pleased him and to place them in his books. This he had done for half a century, and many of the flower petals and leaves in the grey old works of bygone authors had been there a generation. It is wonderful how long they will endure left undisturbed and pressed in this way; the paper they used in old books seems to have been softer, without the hard surface of our present paper, more like blotting paper, and so keeps them better. Before the repulsion between father and son became so marked, Amaryllis had often been with her grandfather in the garden and round the meadows at Coombe Oaks, and seen him gather the yellow tulips, the broad-petalled roses, and in autumn the bright scarlet bramble leaves. The brown leaves of the Spanish chestnut, too, pleased him; anything with richness of colour. The old and grey, and withered man gathered the brightest of petals for his old and grey, and forgotten books.

Now the sight of these leaves and petals between the yellow pages softened her heart towards him; he was a tyrant, but he was very, very old, they were like flowers on a living tomb.

In a little while Grandfather Iden got up, and going to a drawer in one of the bookcases, took from it some sc.r.a.ps of memoranda; he thrust these between her face and the book, and told her to read them instead.

"These are your writing."

"Go on," said the old man, smiling, grunting, and coughing, all at once.

"In 1840," read Amaryllis, "there were only two houses in Black Jack Street." "Only _two_ houses!" she interposed, artfully.

"Two," said the grandfather.

"One in 1802," went on Amaryllis, "while in 1775 the site was covered with furze." "How it has changed!" she said. He nodded, and coughed, and smiled; his great grey hat rocked on his head and seemed about to extinguish him.

"There's a note at the bottom in pencil, grandpa. It says, 'A hundred voters in this street, 1884.'"

"Ah!" said the old man, an ah! so deep it fetched his very heart up in coughing. When he finished, Amaryllis read on--

"In 1802 there were only ten voters in the town."

"Ah!" His excitement caused such violent coughing Amaryllis became alarmed, but it did him no harm. The more he coughed and choked the livelier he seemed. The thought of politics roused him like a trumpet--it went straight to his ancient heart.

"Read that again," he said. "How many voters now?"

"A hundred voters in this street, 1884."

"We've got them all"--coughing--"all in my lord's houses, everyone; vote Conservative, one and all. What is it?" as some one knocked. Dinner was ready, to Amaryllis's relief.

"Perhaps you would like to dine with me?" asked the grandfather, shuffling up his papers. "There--there," as she hesitated, "you would like to dine with young people, of course--of course."

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CHAPTER XII.

OLD Grandfather Iden always dined alone in the parlour, with his housekeeper to wait on him; they were just bringing in his food. The family and visitors had their meals in a separate and much more comfortable apartment in another part of the house, which was large.

Sometimes, as a great favour and special mark of approval, the old Pacha would invite you to eat with him.

Amaryllis, though anxious to please him, hesitated, not only because of the smoke, but because she knew he always had pork for dinner.

The rich juices of roast pork sustained his dry and withered frame--it was a sort of Burgundy of flesh to him. As the good wine of Burgundy fills the blood with iron and strengthens the body, so the rich juice of the pork seemed to supply the oil necessary to keep the sinews supple and to prevent the cartilages from stiffening.

The scientific people say that it is the ossification of the cartilages--the stiffening of the firmer tissues--that in time interferes with the processes of life. The hinges rust, as if your tricycle had been left out in the rain for a week--and the delicate watchwork of the human frame will not run.

If suppleness could only be maintained there is no reason why it should not continue to work for a much longer period, for a hundred and fifty, two hundred years--as long as you fancy. But nothing has yet been devised to keep up the suppleness.

Grandfather Iden found the elixir of life in roast pork. The jokers of Woolhorton--there are always jokers, very clever they think themselves--considered the reason it suited him so well was because of the pig-like obstinacy of his disposition.

Anything more contrary to common sense than for an old man of ninety to feed on pork it would be hard to discover--so his friends said.

"Pork," said the physician, had down from London to see him on one occasion, "pork is the first on the list of indigestible articles of food. It takes from six to eight hours for the gastric apparatus to reduce its fibres. The stomach becomes overloaded--acidity is the result; nightmares, pains, and innumerable ills are the consequence. The very worst thing Mr. Iden could eat."

