A Girl Among the Anarchists | Page 3

combined the passionate enthusiasm of a Southerner with the independence and self-reliance which life in a new and only partially civilised country breeds. She was an orphan and penniless, but our father fell in love with her, attracted doubtless by her beauty and vivaciousness in such striking contrast with his bookish way of life, and he married her and brought her home to London. He truly loved her and was a good husband in all essential respects, but the uncongenial climate and monotonous life told on her health, and she died three years after my birth, much mourned by her husband, who plunged all the more deeply into scientific research, his only other thought being a care for our education. He had lived on in the same old house which grew somewhat dingier and shabbier each year, whilst the neighbourhood fell from its pristine respectability to become the resort of foreigners of somewhat doubtful character, of Bohemian artists and musicians.
As I sat gazing into the fire many pictures of those old days rose before me. I saw our large drawing-room with its old-fashioned furniture, handsome, often beautiful, but ill-kept; its sombre hangings and fine pictures. I recalled a typical scene there with a large fire burning cheerily in the big grate, relieving the gloom of a late winter afternoon with the bright flickering of its flames. Ensconced in a roomy arm-chair, our father is seated by the fire in a skullcap and list slippers, with his favourite cat perched on his knee. Opposite him sit two ladies, the elder of whom--a quaint, nice-looking old lady, dressed neatly in black, but whose innate eccentricity succeeded in imparting something odd to the simplest and quietest of attires--is leaning eagerly forward, pouring forth a long tale of woe into my father's sympathetic ear. She is denouncing the London roughs, landlords, and police, who, apparently, are all in league to ruin her and turn her cats astray upon an unkind world. The brutality of the English poor, who consider their duty towards the feline race fully performed when they have fed them, and who pay no more attention to their morals and higher feelings than if they were stocks and stones, arouses her ire; sympathy is what she needs, sympathy to help her to face the world and continue her crusade against cruelty. She says all this in a scattered and disconnected style, jumping from one point to another, turning occasionally to her friend for support or confirmation. This friend is a meek, subdued-looking person of uncertain age, somewhat washed-out and bedraggled in appearance. Her attire is nondescript, and seems to consist of oddments bought solely because they were cheap and bearing no relation whatever one to the other. Mrs. Smuts, growing more and more absorbed in the course of her harangue on the great cat question, states that she believes in marrying cats young in life and looking strictly after their morals; and as she appeals to Miss Meggs whilst voicing this sentiment, the latter timidly interjects, "But do you think, my dear Maria, that cats can maintain themselves chaste on a meat diet? I never give mine anything more exciting than cold potatoes and rice pudding, and I find that they thrive on it, Mr. Meredith!"
At this point we children, stifling our laughter, rush headlong from the room, to vent our mirth in safety in the kitchen.
Another frequent visitor whom my imagination summoned from the grave in which he had lain now for several years past, was a tall, thin, delicate-looking man of some thirty years of age. He was by birth a Frenchman, but had lived mostly in England, his parents having come over as political exiles from the tyranny of Louis Napoleon, afterwards settling permanently in this country. He was an engineer by profession, but a poet at heart, and all his spare time and thought he devoted to tackling the problem of aerial navigation. His day was spent earning a scanty living in a shipbuilding yard, but his evenings and nights were passed in constructing a model of a flying-machine. He would bring his drawings round to our father for discussion and advice; and although he never attained success, he was always hopeful, trusting that some one of the ever fresh improvements and additions which his fertile brain was always busy conceiving would solve the difficulty which had hitherto beset him. His sallow face with its large dreamy eyes and his spare figure, clad in an old bluish suit, rusty with age and threadbare with brushing, stand out clear in my memory. There was also an old professor, a chemist like my father, who often assisted him in his experiments. He was somewhat formidable in appearance, wearing gold spectacles, and helping himself freely to the contents of a snuff-box,