Читать книгу The Primrose Path: A Chapter in the Annals of the Kingdom of Fife онлайн

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Thus they lived, not uncontented, from year to year. No one told Margaret to read, but she did so, perhaps with all the more pleasure because nobody told her. She read all the best poetry that is written in English, and a great deal that was not the best. She was so great in history that she had been a Lancastrian and taken an active, even violent, part on the side of her namesake, Margaret of Anjou, as long as she could remember—a more violent part even than she took for Queen Mary, though to that also she was bound as a true Scot. She had read Clarendon and Sir Thomas Brown, and Burton on “Melancholy” (not caring much for that) and an old translation of Froissart, and “Paul and Virginia,” and Madame Cottin’s “Elizabeth,” and “Don Quixote,” all in translations; so that her range was tolerably wide; and everything came natural to Margaret, the great and the small. Needless to say that all Sir Walter was hers by nature, as what well-conditioned Scots person of seventeen has not possessed our homelier Shakspeare from his or her cradle? Whether she loved best the Spanish Don, or Lord Falkland, or Sir Kenneth in the “Talisman,” was not to her mind perfectly clear. In this respect she was not so sure about Shakspeare. His lovers and heroes did not satisfy her youthful requirements; she loved Henry the Fifth, and Faulcon-bridge, and Benedick, but was not at all satisfied about the relations between Hamlet and Ophelia, naturally standing by her own side, and thinking that poor maiden badly used: which is as much as to say that the spell of story was still strong upon her, though the poetry went to her head all the same. These were the books Sir Ludovic saw her reading—but he took no notice and no oversight. He did not think of her at all as a responsible creature to be affected one way or other by what she read, or as undergoing any process of training for the future. The future! what is that at seventy-five? especially to a man who amiably and without evil intention has always found himself the centre of the world! It is like the future of a child—to-morrow. He did not want to pry any further. What was to come, would come without any intervention of his. Had his child been penniless, probably he would have thought it necessary to remember that in all probability (as he expressed it) she would survive him. But she was rich, and where was the need of thinking? The great thing was that there was no room. The bedrooms in the house were so few. Where could they put a governess, he asked Bell; and even Bell, though full of resources, could not reply. There was one good-sized room which Sir Ludovic himself occupied, and another quaint small panelled chamber in which Margaret was very snug and cosy, but beyond these scarcely any bedchamber in the house was in a proper state of repair. What could any one say against so evident a fact? “We could dine fifty folk,” Bell said, half proudly, half sadly, “and we could gie a grand ball after that up the stair; but pit up one single gentleman that is no very particular, that’s all we could do beside.” It was a curious state of affairs. The two long rooms, one above the other, were the whole house.