British -- Italy -- Fiction; Domestic fiction; Female friendship -- Fiction; Italy -- Fiction; Love stories
Because of Mrs. Fisher’s stick Lady Caroline had to see about
everything. Mrs. Fisher’s intentions, she explained from her fly when
the situation had become plain to her, were active, but her stick
prevented their being carried out. The two drivers told Lady Caroline
boys would have to carry the luggage up to the castle, and she went in
search of some, while Mrs. Fisher waited in the fly because of her
stick. Mrs. Fisher could speak Italian, but only, she explained, the
Italian of Dante, which Matthew Arnold used to read with her when she
was a girl, and she thought this might be above the heads of boys.
Therefore Lady Caroline, who spoke ordinary Italian very well, was
obviously the one to go and do things.
“I am in your hands,” said Mrs. Fisher, sitting firmly in her fly. “You
must please regard me as merely an old woman with a stick.”
And presently, down the steps and cobbles to the piazza, and along the
quay, and up the zigzag path, Lady Caroline found herself as much
obliged to walk slowly with Mrs. Fisher as if she were her own
grandmother.
“It’s my stick,” Mrs. Fisher complacently remarked at intervals.
And when they rested at those bends of the zigzag path where seats
were, and Lady Caroline, who would have liked to run on and get to the
top quickly, was forced in common humanity to remain with Mrs. Fisher
because of her stick, Mrs. Fisher told her how she had been on a zigzag
path once with Tennyson.
“Isn’t his cricket wonderful?” said Lady Caroline absently.
“_The_ Tennyson,” said Mrs. Fisher, turning her head and observing her
a moment over her spectacles.
“Isn’t he?” said Lady Caroline.
“I am speaking,” said Mrs. Fisher, “of Alfred.”
“Oh,” said Lady Caroline.
“And it was a path, too,” Mrs. Fisher went on severely, “curiously like
this. No eucalyptus tree, of course, but otherwise curiously like this.
And at one of the bends he turned and said to me—I see him now turning
and saying to me—”
Yes, Mrs. Fisher would have to be checked. And so would these two up at
the window. She had better begin at once. She was sorry she had got off
the wall. All she need have done was to have waved her hand, and waited
till they came down and out into the garden to her.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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