The Greatest Heiress in EnglandOliphant, Mrs. (Margaret)
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The Greatest Heiress in England
Oliphant, Mrs. (Margaret)
England -- Fiction; Inheritance and succession -- Fiction
Her little brother looked at her with wondering eyes; but this mystery
was too deep for him to solve. He had no insight into those deep matters
which occupied his father’s time, nor had he the least notion that
Lucy’s wealth depended upon that father’s death, though it had all been
discussed with so much detail day by day over his dreaming head.
“When you are rich, shall I be rich too, Lucy?” he said.
“I am afraid not, Jock; but if I am rich, it will not matter; you shall
have whatever you please. Won’t that do just as well?”
Jock paused and thought.
“Why shouldn’t I be rich too?” he remarked. It was not said as a
question; it was an observation. The fact did not trouble him, but _en
passant_ he noticed it as a thing which might perhaps want explaining.
It was not of half so much importance, however, as the next thing that
came into his head.
“I say, Lucy, do you think that boy on the pony has to go to school?
What do you think he can be learning at school? I should like to go
there too.”
“When you go, it shall be to a much nicer place,” she said, with energy.
“There is one thing I should like to be rich for, and that is for you,
little Jock. You don’t know anything at all yet. You ought to be
learning Greek and Latin, and mathematics, and a great many other
things. It makes me quite unhappy when I think of it. I go to school,
but it does not matter for me; and you are living all your time, not
learning anything, reading nonsense on the hearth-rug. I could cry when
I think of it,” Lucy said. She said it very quietly, but this was
vehemence in her.
Jock looked up at her with wondering eyes; for his own part he had no
enthusiasm for study, nor, except for the pleasure of being with the
circus boy, whom he vaguely apprehended as caracoling about the very
vague place which his imagination conceived of as “School,” on his
pretty pony, had he any desire to be sent there; but it did not occur to
him to enter into any controversy on the subject.
“Are you going up-town, Lucy?” he asked; “have you got to go to shops
_again_? I wish you would buy all your ribbons at one time, and not be
always, always buying more. Aunty Ford when she goes out goes to shops
too, and you have to stand and stare about, and there’s nothing to look
at, and nothing to do.”
“What would you like to do, Jock?”
“Oh, I don’t know--nothing,” said the boy; “if I had a pony I’d get on
its back and ride off a hundred miles before I stopped.”
“The horse couldn’t go a hundred miles, nor you either, dear.”
“Oh, yes, I could, or ten at least, and if I met any one on the road I’d
run races with him; and I’d call the horse Black Bess, or else
Rozinante, or else Chiron; but Chiron wasn’t only a horse, you know, he
was a horseman.”
“Well, dear,” said Lucy, calmly, “I wish you were a horseman, too, if
you would like it so very much.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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