England -- Social life and customs -- Fiction; Orphans -- Fiction; Uncles -- Fiction; Young women -- Fiction
In the middle of the winter Aunt Cuckoo began to throw out hints of what
Jasmine might expect from herself and Uncle Eneas in the future. She
never went so far as a definite statement that they intended to make her
their heiress; the prospect of future wealth was merely hinted at like
the landscape under a false dawn. Yet even this glimmer over something
beyond was enough to alarm Jasmine with the idea that her uncle and aunt
would suppose that she was aiming at an inheritance. She tried by
diligent combing of cats, by concentration upon the massage of Aunt
Cuckoo's arm, and by the rapidity of her walking pace, to show that she
appreciated what was being done for her in the present; but the moment
Aunt Cuckoo began to talk of the future she was discouragingly rude.
Nevertheless these hints, notwithstanding Jasmine's reception of them,
would probably have taken a more definite shape if on the anniversary of
the conversion of Saint Paul Aunt Cuckoo had not taken shelter from a
sudden storm of rain in a small Catholic mission church at Golders
Green. Here she felt vague aspirations at the sight of half a dozen poor
people praying in the rich twilight of imitation glass windows; but she
was more particularly and more deeply impressed by the behaviour of a
woman in rusty mourning in bringing a pallid little boy to the feet of a
saintly image that was attracting Aunt Cuckoo's attention and
everybody's attention by lifting his habit and pointing to a sore on his
leg. After praying to an accompaniment of maternal prods the child was
bidden to deposit at the base of the image a bandage of lint, after
which he stuck six candles on the pricket, lighted them, and followed
his mother out of the church with many a backward glance to observe the
effect of his illumination. Aunt Cuckoo was puzzled by all this, and
overtaking the woman in the porch asked what it meant. She was told that
the saint's name was Roch and that he had miraculously cured her little
boy of an ulcerous leg. Aunt Cuckoo's arm immediately began to pain her
acutely. On feeling this pain she went back into the church and prayed
shyly, for she was not a Catholic and she had only heard the saint's
name for the first time. The pain vanished as abruptly as it came, and
Aunt Cuckoo, thrilled by the miracle, hurried home to tell Jasmine all
about it. As soon as her mind had turned its attention to miracles Aunt
Cuckoo began to fancy that she was being specially favoured by Heavenly
manifestations.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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