Malbone: An Oldport Romance | Page 5

tropics, what hospitality can you offer? But no sense of embarrassment ever came near Malbone, especially with the children to swarm over him and claim him for their own. Moreover, little Helen got in the first remark in the way of serious conversation.
"Let me tell him something!" said the child. "Philip! that doll of mine that you used to know, only think! she was sick and died last summer, and went into the rag-bag. And the other split down the back, so there was an end of her."
Polar ice would have been thawed by this reopening of communication. Philip soon had the little maid on his shoulder,--the natural throne of all children,--and they went in together to greet Aunt Jane.
Aunt Jane was the head of the house,--a lady who had spent more than fifty years in educating her brains and battling with her ailments. She had received from her parents a considerable inheritance in the way of whims, and had nursed it up into a handsome fortune. Being one of the most impulsive of human beings, she was naturally one of the most entertaining; and behind all her eccentricities there was a fund of the soundest sense and the tenderest affection. She had seen much and varied society, had been greatly admired in her youth, but had chosen to remain unmarried. Obliged by her physical condition to make herself the first object, she was saved from utter selfishness by sympathies as democratic as her personal habits were exclusive. Unexpected and commonly fantastic in her doings, often dismayed by small difficulties, but never by large ones, she sagaciously administered the affairs of all those around her,--planned their dinners and their marriages, fought out their bargains and their feuds.
She hated everything irresolute or vague; people might play at cat's-cradle or study Spinoza, just as they pleased; but, whatever they did, they must give their minds to it. She kept house from an easy-chair, and ruled her dependants with severity tempered by wit, and by the very sweetest voice in which reproof was ever uttered. She never praised them, but if they did anything particularly well, rebuked them retrospectively, asking why they had never done it well before? But she treated them munificently, made all manner of plans for their comfort, and they all thought her the wisest and wittiest of the human race. So did the youths and maidens of her large circle; they all came to see her, and she counselled, admired, scolded, and petted them all. She had the gayest spirits, and an unerring eye for the ludicrous, and she spoke her mind with absolute plainness to all comers. Her intuitions were instantaneous as lightning, and, like that, struck very often in the wrong place. She was thus extremely unreasonable and altogether charming.
Such was the lady whom Emilia and Malbone went up to greet,--the one shyly, the other with an easy assurance, such as she always disliked. Emilia submitted to another kiss, while Philip pressed Aunt Jane's hand, as he pressed all women's, and they sat down.
"Now begin to tell your adventures," said Kate. "People always tell their adventures till tea is ready."
"Who can have any adventures left," said Philip, "after such letters as I wrote you all?"
"Of which we got precisely one!" said Kate. "That made it such an event, after we had wondered in what part of the globe you might be looking for the post-office! It was like finding a letter in a bottle, or disentangling a person from the Dark Ages."
"I was at Neuchatel two months; but I had no adventures. I lodged with a good Pasteur, who taught me geology and German."
"That is suspicious," said Kate. "Had he a daughter passing fair?"
"Indeed he had."
"And you taught her English? That is what these beguiling youths always do in novels."
"Yes."
"What was her name?"
"Lili."
"What a pretty name! How old was she?"
"She was six."
"O Philip!" cried Kate; "but I might have known it. Did she love you very much?"
Hope looked up, her eyes full of mild reproach at the possibility of doubting any child's love for Philip. He had been her betrothed for more than a year, during which time she had habitually seen him wooing every child he had met as if it were a woman,--which, for Philip, was saying a great deal. Happily they had in common the one trait of perfect amiability, and she knew no more how to be jealous than he to be constant.
"Lili was easily won," he said. "Other things being equal, people of six prefer that man who is tallest."
"Philip is not so very tall," said the eldest of the boys, who was listening eagerly, and growing rapidly.
"No," said Philip, meekly. "But then the Pasteur was short, and his brother was a dwarf."
"When Lili found that she could reach the ceiling from