never turn up.
So that poor Phillis is sitting down to dinner with her education unfinished – where is that Coping-stone? Every young lady who has had a finishing year at Brighton may look down upon her. Perhaps, however, as her education has been of a kind quite unknown in polite circles, and she has never heard of a finishing year, she may be calm even in the presence of other young ladies.
What sort of a girl is she?
To begin with, she has fifty thousand pounds. Not the largest kind of fortune, but still something. More than most girls have, more than the average heiress has. Enough to make young Fortunio Hunter prick up his ears, smooth down his moustache, and begin to inquire about guardians; enough to purchase a roomy cottage where Love may be comfortable; enough to enable the neediest wooer, if he be successful, to hang up his hat on the peg behind the door and sit down for the rest of his years. Fifty thousand pounds is a sum which means possibilities. It was her mother's, and, very luckily for her, it was so tied up that Captain Fleming, her father, could not touch more than the interest, which, at three per cent., amounts, as may be calculated, to fifteen hundred a year. Really, after explaining that a young lady has fifty thousand, what further praise is wanted, what additional description is necessary? By contemplation of fifty thousand pounds, ardent youth is inflamed as by a living likeness of Helen. Be she lovely or be she loathly, be she young or old, be she sweet or shrewish – she has fifty thousand pounds.
With her fifty thousand pounds the gods have given Phillis Fleming a tall figure, the lines of which are as delicately curved as those of any yacht in the Solent or of any statue from Greek studio. She is slight, perhaps too slight; she has hair of a common dark brown, but it is fine hair, there is a great wealth of it, it has a gleam and glimmer of its own as the sunlight falls upon it, as if there were a hidden colour lying somewhere in it waiting to be discovered; her eyes, like her hair, are brown – they are also large and lustrous; her lips are full; her features are not straight and regular, like those of women's beauties, for her chin is perhaps a little short, though square and determined; she has a forehead which is broad and rather low; she wears an expression in which good temper, intelligence, and activity are more marked than beauty. She is quick to mark the things that she sees, and she sees everything. Her hands are curious, because they are so small, so delicate, and so sympathetic; while her face is in repose you may watch a passing emotion by the quivering of her fingers, just as you may catch, if you have the luck, the laughter or tears of most girls first in the brightness or the clouding of their eyes.
There are girls who, when we meet them in the street, pass us like the passing of sunshine on an April day; who, if we spend the evening in a room where they are, make us understand something of the warmth which Nature intended to be universal, but has somehow only made special; whom it is a pleasure to serve, whom it is a duty to reverence, who can bring purity back to the brain of a rake, and make a young man's heart blossom like a rose in June.
Of such is Phillis Fleming.
CHAPTER III
Phillis's Education
The dinner began without much conversation; partly because the twins were hungry, and partly because they were a little awed by the presence of an unwonted guest in white draperies.
Phillis noted that, so far as she had learned as yet, things of a domestic kind in the outer world were much like things at Mr. Dyson's, that is to say, the furniture of the dining-room was similar, and the dinner was the same. I do not know why she expected it, but she had some vague notion that she might be called upon to eat strange dishes.
"The Böllinger, brother Cornelius," said the artist.
"Thoughtful of you, brother Humphrey," the poet answered. "Miss Fleming, the Böllinger is in your honour."
Phillis looked puzzled. She did not understand where the honour came in. But she tasted her glass.
"It is a little too dry for me," she said with admirable candour. "If you have any Veuve Clicquot, Mr. Jagenal" – she addressed the younger brother – "I should prefer that."
All three perceptibly winced. Jane, the maid, presently returned with a bottle of the sweeter wine. Miss Fleming tasted it critically and pronounced in its favor.
"Mr. Dyson, my guardian," she said, "always used to say the ladies like their wine sweet. At least I do. So he used to drink Perier Jout très sec, and I had Veuve Clicquot."
The poet laid his forefinger upon his brow and looked meditatively at his glass. Then he filled it again. Then he drank it off helplessly. This was a remarkable young lady.
"You have lived a very quiet life," said Joseph, with a note of interrogation in his voice, "with your guardian at Highgate."
"Yes, very quiet. Only two or three gentlemen ever came to the house, and I never went out."
"A fair prisoner, indeed," murmured the poet. "Danae in her tower waiting for the shower of gold."
"Danae must have wished," said Phillis, "when she was put in the box and sent to sea, that the shower of gold had never come."
Cornelius began to regret his allusion to the mythological maid for his classical memory failed, and he could not at the moment recollect what box the young lady referred to. This no doubt came of much poring over Anglo-Saxon Chronicles. But he remembered other circumstances connected with Danae's history, and was silent.
"At least you went out," said Humphrey, "to see the Academy and the Water-colours."
She shook her head.
"I have never seen a picture-gallery at all. I have not once been outside Mr. Dyson's grounds until to-day, since I was six years old."
Humphrey supported his nervous system, like his brother, with another glass of the Böllinger.
"You found your pleasure in reading divine Poetry," said the Maker softly; "perhaps in writing Poetry yourself."
"Oh dear no!" said Phillis. "I have not yet learned to read. Mr. Dyson said that ladies ought not to learn reading till they are of an age when acquiring that mischievous art cannot hurt themselves or their fellow-creatures."
Phillis said this with an air of superior wisdom, as if there could be no disputing the axiom.
Humphrey looked oceans of sympathy at Cornelius, who took out his handkerchief as if to wipe away a tear, but as none was in readiness he only sighed.
"You were taught other things, however?" Joseph asked.
"Yes; I learned to play. My master came twice a week, and I can play pretty well; I play either by ear or by memory. You see," she added simply, "I never forget anything that I am told."
Compensation of civilised nature. We read, and memory suffers. Those who do not read remember. Before wandering minstrels learned to read and write, the whole Iliad was handed down on men's tongues; there are Brahmins who repeat all their Sacred Books word for word without slip or error, and have never learned to read; there are men at Oxford who can tell you the winners of Events for a fabulous period, and yet get plucked for Greats because, as they will tell you themselves, they really cannot read. Phillis did not know how to read. But she remembered – remembered everything; could repeat a poem dictated twice if it were a hundred lines long, and never forgot it; caught up an air and learned how to play it at a sitting.
She could not read. All the world of fiction was lost to her. All the fancies of poets were lost to her; all the records of folly and crime which we call history were unknown to her.
Try
