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Support the Monkey! Tell All your Friends and Teachers |
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Support the Monkey! Tell All your Friends and Teachers |
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24 Abbot said, in discussing the subject with Bessie when both sat sewing in the nursery one night, after I was in bed, and, as they thought, asleep, ‘Missis was, she dared say, glad enough to get rid of such a tiresome, ill-conditioned child, who always looked as if she were watching everybody, and scheming plots underhand.’ Abbot, I think, gave me credit for being a sort of infantine Guy Fawkes. On that same occasion I learned, for the first time, from Miss Abbot’s communications to Bessie, that my father had been a poor clergyman; that my mother had married him against the wishes of her friends, who considered the match beneath her; that my grandfather Reed was so irritated at her disobedience, he cut her off without a shilling; that after my mother and father had been married a year, the latter caught the typhus fever while visiting among the poor of a large manufacturing town where his curacy was situated, and where that disease was then prevalent: that my mother took the infection from him, and both died within a month of each other. Bessie, when she heard this narrative, sighed and said, ‘Poor Miss Jane is to be pitied too, Abbot.’ ‘Yes,’ responded Abbot; ‘if she were a nice, pretty child, one might compassionate her forlornness; but one really cannot care for such a little toad as that.’ ‘Not a great deal, to be sure,’ agreed Bessie: ‘at any rate, a beauty like Miss Georgiana would be more moving in the same condition.’ ‘Yes, I doat on Miss Georgiana!’ cried the fervent Abbot. ‘Little darling!with her long curls and her blue eyes, and such a sweet colour as she has; just as if she were painted!- Bessie, I could fancy a Welsh rabbit for supper.’ ‘So could I-with a roast onion. Come, we’ll go down.’ They went. |
