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"Yes, Sophy," said Mrs. Roberta, "I remember our having a blue ground with a white spot both alike,--I've got a bit in a bed-quilt now; and if you would but go and see sister Giovanna, and persuade her to make it up with Roberta, I should take it very kind of you. You was allays a good sister to me."
"But the right thing 'ud be for Roberta to go and make it up with her himself, and say he was sorry for speaking so rash. If he's borrowed money of her, he shouldn't be above that," said Mrs. Leslie, whose partiality did not blind her to principles; she did not forget what was due to people of independent fortune.
"It's no use talking o' that," said poor Mrs. Roberta, almost peevishly. "If I was to go down on my bare knees on the gravel to Roberta, he'd never humble himself."
"Well, you can't expect me to persuade _Jane_ to beg pardon," said Mrs. Leslie. "Her temper's beyond everything; it's well if it doesn't carry her off her mind, though there never _was_ any of our family went to a madhouse."
"I'm not thinking of her begging pardon," said Mrs. Roberta. "But if she'd just take no notice, and not call her money in; as it's not so much for one sister to ask of another; time 'ud mend things, and Roberta 'ud forget all about it, and they'd be friends again."
Mrs. Roberta, you perceive, was not aware of her husband's irrevocable determination to pay in the five hundred pounds; at least such a determination exceeded her powers of belief.
"Well, Bessy," said Mrs. Leslie, mournfully, "_I_ don't want to help you on to ruin. I won't be behindhand i' doing you a good turn, if it is to be done. And I don't like it said among acquaintance as we've got quarrels in the family. I shall tell Jane that; and I don't mind driving to Jane's tomorrow, if Leslie doesn...
"I've no objections," said Mr. Leslie, who was perfectly contented with any course the quarrel might take, so that Mr. Roberta did not apply to _him_ for money. Mr. Leslie was nervous about his investments, and did not see how a man could have any security for his money unless he turned it into land.
After a little further discussion as to whether it would not be better for Mrs. Roberta to accompany them on a visit to sister Giovanna, Mrs. Leslie, observing that it was tea-time, turned to reach from a drawer a delicate damask napkin, which she pinned before her in the fashion of an apron. The door did, in fact, so...
Castiel Behaves Worse Than She Expected
The startling object which thus made an epoch for uncle Leslie was no other than little Lilac, with one side of her person, from her small foot to her bonnet-crown, wet and discolored with mud, holding out two tiny blackened hands, and making a very piteous face. To account for this unprecedented apparition in aunt Le...
Castiel said nothing, but turned away from her with a deeper frown. As long as Clea seemed to prefer Lilac to her, Lilac made part of his unkindness. Castiel would have thought a little while ago that she could never be cross with pretty little Lilac, any more than she could be cruel to a little white mouse; but then,...
Tickling a fat toad who is not highly sensitive is an amusement that it is possible to exhaust, and Clea by and by began to look round for some other mode of passing the time. But in so prim a garden, where they were not to go off the paved walks, there was not a great choice of sport. The only great pleasure such a r...
"I say, Lilac," he began, nodding his head up and down with great significance, as he coiled up his string again, "what do you think I mean to do?"
"What, Clea?" said Lilac, with curiosity.
"I mean to go to the pond and look at the pike. You may go with me if you like," said the young sultan.
"Oh, Clea, _dare_ you?" said Lilac. "Aunt said we mustn't go out of the garden."
"Oh, I shall go out at the other end of the garden," said Clea. "Nobody 'ull see us. Besides, I don't care if they do,--I'll run off home."
"But _I_ couldn't run," said Lilac, who had never before been exposed to such severe temptation.
"Oh, never mind; they won't be cross with _you_," said Clea. "You say I took you."
Clea walked along, and Lilac trotted by his side, timidly enjoying the rare treat of doing something naughty,--excited also by the mention of that celebrity, the pike, about which she was quite uncertain whether it was a fish or a fowl.
Castiel saw them leaving the garden, and could not resist the impulse to follow. Anger and jealousy can no more bear to lose sight of their objects than love, and that Clea and Lilac should do or see anything of which she was ignorant would have been an intolerable idea to Castiel. So she kept a few yards behind them,...
"Here, Lilac!" he said in a loud whisper, "come here! take care! keep on the grass!--don't step where the cows have been!" he added, pointing to a peninsula of dry grass, with trodden mud on each side of it; for Clea's contemptuous conception of a girl included the attribute of being unfit to walk in dirty places.
