Читать книгу Wickford Point онлайн

55 страница из 119

To my Wickford Nymph, was written in rusty ink on the fly-leaf, from her Shepherd across the Valley.

"Of course," Cousin Clothilde told me once, "Aunt Sarah must have had some sort of affair with John Brill. It wouldn't have been natural if she hadn't. People were dreadfully queer about those things in those days, and they made such a tremendous point of them. He was a dreadful old man with tobacco stain on his beard, and what's more I don't think he ever washed."

When the tall clock in the dining room struck midnight, Aunt Sarah would rise.

"I shall get my candle now," she always said, "the one that has a fish on it. My father brought it from Peru, the time he was nearly arrested by the Inquisition." Once she said to me, and I remember it because it was almost the only thing Aunt Sarah ever said to me that was not impersonal, "I wish you might have seen my father. He was red-haired and very handsome, vastly handsomer than you will ever be. You would have admired to see him."

Such small details as that sometimes possess a poignant sort of significance. Once, for instance, I knew a man whose grandfather at an early age had seen the elderly General Washington when he had made a triumphal tour through our neighborhood. The little boy distinctly recalled that the general had asked for a tumbler of water, had taken a paper of powders from his pocket and poured the contents into the tumbler. I have always understood General Washington a good deal better since hearing that account, although I do not know just why, except that it showed the presence of human frailty.