Austin and His Friends | Page 3

very ears for Austin, but her affection was of a
somewhat irritable sort, and generally took the form of scolding. She
was not a stupid woman by any means, but there was one thing in the
world she never could understand, and that was Austin himself. He
wasn't like other boys one bit, she always said. He had such a queer,
topsy-turvy way of looking at things; would express the most
outrageous opinions with an innocent unconsciousness that made her
long to box his ears, and support the most arrant absurdities by
arguments that conveyed not the smallest meaning to her intellect.
Look at him now, for instance; a cripple for life, and pretending to see
nothing in it but a joke, and expressing as much admiration for his
horrible wooden leg as though it had been a king's sceptre! In Aunt
Charlotte's view, Austin ought to have pitied himself immensely, and
expressed a hope that God would help him to bear his burden with
orthodox resignation to the Divine will; instead of which, he seemed
totally unconscious of having any burden at all--a state of mind that
was nothing less than impious. Austin was now seventeen, and it was
high time that he took more serious views of life. Ever since he was a
baby he had been her special charge; for his mother had died in giving
him birth, and his father had followed her about a twelvemonth later.
She had always done her duty to the boy, and loved him as though he

had been her own; but she reminded onlookers rather of a conscientious
elderly cat with limited views of natural history condemned by
circumstances to take care of a very irresponsible young eaglet. The
eaglet, on his side, was entirely devoted to his protectress, but it was
impossible for him not to feel a certain lenient and amused contempt
for her very limited horizon.
"Auntie," he said to her one day, "you're just like a frog at the bottom
of a well. You think the speck of blue you see above you is the entire
sky, and the water you paddle up and down in is the ocean. Why can't
you take a rather more cosmic view of things?"
This extraordinary remark occurred in the course of a wrangle between
the two, because Austin insisted on his pet cat--a plump, white,
matronly creature he had christened 'Gioconda,' because (so he said)
she always smiled so sweetly--sitting up at the dinner-table and being
fed with tit-bits off his own fork; and Aunt Charlotte objected to this
proceeding on the ground that the proper place for cats was in the
kitchen. Austin, on his side, averred that cats were in many ways much
superior to human beings; that they had been worshipped as gods by
the philosophical Egyptians because they were so scornful and
mysterious; and that Gioconda herself was not only the divinest cat
alive, but entitled to respect, if only as an embodiment and
representative of cat-hood in the abstract, which was a most important
element in the economy of the universe. It was when Aunt Charlotte
stigmatised these philosophical reflections as a pack of impertinent
twaddle that Austin had had the audacity to say that she was like a frog.
And now her eaglet had been maimed for life, and whatever he might
feel about it himself her own responsibilities were certainly much
increased. At this very moment, for instance, after having practised
stumping about the room for half-an-hour he insisted on going
downstairs. Of course the idea was ridiculous. Even the doctor shook
his head, while old Martha, who had tubbed Austin when he was two
years old, joined in the general protest. But Austin, disdaining to argue
the point with any one of them, had already hobbled out of the room,
and before they were well aware of it had begun to essay the descent
perilous. Ominous bumps were heard, and then a dull thud as of a body
falling. But a bend in the wall had caught the body, and the explorer
was none the worse. Then Aunt Charlotte, rushing back into the

bedroom, flung open the window wide.
"Lubin!" she shouted lustily.
A young gardener boy, tall, round-faced and curly-haired, glanced up
astonished from his work among the sweet-peas.
"Come up here directly and carry Master Austin downstairs. He's got a
wooden leg and hasn't learnt how to use it."
The consequence of which was that two minutes later Austin, panting
and enraged at the failure of his first attempt at independence, found
himself firmly encircled by a pair of strong young arms, lifted gently
from the ground, and carried swiftly and safely downstairs and out at
the garden door.
"Now you just keep quiet, Master Austin," murmured Lubin, chuckling
as Austin