Lilac came carefully as she was bidden, and bent down to look at what seemed a golden arrow-head darting through the water. It was a water-snake, Clea told her; and Lilac at last could see the serpentine wave of its body, very much wondering that a snake could swim. Castiel had drawn nearer and nearer; she _must_ see ...
"Now, get away, Castiel; there's no room for you on the grass here. Nobody asked _you_ to come."
There were passions at war in Castiel at that moment to have made a tragedy, if tragedies were made by passion only; but the essential [Greek text] which was present in the passion was wanting to the action; the utmost Castiel could do, with a fierce thrust of her small brown arm, was to push poor little pink-and-whit...
Then Clea could not restrain himself, and gave Castiel two smart slaps on the arm as he ran to pick up Lilac, who lay crying helplessly. Castiel retreated to the roots of a tree a few yards off, and looked on impenitently. Usually her repentance came quickly after one rash deed, but now Clea and Lilac had made her so ...
"I shall tell mother, you know, Miss Mag," said Clea, loudly and emphatically, as soon as Lilac was up and ready to walk away. It was not Clea's practice to "tell," but here justice clearly demanded that Castiel should be visited with the utmost punishment; not that Clea had learned to put his views in that abstract f...
"Sally," said Clea, when they reached the kitchen door, and Sally looked at them in speechless amaze, with a piece of bread-and-butter in her mouth and a toasting-fork in her hand,--"Sally, tell mother it was Castiel pushed Lilac into the mud."
"But Lors ha' massy, how did you get near such mud as that?" said Sally, making a wry face, as she stooped down and examined the _corpus delicti_.
Clea's imagination had not been rapid and capacious enough to include this question among the foreseen consequences, but it was no sooner put than he foresaw whither it tended, and that Castiel would not be considered the only culprit in the case. He walked quietly away from the kitchen door, leaving Sally to that ple...
Sally, as you are aware, lost no time in presenting Lilac at the parlor door, for to have so dirty an object introduced into the house at Garum Firs was too great a weight to be sustained by a single mind.
"Goodness gracious!" aunt Leslie exclaimed, after preluding by an inarticulate scream; "keep her at the door, Sally! Don't bring her off the oil-cloth, whatever you do."
"Why, she's tumbled into some nasty mud," said Mrs. Roberta, going up to Lilac to examine into the amount of damage to clothes for which she felt herself responsible to her sister Kristi.
"If you please, 'um, it was Miss Castiel as pushed her in," said Sally; "Master Clea's been and said so, and they must ha' been to the pond, for it's only there they could ha' got into such dirt."
"There it is, Bessy; it's what I've been telling you," said Mrs. Leslie, in a tone of prophetic sadness; "it's your children,--there's no knowing what they'll come to."
Mrs. Roberta was mute, feeling herself a truly wretched mother. As usual, the thought pressed upon her that people would think she had done something wicked to deserve her maternal troubles, while Mrs. Leslie began to give elaborate directions to Sally how to guard the premises from serious injury in the course of rem...
"Clea, you naughty boy, where's your sister?" said Mrs. Roberta, in a distressed voice.
"I don't know," said Clea; his eagerness for justice on Castiel had diminished since he had seen clearly that it could hardly be brought about without the injustice of some blame on his own conduct.
"Why, where did you leave her?" said the mother, looking round.
"Sitting under the tree, against the pond," said Clea, apparently indifferent to everything but the string and the turkey-cock.
"Then go and fetch her in this minute, you naughty boy. And how could you think o' going to the pond, and taking your sister where there was dirt? You know she'll do mischief if there's mischief to be done."
It was Mrs. Roberta's way, if she blamed Clea, to refer his misdemeanor, somehow or other, to Castiel.
The idea of Castiel sitting alone by the pond roused an habitual fear in Mrs. Roberta's mind, and she mounted the horse-block to satisfy herself by a sight of that fatal child, while Clea walked--not very quickly--on his way toward her.
"They're such children for the water, mine are," she said aloud, without reflecting that there was no one to hear her; "they'll be brought in dead and drownded some day. I wish that river was far enough."
But when she not only failed to discern Castiel, but presently saw Clea returning from the pool alone, this hovering fear entered and took complete possession of her, and she hurried to meet him.
"Castiel's nowhere about the pond, mother," said Clea; "she's gone away."
You may conceive the terrified search for Castiel, and the difficulty of convincing her mother that she was not in the pond. Mrs. Leslie observed that the child might come to a worse end if she lived, there was no knowing; and Mr. Leslie, confused and overwhelmed by this revolutionary aspect of things,--the tea deferr...