The Early Life and Adventures of Sylvia ScarlettMacKenzie, Compton
General
The Early Life and Adventures of Sylvia Scarlett
MacKenzie, Compton
Fiction
The Worsleys' home at Arbour End made an altogether different impression
upon Sylvia from Markham Grange. She divined in some way that the
background here was not immemorial, but that the Worsleys had created it
themselves. And a perfect background it was--a very comfortable red
brick house with a garden full of flowers, an orchard loaded with fruit,
fields promenaded by neat cows, pigsties inhabited by clean pigs, a
shining dog-cart and a shining horse, all put together with the
satisfying completeness of a picture-puzzle. Mr. Worsley was a handsome
man, tall and fair with a boyish face and a quantity of clothes; Mrs.
Worsley was slim and fair, with a rose-leaf complexion and as many
clothes as her husband. The twins were even naughtier and more charming
than they were at Hornton House; there was a small brother called
Hercules, aged six, who was as charming as his sisters and surpassed
them in wickedness. The maids were trim and tolerant; the gardener was
never grumpy; Hercules's governess disapproved of holiday tasks; the
dogs wagged their tails at the least sound.
"I love these people," Sylvia said to herself, when she was undressing
on the first night of her stay. "I love them, I love them. I feel at
home--at home--at home!" She leaped into bed and hugged the pillow in a
triumph of good-fellowship.
At Arbour End Sylvia banished the future and gave herself to the
present. One seemed to have nothing to do but to amuse oneself then, and
it was so easy to amuse oneself that one never grew tired of doing so.
As the twins pointed out, their father was so much nicer than any other
father, because whatever was suggested he always enjoyed. If it was a
question of learning golf, Mr. Worsley took the keenest interest in
teaching it. When Gladys drove a ball through the drawing-room window,
no one was more delighted than Mr. Worsley himself; he infected
everybody with his pleasure, so that the gardener beamed at the notion
of going to fetch the glazier from the village, and the glazier beamed
when he mended the window, and the maids beamed while they watched him
at work, and the dogs sat down in a loose semicircle, thumping the lawn
with appreciative tails. The next day, when Hercules, who, standing
solemnly apart from the rest, had observed all that happened, threw a
large stone through the mended window, there was the same scene of
pleasure slightly intensified.
Mrs. Worsley flitted through the house, making every room she entered
more beautiful and more gay for her presence. She had only one regret,
which was that the twins were getting so big, and this not as with other
mothers because it made her feel old, but because she would no more see
their black legs and their tumbled hair. Sylvia once asked her how she
could bear to let them go to school, and Mrs. Worsley's eyes filled with
tears.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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