"Hum," growled the family doctor, a native of Woolhorton, when he heard of this. "Hum!" low in his throat, like an irate bulldog. If in the least excited, like most other country folk, he used the provincial p.r.o.nunciation. "Hum! A' have lived twenty years on pork. Let'n yet it!"

Grandfather Iden intended to eat it, and did eat it six days out of seven, not, of course, roast pork every dinner; sometimes boiled pork; sometimes he baked it himself in the great oven. Now and then he varied it with pig-meat--good old country meat, let me tell you, pig-meat--such as spare-rib, griskin, blade-bone, and that mysterious morsel, the "mouse." The chine he always sent over for Iden junior, who was a chine eater--a true Homeric diner--and to make it even, Iden junior sent in the best apples for sauce from his favourite russet trees. It was about the only amenity that survived between father and son.

The pig-meat used to be delicious in the old house at home, before we all went astray along the different paths of life; fresh from the pigs fed and killed on the premises, nutty, and juicy to the palate. Much of it is best done on a gridiron--here's heresy! A gridiron is flat blasphemy to the modern school of scientific cookery. Scientific fiddlestick! Nothing like a gridiron to set your lips watering.

But the "mouse,"--what was the "mouse?" The London butchers can't tell me. It was a t.i.tbit. I suppose it still exists in pigs; but London folk are so ignorant.

Grandfather Iden ate pig in every shape and form, that is, he mumbled the juice out of it, and never complained of indigestion.

He was up at five o'clock every morning of his life, pottering about the great oven with his baker's man. In summer if it was fine he went out at six for a walk in the Pines--the promenade of Woolhorton.

"If you wants to get well," old Dr. Butler used to say, "you go for a walk in the marning afore the aair have been braathed auver."

Before the air has been breathed over--inspired and re-inspired by human crowds, while it retains the sweetness of the morning, like water fresh from the spring; that was when it possessed its value, according to bluff, gruff, rule-of-thumb old Butler. Depend upon it, there is something in his dictum, too.

Amaryllis hesitated at the thought of the pork, for he often had it underdone, so the old gentleman dismissed her in his most gracious manner to dine with the rest.

She went down the corridor and took the seat placed for her. There was a posy of primroses beside her napkin--posies of primroses all round the table.

This raging old Tory of ninety years would give a shilling for the earliest primrose the boys could find for him in the woods. Some one got him a peac.o.c.k's feather which had fallen from Beaconsfield's favourites--a real Beaconsfield peac.o.c.k-feather--which he had set in the centre of a splendid screen of feathers that cost him twenty guineas.

The screen was upstairs in the great drawing-room near a bow window which overlooked the fair.

People, you see, took pains to get him feathers and anything he fancied, on account of the twenty thousand spade guineas in the iron box under the bed.

His daughters, elderly, uninteresting married folk, begged him not to keep a peac.o.c.k's feather in the house--it would certainly bring misfortune. The superst.i.tion was so firmly rooted in their minds that they actually argued with him--_argued_ with Grandfather Iden!--pointing out to him the fearful risk he was running. He puffed and coughed, and grew red in the face--the great grey hat shook and tottered with anger; not for all the Powers of Darkness would he have given up that feather.

The chairs round the large table were arranged in accordance with the age of the occupants. There were twenty-one grandchildren, and a number of aunts, uncles, and so on; a vague crowd that does not concern us. The eldest sat at the head of the table, the next in age followed, and so all round the dishes. This arrangement placed Amaryllis rather low down--a long way from the top and fountain of honour--and highly displeased her. She despised and disliked the whole vague crowd of her relations, yet being there, she felt that she ought to have had a position above them all. Her father--Iden, junior--was old Iden's only son and natural heir; therefore her father's chair ought to have been at the top of the table, and hers ought to have been next to his.

Instead of which, as her father was not the eldest, his seat was some distance from the top, and hers again, was a long way from his.