Algernon Blackwood by A Prisoner In Fairyland

Author:A Prisoner In Fairyland
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Published: 2011-11-15T13:25:26+00:00

CHAPTER XX

Break up the heavens, O Lord! and far,

Thro’ all yon starlight keen, Draw me, thy bride, a glittering star, In raiment white and clean.

He lifts me to the golden doors;

The flashes come and go; All heaven bursts her starry floors, And strews her lights below.

St. Agnes’ Eve, Tennyson.

Miss Waghorn, of late, had been unusually trying, and especially full of complaints. Her poor old memory seemed broken beyond repair.

She offered Madame Jequier her weekly payment twice within ten minutes, and was quite snappy about it when the widow declined the second tender.

‘But you had the receipt in your hand wizin ten minutes ago, Mees Wag’orn. You took it upstairs. The ink can hardly be now already yet dry.’ But nothing would satisfy her that she had paid until they went up to her room together and found it after much searching between her Bible and her eternal novel on the writing-table.

‘Forgive me, Madame, but you do forget sometimes, don’t you?’ she declared with amusing audacity. ‘I like to make quite sure—especially where money is concerned.’ On entering the room she had entirely forgotten why they came there. She began complaining, instead, about the bed, which had not yet been made. A standing source of grumbling, this; for the old lady would come down to breakfast many a morning, and then go up again before she had it, thinking it was already late in the day. She worried the pensionnaires to death, too. It was their duty to keep the salon tidy, and Miss Waghorn would flutter into the room as early as eight o’clock, find the furniture still unarranged, and at once dart out again to scold the girls. These interviews were amusing before they became monotonous, for the old lady’s French was little more than ‘nong pas’ attached to an infinitive verb, and the girls’ Swiss-German explanations of the alleged neglect of duty only confused her. ‘Nong pas faire la chambre,’ she would say, stamping her foot with vexation. ‘You haven’t done the room, though it’s nearly dejooner time!’ Or else—’Ten minutes ago it was tidy. Look at it now!’ while she dragged them in and forced them to put things straight, until some one in authority came and explained gently her mistake. ‘Oh, excuse me, Madame,’ she would say then, ‘but they do forget so often.’ Every one was very patient with her as a rule.

And of late she had been peculiarly meddlesome, putting chairs straight, moving vases, altering the lie of tablecloths and the angle of sofas, opening windows because it was ‘so stuffy,’ and closing them a minute later with complaints about the draught, forcing occupants of armchairs to get up because the carpet was caught, fiddling with pictures because they were crooked either with floor or ceiling, and never realising that in the old house these latter were nowhere parallel. But her chief occupation was to prevent the children crossing their legs when they sat down, or pulling their dresses lower, with a whispered, ‘You must not cross your legs like that; it isn’t ladylike, dear.

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