Читать книгу Wickford Point онлайн

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I must have accepted Wickford Point in the same way that philosophers accept the universe, and I adjusted myself without a thought to the local peculiarities, including those of my great-aunt Sarah. My cousin Sue informed me later that Aunt Sarah was not what she used to be even before I was born; and it may have been, when Aunt Sarah and I became acquainted, that her mind was failing, but I was in no position to judge.

When it came to more practical matters I was obviously incapable of understanding them, nor should I have cared to analyze such ties as family relationships. Those are facts which dawn upon one gradually, and I suppose a great many of us never get them straight. For instance it was a long while before I came to realize that a gentleman named Samuel Seabrooke, who was my great-aunt Sarah's father, and whom I looked upon as her special property, was my own great-grandfather. It was later still before I got it clearly in my mind that my own grandmother was Samuel Seabrooke's daughter and just as much Aunt Sarah's sister as my great-aunt Georgianna, who died before I was born. Later still I discovered almost by accident that Aunt Sarah was a spinster, and that Cousin Clothilde and Cousin Sue were my Aunt Georgianna's surviving daughters and my father's first cousins. I never really understood how the Brills entered into our common picture until I was fourteen. Then I knew, only by fitting facts together, that John Brill, who in later years became the poet and the Wickford Sage, used to row frequently across the river to pay his respects to Samuel Seabrooke's three daughters, but that nothing had ever happened until John Brill's son Hugh, following his example, rowed across the same river a generation later and met my cousin Clothilde; and that was the beginning of all the Brills. When Hugh Brill died, Cousin Clothilde married Archie Wright and naturally she took his name, but as I said before it always seemed to me that she was still a Brill.